Steve Parrish (who also goes by S. Lawrence Parrish) is a writer who has made several of his “weird and twisted” horror and science fiction stories available as free audiobooks.
A collection of short “twisted” horror stories.
Meet Avery Carmichael, student-teacher. This year he's teamed up with Mr. Samuel Petersen, veteran teacher. Avery is about to get an education in educating… but not the one he is expecting. In a semester that will see school-shootings in the United States and Canada, Sam Petersen's lessons to Avery will be, at first, enlightening. Then horrifying.
The sun sets. The moon rises. And the night howls…
The people in the foothills town of Black Diamond are thrilled to hear of government plans for commercial development of the Kananaskis Parklands. With three world-class ski resorts within an hour's drive, everyone is going to get rich! But The Fellowship, a colony of “nature nuts” who live to the immediate west of Black Diamond, are effectively stalling the government's plans. Hostilities escalate when a hitch-hiker is brutally slaughtered just outside of town…
Shape Shifters–a werewolf tale with NO vampires.
In a post-plague world where plants have suffered as much as animals, a colony of human survivors has gathered in a fortified former-luxury condominium complex they call “The Park”. These remnants of humanity are inextricably bound to their domestic cats, from which Dose (a temporary plague vaccine) is derived.
A forager army is rumored to be heading toward The Park. The Park people must prepare to defend themselves and all they have worked for, because they have made a discovery: not all cats are created equal; while regular Dose only staves off plague symptoms, the dose derived from Simon, The Park's only Siamese cat, can be refined into SHAT, a super-dose that rejuvenates the growth of plant life. . . and which also may hold the secret to a permanent plague-cure. Problem: Simon is a neuter. If he should die, so, too, dies humanity's one hope for survival.
Enter Sasha, a purebred female Balinese of breeding age that also produces SHAT. With the sky-rocketing tensions of increasing militarization, Sasha's humans want to take their cat and leave The Park. But The Park people will use whatever means necessary to make them stay.
Sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll… from Hell.
It's 1976. The rock group KISS is cool. Every teenager alive wishes they could be so cool. So what would you be willing to do to hang around with the cool kids? Pretty much anything…
Justin Foley has cool new friends; they smoke dope and everything. And now that Justin is just as cool as his friends, an evil and malignant entity as old as time and space also wants to be his friend. And more than that, while it gestates in the service tunnels beneath Justin's school, the thing wants Justin to be its mentor. It wants Justin to teach it all about life and what it takes to be a success in this world.
What better place to learn than in a school? And what better measure of success than in taking control of your own destiny? Of course, along the way you might also learn how to assume control of everybody else's destiny…
Heed not the limits of time and space,
for the Ageless Ones know no such place.
And man, that slave to light and life,
should free himself with edge of knife.Dread C'thulhu longs to embrace,
those strong enough to face the face
and spill their blood, a fountain red,
to satiate the timeless dread.The darkness spreads in search of those
whose righteous meddlings did impose
upon the Masters a prison cell.
Hear these words and mark them well.Mankind's apparent supremacy
over all the creatures of land and sea,
is but a myth that stifles truth.
Yog-Sothoth's Box is all the proof
that fools need press to heart and vein
to understand this last refrain:Heed not the limits of time and space,
for the Ageless Ones know no such place.A warning from an ancient manuscript. An artefact. A scientist, a librarian, and a scholar. Mythos from the imagination of H.P. Lovecraft given a modern twist.
Yog-Sothoth's Box: the darkness must be fed…