“There’s a part of the brain tells us you can’t

be dead and alive at the same time,” said

the Yellow Man. “It doesn’t work in you.“

October’s here, time for tales that send shivers along the spine, that whisper “What if?” to the part of you that thrills to the dread and unspeakable.

If you want a cerebral, eerie but ultimately humanistic read, check out my novelette, “The Yellow Man,” winner of the 2016 Mariner Awards, available at Bewildering Stories.

It’s an unsettling tale about Allan, who’s 11 and sits alone in a basement, fitting puzzle pieces together as visitors come and go, people from the town who sit quietly with Allan, saying nothing before fading again into nothingness.

One of his visitors is his best friend, Sheri. But something has gone wrong in their friendship. And she is only a shadow of what he remembers.

Allan knows his visitor have something to do with what is on the other side of the basement wall.

He knows they are not alive.

And then there is the one who is something worse than that, and the key to all of Allan’s problems and why he has been in the basement so long …