Source: Unnerving Magazine

I’m very excited to announced that my story, “Twinwalkers” now appears in the first issue of Unnerving Magazine.

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure where the idea for “Twinwalkers” came from, but the story has obvious Lovecraftian influences. For instance, it involves an academic whose obsession with the fabled Berkshire mimic spider leads him to investigate things that humanity is better off not knowing. Doctor Saunders also never learns what is driving the creatures he is studying in the same way there tends to be unanswered questions in the typical Lovecraft story.

Lovecraft’s stories also often have an isolated New England feel. Having lived in New England for three years and being married to a native New Englander, I tried to invoke that New England spirit in this story, working very hard to get the atmosphere just right all the way down to the caretaker’s Massachusetts accent.

In my stories, I often intertwine elements of history with the supernatural. In this tale, the Pocomtuc were an actual Native American tribe that had settled in parts of Western Massachusetts and were ultimately wiped out by Mohawk tribes and diseases carried by European settlers like small pox. Other than that, very little is known about the Pocomtuc, which made it easier for me to invent speculative elements of their history such as their fictitious worship of an anthropomorphic spider deity.

Even the looming construction of the Kinder Morgan pipeline which drove Doctor Saunder’s urgency to uncover evidence of the Berkshire mimic spider in the fossil record before it was gone was based on an actual natural gas pipeline project that Kinder Morgan had proposed building in parts of Massachusetts. While the company ultimately shelved the three billion dollar project in early 2016, it still served as a critical plot device to drive Doctor Saunder’s hasty and ill-advised trip to the Berkshires.

I hope you found this story both creepy and enjoyable.

Buy my first complete anthology at Amazon or Smashwords. It includes ten stories about cursed alien artifacts, interstellar investment banking, ancient alien astronauts, parallel timelines, alien experimentation, and space colonization gone horribly wrong.

First published in venues like Fictionvale Magazine, NewMyths.com, Mad Scientist Journal, Plasma Frequency Magazine, Outposts of Beyond, and The Colored Lens, several of these stories have received Honorable Mentions in the prestigious Writers of the Future Contest.