Saw kept his eyes closed but imagined opening them, seeing night. The sun would have set, everything gone dark.

I walk into the confessional booth.

I haven’t been in at least a decade,

and, between you and me, I should confess

When you died everyone came home

to fill up the church.

The three of us—me and Cassie and our ten-year-old daughter, Luanne—were carving pumpkins at the kitchen table when Lu announced that her favorite movie of all time was The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Even now in the dawn of the seventh grade, you know that you’re taking a risk.

Is this a horror story? I'd rather not use that word, because it involves one of my very best friends in the distant past and there was no horror in the event I will describe.

My mom says not to fall in love with a car.

My son is afraid of zombies. He runs into my room at night. They're going to eat my brains! They’ll come in through the windows while we’re sleeping and eat our brains!

Freddy Vs. Jason is a quintessential tale of a clash between titans, the unstoppable force pitted against the immovable object, a crude powerhouse reckoning with a vulgar wit.

Hasbro says pass goFingers divinefrom worlds beyond

So, Kelsey had this ghost boyfriend, see, and it was weird because, well, for one reason, she’d met him through her younger sister, who was really like a little sister, like Kelsey’s sister was young, but before you go thinking, you know, this is the kind of fucked up story where kids are hanging out with much older people, you should remember that Bradley wasn’t, like, an actual person.

In windows behind the night glassof my second story bedroom, I seeyour one green eye as bright as a dying star.

Under the water

--nodeeper than that,

farther.

The woods are quiet, Daria said. Yeah, what do you mean? I mean they’re quiet. No sound. No movement. Nothing. It’s weird.

WANTED:

Hell Hunter: slayer of demons, killer of psycho clowns, fearless destroyer of creatures born from utter blackness/bleakness of bottomless pit nightmares

Barrelhouse Poetry Editor Dan Brady sat down with Chase Berggrun to discuss their book R E D, a book-length erasure of Bram Stroker’s Dracula, forthcoming from Birds, LLC. 

there once was a girl who forgot everything,who named herself Gretel.