
OBSOLESCENCE is a collection of short stories about horrifying or fantastical interactions with technology. All leaps in technology are scary. Mysterious. Misunderstood. Until they slowly creep into our daily lives and become impossible to get rid of. Like an evolving parasite. The broken cell phone that can only text with your dead husband. The backyard tire swing that becomes a portal to another world. The Radio Shack Walkie-Talkies that pick up an alien GPS… In OBSOLESCENCE, technology gets repurposed, subverted, and redefined.
Authors


Subscribe to myNewsletter Join my street team on Facebook to win prizes, discuss my work with others, and get exclusive content and offers David Niall Wilson has been writing and publishing horror, dark fantasy, and science fiction since the mid-eighties. An ordained minister, once President of the Horror Writer 's Association and multiple recipient of the Bram Stoker Award. He lives outside Hertford, NC with the love of his life, Patricia Lee Macomber, His children Zane and Katie, occasionally their older siblings, Stephanie, who is in college, and Bill and Zach who are in the Navy, and an ever-changing assortment of pets. David is CEO and founder of Crossroad Press, a cutting edge digital publishing company specializing in electronic novels, collections, and nonfiction, as well as unabridged audiobooks and print titles.

Nicole Dieker is a writer, teacher, and musician. She began her writing career as a full-time freelancer with a focus on personal finance and habit formation; she launched her fiction career with The Biographies of Ordinary People, a definitely-not-autobiographical novel that follows three sisters from 1989 to 2016. Currently, Dieker writes the Larkin Day mystery series and the perzine WHAT IT IS and WHAT TO DO NEXT. She also maintains an active freelance career; her work has appeared in Vox, Morning Brew, Lifehacker, Bankrate, Haven Life, Popular Science, and more. Dieker spent five years as writer and editor for The Billfold, a personal finance blog where people had honest conversations about money. Dieker lives in Quincy, Illinois with the great love of her life, his piano, and their garden.

KRISTINA HORNER is an author who writes contemporary and urban fantasy for young adult and middle grade readers. She runs a small, independent publisher called 84th Street Press through which she has published multiple anthologies, including 'Boys, Book Clubs, and Other Bad Ideas' and 'The Mistletoe Paradox'. She created the writing podcast 'How To Win NaNo', has written for a number of tabletop RPGs, including 'Vampire: The Masquerade' and has been a consistent winner of National Novel Writing Month since 2006. Kristina lives and works out of her home in Seattle, Washington alongside her husband Joe and their son, Maximus. When she’s not writing, she can be found in her garden or playing board games. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter at @KristinaHorner.

Christi Nogle’s debut novel, Beulah, is out now from Cemetery Gates Media and her collection The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future is coming in early 2023 from Flame Tree Press, to be followed by Promise (mid-2023) and One Eye Opened in That Other Place (2024). Her short stories have appeared in over fifty publications including PseudoPod, Vastarien, and Dark Matter Magazine along with anthologies such as C.M Muller’s Nightscript and Flame Tree’s American Gothic. Christi is a member of the Horror Writers Association, Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, and Codex Writers’ Group. She lives in Boise, Idaho with her partner Jim and their gorgeous dogs. Follow her at christinogle.com or on Twitter @christinogle Praise for Beulah: “Nogle, like all writers with a rare knack coupled with incredible skill and imagination, makes everything she writes look easy and effortlessly ingenious. Even the Table of Contents of her latest novel, Beulah, reflects that sense of effortless ingenuity (The beginning chapter is called “When you talk to the dead”, followed by 12 month named titles, followed by the last chapter, “When you walk with the dead”). I’ve been lucky enough to publish Nogle’s short stories twice now, and I hope to publish her work many more times in the future. My initial reaction to reading this debut novel is simply this: how in the hell could this be anyone’s first novel? It’s so assured, so masterful, so in control at every level. This is not the typical mess of even the most talented writer’s first attempt at that tricky long form. This is the work of a top tier author in top form. Anyone writing a book blurb is tempted to summarize the plot and shower the book (and writer) with hyperbolic praise. I won’t do the former, and I promise you I’m not doing the latter. Nogle has all the goods, a singularly weird imagination, a tremendous sense of pacing and voice, and a mastery of clarity and control on the sentence level. Beulah will easily prove to be one of the best horror novels (never mind debut novels) of 2022. Read it. “ -Jon Padgett, author of The Secret of Ventriloquism With a skilled and unflinching hand, Nogle guides us through layers of time and experience in Beulah. Through the eyes of reluctantly “gifted” Georgie, we see what is usually hidden—the heartbreaking and terrifying—every rich and textured detail leading to a truly satisfying payoff. I will never forget this walk with the dead. — J.A.W. McCarthy, author of SOMETIMES WE’RE CRUEL AND OTHER STORIES Beulah: Beulah is the story of Georgie, an eighteen-year-old with a talent (or affliction) for seeing ghosts. Georgie and her family have had a hard time since her father died, but she and her mother Gina and sisters Tommy and Stevie are making a new start in the small town of Beulah, Idaho where Gina’s wealthy friend Ellen has set them up to help renovate an old stone schoolhouse. Georgie experiences a variety of disturbances—the town is familiar from dreams and she seems to be experiencing her mother’s memory of the place, not to mention the creepy ghost in the schoolhouse basement—but she is able to maintain, in her own laconic way, until she notices that her little sister Stevie also has the gift. Stevie is in danger from a malevolent ghost, and Georgie tries to help, but soon Georgie is the one in danger.

Born and raised in a small harbor town in the south of Ireland, Kealan Patrick Burke knew from a very early age that he was going to be a horror writer. The combination of an ancient locale, a horror-loving mother, and a family full of storytellers, made it inevitable that he would end up telling stories for a living. Since those formative years, he has written five novels, over a hundred short stories, six collections, and edited four acclaimed anthologies. In 2004, he was honored with the Bram Stoker Award for his novella The Turtle Boy. Kealan has worked as a waiter, a drama teacher, a mapmaker, a security guard, an assembly-line worker at Apple Computers, a salesman (for a day), a bartender, landscape gardener, vocalist in a grunge band, curriculum content editor, fiction editor at Gothic.net, and, most recently, a fraud investigator. When not writing, Kealan designs book covers through his company Elderlemon Design. A movie based on his short story "Peekers" is currently in development as a major motion picture. Represented by Merrilee Heifetz at Writers House Agency.

Rob Hart is the author of THE PARADOX HOTEL. He also wrote THE WAREHOUSE, which has been sold in more than 20 countries and been optioned for film by Ron Howard, as well as the Ash McKenna crime series, the short story collection TAKE-OUT, and SCOTT FREE with James Patterson. His short stories have been published widely, including “Due on Batuu,” set in the Star Wars universe, which appeared in FROM A CERTAIN POINT OF VIEW: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, and "Take-Out," which appeared in BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES 2018. He’s worked as a political reporter, the communications director for a politician, and a commissioner for the city of New York. He is the former publisher at MysteriousPress.com and the current class director at LitReactor. He lives in New York City.

Hailey Piper is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Queen of Teeth, No Gods for Drowning, The Worm and His Kings series, Your Mind Is a Terrible Thing, Unfortunate Elements of My Anatomy, Benny Rose, the Cannibal King, and The Possession of Natalie Glasgow. She is an active member of the Horror Writers Association, with articles and short fiction appearing in Tor Nightfire, CrimeReads, Library Journal, Pseudopod, Cast of Wonders, Vastarien, Cosmic Horror Monthly, and various other publications. She lives with her wife in Maryland, where their occult rituals are secret. Find her on Twitter via @HaileyPiperSays or at www.haileypiper.com.



ALAN LASTUFKA writes horror, supernatural, and magical realism stories. His short fiction has been praised by Writer’s Digest. The screenplay adaptation of his story, “The Fort,” was an Official Selection at numerous film festivals. Alan is the co-founder of DFTBA Records with Hank and John Green. When he's not writing, Alan is one-half of the rock band The Caulden Road with bandmate Christian Caldeira, and enjoys walking through Oregon's beautiful woods with his partner, Kristen.


