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Built on Unconditional Love
The Devil Inside follows a father and daughter pulled into a haunting tied to H.H. Holmes, where ledgers, mirrors, and breathing pages reveal that evil survives through memory and the stories that keep rewriting it. What inspired you to reimagine H.H. Holmes?
H.H. Holmes has always fascinated me because he’s one of history’s most infamous serial killers, but most books about him simply retell the crimes we already know. I wanted to explore something different. I started asking myself, What if Holmes never really disappeared? What if death wasn’t the end for him? What if he found a way to rebuild his Murder Castle and continue his work through memory, obsession, and the people drawn to him? That “what if” became the foundation of the novel. Rather than writing another historical thriller, I wanted to blend real history with supernatural horror and create a story where Holmes becomes something far more terrifying than a man. You could say I wanted to bring him back to life.
The novel uses recurring images of ink, ledgers, gold script, ash, and breathing architecture. How did those motifs develop as you wrote the story?
Those images grew naturally as I explored the idea that evil leaves traces behind. Holmes wasn’t just collecting victims in my version of the story. He was preserving them. The ledgers became a way of recording souls, the ink represented memory refusing to fade, and the gold script symbolized temptation because it always appeared beautiful before revealing something horrific. Even the house itself became a living participant in the story. I wanted the building to feel as though it remembered every victim and every secret, almost as if the walls were breathing alongside the people trapped inside. Those recurring images helped tie the supernatural elements together while reinforcing the idea that some horrors never truly disappear because they simply wait to be remembered. As I continued writing, those motifs took on a life of their own and became another way of showing that the past is never truly gone. It lingers, waiting for someone to uncover it.
Julie and Frank’s relationship gives the horror a strong emotional center. How important was that father-daughter bond to the novel’s structure?
For me, it was the heart of the novel. Horror is always more powerful when readers genuinely care about the people facing it. Frank approaches everything as a scientist who believes there must be a logical explanation, while Julie is forced to experience things that defy reason. Their relationship creates a balance between skepticism and belief, but more importantly, it’s built on unconditional love. No matter how frightening the haunting becomes, Frank never stops trying to protect his daughter. That emotional bond gives the story its humanity and raises the stakes because the battle isn’t just about surviving evil. It’s about a father refusing to lose his child to it.
What do you hope readers are still thinking about after they turn the final page of The Devil Inside?
I hope readers walk away wondering where evil really comes from. Is it something we create, something we inherit, or something that survives because we continue telling its story? The Devil Inside asks whether monsters die with their bodies or whether they continue to exist through memory, fear, and obsession. More than anything, I hope readers are left questioning the things we choose to remember and the things we desperately try to forget because sometimes those are the stories that refuse to stay buried.
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What begins as a haunting becomes something far more disturbing: a legacy of obsession born in the shadow of Chicago’s Murder Castle, where a killer learned to turn flesh into data and memory into machinery. As the past reasserts itself through hidden ledgers, buried tunnels, and recorded breaths, Julie is drawn into a design that refuses to end.
To break the cycle, she must descend into places where light cannot reach, where history does not stay buried and the Devil is no longer a man, but an idea that survives through memory, ritual, and inheritance.
The Devil Inside Me is a gothic, slow-burn psychological horror novel that blends possession, historical evil, and emotional dread. Elegant, unsettling, and relentless, it explores temptation, redemption, and the terrifying cost of remembering what was never meant to survive.
Unapologetic Ambition
Roots & Wrath centers around five former friends and witches who find themselves bound together by their deceased professor’s will. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
You know, ideas come from everywhere. I had a friend who was fascinated by tontines–a type of will where the last person living gets everything (it’s now illegal because it incentivizes murder). But from there it became a story about ambition, friendship, power, vulnerability, and those bad choices we make while coming of age that cannot be undone. Hopefully, for most of us, those bad choices aren’t as costly as for these young witches.
The novel focuses as much on broken friendships as it does on magic. Why did you want the emotional history between the women to drive the story?
Because this concept started with the concept of a tontine, it was always necessary that this story focus not on an individual but on a group. Then, I needed compelling reasons for them not to trust each other–the incentive of a will simply is not enough to make it believable that five friends, or even five strangers, would move to murder as the solution. There had to be compelling reasons for divide, mistrust, and… well, proactively defensive action, if you will.
Alicia is a wonderfully complicated protagonist—sharp, defensive, funny, and deeply wounded. What did you enjoy most about writing her?
Thank you! Yes, I absolutely loved writing these deeply flawed ladies. Alicia and her friends let me really let loose my darker side with their unapologetic ambition, ego, judgement, and snark. I find the most flawed characters are the ones I love the most in other stories, and I think that deeply flawed women in particular are so important–we need to get women out of these glass cases and let us be fully, problematically human, in stories and in life.
I find a problem in well-written stories, in that I always want there to be another book to keep the story going. Is there a second book planned?
For now, at least, Roots & Wrath is a standalone. I think it has duology potential to see what happens to Beverly when she grows up and goes to Millinocket herself, but I’m not sure where that goes–yet.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
Six young witches hungry to achieve remarkable things…until they performed a clandestine ritual in the dark wood. Only five witches returned. The secret they buried beneath a hungry great oak split them apart forever.
Now there are five.
Eighteen years later, the death of their legendary mentor forces them back together. In her will, the professor binds them to carry on her work until their magical bond is shattered for good…by death.
Soon, there will be four.
The remaining witches scramble to uncover who is willing to kill to escape their bond. Magical spells and broken alliances—not to mention a relentless ghost of their past deeds—drive them back to the dark wood to unearth their past.
Can any of them survive the specter of the dark wood and finally put the past to rest?
Roots & Wrath is a standalone dark fantasy featuring ruthless, unapologetic female characters in a twisty, suspenseful whirlwind of a plot. Perfect for fans of The Craft, Yellowjackets, Plain Bad Heroines, The Return, and Once and Future Witches.
Frostbend
K.M. Bennett’s Frostbend is a haunted house novel with its feet planted firmly in family trauma, small-town memory, and the messy bond between sisters. Isla Desmond returns to Frostbend after the death of Lionel, the man who terrorized her childhood, and what should be a grim but practical trip becomes something much stranger. The old Desmond mansion isn’t just a setting here. It feels active, hungry, and deeply tied to everything Isla has tried to leave behind.
The book works best when it lets the house speak through sensory details. The mansion is full of rot, dust, old polish, ruined rooms, and memories that don’t stay politely in the past. One of the strongest lines captures that mix of tenderness and horror: “It was the prosaic smell of their mother’s sweetness covering their father’s sins.” That’s really the heart of the novel. Every room holds two stories at once: the life Isla and Willa once had and the violence that warped it.
Isla is a compelling lead because she’s sharp, guarded, and often difficult in a very believable way. She’s not written as someone who has neatly processed what happened to her. She’s someone who has built a life out of control, distance, and sarcasm, then gets dragged back to the one place where none of those defenses work. Willa gives the story much of its warmth. Their relationship is prickly, funny, painful, and gradually healing, with moments like “But you’re my crazy bitch” showing how Bennett lets affection come through in imperfect, authentic language.
There’s plenty of supernatural horror in Frostbend, especially as the mansion, Lionel’s presence, and Isla’s strange ability become more intense. Still, the emotional story is just as important as the ghost story. The book is about what abuse leaves behind, how secrets calcify inside families, and how survival can look cold from the outside. Bennett also gives Frostbend itself a strong identity, from diners and funeral food to local history and buried art, so the town feels like more than a backdrop.
Frostbend is a dark, heartfelt gothic horror novel about confronting the place that made you and deciding what parts of yourself you still want to keep. It has creepy imagery, a bruised but stubborn heroine, and a sister relationship that gives the story its pulse. Readers who enjoy haunted houses with emotional weight, family secrets, and a strong thread of supernatural revenge will find a lot to settle into here.
Pages: 251 | ASIN : B0H1QM8V36
Viscera Varnish: A Novella
Viscera Varnish, by Jason Garman, is a horror novella about Daniel Virek, a celebrated Chicago artist whose talent has begun to curdle into repetition, panic, and desperation. After a humiliating gallery opening confirms that the art world is losing faith in him, Daniel returns to the grisly private ritual that once made his work feel alive: murder as medium, the body as pigment, suffering as process. What begins as a portrait of artistic decay soon slips into stranger territory, where guilt, ambition, and something occultly bureaucratic gather around him like wet paint refusing to dry.
I liked how confidently the novella marries the grotesque with the mundane. Garman does not treat Daniel like a mythic monster at first; he lets him move through apartments, galleries, fast food bags, traffic, bad parking, and petty professional humiliations. That ordinariness makes the horror feel less theatrical and more contaminating. The violence is extreme, but the more unsettling element is Daniel’s almost clerical calm. He has turned atrocity into workflow, and the book keeps asking whether the world around him is horrified by that or merely waiting to see if the result sells.
What I appreciated most was the way the book skewers the appetite of the art scene without flattening it into parody. The gallery patrons, managers, and critics are ridiculous, but they are not harmless; their hunger for genius gives Daniel’s monstrosity a market. The prose has a slick, nasty elegance when it wants to, especially in the descriptions of canvases that seem less painted than coagulated. I also liked the late turn toward the uncanny, where the story stops being only about a killer artist and becomes something more metaphysical: a grim little fable about inspiration, extraction, and the cost of being “special.”
Readers drawn to horror novellas, psychological horror, body horror, supernatural horror, occult and dark art thrillers will find plenty to admire here, especially if they like their nightmares intimate, bloody, and morally rancid. Fans of Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart may recognize a similar fascination with the border between ecstasy, creation, and mutilation, though Garman’s voice is grimier, more contemporary, and sharpened by satire of artistic prestige. Viscera Varnish is a savage little gallery of ambition and appetite, where the masterpiece is never as frightening as the price paid to make it.
Pages: 131 | ASIN : B0H1DSB67X
Roots & Wrath
Roots & Wrath, by E. J. Wenstrom, is a dark fantasy thriller about five former friends, witches who once formed a powerful pentam at an elite magical school, being dragged back together after the death of their old professor. What begins as an uncomfortable memorial turns into something much darker when Alicia, Everyn, Isa, Rachel, and Sybil learn that Professor Berriman’s will has bound them to her unfinished work through an old blood oath. From there, the novel becomes a sharp, witchy story about power, guilt, ambition, betrayal, and the awful weight of the past refusing to stay buried.
I liked how prickly the book allows its characters to be. Alicia, especially, is not softened for the reader. She is angry, defensive, vain, wounded, and often funny in a cutting way. I found that refreshing. The story doesn’t pretend that old friendships, especially ones forged under pressure and broken by trauma, can be fixed with one heartfelt conversation. These women hurt each other. They also know each other in ways no one else can. That tension gives the book its pulse. The magic is fun and dangerous, but the emotional history is what kept pulling me in.
Wenstrom’s choices give the novel a nice bite. The alternating “now” and “then” structure works well because it lets the dread build in layers. We see the adult witches circling each other like knives, then we go back and watch how they became that way. I also appreciated that the school setting isn’t just nostalgic window dressing. Millinocket feels enchanted, with its rituals, codes, and old power, but it also feels like a place where ambition can curdle. The book is candid about how institutions can reward brilliance while ignoring harm. That idea sits under the plot like a root system.
I would recommend Roots & Wrath to readers who enjoy dark fantasy, witch fiction, and supernatural thrillers with messy adult friendships at the center. It will especially appeal to readers who like stories about magical schools after the shine has worn off, when the graduates are older, angrier, and still paying for what happened there. This isn’t cozy witchcraft. It’s sharp, moody, and full of grudges. And for the right reader, that is exactly the fun of it.
Pages: 397 | ASIN : B0GSGPD2PD
Blood Echoes
Aaron Ryan’s Blood Echoes follows Tracie Vossler, an ex-Marine turned prison security guard, as she becomes entangled in the horrifying mystery surrounding identical twins Elias and Gabriel Brickert. Set largely inside Airway Heights Corrections Center and told through shifting timelines, the novel begins with a murder that should be impossible and then widens into something far stranger: occult rituals, demonic possession, body-swapping, institutional panic, and a mother’s desperate fight to protect her daughter, Lela. What starts as a prison thriller curdles into supernatural horror, with blood evidence, security footage, and human memory all becoming unreliable witnesses.
I was most compelled by the novel’s atmosphere. Ryan gives Airway Heights a clammy, pressurized quality; the prison never feels like a backdrop so much as a sealed lung trying to breathe around something rotten. Tracie’s voice is brash, bruised, funny in the wrong places, and sometimes jagged enough to cut through the melodrama. Her fixation on burgers, cigarettes, nail appointments, and her daughter’s teenage moods keeps the story tethered to ordinary life even as the plot begins to levitate into the occult. That grounding matters because without it, the supernatural machinery could have felt too gaudy; with it, the horror feels personal, almost domestic.
The book also has a maximalist streak. It piles on murders, rituals, possessions, confessions, betrayals, legal fallout, and emotional wreckage with very little interest in restraint. The momentum is hard to deny. Ryan writes like someone determined to shove every locked door open, and the result is messy in a way that often feels alive. I especially appreciated how the novel refuses to let Tracie remain a clean heroine. Her love for Lela is luminous, but her choices grow morally murky, and the ending leaves a residue of grief rather than the neat click of a solved case.
I think this would be a great book for readers who enjoy supernatural horror, prison thrillers, demonic possession stories, occult suspense, body-swap horror, and psychological thrillers. Fans of Stephen King’s The Green Mile may recognize the charged prison setting and the sense that something otherworldly has slipped into a place already built for suffering, though Ryan’s novel is more lurid, more frantic, and more openly demonic. Blood Echoes is a grim and feverish book about blood ties, borrowed bodies, and the terrible cost of surviving evil.
Pages: 332 | ASIN : B0GXN2TMD5
An Imprint of Evil and Other Hauntings
Stephen Tallevi’s An Imprint of Evil and Other Hauntings is a compact collection of ten horror stories built around cursed objects, old sins, hungry gods, occult bargains, and people who make one terrible choice too many. The book has the feel of classic ghost and weird fiction, with each story rooted in a specific time and place, from Manchester in 1831 to the Florida Keys in 1964, Chicago in 1905, and Muskoka Lakes in 1929. That historical spread gives the collection a pleasing variety, while the tone stays consistent: polished, eerie, and quietly wicked.
I enjoyed how often the horror grows out of desire. Mary’s longing in “Love is Blind,” George’s greed in “Pearly Whites,” Cathers’s ambition in “The Death God,” and the community’s bargain in “The Barn” all lead characters into darkness with their eyes wide open. These aren’t random hauntings so much as moral traps. Tallevi has a knack for letting people talk themselves into the unforgivable, then watching the supernatural world meet them halfway.
The stories also move at a brisk, readable pace. Most begin with a familiar situation, such as a reunion, an expedition, a country visit, a carnival, or a marriage under strain, and then tighten the screws until the final turn lands. “Idol of the Deep” is especially effective as an adventure story that slowly becomes something stranger and more fatal, while “Hands of Fate” adds a detective-story rhythm to the collection. The line “There is no death god in this cave, only death” captures the book’s taste for irony, where the supernatural and human cruelty often blur into one another.
Tallevi’s best moments come when he lets a simple image do the work: a wax doll, a black idol, stained hands, a scarecrow in a storm, a barn door that won’t open. The prose is clear and atmospheric without getting bogged down, and the collection has a campfire-story quality that makes it easy to keep turning pages. Even the brief “Summer Blood” has a playful bite. That story’s mix of menace and dark humor showcases the author’s personality.
An Imprint of Evil and Other Hauntings is an entertaining horror collection with a strong affection for old-school supernatural storytelling. It’s full of cursed inheritances, cruel bargains, and endings that snap shut like a trap. Readers who enjoy concise, atmospheric tales with a macabre sense of justice will find a lot to enjoy here, especially in the way Tallevi turns ordinary human weakness into something ghostly, grotesque, and strangely satisfying.
Pages: 132 | ASIN : B0G5LVNKF6
