Acephale: Horror Fiction

Acephale: Horror Fiction presents horror stories written as prose and read aloud, with Jeffrey Walker credited as both writer and performer. Several of the recent ones begin with nothing frightening at all. Rutger wakes at 3:27 a.m., hungry, and weighs breaking his rule against eating between eleven at night and six in the morning. Jasmine has spent years stringing scammers along in long text conversations for the thrill of it, and she receives one claiming to come from her grandmother. Nolan rides in Ryu's twin-turboprop plane and wonders whether it always shakes this much. Jasper spends a rainy day off stoned and gaming, hunting for obscure indie horror games and mods. Then the details start to go wrong. Night drops over Nolan, June and Ryu at three in the afternoon, and the unlocked house they find holds nobody at all. A television shows a sitcom Jasper does not recognize. Its cast turn one by one toward the camera, until a woman in a cream-colored sweater says Jasper's name. Jasmine's search for the word Mayanak leads to a folklore blog describing a shapeshifter of Turkish origin that steals faces. What sets this run apart is how easily it moves between the very old and the very current. In 'What Came Back', a character named Vincent passes a power outage by telling a story about a town where adults at a birth cut their own palms and wipe the blood on the newborn's head. 'Blood Market' is crowded with the present instead: online posts trading theories about the killer, AI videos built from the victims' likenesses, and prediction-market traders betting on the Strangler's victim count and the date the next body will be found. One small touch there stands out: the videos irritate Rutger because they get the killer's face wrong. Across these stories, screens keep carrying the uncanny, from phone searches and social feeds to the static in which Nora thinks she hears a hidden message. The prose is unshowy and favors exact physical detail, such as a clock's red digits or bolts imagined rattling loose in mid-flight. It keeps the same level tone when describing violence, and that is what gives the graphic passages their weight. Early in 'What's Underneath', a character cuts her own face from temple to jaw with her husband's straight razor, and the prose sets it down step by step without flinching. Most of the recent stories stay close behind one character in the third person, while 'Death Envy' is told in the first person by Jasper. For a first listen, 'Familiar' suits someone drawn to folklore, and 'Blood Market' suits someone more unsettled by the internet than by monsters. 'What's Underneath' is better saved for later.