While I’m not certain what I have to share is actually scary, I know that it does squick some people out. So a warning, this snippet involves dental chairs and tools, eyes being pried open and language.

From Happy Hour of the Damned (coming January 31st in mass market paperback–yay!!!)…

On the screen, Wendy had stopped struggling with her ropes. Her head hung down, the back of her skull even with her arched shoulders. She heaved occasionally, sobbing, I suspected. It was torturous to watch. I shut my eyes.
“No, no, no, lover. This next part is very important.”
I gargled dissent.
A clanking on the tray, and he drew a mechanism that looked like an eyelash curler. The tool had two flexible metal strips, attached to a pair of tong-like handles. Shane demonstrated that with a squeeze, the bands sprang into an oval shape. The sight of them blurred as he brought them closer to my left eye.
“Don’t move now. I’d hate to slice it open, eyes are quite messy and pop like grapes with even a minor pressure from something this sharp.” He squeezed the tongs lightly and they made an ominous, click-click, to accentuate his point. Shane was the worst kind of sadist, the cliché. He just had to describe the events, self-gratification barely hidden behind the wavy lip of a Peanuts character. I hope you never meet up with his type. The spank and nibble sadists are fun, occasionally, just to change things up. But this guy was totally out of control.
I howled with frustration and pain, as he pressed the slivers between my clenched lids and pried my eye open. I felt a horrible scraping inside the socket. I forced myself to look straight ahead, lest he get sloppy and blind me. The corners stretched to the point of tearing. I relaxed a bit for a second one, for fear of cutting my eye in the struggle.
With both hostile appendages adhered, I had no choice but to watch the screen. A person entered the dingy room. A woman, in a white shirt, black pants, draped in a green logo apron, one of Persephone’s Starbucks death goons, strode up to the chair, circled, and positioned herself behind Wendy.
She must be mortified, I thought. Wendy prefers the upper hand, in every situation. She’s in control, even when she follows my ass around. Her suggestions are always welcome, and appropriate for the situation. She’s my Betty Crocker Ho, and she was in trouble. I fought with the belts again. Every part of my body tense and probably compressing the empty honeycomb of blood vessels, collapsing them.
The barista wrapped her right arm around the top of Wendy’s head, pulling it backwards and lengthening the bound woman’s throat, exposing it to vulnerability. My mind dragged a memory from its fat trap. Hostage footage from Al Jazeera. Serrated knives and beheadings. I tried to shake my head as though cold, frozen, to vibrate my eyes and blur the image, disrupt my suspicion of where this was all leading.
The woman drew up her left hand and pointed a scraggy unmanicured nail, toward Wendy’s cheek. She continued until the nail was touching the hollow of a dimple. Then, she started scratching, slowly at first, lightly, a caress. The victim’s pail skin issued a deep purple hue and Wendy began to mouth the word ‘no,’ barely audible, over and over, like a chant.
The scratching became more direct, always at the same spot, until the already loose covering gave way and a gash lit into the dead cheek. The woman began to pick at the tear exposing grayed mealy muscle. She looked up at the camera, and instructed Wendy to do the same, which she did. I hoped she was drugged; her eyes were sanded with defeat.
Then, the unthinkable.
The torturer pinched onto the tear and slowly pulled at it, until it gave, releasing a long ribbon of skin from Wendy’s face. A scream echoed from the speaker as the ribbon, as if reaching the end of the Christmas roll, caught hold of some stronger attachment. The woman looked down at her work, wound the strip of skin around her finger and jerked it taught; it released with a further pull.

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Now go on and read some further Halloween snippets!

Anya Bast
Eliza Gayle
Juliana Stone
Michelle Pillow
Lauren Dane
Moira Rogers
TJ Michaels
Jody Wallace
Ashley Ladd
Kelly Maher
Shelli Stevens
Shelley Munro
Mandy Roth
Mark Henry
Savannah Foley