A neighborhood won’t let its residents forget the past. One taste draws two lovers into a nightmarish addiction. A harsh winter forces strange creatures down from the mountains.

Beware of Terror at 5280’, a local horror fiction anthology featuring 22 dark tales set in and around Denver and the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains penned exclusively by local authors (including Stephen Graham Jones, Carter Wilson, and others).

Paperback ($12.95) and e-book ($3.99) available on Amazon on Tuesday, November 26, aka Terror Tuesday! Makes a great holiday gift for friends/loved ones/enemies!

It’s been a busy week for a biological horror fiction writer!

Over the weekend, I helped put on “Music To My Fears” with Denver Horror Collective, our experiment with horror fiction readings set to live music. On top of making sure everything went smoothly with the acts and the event itself, I played guitar accompaniment behind two stories. “Love Bug” by Amy Armstrong dealt with the outbreak of a strange, new disease and “You Can Do Better” by bestselling author JoAnn Chaney was about a disturbing Tinder date.

We had a sold-out show with about 80 people in the audience and we raised enough money to fully finance Terror at 5280’, Denver Horror Collective’s local horror fiction anthology due out in November (of which I’m an editor).

As if that wasn’t enough, last night I read at something called “Noir at the Bar,” a semi-regular event at the Irish Snug here in Denver typically focused on crime fiction. However, since this is the Halloween season, they wanted a horror twist—which is probably the only reason they invited me!

I had a great time listening to the other authors including organizer Michael Poole, Sam W. Anderson, Carina Bissett, Hunter C. Eden, Molly Tanzer, and Jane Keir.

Though I haven’t written anything I’d call “noir,” I read an excerpt from my short story “Viremia,” which was published in Campfire Tales in 2017. If you haven’t read the story yet, it certainly has a few elements of crime fiction, but in my particular style, things get weird pretty fast.

Darkest Regards,

Josh Schlossberg

What do vampire bedbugs, desert parasites, and zombie deer have in common? They’ve all had starring roles in my horror fiction!

Though I rarely lack for dark inspiration, for years I’ve struggled to define the specific subgenre of horror in which I write. For a while I was calling it “microbial horror,” as a lot of my work focuses on viruses and bacteria, though not all.

For instance, the novel I’m currently pitching, Alpha Syndrome, has to do with deer ticks, but I’m sure as hell not calling my stuff “tick-lit.” And then I wrote “Handgina,” and while some tried to label it “body horror,” to me that brings up images of guts and gore, which I tend to shy away from (in my writing, my reading, and life in general).

Over time, I pondered my (world’s largest?) collection of “nature-based horror” books: dark, clever, and often absurd tomes about killer sea birds, deadly snails, and murderous bodies of standing water. But while many of my stories do take place in or involve nature, that didn’t quite feel right either.

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