Today might be your last chance to win a bajillion books (including the LAST multi-signed copy of A Career Guide To Your Job In Hell!) and, more importantly, make Christmas that little bit better for a child in need.

Get your donations in to Toys for Tots and your pictures in to Toys For Tots: Horror Style and make a difference this festive season.

Then Hear This:

Today’s 12 Days of #Creepfest treat brings us the colossally talented Jason Darrick and his excellent collection Fear in Words Vol. 1: The Stories available on Amazon, and his FREE companion piece Fear in Words Vol.2: The Poems, which  you can dig up on Smashwords. Jason also writes and reviews all things “horror” on the popular Dreadful Tales website.

Darrick’s debut tome swerves in package and contents, from flash fic to short story, and from the more traditional gothic terrors of mysterious figures and people stranded among the wilds of nature, to the modern macabre of body horror and horrifically extreme BDSM. Bloody, gory, disturbing, and – above all – entertaining, Fear in Words Vol. 1: The Stories is a damn fine collection of truly nightmarish stories from a fantastic emerging author. Pick it the F up and scare your jingle bells clean off!

Now, it’s been awful quiet up in these parts, but get on the comment board and let us know you’re out there, and somebody will be getting Master Darrick’s two-fer of terror in their stocking.

Now check out this little treat from the greatest TV show ever made:

Then rock out to some bloody Ramones. Cuz it’s CHRISTMAS, BABY!

And don’t forget to keep CREEPING!

Today, my pretties, I urge you to check out the zombiepocalypse novella Monsters Unmasked, by fellow Creeper Lori Whitwam.

A blow-by-blow account of one woman’s horrifying ordeal during the rise of the undead, Monsters Unmasked steers clear of the stand-by plots of zombie sieges and people on the run, and focuses on the realities of what kind of world we would find ourselves devolving into. Bad men become worse, slavery and profiteering would become a way of life, and the weak would be preyed upon by the strong.  But is there hope for a woman with no reason to live? Is there still good in mankind when death ceases to be the worst that could happen?

Whitwam asks these questions and many more, crafting a slow-building, riveting drama from the ashes of society. The living dead become peripheral dangers, like sharks circling the Titanic, and they aren’t missed in the least. Monsters Unmasked pulls no punches, but also doesn’t revel in gore and cartoonish violence and mayhem. This is a thoughtful and intelligent take on the Zombie tale and one well-deserving of a read.

Check it out at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/49948

*Lori Whitwam spent her early years reading books in a tree in northern West Virginia. The 1980s and ‘90s found her and her husband moving around the Midwest, mainly because it was easier to move than clean the apartment. She currently lives in a northwestern suburb of the Twin Cities for reasons that escape her, but were probably good ones at the time. Her debut novel, a contemporary romance titled Make or Break, will be released in Spring 2011, and she is at work on her next project. For more information, or to preview Make or Break, please visit her website at loriwhitwam.com. 

*from the Author’s notes of Monsters Unmasked

Now get yoself a double-shot of X-Mess cheer to make up for yesterday’s absence:

Young Crosby Stills Nash and Young Crosby!

Welcome back to the big #Creepfest show!! Today’s spotlight falls directly on Auckland, NZ author and poet Kim Koning of Wrestling the Muse, whose YA Dystopian tale “The Ring of Fire” is included in the Tales for Canterbury anthology from Random Static Press, a charity collection benefitting the Red Cross NZ Earthquake Relief fund and featuring stories by a wide variety of authors including the likes of Neil Gaiman and Jeff VanDerMeer. Check that out HERE and support a worthy cause, cuz’ it’s CHRISTMAS and YOU like helping people, right? Do it. Or find yourself forever relegated to the naughty end of Santa’s long list. And check Kim out on Erik Gustafson’s blog Apparitions of Terror!

I also happen to be featured on Kim’s blog today, including a “flash” piece which is really more of a random segment of a story still caught in the detritus of my catastrophically disorganized brain. There is also much reference to His Dudeness and Zee Grinch.

Now Hear This:

Get out there and consume your asses off people, Santa is counting on YOU!