Horror (85,000 words)

On the night of her medical school graduation, promising young doctor Winter Beck and her bestie are pulled over. They’ve heard the rumors. Successful women in their 20s are being locked up in droves and forced to be surrogates in exchange for shorter prison sentences…or so they say.

Winter learns the rumors are true when she is thrust into a twisted world created by maniacal CEO scientist, Ivy Parker, who has orchestrated a terrifying partnership between reproductive medicine and the criminal justice system. Inside the funhouse-like prison—run by a puppeted warden and an even stranger cast of all female guards, nurses, and staff—inmates gather in colorful spaces (good for mood), are fed the finest foods (good for baby), and invasively monitored (good for business), grooming them to become perfect vessels for the fetuses they will carry. But when Winter refuses to participate in the program, she quickly learns that choice was an illusion. Her captors implant her with an embryo against her will anyway.

Faced with a future of multiple unwanted pregnancies and sedation, Winter must decide if she'll accept her fate or attempt an unprecedented escape—even if it costs her life. The problem is, Ivy Parker is equally determined and she isn’t going to let one of her most valuable vessel’s get away with someone else’s baby inside her womb that easily.

A social horror with sci-fi elements, A PERFECT VESSEL will take you on a chilling journey from the peculiar streets of Capital City, all the way to the dense, nature rich, wilderness of The North Woods. The reader meets a cast of mostly female characters who are smart, empowered, and ready to change the course of a history that has recently been rewritten without their best interests in mind.

Horror (75,000 word)

After her seventh—and most gruesome—failed pregnancy the bond that Pearl and her devoted husband share begins to break. Memories of her troubled childhood and her sister Ruby’s sudden death at age 15 plague her. The ghost of her sister, who she once thought of as a comforting presence, has begun to complicate her thoughts.

When Pearl is forced to question her role in the sudden death of her husband, she leaves the stability of her life in Southern Maine and settles north. There she infiltrates a homeschool group by pretending to be the mother of the children she’s found work nannying for. The fog of grief and bad advice, that only she can hear from her sister’s apparition, drives Pearl to kidnap one of the homeschool mother’s babies while on a secluded lake house retreat.

Pearl grapples with what she’s done, and the role that her sister has played in manipulating her all these years from the afterlife. Pearl must rid herself of Ruby’s ghost and its sinister influence once and for all, before it's too late.

Horror/Suspense (82,000 words)

When the last ferry of the season off a remote Maine island never shows, Mallory Grey is faced with her worst nightmare. She is stranded on the sleepy island she never wanted to call home with an eclectic group of locals that includes her bickering sisters and island lobsterman Nolan Doughty, the ex she has avoided for twenty years.

The inconvenience quickly grows frightful when clocks stop ticking, radios report nothing but static, and engines refuse to turn over. But when an ice storm snuffs out the power for good the ill prepared castaways must band together for a shot at making it through the inhospitable winter.

Months bleed into years and the speculations as to why no one has come back for them intensify. As hope of ever fleeing the island diminishes, Mallory finds herself drawn to Nolan. She despairs for her high-profile career and life of anonymity in the city. But, the security she finds in Nolan and the eventual birth of their unplanned baby allows her to see that being trapped on the isolated island might be more blessing than curse. That is, until they finally get their shot at leaving.

Mallory is faced with an impossible choice: leave with her sisters to unravel the mystery and maybe get her life back, or stay with Nolan and their child in this unexpected paradise.

Horror (10,000 word short story)

A mother seeks a much needed afternoon away from the stress of everyday life and sets out on a hiking expedition with her three young children and beloved golden retriever.

Reaching the peak of the mountain makes the strenuous journey worth it, but the sun is setting quickly and despite their exhaustion she feels the pressure to nudge her kids back down before nightfall. As she takes in one final look of the majestic view, a tragic sequence of events leaves her and the family dog at the bottom of a rocky gorge.

The terrified children are left to fend for themselves while the fate of their mother and beloved dog remains unknown.

(Winner of honorable mention, in Tulip Tree Publishing’s Stories That Need to be Told Contest. Complete anthology, including On Sawyer Mountain, available here.)