Eytan Gall
Traps for the living: Of Flash and Fiction volume 2
Synopsis
The things that trap you rarely announce themselves.
A crack in the wall that keeps coming back. A plate that refills every time you finish it. A boy's drawings that are a little too easy to fall into. Rain that doesn't burn, it just dissolves.
Twenty stories of psychological horror, dark fantasy and surreal fiction, set in the space between the ordinary and the wrong. Grief that starts wearing your face in the mirror. A physicist's consciousness riding the curve of time back past the first star. The woman everyone called a dangerous witch, who turns out to be the only one doing the actual work. A man waking in a dream clinic where the ceiling says WAKE UP in red letters, and the only question is whether anyone on the outside is still writing on ceilings.
The dread here is never loud. It accumulates, detail by detail, until the thing you should have noticed earlier is standing right behind you.
Author's Note
Most of these stories began with something small that I could not shake off. A detail that stayed wrong, or an ordinary object that stopped behaving the way it should. I would notice it, put it aside, and find it still sitting there a few weeks later.
The horror that interests me is not the kind that arrives from somewhere else. It is the kind that has been in the room for a while already, waiting for someone to look at it directly. If one of these stories unsettles you later rather than immediately, then it is doing what I hoped it would.