"A Simple Defense" and Other Stories: Four Horror Genre Novellas

A Simple Defense: A simple device has held the Beast in the darkness at bay for forty years but despite attempts to stop him a son who has never wanted to believe in the creature deliberately removes that protection with horrific consequences for the his father who protected the family all that time. The son then learns the hard way that he must now deal with the Beast. Trained For Disaster: A man fascinated by occult powers but afraid to test rituals from ancient sources himself recruits others to run the tests while he secretly observes. He learns what works and what doesn't even though often the recruits don't survive their encounter with what they evoked. The teen who is his latest recruit and learns that the thrill of calling a monster into this dimension brings with it the terror of not being able to control that thing that could easily kill him and the guilt when it kills others. Fear It If You Fear It: The police come to suspect that exposure to something at special social parties called Wave Rituals alters the brains of the participants and can trigger extreme paranoia and lead to those exposed dying the death they have most dreaded for years. The police rush to make a convincing case to get those events banned. Ancient Enemies Revived: A creature called a Woogie that awakens from a primitive life form and "evolves" to human form has revived and prowls the streets. Several people are found stripped of all memory but physically unharmed. Then others are found very much physically harmed. Professor Murmur tells what is suspected about the thing. It forgets everything when it goes into 150 year long sleeps and must "steal memories" to rapidly learn to fit in when it reemerges. It must feed on human tissue for the DNA information it needs to take on a human form each active cycle. The race is on to contain or destroy it.