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Welcome to my Gray Skies of Dismal Dreams, where the days are never sunlit and blithe, and where the nights are always cold and wrapped in a winding sheet of endless nightmares. This is a collection of my poetry and short stories – all of which have been forged in the darkest recesses of my mind and soul.
Poetry has played a constant role in my life for nearly as far back as I can remember. I composed my first "real" poem while in the Fifth Grade. It was called "The Hounds of Hell" and was about the dead returning to life and clawing their way out of their graves one fateful Halloween night. I recall that my English teacher seemed to be quite taken with it; however, my classmates thought I had a rather morbid imagination. And how right they were!
Since that day, I've never really had the desire to write hearts-and-flowers poetry or upbeat short stories. Quite frankly, I don't feel that it's something I'm even capable of doing. This isn't to say that I haven't made the odd attempt. However, an idea that starts out as pleasant prose about fluffy kittens, for instance, will take a dark turn and lead me far away to some disturbing destination, like a crumbling old house where an elderly woman dies alone and is devoured by a horde of hungry cats from hell. Poems intended to be cheerful holiday rhymes recited in front of the Christmas tree transform into gift-wrapped boxes of sarcasm and poetic lamentations about being raped by Santa Claus or committing suicide with broken tree ornaments.
I just can't help myself. It's the way my mind works.
With regards to the writing of horror, my influences tend to lean towards authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, M.R. James, and Bram Stoker, just to name a handful. In my own tales of supernatural terror, I tend to combine Gothic sensibilities with a touch of gallows humor, and sometimes hidden sarcasm. I adore the absurd and the abnormal; therefore, that's what I write about. That's what I need to write about. The mainstream has never turned me on.
I hope you'll enjoy your excursion into my gloomy world of shadows. But don't expect happy endings and silver linings in the clouds that fill my gray skies. You won't find any there. But you will encounter a tapestry woven from the threads of pain, grief, sorrow, death, nightmares, and unstoppable dark forces.
With that being said, please come in and make yourself at home, as the spider once said to the fly. By the way, do you take arsenic or strychnine with your tea?