Enjoy two monster-packed excerpts from the horror fiction collection PARTNERS IN SLIME, by Michael McCarty and Mark McLaughlin. PARTNERS IN SLIME was released by Damnation Books and is available as an e-book or paperback. EXCERPT No. 1: The sunny days roasted the flesh and the windswept nights chilled it to the bone. At one point, after the power went out, Herod removed all the Bibles from the hotel rooms and burned them in trash cans inside a supermarket. He had appointed himself leader, and he’d thought this action would serve his people well. After all, people were more important than books. The blaze kept everyone there warm all night. The previous night they had used menus and playing cards. Those hadn’t burned well because of their heavy lamination. They gave off sickening fumes and many people became ill. But the Bibles had burned splendidly. They kept everyone nice and warm. Eventually the people turned against Herod. He hadn’t done anything wrong… But still, they needed to vent their frustration with the world somehow, and his helpfulness – his patient optimism in the face of maddening despair – had become an annoyance. A group assigned to the task tied him down outside of the tallest building in the city. Then they went up to the top and starting dropping things down on him out of a penthouse window. There was no special significance in this particular form of torture: it just seemed like the thing to do at the time. In the end Herod was reduced to a pile of human slush embedded with a medley of broken everyday objects – everything from wine glasses to typewriters. — Excerpt from the story, “City of Two-Thousand Sins” in PARTNERS IN SLIME. — EXCERPT No. 2: Heading toward her down a high corridor of cream-colored stone was an abomination worse than any fantastical devil from a Hieronymus Bosch painting. The creature had a puffy, tubular body with a multitude of pincer-legs, like a caterpillar. It also had long, heavily veined spiral wings. Even though Bobbie was frightened and in intense pain, her powers of observation were still fully functional. She found herself wondering how any creature could fly with such an awkward body and misshapen wings. The head of the monstrosity didn’t have a brainpan – it was just a gaping mouth filled with crooked, needlelike teeth. The thick lips were dotted with small, black eyes. At the base of the wings was a melon-sized, knobby hump. Bobbie figured, this had to hold the brain of the creature. A thick cluster of thick, lashing tendrils grew out of the top of the hump. The lamp was held up high by one of these tendrils. Bobbie suddenly saw that York was walking behind the monster. He staggered a little, as though he were drunk. His face registered no emotion whatsoever. He simply stared ahead with complete disinterest. – From the story “The Resurrection of Ghattambah” in PARTNERS IN SLIME. You can download the whole book in Kindle from Amazon (they also have it as a paperback): amazon/Partners-in-Slime-ebook/dp/B004PYDI42
Posted on: Sun, 17 Nov 2013 05:05:50 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015