Denver Horror Collective is proud to announce the authors for its upcoming Sci-Fi Horror anthology, Sinister Systems. Featuring 16 tales across the Sci-Fi spectrum, Sinister Systems includes stories with rogue AIs, interdimensional mysteries, biological terrors, alien threats and much more. Coming out later this summer, watch our site for release details.

• Interview with Desi D.

1. Name one horror author you admire and explain how they helped you become a better writer.

Every year, I discover a new author who changes my perspective on horror, and sometimes, literature and writing in general. Choose one that’s impossible. I can’t split the baby. But I can say with certainty that anyone who loves horror couldn’t go wrong reading some of my recent favorites: Steve Rasnic Tem, Attila Veres, Reggie Oliver, Mark Samuels, and Luigi Musolino.

The person who’s helped me the most become a better writer is Noah Lukeman, who doesn’t write horror at all (at least not to my knowledge).

That being said, all of my answers might be completely wrong, and I might read this interview later and say, “What the hell was I talking about?” No, not might: probably will.

2. What is your favorite supernatural creature? And why?

The Wandering Jew. His immortality and itinerancy make him something like a biblical cowboy. If that biblical cowboy was also a scapegoat. In terms of conceptual impact, he’s a very powerful character, though not very popular, at least not contemporarily. I think because some people are uncomfortable writing or saying the word “Jew” and others are way too comfortable writing or saying it (and not because they’re fans of the tribe).

Aesthetically, the xenomorph—what H.R. Giger calls the actual monster he designed for Alien—is pretty badass. If something looks evil enough, it can overcome the absence of evil character development in the narrative. Kind of adjunct to “Quantity has a quality all its own.”

Although the horror series The Strain also has two of my favorite villains. Thomas Eichhorst, an undead Nazi who’s hardened after betraying the Jewish woman he loves (after that, he’s all in on evil; in for a penny, in for a pound). And The Master, when his physical host was the gigantism-afflicted Jusef Sardu. A bloodthirsty giant in a holocaust cloak is pretty terrifying.

These questions are too hard. Why would you give me these impossible questions?

3. What is your favorite story? And why?

I don’t have one, and it’s impossible to have one, and if people claim to, if you talk to them long enough, they’ll find another story they say is just as good. And if you wait a few years, those same people will change their minds completely.

The best stories, to me, are the ones that make you set the book down on your chest after finishing, take a breath, and then register, if even only on an unconscious level, that you are no longer the same person who began reading it.

There are a few I’ve read over the last few years: “The Red Fog” by Mark Samuels, “The Amber Complex” by Attila Veres, “Whatever You Want” by Steve Rasnic Tem, “The Mortlake Manuscript” by Reggie Oliver.

But the story that really kicked my ass was “Lazarus” by Leonid Andreyev. It takes a biblical story of resurrection and turns it into a cautionary tale of cosmic dread. If “Lazarus” doesn’t freak you out, then you’ve got ice water in your veins.

4. What about the thrill of writing that calls your name and excites you to create a new tale? And of course, what is the next story we can look forward to reading from you?

Rarely does writing thrill me. But if I don’t write, I feel like I’m swollen with psychological edema. Writing is agony, and going back and reading your older writing is a specific, can be cringe-inducing agony.

What’s next? I’m not sure. The majority of what I write ends up abandoned and consequently unpublished. I started my writing career with three semi-competent longer works and a not-so-great novella. Although recently, I’m really enjoying writing short stories, even though they don’t give me as much space to develop character arcs or create a fictional universe, so I’ll probably keep doing that.

Alright, I’d like to go eat lunch now.

Denver Horror Collective is seeking submissions for a Science Fiction Horror anthology: SINISTER SYSTEMS. Send us your stories of first contact gone wrong, the bio weapon that escapes containment, or an AI bleeding into the real world with disastrous results. We’re looking for mad science (Resident Evil), cosmic horror (Event Horizon), incomprehensible alien life (Annihilation), and more.

Archivist Mara accepts a quiet contract to catalog the crumbling Dumont estate. She expects solitude and routine; instead she finds a house steeped in silence, where the walls listen and the mirrors shift when no one is looking. The longer she stays, the more her own reflection falters. Her memories bend, her thoughts blur, and the line between herself and the presence within the house begins to dissolve. Somewhere in its history, a woman named Isabelle Dumont was erased—and Mara senses that same fate closing in.

What haunts the estate isn’t a ghost. It’s a patient predator, practiced in the art of rewriting lives, and it has set its sights on her.

The Memory Keeper is a gothic psychological horror about coercion, haunting, and the violence of being forgotten. It’s the first novel in Rowan Taylor’s chilling new series The Oblivion Cycle— standalone horror novels united not by character or plot, but by a single devouring idea: what if identity is not a fixed truth, but prey?

Each book opens a different doorway into oblivion, revealing how the self can be stolen, rewritten, hollowed out, or willingly surrendered.

Available now in ebook

Welcome to the quiet horror of Rowan Taylor — where memories linger, love unravels, and the line between presence and absence is never quite clear. These are stories that don’t scream — they whisper, weep, and wait in the silence.

Here, hauntings are intimate. Familiar faces become unfamiliar. Rooms remember. And some doors never close.

Rowan Taylor writes unsettling fiction that blends psychological dread with the supernatural, exploring what it means to forget—and to be forgotten. She is also known as Tracy Fobes, author of eight award-winning paranormal romances published by Simon & Schuster and Leisure LoveSpell. Fobes has also independently published numerous romantic suspense stories, including Hard Charger and Billionaire’s Hidden Heart.

As Fobes, she wrote of witches, grimalkins, haunted seas, and dangerous love. As Rowan, she steps fully into the dark.

She lives near Philadelphia, owns too many books and too few flashlights, and believes the scariest monsters are the ones who know your name.

When a successful bookstore owner is abducted by a meticulous serial killer, she finds herself in a sterile cage designed for torture. But as the captor attempts to break his victim, the roles of predator and prey begin to blur. In a deadly psychological game where survival means becoming the greater monster, she must confront her own dark history to not only escape, but to take everything from the man who trapped her.

Available in paperback and ebook.

Floy Owens writes about the predators we fear, and the ones we become. Owens crafts stories where monsters wear familiar faces and victims learn to bite back. When she isn’t writing, she can usually be found with her senior dog, a cup of tea, and a stack of true crime books, researching what drives people past their breaking point.