At Home with the Horrors (2022)

Just when you thought it was safe to go home again… In this chilling collection of short fiction, Sammy Scott dares you to explore the horrors that are lurking behind your front door. In “Katherine,” a lonely woman finds an unlikely companion when she discovers that her new house is haunted. A couple’s mundane argument quickly evolves into a night of terror in “What We Have Here.” A harried wife finds herself the victim of her husband’s pranks when he launches a YouTube channel titled “Scared Mary.” An antisocial teenager encounters a mysterious new world when he begins looking into the windows of his neighbors’ homes in “Peeping Tommy.” A mourning widow is forced to relive her husband’s death when he calls her daily on her cell phone in “Theresa.” In “People You May Know,” a happily married man turns his life upside-down when he sends a Facebook friend request to an old college flame that no longer remembers him. A woman sets a trap for her runaway cat and is horrified to find that she has captured “Something Else Entirely.” And in the concluding novella “Emil Bones,” a librarian regrets the day she reads a mysterious little book left behind in the library’s drop box. Exploring both the natural and the supernatural, the alien and the ghostly, the chilling and the horrific, these fourteen diversions first root themselves in the mundanity of everyday life before extending their branches into the very things and ideas that terrify us all. In At Home with the Horrors, Scott brings the nightmares to the one place where we should all feel the safest, and shows us that when it comes to horror, grief, loss, and guilt can be just as terrifying as ghosts and goblins.