Skin Deep / She Ain't Pretty / Church

Three suspenseful, horrific, and bloody novellas...

SKIN DEEP

Victoria MacDonald wants to die but finding a way to go beautifully is difficult. She's tenacious, and vows to find a way to leave this world with the beauty she fought so hard to attain. Somehow, her search for the perfect suicide turns into murder...

Detective Amos Christianson answers a call about an intruder at Victoria's house. It's her second home invasion in less than a month, but this time she kills her attacker in "self-defense." Something about Victoria's story stinks, though, and Amos can't let it go.

He can't let Victoria go either.

As they spiral into separate obsessions, their paths twist until neither can untangle themselves from the other, and Victoria's desperate search for a beautiful death forces Amos to make a drastic decision.

But is the price for freeing himself of her insanity too high?

SHE AIN'T PRETTY

Blake Swanson answered an ad for a job as a farmhand, but when he arrives for his interview, Lily, the widow who placed the ad, seduces him. He forgets everything but Lily as he falls down a rabbit hole of sex and terror.

Eva Bright is following a true crime scoop for a book, and infiltrates a cult run by a woman named Lily Maenad via a job posting. Working as Lily's assistant, Eva knows she's stumbled into something bigger than a doomsday cult. Lily isn't just some nut in the woods trying to convince people she's the next Messiah.

Eva teams up with a hopeless young man who has been drained by Lily, but are they enough to stop the terrors going on?

CHURCH

Ray is a Christian, but he loves a woman who follows a god called Zabir. Determined to save her from eternal damnation, he joins her church.

Ray doesn't realize that indoctrination into the Zabian way is a process that not only breaks a man physically, it strips his identity and shatters his mind. He holds onto his faith at first, but as his prayers for mercy go unanswered, and the pain inflicted on him becomes too much to bear, the void of nothingness promises relief, and tempts Ray to do the unthinkable, even if leaves his soul as damned as the one he tried to save.