Philip Fracassi

I struggle to remember the last time a story evoked such a visceral sense of dread. Both Chuck Palahniuk’s “Guts” and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho had scenes that forced me to stop reading, but “Altar” is different.

The local vicar strikes up a relationship with a woman seeking to build an orphanage on church lands. But the woman harbors a secret interest in Amelia Dyer, a notorious Victorian-era serial killer who preyed on infants in her care.

An accomplished debut collection from Fracassi. “Altar” shines with “Mandala” a strong second. Not a below average entry in the bunch. And I loved the author’s notes section, where Fracassi grants insight into each story’s origin (and confirms my thoughts on the ending of “Mandala”).

Sylvia attends her nana’s funeral. Through flashbacks, we learn nana wasn’t the sweet old lady most believed.

Five thirteen-year-old boys go hunting for a mysterious black Commodore in the local junkyard but discover the car—and their town—harbor darker secrets than they could have imagined.

Don’t Let Them Get You Down follows Peter, a copywriter for a medical website, struggling to hold his life together while battling a spiraling depression triggered by his wife’s cancer death two years prior.

A twelve-year-old boy’s father and other family “friends” have built a chamber in the family basement to contain his mother when she “turns”. One night, things go wrong.

“It’s like Christine… but wood!”

So remarks a character in Philip Fracassi’s meta horror novel about a haunted desk. And while the statement is true per se, it doesn’t do justice to Fracassi’s work, which proves far leaner and meaner than King’s.

One humid Florida night, Gabino, an aging horse thief, steals a prize mare for Fat Ted, a black-market middleman. Bad things happen.

In 1780 London, William Blake finds himself swept into the Gordon Riots, only to discover the rioters’ enigmatic leader harbors a dark secret.

At the beach, twelve-year-olds Mike and Joe play, unaware of the malevolent forces at work around them.

Boy meets girl at a college freshman mixer. They date, fall in love, graduate and marry. They move to his hometown and begin their lives together. The bliss fades. His career takes off, hers flounders. Resentment sets in. Things escalate when she takes an interest in the ominous woods surrounding their home.

To celebrate Jim’s older brother Jack’s release following a six-year prison stint, the brothers, their father Henry, and Jack’s hulking best friend Chris, charter a fishing boat in the Pacific. The choppy seas don’t bode well for an outing, but the group presses ahead, and their grizzled captain takes them a few miles offshore to a deep spot good for fishing. But the men soon realize they’re under threat by an unknown, overwhelming assailant—and how alone they are at sea.

During the brutal Civil War battle, as artillery shreds trees and flesh alike and soldiers become scavengers among the corpses, a Confederate veteran encounters something supernatural stalking the battlefield.

Tom receives a frantic pre-dawn call from long-time friend Marcus. Arriving at Marcus’s apartment, Tom discovers a surreal horror. Fracassi’s Twilight Zone style take on Uri Geller’s spoon bending trick proves entertaining. His deft description of dreamscapes and the surreal echo Clive Barker, though he stops short of the big reveal, leaving it to our imagination.

A serial killer comes of age during a vacation with his mother and step-father in Acapulco.