Until May 23, 2023, my collection Stains of Atrocity: Twenty Tales of Horror and Dark Fantasy is a FREE ebook to download at Amazon. In case you don’t remember or don’t feel like scrolling down, Stains of Atrocity’s twenty horrific tales vary in style and extremity–some are mild, some are off-the-walls, some are even funny–but each aims to leave an unusual, dark, and lasting impression. It begins with “Silence,” a surreal haunting about a woman who visits a strange house and then quietly loses the people closest to her, and it ends with “Mandy Schneider Makes Friends,” a taboo-breaking account of three psychopaths who form an alliance and then torture a group of campers and their chaperones. Arranged into five sections or “blots” that might stain your psyche in different ways with the atrocities they depict, the stories explore distorted responses to tragedy, strange connections that form when people give in to chance, political anxieties acted out through rent flesh and spilt blood, miraculous feats paid for with massacres, and a crime that lives on in a place and in people devoted to human violation.

Okay, that last bit was borrowed from what you’ll see when you go to Amazon to get your free copy. If you want a more inside scoop, read my post here. My point is that, though I’m pretty consistently weird, I cover a broad spectrum of horrific affects, so there’s a good chance you’ll like something. And even if you don’t, what have you got to lose? It’s FREE!

By Andrew

L. Andrew Cooper specializes in the provocative, scary, and strange. Works include book-length stories Noir Falling, Alex's Escape, The Middle Reaches, Records of the Hightower Massacre [with Maeva Wunn], Crazy Time, Burning the Middle Ground, and Descending Lines; short story collections Leaping at Thorns, Peritoneum, and Stains of Atrocity; poetry collection The Great Sonnet Plot of Anton Tick; non-fiction Gothic Realities and Dario Argento; co-edited fiction anthologies Imagination Reimagined and Reel Dark; and the co-edited textbook Monsters. He has also written 35 award-winning screenplays. After studying literature and film at Harvard and Princeton, he used his Ph.D. to teach about favorite topics from coast to coast in the United States. He now focuses on writing and lives with his husband in North Hollywood, California.

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