Showing results by author "Stephen Huff" in All Categories

Tabloids invite us to gorge ourselves on tales of epic personal failures, and so many of us eagerly oblige. Guilty pleasures, we savor these stories most satisfactorily with a garnish of sex scandal, a dash of fiscal malfeasance and a generous dollop of social corruption. Next, we expect a weeping dessert of shame and regret to follow. Afterward, everything ends in a dumpster or the backseat of an aging sedan before we stagger home again, sated, smug and full of improving condemnations. Cup your ears and shade your eyes now. Peer into the gloom of your neighbor’s windows to eavesdrop. ...

Champions come in all shapes and forms. The same is true of cowards. Most of us line up somewhere between these two extremes of potential, but none of us eagerly anticipate having to prove ourselves in a crossfire. In fact, most notable acts of heroism are not the results of well-considered, carefully laid plans. Rather, these are often spontaneous yet deliberate demonstrations of selflessness occasionally on display when normal human beings must confront life-threatening risk. Take a deep, calming breath now before you dare gaze into the face of death. Trembling, heed its heckling catcalls...

Disinfectants, detergents, insecticides, fungicides, herbicides and homicides – everything a human being needs to clear his or her lot and start fresh in life, clean and pure, and it all waits at the press of a finger. Some of us love a good disaster, but we watch from a safe distance and it always happens to someone else… somewhere else… never here. Never us. Distended bellies and skeletal children are always the misfortune of others. Stop and wonder why. Your preferred answer no doubt leaps easily to mind, but the truth is probably quite different, because pestilence comes in all ...

Mothers no longer name their sons ‘Adolph’. Almost everyone knows why. Though all innocent babes do not develop into monsters, all monsters develop from innocent babes. We prefer fiction to reality, because thoughts of the former easily yield to denials of reason, while the latter only reminds us of our common origins in the primitive. Steal a private moment now and listen to your inner voice. It whispers. Of rising mutant domination amid apocalyptic wastes; of grotesque human chimeras practicing ancient arts; of despicable capital criminals kept in unbreakable cages and of the flawed ...

A silly titmouse once sang sweetly to describe love as “a many-splendored thing”. Perhaps this is so. For some. For others, love’s terrible spectacle shines in its many violent twists and unexpected turns. Each feckless angle of its affection or disaffection invariably leaves a disfiguring blemish that renders exquisite facets of character from alternating impacts of tragedy, disaster, triumph and ecstasy. Too briefly, desire’s artistry sparkles the amazed eye with a fateful brilliance before fiery passion fades to leave its victims cold and trembling in its wake. Steal a secret ...

In the limitless expanse of the cosmos, intelligence need not be confined to water-filled flesh. For every form of imagination, there is an embodiment of it out there in the void. On this world in this system, everything may be uniquely alive, from the rocks to the sandstorms. How does one conquer the wind? It is an alien intellect in the shifting sands of a waterless planet. Journey here to die. Or be reborn.

During the summer of 1968, the Nightland, Incorporated carnival stopped in suburban Pecan Groves, Texas to stage a one-week show. Its performances paralleled a three-man prison escape, the miraculous resurrection of a cherished young boy, and the mysterious appearance of a young lady with a potent pedigree. If the squalor of its Freak Show and the rigged games of its midway are now known only within the faded archives of history, then contemporary society is its primary benefactor and direct ancestor. We see its shadows and hear its echoes everywhere. Welcome to the Freak Show. We are it.

He is the scourge of the night, every bachelorette's worst nightmare. He has already killed many single young ladies, and he will certainly kill again. Tonight, he lingers outside the house of his next intended victim. Watching. Waiting. When he sees her climb the stairs to her bedroom, he knows her time has come. Demonstrating expert skill and terrible discipline, he steals into her home to rouse her from her dreams. This victim will not go as easily as all the rest, however, much to his sinister delight. Every matchmaker claims there is someone for everyone. This old adage is never truer ...

Every day, we confront ourselves in mirrors of various shapes and sizes. We stare into them and our reflection stares back. Within these visions, everything about our reflection is backward, opposite, and reversed. Laws of physics prevent one side from emerging into the other, but we all wonder how far those renditions of reality might go. We wonder about life on the other side. How far does our mirror's reflection imitate reality? If we could crossover to the other side, what might happen when in the twain we and our reflections meet?

Within each human being lingers a mischievous child, but each of us also cages an unformed primitive. We keep our individual id-monster within the tempered bars of civility, yet it remains our secret delight of a darkened, unobserved evening and we make it our fondest fetish at every available opportunity. No matter how mightily we struggle, history scrawls with endless tales of failed self-control, so each scandal both titillates and disgusts depending upon personal sensibilities. Indulge your inner-beast. How it roars! Of broken souls crushed between despair and revenge; of normalcy ...

A special agent with a special job, he's the janitor of all the unhappy, unpleasant, bleeding places of the world. He'll clean up your messes and leave nary a living witness in the muck that remains. Man, woman and child, his conscience is absent, his drive is relentless, and his soul is a ravenous void. Cyclic rates of cannon fire and napalm. Cluster bombs and poison gas. Ever the calm, cool professional, he feels nothing. He is nothing.

Every stellar rise deserves a cosmic fall. Inhumanly callous and ruthlessly selfish, he made a fortune in predatory mortgage loans prior to the economic collapse of 2008. In its calamitous aftermath, executive handlers staged him for a corporate patsy and left him to answer alone for their collective crimes. Facing financial ruin and certain incarceration, his reduced prospects force him to move his family into a rat-infested bungalow. In the aftermath of his ruin, one man’s family confronts an epic plague of vermin when they move into a modest country home. They have all the benefits of ...

While we collectively fear wild animals and muggers, most contemporary plagues come in the guise of unavoidable corporate logos and unforgettable commercial jingles. This new and most modern form of disease presents symptoms that include unhealthy obsessions, unwise compulsions and preprogrammed responses, all accompanied by an irrepressible tune that inevitably drives a rational mind to the very brink of lunacy. Visualize anything except the latest fad slogan while engrossing yourself in a moment of hysteric interest, and then pause to think. Of dreamscape dominions wrought from the felt ...

Boogeymen, banshees, werewolves and vampires; all figments of horror drawn upon parchments of fable, each the scrawl of individual phobias revisited by trembling quills dipped into inkwells of collective nightmare. Despite vaguely amusing caricatures, these monstrous legends probably developed from grisly human origins. Indeed, we confront our violent primitives in every new atrocity, and each murder teaches a simple lesson that humankind consistently resists. Consequently, we forever lack viable means for exorcising so-called ‘inner demons’. Even now, your secret devil whispers into ...

Peddlers and snake oil, pimps and pornography, lunatics and paranoia… each pair travels the same darkened alleyways to service identical shadow-bound gates. We receive them by the backdoor, thank you, and always well into the evening. These are private matters undertaken and clearly marked by clandestine hush and furtive sidelong glance. Sometimes concealed in the open but more often hidden in a fog of disinformation, our every secret contains a kernel of truth wrapped within a burlap of proficient lies. Patience and due diligence may unwrap the enigma to decipher a hidden message, but ...

Born to the street and abandoned by his paranoid, drug-addicted mother, a young boy struggles to evade vicious predators, who hope to exploit him, and insistent authorities, who hope to save him. His only ally is his extreme natural intelligence, and his only home is the public library. Daily, the noose tightens after his mother, his last link to childhood, goes missing. His future seems as bleak as the cold, hard streets. Then he meets Longbow. In a gritty, existential world rife with threats, a young boy fights to survive. One man has the power to save him.

His nickname at work, where his colleagues avoid him like a plague, is "Mr. Accident". Alongside a lonely stretch of road on his way home one evening, he earns his reputation once again. While he sits with a dying youth trapped inside an overturned and crumpled automobile, Mr. Accident tells the boy how he earned his reputation. His is a sordid tale of endless cacophony and disaster, and death follows Mr. Accident like a shadow. Today, he earns his nickname with flare. If you should cross paths with Mr. Accident, beware.

Corporate lobotomies. Psychotically amorous semi-sentient bots. Endless corridors. Countless unlabeled doors, all viciously locked. A lethally dysfunctional social infrastructure rife with corruption, inefficiency, and crime. Spiraling homicide rates… Welcome to your corpulent, overpopulated future! Here, everyone loves you, because everyone wants to screw you before they sell your living body to illegal pharmaceutical tumor-farms, which are also a popular method of suicide, because death-by-tumor is not as bad as many (though it is also worse than some). In this world, a much-hated ...

Somebody has to do it, and his mind is sufficiently perverse to qualify for the job. It's the age-old conundrum of time travel. It's the ultimate experiment. He packs a handgun before he steps into the time machine. What happens when a young man travels into the past to kill his own parents? Hello, father. Hello, mother. Good-bye, Thaddeus.

Lucky to survive the circumstances of his birth, he learned to make the most of a life that might have killed a lesser person. In fact, he learned to thrive. Via crime, he improved himself to the point of obtaining a college education, an enormous bank account, and a veritable army of minions. He proves the road to hell is not always paved with the best of intentions. This is the story of his downfall and ultimate fate. Nobody escapes.