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"The Wicked King"  in Apex magazine  (Issue #12 - March '08)

The thing stepped freely from the tank. Its legs wobbled like a newborn deer and it grabbed the sides of the hatchway to steady itself. How many corpses would this one make? Robert wondered. He half closed his eyes to the thought and stepped aside to let the thing pass by. But it didn’t. It stopped.
And now stood beside him and Robert could hear the fluids dripping off its charcoal skin onto the floor. He could smell the synthetic stench of something between cheap fruity wine and formaldehyde. Robert gagged and a deep gargle burbled down the thing’s throat. He assumed it was laughing. Something gently touched Robert’s arm, tugging him closer...

 ( Geoffrey Girard )


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.Geoffrey Girard

"Translatio"  in the horror anthology Gratia Placenti
It hung in the grey sunless sky like an enormous black balloon, bloated and dull, with a dozen rutted tendrils dangling loosely just beneath. Had Keller not been looking for one, he probably would have missed it completely. It would have become only another dark cloud or treetop lurking at the far corner of his eye. Every city had them by now. Hundreds. Some no bigger than a minivan. Others, he’d heard, were as large as stadiums. The creatures hovered in one spot for hours, days sometimes, drifting almost imperceptibly on some terrible unseen current. As if they were only sleeping. Watching. Waiting. Every so often, they “woke” and someone was killed.

Review: "A twisted tale of servitude that starts dark and dives, without hesitation, for darker. Oppressively dark and daringly delivered, "Translatio" is likely to leave readers wondering if this anthology might be more than they can handle."  (from Dark Scribe Magazine)

Review: "Very effective... Dark and terrifying."  (from Horror World)

Review: "A post-apocalyptic tale of mood, despair and purpose. A gripping tale..."  (from FearZone)


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.Geoffrey Girard

"Sorry About the Blood"  in Apex magazine  (Issue #11 - November '07)

Her hair was wrong. It had to be the hair. It was a little too short. Too clean. Everything else was spot on. Perfect. The body was two-thirds across the bed, left side. The shoulders flat. Head turned to the left cheek. The left thigh at a perfect right angle to her trunk. One breast under the head, the other under her right foot. Liver between the feet. Intestines on the right side of the body. Spleen on the left. The flaps he’d removed from her abdomen and thighs were on the bedside table. The Thing on the Bed. Just like in the pictures. Just like in the dreams. Jacobson dragged the kukri knife gently along her forehead. Do I cut again? He’d already hacked off her ears and nose. Do I rip some more? ( Geoffrey Girard )


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.Geoffrey Girard

"Where the Shadow Ended"  in The Willows magazine  (September '07)
 [ reprinted in CLASS IN SESSION: A Student's Guide to Old School Horror  (Lake Fossil Press, 2008 ]
Tom was familiar to the darkness, an adopted son. He woke to it each morning and scurried over its dim empty streets, then immediately climbed back into it again to work in pitch black flues for hours. Wedged in endless shadow, reaching tiny hands into the dark unknown to scrape clean the insides of London’s chimneys. His skin, hair and clothes were soot-dyed and black. It was rumored to be bad luck to step on a chimney sweep’s shadow, and Tom supposed that was because it was never really clear where the shadow ended and the boy began.


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.Geoffrey Girard

"The Henry Lee Lucas Memorial Highway"  in Apex magazine  (Issue #10 - July '07)

The boy reached over to his plate and took the two slabs of half-cooked bacon. Becker looked away as he started stuffing the greasy meat into his mouth. Couldn’t help but wonder what other slippery meats had once passed across those exact same lips. What gristle those same sharp teeth had once chewed into. The same tongue savoring the taste of flesh. It wasn’t fair, Becker knew. This kid was not THE Ed Gein. Not technically. Nature, nurture, right? The boy's face was wet and shiny with grease. For just a moment, Becker thought it was blood. ( Geoffrey Girard )

Review: "The best I can personally hope for out of horror nowadays is to be vaguely creeped out, and even those thrills are becoming fewer and farther between for jaded old me. Then something like "The Henry Lee Lucas Memorial Highway" by Geoffrey Girard comes along. Definitely not for the squeamish... Part two of a four-part piece, but this piece standing alone makes for an excellent story."  (from TangetOnline.com)


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.Geoffrey Girard

"Universal Adaptor"  in Aoife's Kiss magazine  (Issue 21)
“Please don’t,” Paul said, then treated 45-23b with another thousand directed beams of hyper-radiation. The man’s mind punched back at it, betrayed and angry, and Paul ended up taking some of the jolt himself. The new pods they shared didn’t burn like the older models, but the rest was still there. A flash of loss, despair and defeat. Floating, hollow. Paul was only getting a taste of what his patient got, and it was terrible. But he didn’t try shaking it off because he knew that only time could make it go away and that it hurt like hell to rush the process. He relaxed and simply let the computer-driven despair settle in. Then he reminded himself it was just part of the job.
 ( Geoffrey Girard )

Review: "A story that could have gone to a much darker place, but the writer knew enough not to underestimate his audience. Just the hint at how dark it can go can be enough to send shivers of fear up your spine."  (from PuttPutt Productions)


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.Geoffrey Girard
"Dark Harvest" in Writers of the Future XIX 

No one knew what it was at first, the black thing lying in Tomas Walker’s barley field, and guesses and opinion collected for three days before anyone even dared touch it.  On that third day, surrounded by hushed words of both encouragement and warning, Leo Barth carefully used his longest walking stick to roll the thing to its side so they could all get a better look.  Then, though none of them had ever seen one before, they somehow knew exactly what it was.  A crow-black hooded cloak hid most of the long body, its legs and arms limp and twisted in peculiar directions, broken, looking just as if one of the girls had dropped her cloth moppet.... ( Geoffrey Girard )

 

Review: "The 19th installment contains more top-notch stories than last year's volume and is likely to satisfy science fiction and fantasy aficionados looking for fresh ideas and new twists on old conventions. Should be required reading for aspiring sci-fi and fantasy writers."  (from Publishers Weekly)

 

Review: "Geoffrey Girard brings us a story about what happens when you find your worst nightmare dying in a field, and it becomes a tourist attraction. Excellent writing, and a wonderful story." (from Amazon.com)


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Geoffrey Girard

"Wizards' Encore" reprinted in the anthology PRIME CODEX
         [ Originally appeared in Beyond Centauri magazine  (4/2005) ]
After he’d defeated their kingdom, the French wizard came to speak to Kabir’s father. The Frenchman wore a burnous, the traditional desert robe dark and long, a camel’s-hair cord wrapped tight around his fat and large forehead. He had dead, white skin, his face bare and corpselike with hard sharp eyes of a stone, blue as the sky, gazing lewdly about the tent from under his robe’s hood. Djenoum, Kabir thought again. A demon.    

Review: “Girard’s story of the French conjurer was so well-written that it took me right in. It’s not a simple tale of ‘magic as misdirection,’ but a conflict of magic in which the focus of the events is not revealed until the end of the story. It was impossible for me to put down this layered story with textured characters.” (from Sams Dot Publishing) ( Geoffrey Girard )

Review: "Prime Codex can stand next to any 'Best of' in the field. Full of fresh thinking, innovative writing, and outbreaks of staggering beauty, Prime Codex should be at the top of your to-be-read pile." (Jay Lake, Winner of the 2004 John W. Campbell Award)



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.Geoffrey Girard

"H. E. Double Hockey Stick" in the horror anthology Damned Nation 
Everyone on the team hated the twins. And not just the other players. Anyone who had anything even remotely to do with the Red Raiders hated them too. The coaches, all of the parents, refs, the kids they played against, the Zamboni guy, even the little old grandma who volunteered in the rink’s snack shop. The two boys were frail, pink-faced halfwits. Even for ten-year-olds who’d clearly never played hockey before, they stunk at everything from stick handling to shooting and, if possible, skated even worse. They didn’t know the rules or pay attention during practice. They couldn’t remember plays or formations. They didn’t even lace their stupid skates right. To make matters worse, Cory also suspected they were both demons straight from the pits of hell. ( Geoffrey Girard )

Review: "...Geoffrey Girard is my favorite! Hilarious and horrific. I need to read more of this guy's stuff." (from Shocklines.com)


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SALE: $5.00!
.Geoffrey Girard

"The Voice of Thy Brother's Blood"  in Apex magazine  (Issue #9)

This boy was every boy. The standard-model boy. T-shirt, jeans. Straight bangs falling over a rounded face. Big brown eyes. The fixed playful grin of a pirate. Plato’s Eternal-Form boy. Ten years old, legs too long, deep summer tan. Fidgeting in his chair. An iPod slung around his neck for later. He’d raped his first victim with a metal bar wrenched from the bed frame, then carefully positioned the body and the inserted bar for her family to find. Another dead woman, he’d bitten off both nipples before strangling her with a pair of stockings that’d been pulled so tightly around her neck, they’d cut to the bone. He’d done all these things. This boy. Theodore. Done more, actually, according to his summary file. Or his DNA had. ( Geoffrey Girard

Review: "Part one of Geoffrey Girard's serial, Cain XP11, is a must-read. Excellent storytelling and dialogue carry this first installment along at a clip... But mainly you have to read Cain XP11 for the last line. It is one of the strongest single lines I've ever read in any story, and I've never come across a writer who can deliver such an impact of both horror and humor in six simple words." (from Whispers of Wickedness magazine)


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.Geoffrey Girard

"The Twelve Year Bog" in The Rocking Chair Reader: Family Gatherings
This bog was smaller than the others, not much more than a dozen acres, but dense with the fattest and tastiest blueberries I’d ever picked. It was framed awkwardly in the tall dark trees of the New Jersey Pine Barrens, which surrounded the bushes on all sides and cast a mixture of wraithlike shadows and radiant sunlight over the deep-set field. Its boundaries were uneven and crooked, the dams built many years before.

My fingers were already stained blue in berry wax, collecting a hundred pounds a day. My grandfather, who’d worked the same fields for sixty years, watched us work and helped where he could. Though, he often just played his guitar. We slept on the porch each night with half a dozen other cousins. We ate our aunts’ various deep-dish cobblers and we all played penny poker until the first whippoorwill’s hoot. I was thirteen.


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.Geoffrey Girard

Forthcoming...

"Collecting James"  in Apex magazine  (Issue #13 - August '08)

Two dozen seemingly identical chips rested atop small black stands, displayed on the shelves like treasure. On the top shelf of the rosewood cabinet was something else, something dark and square. The case.
James looked away from it and considered the chips again, reaching into the narrow cabinet to inspect one. It was the size of a thick poker chip. An almost perfect circle of bone. He took it off its stand and ran his fingers along the edge. Felt where the chip has been carefully, tenderly smoothed. He clutched it tightly, and suddenly heard the faint sound of strings. An abrupt rush of violins. He heard notes, chord voices moving. A celebration of... He shook off the chip’s memory and placed it back on the stand.
 ( Geoffrey Girard )

.Geoffrey Girard

"What You Know"  in Courting Morpheus anthology  (October '08)

It might have stopped with the lists they’d made.

But, she’d only glanced at them. Had they filled the page? Kept within the lines? Had Tess Barber put down anything at all? Was Brendon McCarty’s writing still hopelessly illegible? She hadn’t really looked at what they’d really put down.

She pressed back deeper into the kitchen’s shadows, body trembling. Buster barked again somewhere outside, but the dog’s voice sounded empty and distant. Like a ghost dog. She eyed the counter above and thought again of grabbing one of the many knives there, one of the really big ones.

.Geoffrey Girard

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