Billy liked cars and he liked to talk about them, and in 1999, he was the top salesman at the dealership, winning a trip to Hawaii for two. He took his girlfriend and proposed on Waikiki Beach after an afternoon of hotel sex and room service piña coladas. He’d seen the fabled “green flash” as the sun hit the water and took it as a good sign. He and Joanne were married at a little Methodist Church in Hopewell, where her parents lived.

Thirty-one days.
Thirty-one stories.
Thirty-one illustrations.
This will be an October to remember.  Beginning on Friday, October 1st, Dark Valentine Magazine will post a new story a day.  The frenzy begins with “Animal Lover” by Kat Parrish, illustrated by Mark Satchwill, and will end with a Lovecraftian tale by Barbara Emrys, also illustrated by Mark Satchwill.  You won’t [...]

By the end of the week we had evacuated Bethesda in favour of a local church. People discovered the protection of holy ground quickly, and the Church accommodated the survivors as best she could. Of course, we found out soon enough that the sanctuaries couldn’t keep out the wolves because of their mortality. It was just one more thing to guard against in a world where everything was to be feared.

A Knight’s Tale (part 10)

By Scott J Laurange
Illustration by Pamela Jaworska

He paused to let me digest (which is not to say it was going down easily, of course, but I swallowed just the same). “As to the specific occurrence of this attack, though,” he continued, “yes, we did know. But not in any [...]

This is Banned Books Week (September 25-October 2) and we’ve just received word from our China-based writer C.M. Saunders that the Dark Valentine site has been blocked there.  We’re not sure why, but we will take it as a compliment.
Celebrate the week by reading a banned book.  You have a lot of variety to choose [...]

A few days (and a heckuva lot of rest) later, Bredding explained what he’d done to me. I had been a rush job (which explained a lot of the bulky awkwardness of the equipment), but this had also been at the early stages of Bredding’s research into cybernetics. Don’t get me wrong—while it may not have been near as sophisticated as the current “model,” for the time it was … well, impossible. We had nothing like that available medically.

When next I came to, it was several days later. I woke to unfamiliar surroundings though the room was clearly some sort of medical facility. I was connected to an array of machines which blipped, and whirred, and flashed multi-coloured lights—all of which I could only assume meant I was still among the living. I couldn’t move my left arm, and my neck and shoulder felt like they were clamped in a vice, but my fingers responded when I tried to move them, so I figured the situation couldn’t be all bad.

Now you can download and read the Autumn 2010 issue of Dark Valentine on your Kindle! Here’s the link:
Dark Valentine for Kindle
The Kindle store doesn’t allow free downloads, so the Autumn issue is priced at 99¢. All proceeds from the sale of this issue (and all subsequent issues available from the Kindle store) will go [...]

Almost everyone’s seen the teeth on a vamp—a leech, I mean. Long, cluttered, and deadly. And some of us have even seen the more refined and elegant set the masters possess, which are no less deadly for being less a mouthful. But this thing, this vamp—its mouth was like looking into hell itself, row after row of fangs, ranging from an inch to a foot long—impossible to even have fit in the thing’s head, but there they were—descending toward me.

Part of me—a large part, in fact—was ready to just roll over and let it have me. But something, something beyond my ken, cried out from within me for knowledge. I needed to know what was killing me, what had killed my family, and why. Because even though I had no ability to think clearly at that time, something told me the situation was beyond the ordinary. This wasn’t like what was happening in the streets and all around. I was a special case.