DAY 12 OF ANNOUNCING! Table of Contents for: +HORROR LIBRARY+ Volume 6

I’ll be unhurriedly posting all contributors here, one-a-day, to reveal the T.O.C. for this latest anthology volume that I edited for +HORROR LIBRARY+, to be published by Farolight Publishing (Cutting Block Books) in April, 2017.

DAY 12 of 27: the amazing, the prodigious Jeffrey Ford!

1. JG Faherty presents “The H Train”
2. Edward M. Erdelac presents “Hear The Eagle Scream”
3. Rebecca J. Allred presents “Mother’s Mouth, Full of Dirt”
4. Jay Caselberg presents “The Ride”
5. John M. Floyd presents “The Red-Eye to Boston”
6. Tom Johnstone presents “Oldstone Gardens”
7. Bentley Little presents “The Plumber”
8. Darren O. Godfrey presents “D.U.I.”
9. Carole Johnstone presents “Better You Believe”
10. David Tallerman presents “Casualty of Peace”
11. Kathryn E. McGee presents “The Creek Keepers’ Lodge”
12. Jeffrey Ford presents “Five Pointed Spell”

EXCERPT:

…in that instant it became clear that not only was it a truck but it was a black truck.

He must have been doing 90. I pushed down on the gas, to my mind, recklessly, but as wild as I thought I drove, I didn’t stand a chance of outpacing him. I looked at the speedometer and I was only doing 55. “Jesus,” I said, threw the butt out the window and closed it. I inched up to 60 mph but felt as if the car was getting out of control. Then the truck was right behind me, flashing its lights and beeping.

I pulled over at almost exactly the spot I’d pulled over on the way to town. My heart was pounding, and as I hit the brakes to coast to the side, the car wriggled erratically. A dark blur blew past, and I saw the guy in the driver’s seat. He stared over at me with a dull expression while chewing on a black cheroot of a cigar. One detail I caught as he whipped out of sight was that under his orange cap in the back, the hair had been shaved from his scalp behind his ear and there was a big white Frankenstein scar like his head had been stitched back on. It matched up somehow in my mind with the decal on his back window—a spear point with a sword in it and lightning bolts shooting across like scars.

For the next few weeks, every time I left the house, I’d warily check my rearview mirror, and not once was it in vain. That guy had to be spying on me. I asked the farmers on either side of my place if they knew who it was, describing the truck to them. Both of them more or less said the same thing, “Oh, yeah, that black truck, I’ve seen it before.”

— Five Pointed Spell by Jeffrey Ford

ABOUT: Jeffrey Ford

Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, and The Shadow Year. His short story collections are The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, Crackpot Palace, and A Natural History of Hell. Ford’s short fiction has appeared in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies. Both books and stories have been translated into nearly twenty languages worldwide. Ford is the recipient of The World Fantasy Award, Nebula, Edgar Allan Poe Award, The Shirley Jackson Award, The Hayakawa Award, and Gran Prix de l’Imaginaire. He lives in Ohio in a hundred and twenty year old farm house surrounded by corn and soybean fields and teaches part-time at Ohio Wesleyan University. More about Jeffrey Ford at: http://www.well-builtcity.com