Howard Odentz is a life-long resident of the gray area between Western Massachusetts and North Central Connecticut. His love of the region is evident in his writing as he often incorporates the foothills of the Berkshires and the small towns of the Bay and Nutmeg States into his work.
Although he is most known for his young adult and emerging adult thrillers and chillers, his genre hopping fantasy allegory, THE MOUSE WHO BROKE THE SKY, will be coming soon.
Last Friday night, the world changed-and not for the better.
Zombies are among us. School's out for the foreseeable future, and with Mom and Dad at the lake house, my twin and I are on our own in this mess. Which is fine as long as we can avoid being on the menu.
Tripp Light's teenage world is suddenly filled with "poxers"-the infected ones, the ones that have the Necropoxy virus. In an entire world gone mad and bad, Tripp's only hope of survival is to clear a path through zombie land with his sister and head for the hills (aka his aunt's farm) to rendezvous with his parents.
Success clearly favors the fittest and the fastest. Survival demands the twins make hard, ruthless decisions, but that all changes when Tripp and his twin hear a distress call via the radio. Prianka Patel, a girl Tripp loves to hate, is trapped and surrounded in a bakery. Soon, the twins have quite a collection of misfits and survivors and miles to go before anyone can sleep safely again.
The zombie apocalypse just got real.
Zombies rule. Almost everybody in the world has turned into one, thanks to a nifty little disease called Necropoxy. Sixteen year old twins, Tripp and Trina Light, however, are among the rare humans who are not only immune to Necropoxy—they're super immune. Even a bite from a zombie won't infect them.
Great, right? Yeah, but…researchers are capturing every immune human they can find-and experimenting on them like lab rats. Just yesterday, the twins and their friends narrowly escaped.
The researchers will do anything to get them back.
That means Tripp, Trina, and their small band of survivors are on the run from zombies, mad scientists, and who knows what else. What's worse, some people in their group are starting to act funny, which isn't funny at all.
This is so not how they planned to spend the beginning of their junior year of high school in Massachusetts.
Everyone is dead.
Everyone is wicked dead.
Zombie apocalypse? Game over.
Sixteen-year-old twins, Tripp and Trina Light, are rare in the zombie apocalypse. Neither the airborne virus Necropoxy nor the bite from one of the dead will turn them.
No wonder crazy scientists, soldiers in helicopters, and scary doctors want to capture them to see what makes them so special.
But are they special anymore? After freeing their parents and others from experimentation, some of their liberated traveling companions are displaying super immunity, as well. Their former captors just don’t know it.
With the key to super immunity in the twin’s hands, they face a difficult choice. Should they keep running or confront their pursuers with the cure and hope for the best?
Either choice could get them killed. One wrong move in a world filled with Necropoxy, and they’ll hit a DEAD END.
Apple, Massachusetts is rotten to the core.
Every fall, when the orchards ripen and the leaves begin to die, there are murders. We know it, and we accept it. It's the price we pay for living in Apple. Families mourn, but no one is ever caught. Now, there's a body in the woods, and the cycle is starting again. People bruise easily in Apple.
Finding a murdered and mutilated girl plunges Jackson Gill into the middle of a decades-old horror. For Jackson, the newest murders become personal. His mentally ill sister knows far more about the murders than anyone restrained in a basement room should know.
When one by one, her sick, cryptic predictions prove true, Jackson will have to believe the unthinkable and stop what no one has been able to stop in sixty years.
He has no choice. He lives in Bloody Bloody Apple.
Four life-long friends wake in the woods overlooking the highway, without any memory of how they got there.
One has a triangle burned into his forearm. One has lost her pants. One is missing his glass eye. The last is covered in blood.
As images of big, black eyes and the cries of sheep haunt their addled brains, the town fire alarm and police sirens can be heard in the distance. What is happening to them? What is happening to their pristine town? What's more, why can't they remember any of it?
What . . . what did they do?
A beer bottle thrown carelessly at the windshield of a passing car sends the vehicle careening off the road, and the lives of high school seniors Denny Ford, his foster sister Jen McKnatt, and her sometimes boyfriend Brody Erwin, spinning out of control.
Over the next several days as the three experience increasingly bizarre, frightening, and seemingly unrelated events, they are forced to examine the ramifications of their actions and how their lives have been irrevocably altered.
What they've done can never be undone.
After all, it only takes one bottle toss to turn their world cockeyed forever.
Bad things come in small packages....
EPIC award finalist Howard Odentz has penned 26 disturbingly fascinating horror stories about the youngest predators among us.
From Andy and Boris to Yuri and Zina, this eclectic anthology is filled, A to Z, with psychopaths, monsters, and murderers!
So turn on the lights, and huddle under your blankets because murder isn't just for grown-ups anymore. Come meet our gallery of little killers.
After all, they're dying to meet you!
Never steal from a drunk in the woods.
An epic and sudden blizzard is blanketing Mount Tom Regional High School . . . in October.
A dangerous man is stalking the hallways.
And three teens harbor a secret that may get everyone killed if they don’t figure out how to stop the snow and the rampage.
Cooper isn't doing well in Covered Bridge, Massachusetts.
His mother is filling her days with vodka and orange juice, and his psychotic little sister keeps cutting the heads off her dolls. His delusional grandfather won't stop staring at non-existent cows in the pasture, and their farm dog is acting meaner than usual.
Everyone blames Cooper for the tragic accident which took his girlfriend’s life. Now a group of slackers from Mount Tom Regional High School are gathering deep in a forest clearing—at the Devil’s Dining Room—eager for the rising of her ghost on Devil’s Night, the eve before Halloween.
Cooper thinks they're all crazy. Are they?