Rael Marak's Collection of Horror Stories for the Sleepless
Ah, you found me! I’ve been waiting… just stirring and fumbling around here with some ink and paper. Horrible things have been born since you’ve been away, dripping from dream-filled chasms and pooling around the nearest door to this world: your wonderful brain. I’m so glad you’ve made it!
A modern-classic for weird short stories.
Book Details
The enduring success of humankind is predicated on our ability to work together. “Society” is possibly our most successful invention, but it comes with the requirement to govern. The United States is lucky enough to be a republic and passion around the governance of a democracy is essential to its health, even when it’s painful. Sometimes that passion is contained to an election cycle. Sometimes it consumes entire lives.
That headline will show up in a Google search and stir some feelings, no doubt. It’s the least I can do this Halloween– which has been an utter pain. Halloween on a Thursday, days before an election, is simply hurtful. We should all just have a wake instead, an unholy wake where we put our hands to the threshold until the other side acknowledges us, of course.
This is my time of year and it’s more than the “Spooky Season”. What draws the most intense feelings from myself is that very human sense of change, loss even. It’s a beautiful season and it makes us feel: cold returns to the air, damp seeps right through our suddenly tender skin, and our eyes begin to question the edge of every shadow. Leaves escape the branches and we have no choice but to watch the earth shut up shop. She locks the cupboards and pulls the grey veil over herself until the sun returns in an unfathomable number of months.
I held an idea in my head: the colossal necrotic lord of a wasteland empire lumbering through the ruins of his kingdom. I imagined a towering creature formed of bones, millions of repurposed femurs and fibulas piled and fused to shape a god-like behemoth that’s inhuman gaze stared down from a cold sky. I didn’t surface this idea for any noble reason, nope– there will be no tale of cyclopean elder-gods or any eerie vision to post to Instagram. I wanted to feed my idea to an AI and see what came out.
This is not a rant about what used to be Twitter. This is simply a modest announcement that I’ve spun up an Instagram (and Threads) account for this holiday season (the Orange Season). The current data suggests that I’ll be visiting my “X” account rarely– but that’s not an indictment, it’s just capitalism. I’m moving my “attention currency” to a different market.