Short stories and flash fiction from writer Simon John Cox.
Looking at the apartment block made me feel colder than the wind did. It was a grim cube of concrete and steel, designed by a communist architect during an age that knew no joy, and the low winter sky leached the life from it like a sponge.
I write horror fiction from time to time, and one thing I've learned is that there are only really three possible horror book endings...
I recently published a horror story called Greenteeth, which was inspired and heavily influenced by the folklore of Jenny Greenteeth. Jenny Greenteeth is a monstrous creature from the English folklore of Lancashire, Cheshire and Shropshire, though she also appears in other parts of the British Isles under different names such as Peg Powler, Kelpie or Grindylow.
When three university friends travel to an isolated lake to investigate reported sightings of an alien big cat they expect yet another hoax, but when footage from their remote cameras appears to show someone emerging from the water in the dead of night they realise that the lake may hold stranger secrets than a phantom… Continue reading Greenteeth
When Adam Bradford's sister goes missing he drops everything to assist the police, travelling up to the isolated village where she lived. When he arrives at her cottage, however, he discovers a life in disarray and a bedroom filled with cryptic notes and mysterious blurred photographs. At first he puts this obsession down to some… Continue reading The Slender Man
Inside the box is a large glass case, almost as large as the box itself, and inside the case is a shrunken figure. It looks like a mummy, but it is unlike any that I’ve ever seen before. The position is all wrong, for a start: it is sat upright, hugging its knees to its chest, and its chin is perched neatly upon its folded arms. There are no bandages; instead it is naked apart from a perished woollen loincloth, a couple of dull gold bracelets and a woven headdress tied with feathers made almost translucent by age. Its dead skin is the miserable grey of wet slate, and dry black fingernails protrude like chips of bark from its fingers. Worst of all is its face, from which two black pebbles stare dully out of the puckered sockets of its eyes above a collapsed nose and two desiccated lips that have shrivelled into a cruel grin.
I'm not a huge reader of horror, and I think that's largely because I generally don't find conventional horror fiction scary. I'm not sure why. I find horror films scary, in a way; not in the sense that I'm genuinely scared, but in the sense that I experience the cheap shocks and I appreciate the… Continue reading Dracula is only scary if you are scared by sex
