Horror

The System told me to do good deeds during the apocalypse.

It also told me to change the world through love.

I've always been the cooperative type. So I raised my blade, brought it down, and carved through the scum of this world—one slash at a time.

The System lost its mind, shrieking inside my head at a deafening pitch:

*"AHHH! Host! Why are you killing people?! This counts as evil! Points wi...

My mother had no medical license, yet wealthy socialites lined up to hand her fat checks.
I often saw her lead those women into the treatment room, where agonizing screams would pierce through the locked door.
But strangely, those same women emerged radiant, as if they'd shed twenty or thirty years overnight, pressing stacks of cash into her hands with tearful gratitude.
What baffled me more was h...

In the languid twilight of existence, where the air hangs heavy with the scent of forgotten dreams, a figure lurks within the confines of the Vampire Zoo, a private prison adorned with the grotesque glamour of human fascination. Bohdan the Vampire Ripper, a creature of legend and lore, finds himself ensnared in a gilded cage, revered by a chorus of prison groupies whose adoration masks their own m...

Deep in the Appalachian Mountains, there stands a Gothic manor.

That is where my family lives.

Every twenty years, we invite an "outsider"—a man not of our blood—to be our guest. They all share one thing in common: each is steeped in wickedness.

Ron was the eighteenth. And he was the key to whether I would successfully shed my skin.

He believed he had come only to inherit a fortune.

He did no...

"What kind of sick game are you playing?" my husband, Mark, snapped through the phone.
I stared at my heavy plaster cast and said nothing.
In my previous life, distant relatives brought a bag of cash to my clinic, begging me to bump my cousin up the surgery waitlist. I refused.
By morning, the money vanished.
Security footage showed someone in my scrubs, with my exact face, stealing it.
My colleag...

"You sure dispatch called this... natural causes?" I gripped the steering wheel, staring at the perfect suburban house.
"That's what they said," Gates muttered. The victim's father, Arthur, stood at the door in pressed khakis, weeping.
He swore his daughter, Grace, died in her sleep last night after eating vanilla pudding.
But the moment we stepped inside, a suffocating cocktail of cheap lavender...

My best friend Bella had a cluster of mushrooms growing on her back, every color you could imagine.

They throbbed like something alive, and the smell coming off them was like nothing I'd ever smelled.

She called it Moonlight Bloom, a gift straight from Viscount Lucas himself.

If she kept that thing on her body for forty days, not one more, not one less, until it bloomed its brightest spores, th...

On the second floor of this old Victorian house is a long hallway with a dark red rug. Six doors are evenly spaced along its walls.
We lived here peacefully for ten years.
Until last month, when my seven-year-old sister, Maeve, suddenly refused to set foot in it.
The adults dismissed it as a childish phobia.
Until late one night, hiding under the covers, she pressed her face to my ear and whi...

I thought Auden was the most devoted husband in the world—until the day I regained my sight and recognized him on the front page: a serial killer who had murdered eight blonde women.
I had to play blind. I swallowed the liquid the maid brought me—a brew soaked in dead people's eyeballs. I chewed on a human molar in my dinner. I sat perfectly still as I watched him fuck our maid right in front of m...

Translation

Zombies besieged the city. I fought through the infected zone alone and brought back the vaccine.

All of humanity hailed me as their savior.

But at the medal ceremony, my superior and fiancée Amy shoved me aside. "You're covered in blood. Stand over there. Would it kill you to be more like David?"

"A man who can't even bear to look at violence—that's what a civilized person loo...

When the apocalypse came, my materialistic ex-girlfriend not only complained that I only knew how to play games, but also conspired with relatives to poison me, cruelly steal my superpower crystal core, and degrade me into a hopeless cripple!
She thought that by taking away my power she could curry favor with the powerful and live a carefree life, but little did she know that not only did I not di...

As the only mute player in this horror game, I thought I was screwed.

Turns out the boss knows sign language.

Thank God! Perfect!

Then he gets everything completely wrong.

I sign "help me," he reads it as "you're hot."

I sign "danger," he thinks I'm saying "I like you."

I sign "get lost," and he goes, "You want me to come closer? Okay."

The worst part? I curse him out in sign language, call...

Siren's Reef only breeds women.
On this isolated island, Henrietta's orphanage takes in all fatherless girls. She raises us until our eighteenth birthday—the night of the "Coral Crowning," an annual coming-of-age ritual that supposedly earns the Sea God's blessing.
My sister Saffron and I are identical twins, raised wearing the exact same face.
But on this island, the same face doesn't spell the s...

On the night of Reeve’s birthday, I drove to his family’s coastal estate with a premium ribeye and a bottle of Pinot Noir, ready to give him a romantic surprise.
But the rug was shifted three inches, and a single drop of dark blood hid in the floorboards. Before I could run, a gun barrel pressed against the back of my head.
The man was impeccably dressed and terrifyingly calm. Upstairs in my batht...

I'm a folklorist. Folk traditions are my field.
At first, I thought it was just an ordinary rhyme, a scrap of oral history set to a tune.
"A rag doll in the mire, swinging high up to the sky..."
We all thought it was just a prank.
Until the first person drowned in the bog. Then the second fell from a tower crane. Then the third somehow drowned in a bathtub.
I stared at the black symbol surfacing o...

Two years ago, my best friend Maddie knelt in front of me, crying as she borrowed $50,000.
The very next day, she vanished off the face of the earth. No explanation, no apology, not even a single text message.
I was left carrying her toxic debt. I lost my fiancé, and I lost my ability to trust anyone.
Until one late night, a call came in from an unknown number originating in an abandoned mining di...

Did you slaughter your roommates?" the detective sneered. "No!" I screamed. The polygraph technician stared at the flawless readouts confirming I told the absolute truth. I was innocent. But if a human didn't tear those girls apart in our locked dorm... then what exactly is hunting me now?

Our clan worships the Spider Goddess.
To keep this face, every girl in our bloodline must sacrifice a truly evil man every ten years.
Just two weeks before my twentieth birthday, my mom asked me again over the phone:
"Sweetie, is it really that hard to find a sufficiently bad guy in a place like Ashfield?"
Right now, I’m looking at my boyfriend, who just handcuffed me to a bed. He’s laughing, nego...

When the apocalypse arrived, my girlfriend, driven by vanity, exposed my unlimited resource space and incited starving people to kill me and feed me to the zombies, while she herself stepped on my flesh and blood to become the "savior goddess".
But she didn't know that I mutated amidst the pile of corpses and awakened into the only zombie tyrant.
I corrupted the space, cut off food supplies, led a...

"You were like a starved beast last night," I complained, spreading jam on my toast.
Gideon's hands froze mid-knot on his tie. He turned to me, his eyes filled with utter bewilderment.
"Nadia, are you out of your mind? I was in the study finishing up that proposal last night. I crashed on the couch at three in the morning. I never even went into the bedroom."
The knife dropped from my hand onto th...