Chickens genetically engineered into dinosaurs? That’s crazy! But that’s exactly what happens in “Cretaceous Carnivores,” a story written by Joel Austin in a new weekday-specific anthology called Monster Monday.

It’s not impossible, says Austin. After all, chickens evolved from velociraptors, and they share a significant amount of DNA with the T-rex. They are already miniature, modern-day dinos, so becoming a towering carnivore feels as natural as the green grass. All they need is an evolutionary boost.

At the beginning of the story, the world is an apocalyptic dino-hell. Twenty-foot-tall, bloodthirsty chicken-raptors have already destroyed polite society. It’s too bad the author doesn’t advance the adventure beyond the zany setup. I encourage him to expand his vignette into a full-blown novel. I’m sure it would be the most awesome chicken-dinosaur novel ever written. 

In her introduction to Monster Monday, editor Dawn Wilson says that monsters are simply a projection of accumulated rage against society and the status quo. As such, she’s picked two terrific stories for this collection that reflect her opinion. 

“Black Dove” by Desiree Horton is about two adult siblings who share a house in the woods, an hour away from the nearest grocery store. During the day, Brian goes to work (or wherever a middle-aged man goes when he pretends to go to work), and Natasha stays home to cook and clean. 

Over the years, the pair’s relationship has become toxic—Brian’s a mean asshole, and Natasha lets him abuse her without consequence. 

One night changes her life forever. During a chance encounter with a mysterious soot-colored dove, Natasha’s suppressed hurt and anger turn into an all-encompassing blazing fury. With a mighty swoop, she gives her brother some well-deserved payback. And later, she embraces her rightful destiny. “You are what scares in the woods,” coos the black dove as Natasha spreads her wings majestically in the moonlight. 

Kathleen Palm’s volume-ending story called “What Is Passed On,” is a sad tale of generational abuse. A young girl’s family trauma manifests itself into a horrible monster every time her parents have an argument. The monster, unfortunately, doesn’t go away when the parents split up. It lingers forever, becoming the young girl’s cursed inheritance. 

And finally, there’s one last story I’d like to mention. If you’ve ever wanted to know what it would be like to be a passenger on a plane being attacked by a pterodactyl, I recommend “Delta Six One Nine Is Overdue” by J. Rocky Colavito.

[ Monster Monday / Edited by Dawn Wilson / First Printing: August 2025 / ISBN: 9798298896252 ]

Nightmare Reef starts with a pod of plesiosaurs cruising the Pacific Ocean as if nothing had changed since the Cretaceous Period. Obeying instincts passed down for 215 million years; they were on the prowl for a big buffet of marine creatures to eat.  

These monsters—with bodies like turtles, necks like snakes and heads like crocodiles—were as long as camper vans and weighed up to five tons. You could say they were similar to the Loch Ness Monster, or maybe something from a Scandinavian legend.

By serendipity, the pod crosses paths with a family of five (six if you include a fluffy Pomeranian doggo) currently on a year-long sailing adventure from Melbourne to San Francisco. 

Naturally, this excites the Plesiosaurs very much. “People are particularly delicious,” explains author Deborah Sheldon. “The muscle tissue of a human is tender and much prized and considered a premium meat to a plesiosaur.” Humans were the rarest and therefore the most prized meat—ranking above critically endangered species such as Kemp’s ridley sea turtle or the elusive bigfin squid.

One specific plesiosaur sets his sights on Marique, the matriarch of the Wagner family. At night, he surfaces to watch the woman on the sailboat’s deck. The sight of her makes his mouth water. He could smell her on the breeze—a provocative and heady combination of sweat, skin oils and trace elements of hair and genitalia. The scent of her spicy, warm meatiness saturates his sinuses and tingles his salivary glands. “Anticipation made him clench and unclench his long jaws.”

Instead of tasting Marique’s juicy female parts, the plesiosaur has to settle for a nip at her husband, Christoph. It’s the creature’s first sampling of human meat and he’s not disappointed. “Oh, so gratifying, heady, tender—like nothing he’d ever consumed before. Similar to turtle; meaty, but not briny. A soft texture reminiscent of squid, but not slimy.” Note: I have a strong suspicion that Deborah Sheldon would love a gig as a newspaper restaurant critic.

BTW: The husband getting eaten by a plesiosaur isn’t a spoiler—it’s karma. He was a stuffy, inflexible, egotistical and manipulative man. He was also stupid. Taking his family with three young children on a 12-month sailing excursion on a rickety sailboat was the most irresponsible thing imaginable. To be honest, I don’t think I could’ve finished Nightmare Reef if Christoph hadn’t died by page 40.  

Sheldon doesn’t go easy on her surviving protagonist either. The initial description of Marique is quite harsh: she’s “a scrawny, flat-chested housewife wearing Target clothes and flat-heeled shoes, with a sensible bob haircut, no makeup, sexless and meek.” She also suffers from a debilitating, self-defeatist attitude. 

The novel’s final tableau finds the surviving members of the Wagner family stranded on a sandbar in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Can Marique and her kids survive their dire situation? Or are they fated to become monster food? The answer to both questions is: yes. 

[ Nightmare Reef / By Deborah Sheldon / First Printing: September 2025 / ISBN: 9781923165830 ]

All the beloved tropes of the mummy genre are present in the stories included in Modern Mummies: A Horror Anthology. But I applaud editor A.C. Bauer’s desire to expand the scope of what mummy horror can be. 

“By the World Forgot” by Mia Dalia is probably the most overt example of Bauer’s editorial directive. It’s also my favorite story in the collection. 

Readers are told that technology has radically improved the process of mummification. For example, when a corpse is on the slab during surgery, a doctor can remove specific bits of the brain as requested. An individual gets to decide which memories, preferences and desires to keep when reanimated. Unwanted pieces of the brain can simply be thrown away in the dumpster. 

It’s a pretty standard science fiction setup, neither good nor bad. Things get interesting when the story takes an unexpected versific-inspired twist. “Can a mummy live in peaceful ignorance?” asks the author, echoing Alexander Pope’s 18th century poem “Eloisa to Abeland.”

There are two other stories in this collection that really caught my attention, one by Carter Lappin and the other by Jennifer Lesh Fleck. Both concern the variants and vagaries of immortality. 

“Reanimation” follows the reanimation and recurring deaths of a mummy through multiple generations. Each time Mek rises from his sarcophagus, he meets new people who provide additional information about his situation, sometimes good and sometimes bad. Over time, he cannot escape a lingering identity crisis. “I’ve never known, really, if I was cursed or blessed,” he croaks. “Nobody ever told me.”

When Lana De’lonzo, a popular social media influencer, develops stage 4 colorectal cancer in a story called “In My Little, Dead Way,” she opts for a radical new medical procedure. She’s stuffed in a vat of honey and kept in stasis, waiting for science to find a cure for her illness. Her goal is to eventually return to TikTok and Instagram and continue creating content for her 1.8 million fans. In other words, she wants to live forever. With the help of her schlubby twin sister, she gets her wish—but in the most unexpected way imaginable. 

Modern Mummies contains other excellent stories as well—each one bending tropes to whatever extent possible. These stories include: “Bound by Love” by Stewart Moore, “Going Home” by Ute Orgassa (great name, btw), “Dead Kings, No Crowns” by Christopher La Vigna and “Rot” by Ray DeChant. “Servants of Frost and Madness” gets my vote for the story with the best ending.

To be honest, there’s only one bad contribution included in this anthology, and that’s “One Hundred Dead Cats.” No offense to the author or the good folks at Cat Eye Press, but one story with “cat-on-undead-cat violence” is one story too many. 

[ Modern Mummies: A Horror Anthology / Edited by A.C. Bauer / First Printing: August 2025 / ISBN: 9798991336727 ]

When vampires found themselves in a pinch and needed some help, they’d call Alexandru Dragoi. Born in 699, he was one of the oldest beings alive. As a vampire, 13 centuries of debauchery had granted him unbelievable power and status. Every continent he had ever set foot on had spoken of him in terror. In Europe, they called him the Wolf of Wallachia, and in Asia, they called him the Silk Road Slasher. Currently, he was known worldwide as the Pennsylvanian. 

But as we all know, there are always two sides to every story. It’s true that Dragoi was a famous monster, but he was a monster with a nuanced ethical code. According to author Kyle Brokenshire, Dragoi was a guardian of order. “Without him, the world would descend into anarchy.”

Dragoi’s ongoing mission was to create an environment where the living and the unliving could exist side by side. In the U.S., for example, he had government operatives suppressing vampiric activity for decades. He knew first-hand that vampires in stable environments didn’t affect the larger human community. But if vampire hunters coalesced into stake-wielding militias, he would come to town and obliterate the threat immediately. 

All hell broke loose when a clandestine network of FBI agents upended Dragoi’s “peaceful” world order. These deep state wildcards didn’t anticipate the consequences of their actions, nor did they comprehend the horrors that would be unleashed. The Vampire Wars began with no words spoken and no promises broken. 

There were also no apologies—especially from Dragoi. He was a practical killer. “You were naive thinking you could challenge me,” he told Jackson Jefferson Tanner, the director of the FBI, when the two finally met face to face. “Who gave humans the right to escape the food chain, anyway? This is the natural order of things. In nature, the superior creature is the one that feeds on others.”  

There’s lots of gunplay (including harpoon guns!) between the covers of The Pennsylvanian. And if there’s one thing I like, it’s gun-totin’ vampires. It doesn’t make sense, but I dig it. By the time Dragoi and the federal agents reach the novel’s John Wick-like endgame (pages 153-163), author Brokenshire is in peak New Pulp territory. 

When it’s all over, readers won’t know what hit them. “I left a wound upon this world that will never heal,” said Alexandru Dragoi, the 1,300-year-old man, during his novel-ending soliloquy. “It will bleed and fester forever!” 

[ The Pennsylvanian / By Kyle Brokenshire / First Printing: August 2025 / ISBN: 9781069587909 ]

The sun and the Earth have always been inextricably linked. In literature and mythology, they’re symbolically connected through stories of life, death and rebirth. They are celestial giants that represent the ultimate cosmic balance. 

But what if these two heavenly bodies did not actually get along? Imagine that. If Mother Earth declared war on Father Sun, how would her rage manifest itself? For answers to these questions, I recommend reading Kaiju Chrysalis by Sam M. Phillips. 

Breanne was a young woman from a small town in Australia. She was a bit of a kook, but she knew about the advent of the war of worlds. She had a psychic connection to the primordial heart of the Earth and wasn’t surprised when a giant lava lizard emerged from the Pacific Ocean. 

Godrisaur was big—really big. Not even the heavens were free of its wrath. While walking east toward Australia, its feet touched the ocean floor and its head rose above the clouds in the sky. In other words, the monster stood 15 miles tall—almost three times bigger than Mount Everest. Nothing could stand in the path of this bestial force of nature. 

Furthermore, its eyes were fathomless pits of a fiery hell, portals to a nightmare realm of torture and pain. They were primordial spectres of a dead age, where monsters were common and mankind had no hope to live in their shadows.  

Even worse, Godrisaur had an ego. Burning with ravenous desires and megalomaniacal goals, it wanted to feed on the power of the sun. Breanne could feel the ambition radiating off the monster like a feral heat—its need to ascend further in the pantheon of the Earth. It was more than a monster; it was a deity. 

As apocalyptic as Godrisaur was, Breanne knew the lava lizard wasn’t Earth’s ultimate weapon against the sun. That honor belonged to a vast and terrible monster named Mothzen. Its wings spanned continents and its shadow was a dark blade capable of severing us from our life force. Said the author: “All that mattered was that the god moth freed the Earth from the bonds of the shining source of false light: the sun.”

As it turned out, Mothzen was the perfect creature, eternal yet finite. It flew across the sky, creating a sonic boom, endlessly chasing the sun. It was like Ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail. 

Kaiju Chrysalis ends with a sudden and unexpected solution—a deus ex machina. But don’t be too disappointed, dear readers. More monsters are on their way to fight the eternal war between light and darkness. 

[ Kaiju Chrysalis / By Sam M. Phillips / First Printing: August 2025 / ISBN: 9781923165809 ]

Question: While reading a murder mystery (or any other type of novel), do you parse the clues, track the characters and second-guess the narrator in an attempt to figure out the resolution? Or do you simply enjoy the plot twists as they unfold?

In the past, I would spend a lot of energy attempting to solve the murder case before the final chapter—but I rarely got it right. These days, I generally sit back and allow the author to tell their story one way or another with no expectations from me.  

While reading Unholy Blood by Ian Gielen, however, I slipped up and misinterpreted a bit of baseless foreshadowing. “Aha!” I thought immediately. “I know exactly how this book’s going to end. The girlfriend is gonna take a hammer and smash her boyfriend in the back of the head.” 

Boy, was I wrong. There was no skull-smashing whatsoever. Instead of reading between the lines like I did, I should have focused more on the imminent danger—id est, the giant, otherworldly bat living in a cave beneath the Adirondack Mountains. 

What begins as a fun Halloween party for a bunch of jocks and their cheerleading girlfriends quickly escalates into a grisly subterranean nightmare. It’s messy, pulpy and deeply unsettling. 

Without question, the Coon Mountain cave and its labyrinth of tunnels were truly magnificent. It was an intricate tapestry, a rare ecosystem untouched by human hands. The kids were understandably awed by the splendor before them. 

What they didn’t know was that a horrible, bat-like creature was living in the cave. And now it was furious that its lair had been invaded by the sound of laughter and loud music. “There was something about these humans that made it angry,” said Gielen, “something from long ago that slipped through its mind like sand.” Driven by ancient suffering, the bat’s rage becomes a metaphor for forgotten trauma passed down through time. 

For 200 pages, the creature stalks the college kids through the meandering tunnels. I have to admit that the spelunking travelogue often overshadows the monster horror, but overall, Unholy Blood builds to a solid (yet bleak) finale. The author has written a novel with a unique blend of American splendor and American carnage. He even throws in a little bit of bat sex. Just like in Las Vegas, whatever happens in the caves of the Adirondack Mountains, stays in the Adirondack Mountains.  

[ Unholy Blood / By Ian Gielen / First Printing: July 2025 / ISBN: 9781764012614 ]

The Turtlepocalypse begins when giant flesh-eating turtles escape from a biotech laboratory in Milwaukee. Even though these abominations eventually reach a height of 20-30 feet, they aren’t exemplar proxies of Gamera, Japan’s much-loved fire-breathing, flying turtle.

Instead of being a kaiju smackdown, Flesh-Eating Turtles! by Nora B. Peevy (my new favorite author) is a genre-busting novel that’s equal parts eco-horror, science fiction satire and absurdist comedy. I guarantee that you’ll be laughing and cringing while reading this delightfully quirky book. 

Hoping to solve the escalating global demand for sustenance, Agne Labs (not Acme Labs) invent a way to engineer farm animals to grow bigger and faster. By doing this, they’re able to provide more food and be economically efficient at the same time. And for some reason, the scientists of Agne Labs are using turtles as their test subjects. 

Unfortunately, these genetically altered giant turtles aren’t docile or cute. Says Peevy: “There’s nothing cute about being eaten by an animal that is at least 5x larger than you.” They’re aggressive and omnivorous, with a particular craving for raw flesh (with a big scoop of mushrooms and insects on the side). In an early scene, two of the turtles invade a Golden Corral Buffet where one ransacks the salad bar like Godzilla and the other one bites fingers off patrons for a pigs-in-a-blanket-like snack. 

If bitten, scratched—or otherwise exposed to the artificially created DNA mutagen—all living creatures turn into horrible turtle hybrids. Events spiral out of control when all of the animals caged in the Milwaukee County Zoo are infected.

The author goes to town with all the hybrid monster variants. For example: A turtle/spider hybrid that looks like it came from an H.R. Giger painting, a half-turtle/half-snail monstrosity with over 10,000 teeth and over 10,000 beaks crammed onto one head and a turtle/deer creature as large as a Hummer H1 Pickup. “I don’t dare tell you what turtle/shark hybrids look like,” says Peevy, “or snakes and octopi, because they’re so eerie they belong in the pages of Weird Tales.” 

As the chaos builds, the narrative digs deeper into philosophical questions about genetic manipulation, speciesism and humanity’s habit of pushing nature too far. 

Peevy’s novel eventually reaches a satisfying climax when the giant turtles wobble toward the Reptile Expo in Schaumburg, Illinois. Overall, Flesh-Eating Turtles! is an outrageous and sharply satirical critique of scientific hubris packed with awesome mutant mayhem. 

[ Flesh-Eating Turtles! / By Nora B. Peevy / First Printing: June 2025 / ISBN: 9798317498030 ]

Nineteen-year-old James Evans hadn’t blown his load in a week and was almost ready to break his no self-fiddling rule. “A guy like me shouldn’t have to jack off,” he said. 

With no other options available, he allowed a sexy vampiress to bite his cock and suck blood from it. “She went down on him,” wrote author Terry Miller, “eliciting a scream which echoed off the brick walls of the alley. Two sharp teeth punctured through the skin of his favorite organ. The pain mixed with pleasure.”

And just like that, James became a bloodsucker himself. But that was okay. Being adopted by a coven of beautiful fiends named Charisma, Lucretia and Lilith, he would enjoy nightly sexcapades for the rest of eternity. I think all horny boys would agree: it was nice work if you could get it. 

That said, there’s more to Dusk Bunnies than vampire orgies. The dark ladies were being pursued by an obsessive slayer who doggedly followed them from New Orleans to Portsmouth, Ohio. Like Blade the Vampire Hunter and Abraham Van Helsing, Michael Irving was the real deal. He wasn’t a comic-book-collecting poseur like the Frog Brothers. 

Michael was 100 percent anti-vampire, but he had an embarrassing secret. Somewhere along the line, he developed a taste for vamp blood. It was the ultimate pick-me-up, he said. “Coffee and cigarettes were never as satisfying.” 

He wasn’t proud of his habit, but at least a sip of blood came with positive attributes like enhanced strength and healing. Hunting vampires was a dangerous job, and he was glad to have something to level the playing field. 

No matter what kind of supernatural boost he had, however, Michael was still no match for the three she-devils. As soon as he got to Portsmouth, Lucretia promptly and efficiently decapitated him. 

What happened next was totally unexpected. No spoilers from me, but the age-old rumors about the transformative power of vampire blood turned out to be true. 

Once the main characters were all brought together for the finale, Dusk Bunnies came off the rails like a crazy train (R.I.P. Ozzy). The author’s descriptive details were excellent, notably the initial transformation of James into a vampire and Michael’s transmutation into an apex predator. And finally: I had to laugh at the novel-ending tiff between the vampire gals and a cauldron of bats. Good stuff.

I only had one problem with the novel. There’s no clearly defined protagonist. It wasn’t James or the weird sisters or their pet wererat down in the basement. It’s not even Michael, although he was clearly the most compelling character of the bunch. His personal journey awakened a metamorphic crucible where blood boiled and bones reshaped into something not meant to walk this earth. 

[ Dusk Bunnies / By Terry Miller / First Printing: July 2025 / ISBN: 9798291825471 ]

Alex was a get-rich-quick motherfucker. He was a proud dropshipper who never once laid his hands on actual merchandise. His automated system took online orders and activated shipments from warehouses around the globe. All Alex had to do was hang out in his bedroom and keep an eye on his favorite dating app.  

Mary was a bored housewife who sat on her couch watching Wheel of Fortune from morning till night. Ordering a cheapie lemon sprayer from Alex’s company Business Industry LLC provided a hit of dopamine that helped her get through the day. 

What Mary received in the mail, unfortunately, wasn’t a cute, little kitchen gadget. She opened up the package and found a strange orb wrapped in a nest of shredded paper. It was some sort of fantastic egg—cold like stone and smooth as marble. The smell of sulfur, struck limestone and fungus immediately made her gag. 

When the mysterious egg hatched a few minutes later, a gangly monster emerged. It looked like something you’d see a 4-H kid make at the county fair—slightly humanoid, like vegetables glued together, and sitting in a hot barn for a few days. 

Aghast, Mary put the creature on ice and stuffed it into the trunk of her car. She was determined to drive to the company’s headquarters in Illinois and rub the abomination in Alex’s face. 

Like Mary, Alex was mortified when he saw the pint-sized monster. As a dropship merchant, he had nothing to do with the shipment, but he figured there were probably more freaky creatures being sent through the mail. (Spoiler alert: he was right.) As a result, Alex and Mary decided to team up and drive to the east coast and infiltrate the original distribution warehouse. 

Even though author Stephanie Sanders-Jacob refers to the drive across America as Mary’s hero quest, I’m not 100 percent sure that’s correct. Is Mary the hero of Dropshipped? That’s debatable. 

It’s young Alex, I think, who best represents the 12 steps of Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey.” He commits to the adventure, couples with a mentor, defeats the monster queen and returns to his (new) family. Maybe I’m wrong—it’s totally possible that Alex and Mary were characters participating in a dual monomyth. I would love to hear the author’s opinion on this. 

While driving to the coast, the pair noticed fewer and fewer cars on the freeway, seeing instead broken and bloodied bodies, missing limbs and squished organs like roadkill. It was obvious the little dropship critters were on a bender. 

It was all too much, they agreed. Whoever was sending the tiny effigies through the mail needed to be stopped. Together, Mary, the lonely housewife, and Alex, the get-rich-quick motherfucker, vowed to end the carnage. They were on a Heroes’ Journey to save the world.  

[ Dropshipped / By Stephanie Sanders-Jacob / First Printing: July 2025 / ISBN: 9781763725614 ]

Attack of the Colossal Creatures from Planet X asks one simple, yet unanswerable, question: What will it be like when giant monsters invade our planet? Will it be epochal? Apocalyptic? Biblical? I don’t know, but one thing is certain: life on Earth will change dramatically. 

Undoubtedly, there will be tragedy. People will die and buildings will topple. In the beginning, our defensive response will be inadequate. But eventually, over time, the fellowship of mankind will likely find a way to work together against the common threat. 

That’s the way it goes in the story “Dear Madame President” by Brendan Cottam. In a series of letters written to the President of the United States, Dr. Miles Bowman synthesizes data from recent kaiju activity around the globe. Together, the scientist and politician successfully rally other sovereign nations to develop a successful strategy for upcoming emergencies. Quick comment: The whiff of romance at the end of the story made me swoon. I loved it.

Of course, not all the “Colossal Creatures” will be evil. Some will be good, like the giant lizard bear in Ian Gielen’s story “In the Shadow of Giants.” The monster (named Cuddles) emerges from the Adirondack Mountains in New York and is friendly to humans, displaying a shy curiosity and intelligence. And in “Serum 87-F” by Tee Linden, a shot of “communalis gland secretions” enables a human to befriend a massive rock-like crustacean named Bribie, as large as a four-story building. 

Not everyone responds to rampaging monsters in the same way. Some people simply ignore the situation completely hoping that it will eventually disappear. Such is the case in Hamish Rankine’s story “Never Getting Out.” When a giant tentacled beast comes to her suburban neighborhood, a young girl named Blair is confused by her parents complete disregard for safety in favor of blissful ignorance. Eventually, like well-trained school children from the 50s, the parents scurry under the kitchen table for protection, leaving Blair to fend for herself. “She wished she had run so much earlier,” writes Rankine. 

In a similar story called “Front Page Scoop,” Kevin Anderson writes about a group of newspaper reporters debating what article to put on the next day’s front page. Hollywood fashion? A famous athlete’s infidelity? The world’s ugliest dog competition? Their journalistic instincts are blind to the towering alien climbing out of a nearby flying saucer. One reporter shrugs. “Whatever happens,” he says, “I’ll be glad not to read about it in tomorrow’s paper.”

And finally, according to “Mega Xeno Titan Kaiju” by Mark Oxbrow, some people will simply take matters into their own capable hands. When “vast alien monsters” emerge from a nearby space rift, only one person can stop them: Yoshi, the owner of the largest collection of kaiju toys and statues in the world. “It’s fate,” he says. “Out of everyone in the whole stupid galaxy, I know the most about battling kaiju.” 

[ Attack of the Colossal Creatures from Planet X / Edited by T.C. Phillips / First Printing: July 2025 / ISBN: 9780975621141 ]