Halloween is still six weeks away, but you can get an early start on your share of scary tales with Shudder Stories: Green Ghost, available now from Becky Books! Following up on the success of Shudder Stories: Corpus Vile (2025), this new collection leads off with Green Ghost, a novella from the hand of Becky Books editor and publisher, Jim Beard. Jim’s terrifying tale is followed by three short stories: “Corpse Reviver No, 9,” by Win Scott Eckert; “The Opening,” by Laura E. Perez; and “Mad-Bug,” by yours truly.
“Mad Bug” is a post-apocalyptic account of a husband and wife in a rural New England community awaiting the arrival of a deadly airborne virus that has already swept across the globe, driving everyone in its path insane and creating a slow but unrelenting extinction level event. They live day to day in their boarded-up house, doing their best to scratch out some semblance of a normal existence, all the while knowing that an invisible monster in the air could come from them at any moment.
Get the “Mad-Bug” into your system—and while you’re at it, dive into the rest of the terrifying tales in this second round of Shudder Stories!