Altar
A novelette. Cover art by Matthew Revert.
ALTAR is a story about a young boy, his sister and their mother, who decide to visit the community swimming pool for an afternoon of leisure and play in the warm summer sunshine, only to have things go... well, it is a horror story, after all.
“ALTAR is redolent of hard-edged supernatural horror from the golden days of McCammon and King. Nobody is safe in a Fracassi story.” - Laird Barron, author of X’s for Eyes
“Philip Fracassi’s ALTAR does to swimming pools what Peter Benchley’s JAWS did to oceans. Fracassi is masterful at quickly sketching in characters to where you know enough about them to care about their fates, then tightens the tension with each new turn in the plot, until you’re racing through the pages to find out what happens next. And what happens next is a series of twists that caught me completely off-guard. Fracassi has that rare talent of putting you, the reader, smack dab in his characters’ heads, looking out their eyes, which is the best way to ride this roller coaster of a story. Highly recommended.” – Ralph Robert Moore, author of Ghosters
“Fracassi has the ability to inject dread into the familiar and everyday, ratcheting the tension to reach absolute horror. Profoundly disturbing.” – Christopher Slatsky, author of Alectryomancer
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Philip Fracassi
Philip Fracassi's name might not yet be whispered alongside the giants of horror, but those who have dared to enter the dark and twisted worlds he crafts know that his work leaves a lasting impression. Fracassi’s writing isn’t just about fear—it’s about the way fear clings to the edges of the ordinary, distorting the familiar into something nightmarish. His stories tend to veer into unsettling, psychological terrain, where horror isn’t a matter of what’s seen, but of what’s felt. In his worlds, the scariest monsters are often the ones lurking within ourselves.
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