Win this limited tray cased edition of Revival by Stephen King, from LetterPress Publications, still shrink wrapped! It is leatherette bound and has 17 illustrations by François Vaillancourt. It sells at Abebooks for $250 plus.
How do you win? Glad you asked.
You’ve heard of two-sentence horror stories, right? Well, this contest is all about two-sentence cosmic horror stories, and/or two-sentence Lovecraftian stories! SO: in the comments below, write a two-sentence story with that theme, and I’ll select a winner on April 20, 2021.
And if you haven’t read Revival, you really should. It’s great cosmic horror, and it’s only $8.99 on Kindle.
More images to whet your appetite:
After your submission, be sure to check out the latest issue of Cosmic Horror Monthly!
Listen to or watch our weekly podcast.
A synopsis of Revival, from Amazon:
A dark and electrifying novel about addiction, fanaticism, and what might exist on the other side of life.
In a small New England town, over half a century ago, a shadow falls over a small boy playing with his toy soldiers. Jamie Morton looks up to see a striking man, the new minister. Charles Jacobs, along with his beautiful wife, will transform the local church. The men and boys are all a bit in love with Mrs. Jacobs; the women and girls feel the same about Reverend Jacobs—including Jamie’s mother and beloved sister, Claire. With Jamie, the Reverend shares a deeper bond based on a secret obsession. When tragedy strikes the Jacobs family, this charismatic preacher curses God, mocks all religious belief, and is banished from the shocked town.
Jamie has demons of his own. Wed to his guitar from the age of thirteen, he plays in bands across the country, living the nomadic lifestyle of bar-band rock and roll while fleeing from his family’s horrific loss. In his mid-thirties—addicted to heroin, stranded, desperate—Jamie meets Charles Jacobs again, with profound consequences for both men. Their bond becomes a pact beyond even the Devil’s devising, and Jamie discovers that revival has many meanings.
This rich and disturbing novel spans five decades on its way to the most terrifying conclusion Stephen King has ever written.
Many, many thanks to Matthew Carpenter for providing the prize.
THE (NOT SO) FINE PRINT: Unfortunately, I can’t afford postage out of the United States, so I won’t be able to award a prize to anyone outside of the continental USA. Sorry, folks.
For sale: human soul. Never used.
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With apologies to Mr Hemingway
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Fetid air burned my lungs as He emerged from the gigantic mountain fissure, drawn to the frantic cries and chorus chants of his now naked and blood drenched followers. My mind reeled in abject terror as I had witnessed not just His glorious return but also from the brief preview of the upcoming death and violence that was instore for this pathetic planet we call Earth and he calls lunch.
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Cthulhu becomes aware, stirring in the stygian gloom, sending psychic emanations into the waiting cosmos. The stars are not right, and he turns in his bed, falling again into the arms of Lethe.
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There was no new world ahead, no home, and all that await the ship and its valuable cargo of colonists was that thing. How many such beings dispatched their envoys to the young races of the galaxy, envoys like the ‘Leader’, convincing them to deliver themselves as fodder to glut their cosmic overseers?
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*awaited – 🤦🏻♂️
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This new outfit is really uncomfortable. I’ll never understand how people walk around in all this… skin.
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The old Good-Book was right: the bride of the lamb will come again, his 144,000 young trailing on dangling teats. The trump shall sound and the hoary host will descend in the final reaping of the righteous, making way for His ascension to his new earthly throne.
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I finally stitched my eyes closed today and burst my ear drums, but I can still hear and see. The goat-thing sings to me of the death of universes.
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Outstanding.
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I have every light on, but still nothing but shadows. It’s becoming all consuming and I am losing myself.
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My gaze to the heavens revealed the sky yawning wide, revealing the sharp teeth of stars beyond. The cosmos then began to feast on my fear, sanity fleeing on my screams.
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Jamie raised his track mark covered arms, his guitar in one hand and his tongue in the other. He attempted to scream as barbed tentacles wrapped themselves around his hands and mouth, and ripped him apart as his sacrifice was rejected.
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“Pha’tueee mglw’mudratfs Cthulhu R’lyeh wahh fhtagn,”
the batrachian-lipped old geezer proclaimed,
and then grinned lewdly at the newlywed couple,
which translated meant only one thing:
The bathrooms were currently out of order.
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It scared him to his spine when he realized they’d existed way before any human breathed an ounce of air. After the cold realization, the very first thing he did was check his soul to ensure it’s still intact and there.
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In treacherous places, where lightning dreams, the Cyber Gods wake, stirring from a restless, aching slumber; hoping, gnawing, and scratching. Broken free from the cobwebbed dark of the vacuous night, their silvery faces laughed, drinking in every last nightmares, but still, they wanted more and no longer in treacherous places would the Cyber Gods sleep.
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It scared him to his spine when he realized that they’d existed way before any human breathed an ounce of air. After the cold realization, the very first thing he did was checking his soul to ensure it’s still there and intact.
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Not sure if this counts as it’s one sentence. “The eye of Jupiter opened.”
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They always told him “Write what you know!” That was why he wrote horror stories.
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And, as the man watched the droplet glide down the window, he could suddenly see the organisms traveling at breakneck speed within… Longing to make this race, this survival. No
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The sleeper awakes from a nightmare, sweating and gasping for breath. “What a horrible place that planet Earth was,” it thinks.
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“It really is a miracle,” the nurse mused, peering in at the tightly-swaddled bundles arrayed behind the viewing glass. “And to think that just days ago, they were out there among us, walking around with limbs like Real people!”
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Farmer Burgess didn’t know why the moss had come- creeping across his land and claiming his crops, his home, and finally his wife (whose breath now came rattling from the black mass in the root cellar). He only knew how it felt in his dream, the one where his mouth
opened wide as the growth rushed from his throat like a thick and soundless scream.
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Oleaginous tendrils are searching through my memories, I can feel the happiest times disappearing, as it gorges itself. The feel of cold steel on my teeth, the acrid taste of cordite on my palate, as I prepare to starve the beast.
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Shivering and sweat-soaked I awoke from my dreams in the Innsmouth Motel. I swallowed a scream when I opened my eyes to discover that I could still see that infinitesimal but interminable gap between the wall and the floor and could still hear the murmuring sounds calling me towards it.
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The burn scars were agonizing, but he plucked the manuscript from the fireplace, feeling a brief sense of vertigo as if being lifted. Whole charred sections of the house fell into an empty void, and he limped away, cursing the author, and screaming at the bystanders for an ambulance.
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Oleaginous tendrils are searching through my memories, I can feel the happiest times disappearing, as it gorges itself. The feel of cold steel on my teeth, the acrid taste of cordite on my palate, as I prepare to starve the beast.
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The stars are finally right for the Children of the Sky to rise and claim their place above the kings of Earth, and darkness will reign in the skies forever.
Jooooooin uuuuuussssssssss…….
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On his death bed, the old man, whowas my Uncle althoughestranged from my late father, told me to destroy the Book, literally to burn it in the old wood stove.
I wish to God that Ihad, listened and obeyed his final wish.
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Silence greeted him once more, the pulsing light a calming, gentle wave of surreality that embalmed his body in viridian, releasing his mind from it’s fleshy prison. The fury of his painting had abated now, lost in the susurration of light molecules, lines of scarlet and brown, torn from his own body in tribute to The One True King, dripped from the walls and his tongue- severed, pink, useless – sang praises from the nail on the wall in praise of the Old Ways.
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He touched the scar on his chest, its smooth orbit somehow soothing. He watched maggots burst from a pigeon on the street and was touched by an uncanny remembrance, but the moment soon passed and was forgotten, whilst the thing inside him curled ever tighter.
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As he walked into the intense darkness, he felt it congealing around him, thick and glutinous as it sucked at his soul. There would be no way out of this, he knew that, but still he fought to retain what little sanity he had left.
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At 10:07 PM, a cacophony of terror filled the air as every animal, domestic and wild, in the neighborhood began screaming. Though she knew her God to be impotent at best and imaginary at worst, Professor Leticia Benson fell to her knees and recited the litany of her childhood prayers, for she alone knew the truth: something had awakened.
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I met the entity of which we are all components. It was infinite, but its name was Zero.
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“Granfer, Granfer Whateley, the stars, they’re RIGHT!”
“Wilber, lad, I’ll let you into a little secret – the stars are ALWAYS right.”
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The storm rocked the Pacific Princess cruise ship as the leader of the mutineers stared at the sat-nav screen and shouted out the readings to the grim-faced man at the wheel. Around the bridge, the remainder of the leader’s men stared out the windows and continued to chant as the passengers, lashed to the railings and beaten by the wind, the rain and the ocean spray, stopped moaning and crying and began to scream as tentacles rose up from the troubled sea.
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Staff Sargent Wilcox ignored the sporadic sounds of gunfire and dogtrotted to the crashed Toyota pickup, ignored the driver whose brains were splattered over the interior of the cab, and flipped back the tarp covering the truck bed to expose a pile of books and pottery that had obviously been looted from the Iraq Museum. From a shattered window across the street and two floors up, a dark man stood with his rifle held loosely in his hand and grinned as the American slipped the Al Azif into his backpack and hurried back to his men.
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It is said that everybody alive at the time remembers where they were when they heard that President Kennedy had been assassinated. The same might be true of the day that Nyarlothotep arrived in town had there been anyone who remained sane enough to remember.
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“Brothers, Sisters, exult and allow your ebullience to spasm and convulse your flesh in paroxysms of euphoria; moreover, ululate your passionate release as His presence washes over you, as you are suffused with His blessing, as your fluids do spume and dribble, as your mind opens to the realization,” extolling voice lowering to near a whisper. “To the realization, Carcosa has arrived…”
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Trapped forever behind a glass-steel dome, I watched as our vessel pulled away – leaving me behind, as a willing sacrifice to the creatures, that our own planet might be spared.
Too late, realization dawned: the creatures had gone to Earth with it.
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After days of fine meticulous work, her bridal gown was finally finished. Trying it on, she spun giddily around the room, almost oblivious the the screams of the flayed to their gods and mothers.
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From my window, I watched a black man wave as he stood in the spectral moonlight that illuminated my snow-covered front yard. I saw that his palm was as black as the starless night sky and, as he turned and walked away, I rushed outside to follow his footsteps in the snow.
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The twins slipped out of their home, taking care not to awaken their parents. They moved quietly over the newly harvested field so as to not frighten the late working farmers lest they be alerted to the twins’ presence and get away.
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The.45 roared and bucked in my hand but the gorgeous dame in front of me merely laughed as the blunt nose slugs slammed into her body. It was then that I remembered that the doc had said that silver bullets were for werewolves, not vampires.
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At last the artefact had been passed on, his family was safe – but what if Coleridge tried to return it? That would never do, he said to himself and raised the revolver to his temple.
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There is power at those dark ancient places for sure, a power without expression in our language of cultures to describe, they speak of illusive forces, of timelessness and of cosmic terror. They speak silently of antediluvian sinister rituals to the grotesque gods of some long forgotten cult of the shadow and i fear these places, these ominous and forboding markers of worship.
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That blank year the shock of the most astonishing discovery in all of human history fell upon me: Edwin Hubble, through his examination of the ceaseless blinking of Cepheid variables, revealed that more than one galaxy existed, that the universe was filled with galaxies, each with billions of stars, with horrendous empty gulfs of space between them. This revelation of the massive meaningless of human accomplishment in the context of the universe’s unimaginable, dizzying size caused the hairs on my missing legs to prickle erect.
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As I crept toward the sickly glow emanating from the opening ahead of me I heard chanting in a tongue no earthly voice was meant utter, it’s rhythm and cadence utterly alien and unsettling, I peered through the doorway and beheld a scene I cannot possibly recount for the mere thought of it renders me nauseous with terror. A part of my very soul has never left that place and never will, gripped in the terrible maw of the horror birthed there for all the black aeons to come.
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I kept calling my mother the day she buried me. She wouldn’t answer.
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Emerging from the newly thawed cyclopean ruins, having been nearly lost in the insane geometry of its labyrinthine interior, he knew they had awoken it. Not the lumbering leviathan of childish nightmares, but the microscopic malevolent beings that were now in everyone of them—exhaled by the millions in every breath.
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What I thought was a phantom that danced upon my vision proved itself all too real once it began to stroke my hand. An unfathomable infinity burned itself onto my brain in that exact moment.
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This small boy, huddled in fear, shivering in the dark of a starlit night and staring at the shadowed valley hills. Over the eastern ridge crawled something, immense and horrible, conjured from his own mind to terrify his restless sleep.
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The captain and crew of ‘The Adventurer ‘ watched in awe as the northern lights lit up the night sky. Unaware that something monstrous was watching them, waiting to suck out their life force.
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Growing up with cats and dogs, I got used to the sounds scratching at my door while I slept. Now that i live alone, it is much more unsettling.
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Having cast eyes upon the old ones, he stood there paralysed with fear as they shuffled passed accompanied by a sibilant hiss. It was only a matter time before one of them noticed him and then it would all be over, there would be no coming back from this discovery.
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Marilyn awoke a hospital room when the burning in her lower body became unbearable. Outside her room, the nurses and doctors celebrated the first successful insemination by a Deep One in ten years.
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The first radio telescope powerful enough to detect the big bang was finally complete. The scientists waited with bated breath as the speakers crackled to life with the signal: “Never gonna give you up”
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Julia wept as she slumped to the floor; her knife slick with the blood of her children. She begged, “Please — no more,” but the whispers from the well continued to demand even more from her.
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The Eater of Souls cruised the cosmos in search of sustenance, having devoured entire worlds, eating and thriving, until They came to Earth. For a long while, They sat above the atmosphere, searching for life, and when found, attempted to feed, but alas, someone—or rather something—had beat Them to it.
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The man began a high-pitched keening, his face cracking into an impossibly wide smile. With a sound like the splintering of a billion bones, the heavens replicated the gesture.
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Damn! This is really good, so very cosmic in its horror. I love it.
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Thin fingers, strangely elongated and adorned with pulsing, feathery veins sculpt the shape of Jeremy Meyrink’s chin, his cheeks, his lips – a tentative, teasing delicate touch that travels the roadmap of his face. Satisfied, the fingers caress with ease the fleshy neck, therein to guide him into Quonstz, City of Silent Vigil, a place where Dreams are formed.
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It is not known if the Mi-Go have any thoughts about their existence, although it is recorded in one incident that a group of Mi-Go – having fallen asleep on a hot summer day in a field of strangely weeping flowers, their ellipsoid forms writhing under intense heat – seemed to melt into the terrain, their bodies becoming a viscid puddling that nourished the purple-hued flowers wherein which they lay. The rest of the story appears clothed in mystery, although there can be no doubt whatsoever that a number of travelers throughout the land have reported seeing scarlet-petaled flowers with long drifting stamens floating against the moonlit night, creatures endowed with membranous wings traveling through the aether with carefree ease, their destination unknown and unfathomable.
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Death is almost upon me, I feel it as the deep dark hole in the middle of the room grows larger, larger by the second, the voices they whisper to me, ‘He’s awoken! He’s coming! He’s everywhere!’. I am nearing the end of my pitiful existence, my last desire is to jump, not for him, but for my meaningless existence, I can’t fight it anymore, I AM DONE!
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My eyes throbbed when I looked directly at the strange shapes the professor drew on the white board, her erratic motions and sick grin offering no solace. But slowly, an understanding kindled behind my consciousness, and I smiled, too.
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These things I remembered; my father excited about my scholarship to Miskatonic University and my mother crying as the train pulled out of the station to carry me, her daughter, to a new life. These memories I tried to hold onto as my roommate’s chanting faded along with the light which dimmed and left the room filled with a velvet darkness until the nameless colors swirled around me and I knew no more.
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Thran, his naked chest heaving, his hand tight around the grip of his nicked and bloody sword, trod across the field of slaughtered men and horses toward the hill where the king stood with his yellow robes swirling in the wind that stank of death and fear. The king raised a hand and traced a sign in the air whereupon the dead rose up and Thran, though his blade again drank deep of the blood of his foes, was finally sent, broken and bloody, to join his comrades to battle forever in the land of the dead.
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Helen grabbed the book from her younger brother’s hand and pranced around the room holding the book just out of his reach and singing, though terribly off key, “Cthuhu gonna get you if you don’t watch out!” Later that night, Helen was awoken by the sound of her brother chanting, then the weight of slime covered tentacles as they dragged her through her bedroom window.
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Debra stopped her SUV behind a row of likewise stopped cars, tapped the screen on her navigation unit and cursed and damned the thing to an everlasting electronic hell. As some explainable compulsion gripped her, she got out of her vehicle and walked through the other cars until she felt something wet and hard wrap around her ankle and drag her screaming into the darkness.
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Why bother? We’re all dead stardust, just too self-obsessed to realize it.
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The blood moon rose above the foaming waves as the twelve stood on the black sand, raised their hands and chanted as had their ancestors of old. At the last, a monstrous wave rose up and crashed down on the shore to shatter the bodies of the supplicants and free their souls to drift on ethereal winds forever amid the dimming stars.
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Excellent! A perfect depiction of the universe’s utter disconcern with puny humanity, well done!.
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The months-long headache failed to be subdued by even the strongest of medicines at his disposal. And, as he saw the tiny, clawed, hand slide around from behind the orb of his eye, he finally understood why.
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