Fog Warning by Edward Lorn

Edward Lorn's not afraid. That's the scariest thing about reading his stuff. He's got no problem going into that dark basement without a flashlight, and you just know that it makes him so damned giddy to drag you down those rickety stairs right along with him.

He loves taking flawed people, real people, and putting them through the wringer. But I think he especially likes the wringer.

I'm pretty sure Mr. Lorn has his pockets stuffed with blank fortune cookie slips and whenever a harrowing moment of human devastation springs to mind, he jots it down on a little wrinkled piece of paper and saves it for later. I imagine he's got a giant bowl on his desk--the one he used to pass out candy on Halloweens past before the neighborhood kids stopped coming to his door--filled to overflowing with fortunes foretelling awful fates. And when he's writing, and he comes to a point in the story where he says to himself 'time for something awful to happen,' he grabs a slip of paper from this bowl and smiles like a mischievous little boy reaching out to snap a bra strap. Really. Fucking. Hard.

He grabbed a doozy this time around. And I can see him now jumping up and down in his chair and clapping his hands together like one of those little wind-up monkeys clanging their cymbals together.

Clang, clang, clang, hee, hee, hee....

Full Disclosure: I served as a beta reader for this story. I did some light editorial work on this one, too. Edward Lorn's also helped me out in this manner for some of my stuff. You may think that the above review is biased now that you know this.

Read this book!