Showing results by author "Randy Chandler" in All Categories

Red Room Press is extremely proud to present its fourth annual anthology featuring this year's hardcore corps of authors with the best extreme horror fiction of 2018 that breaks boundaries and trashes taboos. Salud! Sleep well. If you can.

Editors Randy Chandler and Cheryl Mullenax put the call out to horror writers and editors of extreme stories, the hardcore stuff that breaks boundaries and trashes taboos, the transgressive tales you can't "unread" (as Chuck Palahniuk says). Some of the stories you'll find here are loaded with very graphic descriptions of violence, sex, and depravities, while others may contain only one shocking moment of brutality. In others, the hardcore aspect may be less graphic and subtler than you might expect.

Welcome to the masquerade. Two thousand twenty was a reality horror show. And like most obnoxious entertainment reality shows, this one had its own idiosyncratic rules and penalties. Call it The Big Lockdown. We were forced to go to ground, to hide in our holes. Some went underground and never came back. Uncertainty ruled because the rules kept changing. We couldn’t say for sure, so we ventured out for food, booze and sundries like scavengers in a slow-motion apocalypse, keeping our distance from fellow human beings because you never knew who might be carrying that heavy viral load.

2019. The year certainly made its mark on the world. It also made for a bounty of good horror stories of the extreme kind, the best of which the tales herein serve to illustrate. 2019 was the year Year's Best Hardcore Horror went global. Not by design but because the stories inside just happened to have been written by authors hailing from various parts of the globe. From Australia by way of South Africa, to Italy, Scotland, Norway, Taiwan, North America and India - the common denominator being that their tales come from darkest regions of imagination.

William Kidd’s travels on stolen roads begin when he’s a boy on leave from a psychiatric hospital and survives a car accident that kills both his parents. Kidd knows the otherworldly thing crouched on his dying father’s chest is no hallucination. Nothing in his mental inventory of the planet’s natural creatures jibes with this pebble-skinned thing nearly as big as a man, with spiky shoulders and lizard-like snout. The beast claws his face, giving him an indelible totem-mark scar he still wears as a young man when he goes in search of the creatures he calls “trocs.”

When virgin warrior Braga learns from a cross-cult sorcerer that Fate has chosen her to steal the sword of a rogue angel, she lights out on a dangerous quest from mystical Hag Mountain to other worlds, and even into the bowels of hell. With her soul in the balance, she and the mist-walking sorcerer encounter all manner of damned souls, demons, the living dead, and noble fighters.

Join four of today's best horror authors as they take you on a journey through dark lands and evil minds: An unfortunate prostitute joins a freak show to get away from her sordid past only to find that death follows her everywhere. A cooking show host is targeted by a jealous chef who wields a sharp blade and a supernatural grudge. A family man is given a choice by a deadly stranger to decide between love or survival. A former lover enlists the help of a shaman to find his kidnapped girlfriend in a land of mystical demons and gods.