It has honestly been too long since I created a new spooky story for the bizarre little series of shorts, An Ominous Hour. This book series is all about misfit short stories that simply are too bizarre to pigeonhole into most categories. And the latest entry is no exception.
The Collectors has been described as horror and thriller since it’s quite tense, but it is most definitely strange. Unsettling. Something that lingers in the mind long after reading it. The stories in the Ominous Hour series are all in the vein of episodes from The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror where things just don’t fit together the way they should. The Collectors is probably one of the most abstract and bizarre stories in this set. And if you’ve read A Beautiful Specimen, you know that’s saying something!
The Collectors follows Eva, a young woman who has been avoiding a bathroom in her house for a long time now. Something lurks in there that she doesn’t want to think about, or maybe is unable to think about. The main theme of this story is facing fear, not obvious ones like bugs or heights or something like that. But fear of truths that are avoided and left to rot. Fear of leaving a task for another day even though it has been months already. These fears are far more malicious, embarrassing, and hard to describe. They’re also very common. When Eva is finally forced to confront the thing she has spent so much time avoiding, she’s horrified to see how bad it’s gotten.
This story pulls at very unsettling feelings, ones that I think many people experience, which is why it tends to linger. See some of the early reviews below:
The Collectors: A Short Story is now available wherever ebooks are sold. You can also purchase a copy directly from my store, which helps support me as an indie author.
The Collectors: A Short Story
Eva can’t deny the truth forever.
Through a rotted out hole in the ceiling of Eva’s bathroom lurks a creature with gray skin and swollen limbs. It watches her every move.
Each year as the hole has gotten bigger, it’s easier for the creature to emerge. It’s been working on Eva for a while now, helping her avoid the hole, encouraging her to deny it even exists.
What starts out as a difficult home improvement project turns into a terror that Eva won’t be able to ignore. She thinks the creature is harmless, a figment of her imagination.
Eva is wrong. The nightmare is about to begin.