Hello all,
I’ve moved my newsletter over to Substack – you can subscribe to it here.
The first edition is below, and includes my Halloween story Grave Tidings (available in my collection The Ties That Bind).
Updates and free story – Happy Halloween!
*taps mic* Is this thing on?
It seems only right that a horror writer brings his newsletter back to life on Halloween. There’s life in the old dog yet. And a particular welcome to those who’ve followed me thanks to Emerald City Ghosts, who were kind enough to publish my story Graveside Oration in their Funerals and Graveyards edition.
It’s been something of a rollercoaster year on the writing front. I have two books unleashed — The Ties That Bind and What Gets Left Behind, which recently showed up in purchases for the Dubai Public Library of all places. My books have made their costs back, which is nice, but I’d still love to sell you a copy. Ebooks available pretty much everywhere.
In the past few months I’ve had a plethora of stories appear out in the wild. I’ve written 25 this year and almost all of them have found a home somewhere, which I still pinch myself over. And check out Red Treehouse’s narration of my vampire tale Contain and Control.
Apotheosis is out now in What Lurks: A Cryptid Anthology from the wonderful people at Graveside Press. I’m particularly proud of this one, and its raging bog mummy. Graveside have picked up a few other stories of mine, with Shadows and Smoke due out in December, Inheritance due out in February, and a standalone novelette, House of Sorrows, out in summer 2026.
Away from that, Cloaked Press has published my creature feature Desperate Remedies (in the same universe as Grave Tidings, which you’ll read below), I have two pieces in The Haunted Quill vol 1, my slightly surreal weird fiction Awakenings is in The Dark Corner vol 5 (my first published story in Ireland), I have ghost stories in Vervain’s The 25th Hour and Dragon Tomes’ Voices From the Void, Wicked Shadow Press have picked up two of my Halloween stories, and I have pieces coming out with ZombZine, Dark Holme’s Dark Descent magazine, Eldritch Cat Press, and Whisper House.
I’ve pulled together the bones of a third collection, The Paths Beyond, but the release is very much TBC.
But I promised you a free story, didn’t I? And I don’t like to make promises I can’t keep. So, without further ado, here’s Grave Tidings, one of my favourites and found in my book The Ties That Bind — and also forthcoming in a readers’ choice collection from UK’s Dark Holme Publishing. The main character, Liam, leads my novel in progress, Beneath the Surface, but both stories stand solidly alone.
So, until my next, possibly shorter update, stay spooky.
-David
Liam Kincaid did a lot of things for money. He cleaned up after occult rituals, banished poltergeists, even removed the occasional dead body after a summoning went either terribly wrong or terribly right. He could talk to ghosts and wield ancient magic. But every year around Halloween he did nothing except keep an eye on the dead.
The veil between worlds was thin at best but unless it was a curse or a true haunting, Halloween was the only time of the year when the dead could push through without needing an invitation.
Through a broker, Liam would be hired to watch graveyards. The brief was simple: Make sure the dead stayed where they were supposed to. They seldom strayed far from their tombs but, on occasion, needed persuading to return to them. This year, a group of local citizens had pooled their resources and brought him home to West Cork, a part of Ireland so filled with ancient monuments and ghosts it put him on edge just travelling through it.
He rolled his car to a stop on the narrow road on the slope overlooking Abbeystrowry Cemetery outside Skibbereen. Liam had driven along the main road by the river many times and the large black sign with white lettering always made him sigh: “Site of burial pits & mass graves of the Great Famine”. As many as ten thousand people lay there, jumbled and nameless.
His ancestors lay in those pits. Commission or no commission, the thought of finding family among the spirits, family who had been left in the greatest distress for over a century, made his blood run cold. He had the power and the skill to send almost any soul to a place of peace – and yet he had never even tried to reach his own kin here. He flushed with shame.
“Are you sure you’re okay with this?” asked Miriam from the seat next to him. Miriam had been with him since he was a teenager, though she had never told him how she died. She always wore the same olive blouse and black trousers, her hair swept up toward the crown of her head in what he’d eventually learned was a very 1940s style. She liked to join him on drives.
“Yeah,” Liam said after a few heartbeats. “Yeah I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine.”
He was gripping the steering wheel too tightly. He could hear them already, the dead of the graveyard. The modern graves spoke with a light, contented sigh; these were souls at peace who had had their chance to say goodbye to loved ones.
But the grave pits. The voices there were discordant, angry, confused at being lost and still gripped with the agony of starvation and disease.
“Okay Miriam, let’s do this. One step at a time,” he said, but Miriam had already demanifested. He sighed, left the car, and crept down the steps into the cemetery. The bracelet of holy and ritual charms he always wore on his wrist clattered.
A handful of spirits had manifested, all among the newer graves. Normally ghosts stayed where they died, repeating the same sequences over and over, but the usual rules didn’t apply around Halloween. The dead were drifting among the tombstones, stopping now and again as if to chat or examine something on the ground. Flowers, perhaps; there was no shortage of offerings or candles.
Liam paused, waiting to see if there was any need to intervene, but they just seemed to be visiting the mortal realm out of nostalgia, or perhaps boredom. Some descended back into their graves, others rose from theirs; these souls did not need to be guided anywhere.
He was releasing a breath he didn’t realise he was holding when a man screamed behind him. Spinning around, hands up in a protective gesture, he found himself just feet away from a ruined cadaver of a man, a hollowed out shell clutching a pile of sticks and rags that Liam was sickened to realise were the piled remains of a child.
The man screamed again, the cry of one whose soul was being torn apart. His lips moved with the rhythms of Gaelic and Liam remembered enough from school to understand the ghost was saying “They’re all gone, they’re all gone, they’re all gone” over and over as he glided forward, thrusting the bundle toward Liam. The rags fell away, showing a mess of bones and two tiny skulls: twins who must have died shortly after birth.
“I’m sorry, friend,” said Liam, weaving his fingers to cast a spell that would at least calm the spirit long enough for him to conduct a proper ritual to let the man and his children move on.
He didn’t get the chance to finish the spell.
From the grave pit climbed a ragged ghost shrivelled almost to dust, then another, then another, then more by the dozen: men, women, and children all out of joint. A man stalked the cemetery with the confused head of a child; a woman limped forward, one of her legs belonging to somebody much taller; a child with the torso of a starved adult sobbed for its mother. Even those who emerged intact wailed at each other’s distress, until the numbers grew so many that they were standing on each other, inside each other.
A sunken-cheeked man, shirtless and strewn with the red rash of typhus, pushed toward Liam, muttering the words “cá bhfuil an sagart?” – “where is the priest?” He lunged at Liam’s eyes, his face distorted with rage. And the way his features strained, the set of his shoulders was so eerily familiar… as if Liam were looking at his own father during one of his drunken rages.
Like in childhood, Liam retreated and swung an arm up to protect himself. The ghost pulled back. His face softened and his hand moved gently toward Liam, the way a parent, or perhaps a great-great-great grandfather, would try to tuck an errant strand of hair behind a child’s ear. His mouth opened to say something but he was drowned out by a wave of other spirits all binding themselves to the hope that the priest had come to give them a proper burial, droves of forgotten souls who had been tipped in their hundreds into gaping holes in the ground – all of them now following the lead of Liam’s long unmourned ancestor.
“I’m not a priest,” said Liam, stumbling over a crumbled grave marker and landing heavily. A hundred begging hands thrust themselves into his face as hundreds more voices pleaded with him for peace. “I’m not a priest!”
The spirits were swamping him but his ancestor spread his arms and they quieted, hovering back. Liam had seen ghosts herd before, but never obey one another like this.
He boosted himself up with a hand then gathered himself. “One step at a time,” he muttered, adjusting his bracelet as he ran a thousand ideas through his mind.
He shook his wrist, the charms clicking and clacking.
One step at a time. It couldn’t be that straightforward, could it?
“I’m not a priest,” he said gently, addressing them all at once. “But maybe I can help, if you can all wait your turn.”
A hush of expectation rolled through them, the faintest of smiles dancing around the lips of Liam’s kinsman.
“One step at a time,” Liam said to himself, removing from his wrist a small silver crucifix engraved with the Latin words “memento mori”. Remember you must die. He needed something familiar to them; they needed to believe this would work or it would go nowhere.
Expectation turned to electric silence as the spirits crowded in, but patiently as if they were slowing themselves to live in the moment.
He held out the crucifix and hundreds of eyes followed it. If there had been only one soul, or even half a dozen, he could have recited the ritual to help them fully move to the next world. But there were too many. All he could do was try to quiet them. Keeping it simple and familiar, he began whispering the words of the Our Father in Gaelic, the language they would have spoken.
Hundreds of spectral hands blessed themselves with the rustle of old clothes and sighs, hundreds of voices recited the prayer in unison.
Liam’s eyes teared up at the emaciation, disease, and degradation on their faces. “Let me help you rest.” Hundreds of eyes looked up in relief that somebody, anybody, was here to help them let go of their suffering, for another year at least.
One by one they withdrew, returning to the grave pit as if falling backwards into a pool of refreshing water. By the end Liam’s voice was hoarse.
Only one spirit remained: his ancient ancestor. The man’s face was serene, all traces of weariness and illness banished. Liam thought it was like looking at an older version of himself. Dawn breaking over the trees, his kinsman lowered himself into the pit. Raising a hand in farewell, he faded into the ground.
A calming breeze blew over Liam as he kneeled, exhausted, and lay a hand on the mass grave.
“See you next year,” he said.
