“Eat Your Catch” at The Genre Society

My horror story “Eat Your Catch” has been published in the Summer 2026 issue of The Genre Society. You can access my story directly beginning on page 36 of Issue #9 through this link.

I’ve got a little more of an intro than usual for this one.

This story has undergone significant edits and alterations over the years. It’s the middle of a long story in itself—the monster featured at the center of the terror originated in an unpublished novel I completed back in 2001 … yes, 25 years ago, that 2001.

When the fiction bug bit me again in 2016, I re-read that novel, decided it had some good scares, but was mostly padded with junk. The idea of a monster trapped in a cesspool stuck with me though. I think the first draft of this story was the second or third story I attempted that year, when I got back into fiction writing. Some of what’s in this story, most notably the description of the monster Levaire, is very close to what I wrote in 2001. Other elements, definitely the tropical fish angle, are brand new.

What makes this story special for me is that after I finished it, I decided to write it as a novel all over again.

The new novel is totally different from the original. The monster still exists, a version of this scene still exists, but the protagonist is now a woman who is not in this short story (Kurt still is in the novel too), and an element of time travel has also been added to the longer version that isn’t mentioned in this story. In fact, the short story that you can read in The Genre Society developed along a totally different track than the novel, so that few of the details you’ll read in the short remain the same in the novel. Same basement setting in many scenes, same descriptions in many cases, a few of the same people, though some with different fates, and others who aren’t in the short story at all.

As for now, I’ve got these eight pages in print to introduce my monster Charles Levaire. I hope one day to be able to share his complete story, a novel that I pitch as the story of a century told over a single weekend. As for this one, I’ll warn you there’s some death, including the unfortunate demise of some tropical fish–ironically, I spend a good deal of my spare time trying to keep several tanks of similar fish alive and thriving!

You can read my story in full, free of charge, over at The Genre Society. Here’s the opening few paragraphs to get you started: