Loving the response for Vetust Vex!

So far, my novella Vetust Vex has garnered some great reviews! This little sucker has sat in my "to do" pile for a long time, and I'm glad I finally finished it.

If you haven't read it yet (and I hope you do), here's a little "heads-up" info: If you’ve read my short story Release (part of Scattered Bones), you know that story also deals with evil residing within an object. At the end of Release, I added a blurb that surely applies to this story as well: 

My wife and I sometimes like to browse through antique stores. We always end up with itchy, swollen fingers & runny noses from the dust (and God knows what else), but we enjoy it just the same. Personally, I like to look through the stacks of old pictures and wonder about the people staring back at me—surely long-dead and forgotten, but still alive in the form of a photo. What were their lives like? What did they do for a living? Were they good people? Or, maybe not so good? The stories those faces could tell.

I also appreciate the old books, not so much for the stories they contain, but more so for the people who have held them, tuned their pages, and escaped for a time within the printed words.

Pictures & books, all inanimate objects. Old, discarded, and for the most part, destined for the rubbish heap. But . . . are they really all that harmless?

A friend once told me a story about a painting she’d acquired, a somewhat creepy scene of a grizzled sailor and a lighthouse. It was a gift, so what does one do with a gift? One hangs it up, right? She did.

And that’s when the nightmares started.

Strange, upsetting dreams, unlike anything she’d ever experienced.

She got rid of the picture, and the nightmares stopped. Just like that.

Coincidence? It was, after all, just a painting. Oil on canvas, nothing more. But what if there were something more to it?

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my fifty-plus years, it’s that we don’t know nearly as much as we think we do. Who’s to say the painting didn’t carry with it some of the less desirable qualities of its painter? Or, maybe the painter himself was trapped within the swirls of oil paint, radiating the twisted thoughts and dark intentions that guided his actions in life. Hmmm . . .

 

So again, if you haven't read it yet, I invite you to give it a go . . . but be careful what you touch.