The Evil Black Widow Sisters

(Margaret Higgins)

 I first ran the story of these two notorious women around six years ago but, in the light of something I have been working on, their names cropped up again. Here is their gruesome tale:

Two sisters living in a rundown part of Liverpool decided on an easy way of improving their meagre circumstances - and paid with their lives.

In 1881, Thomas Higgins took his wife and ten year old daughter to take lodgings in the house of Catherine Flanagan who, along with her recently widowed sister, Margaret, lived at 5 Skirving Street in the Vauxhall area of the city. In doing so, Thomas had unwittingly signed the death warrants of his wife, child and, ultimately, himself.
 

(Catherine Flanagan)

Not long after they moved in, his wife died, and he must have sought solace in the arms of Margaret, for, on 28th October, 1882, the couple married. By the end of the following month, Thomas's daughter had joined her mother. On 22 October 1883, having recently increased his life insurance cover, Thomas died, apparently from dysentery, not uncommon in those days of poor sanitation and public health.

But Thomas's brother Patrick, believed something much more sinister was going on and contacted the doctor who had signed the death certificate with his suspicions. The coroner was alerted and Thomas's body was exhumed and examined. No trace of the disease was found and arsenic was proved to be the cause of death. Amazingly, this deadly poison could be found in most homes in those days - as one of the constituent ingredients of flypapers.

Motive? Simple. Money. Thomas was worth far more to the sisters dead than alive.

Following this gruesome discovery, three more bodies were exhumed. All had died recently, all had life insurance, and all had resided with the sisters. Catherine's own son, John, had netted his mother £71, a young female lodger had added £79 and Thomas's little daughter had returned a quick profit of nearly £22. Not inconsiderable sums in the 1880s. Post mortems revealed that every single one of them had died from arsenic poisoning.

Catherine Flanagan and Margaret Higgins were hanged on 3rd March 1884 for the four murders, but this may only have been the tip of the iceberg. It was found that four other women were involved in the scam (although not convicted of any involvement in the poisonings) and there may have been as many as seventeen victims.

The moral of this gruesome tale? Life insurance may not be good for your health!

You can read more about this fascinating story of dark deeds in Victorian Liverpool in Angela Brabin's book, The Black Widows of Liverpool:

For evil of a different kind: 

  Infinity in Death

Vienna, 1908

Gabriele Ziegler is a young art student who becomes infatuated with charismatic archeologist Dr. Emeryk Quintillus. Only too late does she realize his true designs on her. He is obsessed with resurrecting Cleopatra and has retained the famed artist Gustav Klimt to render Gabriele as the Queen of the Nile, using ashes from Cleopatra’s mummy mixed with the paint. The result is a lifelike portrait emitting an aura of unholy evil . . .

Vienna, 2018

The Mortimer family has moved into Quintillus’s former home, Villa Dürnstein. In its basement they find an original Klimt masterpiece—a portrait of Cleopatra art scholars never knew existed. But that’s not all that resides within the villa’s vault. Nine-year-old Heidi Mortimer tells her parents that a strange man lives there.

Quintillus’s desire to be with Cleopatra transcends death. His spirit will not rest until he has brought her back from the netherworld. Even if he has to sacrifice the soul of a child . . .

Damned by the Ancients is available from:

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Kensington Publishing

Are You Ready for the End of the World?

I am delighted to welcome fellow horror author, Hunter Shea to my blog today. He has a fabulous new book out - Tortures of the Damned - and you can read my review of it later. For now though, it's over to Hunter:

Tortures of the Damned is not for the faint of heart. 

 

Hell, when you get down to it, Armageddon tends to favor the strong. I’m not talking big muscles strong. It’s the kind of strength that comes from the soul.

The original title of the book was Run Like Hell. And that’s exactly how it was written. Each small chapter is a fast-paced sprint to the finish line, except in the world I created for my characters, the finish line is always shifting, never in clear sight. They know what they’re running from – bombs, infection, rabid animals – but never exactly sure where to, other than anywhere but here.  

Each time I sat down to write Tortures of the Damned, I felt as if I’d done a fifty yard dash. I really, really got into my work.  My heart raced, my fingers flying over the keyboard so fast, the typos piling up like stacks of bricks. I talked out loud, making my cats look at me funnier than usual. I frightened myself by researching the types of weapons already out there, realizing how close we all are to a terrible end. Sometimes I had to get up and pace, pondering what awful obstacle to place in the way of the decent, honest characters I’d created. 

That was the hardest part – putting good people through the Devil’s wringer. The Padilla family is a close-knit bunch. They’re not perfect, but they’re also against typecast in today’s world because the parents love each other and the children aren’t runways or sneaking pot when they can. Yes, functional families do exist! And in my mind, that foundation is what gave them the fortitude to press on when everything around them has gone insane. 

The end times are brutal, and I didn’t want to skirt any of the tough issues the Padillas would have to face. I chose Yonkers because it’s close to a major target, New York City, has a very diverse population with its share of serious issues on the best of days, and most importantly, was involved with the parking garage bombing of the World Trade Center in the 90s. Fear and distrust are an underlying current there, no matter how hard people try to ignore it. It’s a big city, with all kinds of little pockets where anything can happen. The layout of the city plays a big part in how the horrors unfold. I know, the mayor of Yonkers isn’t giving me the key to the city any time soon. My wife did grow up with him, though. 

Killing dead things shambling about is easy. When the real shit hits the fan, we’ll wish for zombies. 

SHOCK…

First, the electricity goes—plunging the east coast in darkness after a devastating nuclear attack. Millions panic. Millions die. They are the lucky ones.

AFTER SHOCK…

Next, the chemical weapons take effect—killing or contaminating everything alive. Except a handful of survivors in a bomb shelter. They are the damned.

HELL IS FOR HUMANS

Then, the real nightmare begins. Hordes of rats force two terrified families out of their shelter—and into the savage streets of an apocalytic wasteland. They are not alone. Vicious, chemical-crazed animals hunt in packs. Dogs tear flesh, cats draw blood, horses crush bone. Roaming gangs of the sick and dying are barely recognizable as human. These are the times that try men’s souls. These are the tortures that tear families apart. This is hell on earth. The rules are simple: Kill or die.

“A lot of splattery fun.”—Publishers Weekly

“Harrowing, bloodsoaked.” —Jonathan Janz, Author of The Nightmare Girl

“Frightening, gripping.”—Night Owl Reviews

“Old school horror.” —Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author

I loved Tortures of the Damned. Here's my review:

"I love Hunter Shea’s books. His characters leap off the page. You suffer with them, fight in their corner, feel their fear – the whole package. The premise of this story centres on a post-apocalyptic, world where some cataclysmic episode has wiped out most of humanity and turned other living creatures into raving, rampaging killing machines. In this world, the lucky ones were those who were killed instantly. Those who survived, but were contaminated by the chemical cloud, become fatally sick – but death comes hard. Most of the main characters in the story were unscathed, because they took refuge in a fallout shelter. For them, the torture of fighting for survival with the odds stacked skyscraper-high against them, certainly earns them the title of this book, for they truly are the damned.

Suspense, terror and a plot that screams out to be filmed. Tortures of the Damned had me hooked from the first page and never let go until the end. And the ending was, for my money, well worthy of the story. Excellent."

Hunter Shea, Biography

Hunter Shea is the author of the novels The Montauk Monster, Sinister Entity, Forest of Shadows, Swamp Monster Massacre, and Evil Eternal. His stories have appeared in numerous magazines, including Dark Moon Digest, Morpheus Tales and the Cemetery Dance anthology, Shocklines : Fresh Voices in Terror.

His obsession with all things horrific has led him to real life exploration of the paranormal, interviews with exorcists and other things that would keep most people awake with the lights on. He lives in New York with his family and vindictive cat. He waits with Biblical patience for the Mets to win a World Series. You can read about his latest travails and communicate with him at www.huntershea.com.

PURCHASE!

You can purchase Tortures of the Damned in mass market paperback at more retail stores nationwide, as well as bookstores, both independent and chain.

You can also buy online at:

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One signed book from Hunter Shea of winner’s choice (or e-book) and a bookmark.

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Little Girls - Ronald Malfi's Classic in the Making

 Ronald Malfi scores a massive hit with his latest – Little Girls.  Laurie Genarro returns to her childhood home which she has never revisited since her mother took her away from there suddenly when Laurie was a child. In that long-ago childhood, Laurie had a friend who lived next door. Sadie Russ was the sort of child no one should have as a friend – and most kids wouldn’t have wanted to. Laurie grew to both hate and fear her – for good reason. Now Laurie has a child of her own – Susan – around the same age Laurie was when a terrible accident happened and her friend next door died.

Then there is the sinister matter of how her father met his end. Suffering from dementia, he had become obsessed with keeping some nameless person or monster out of his house. The door at the bottom of the stairs leading to the tiny room he called the ‘belvedere’ was always kept locked. Yet, it was from a window of that room he fell to his death in the middle of the night. Now Laurie must confront some significant demons of the past and she is particularly unnerved to discover her daughter has taken up with a new playmate – a girl who bears an uncanny resemblance to long-dead Sadie, and who is living next door.

I adore a great ghost story and I loved this book. It kept me glued to the page, and thinking about it when I reluctantly had to tear myself away to deal with the business of real life. There are so many secrets to uncover, so many twists and turns and such a fabulously unexpected ending. The plot unfolds at a perfect pace, the smells, sights and sounds of the locations spring from the page, and the characters are real, their reactions natural, their fears transmitting themselves into the reader’s brain with an author’s deftness and skill I thoroughly appreciated.

This is my first Ronald Malfi and I am now looking forward to catching up with his back catalogue. Can’t wait!

You can find Little Girls here;

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A Case of Prophetic Fiction...

... or How My Words Will Bring About the End of the World

by

  

 Ronald Malfi

 

My wife is terrified. She’s got a theory and it may be right. I’ve been ignoring it for some time, but now...well, now it’s getting harder and harder to look the other way. And the children...they’re watching us.

            Let me back up...

            Even before I’d met my wife, it had been going on. My high school friends—those who read my stories, my manuscripts—commented on the peculiarity of them, the serendipitous and eerily prophetic nature of some of my stories. At around thirteen years old, I wrote a story about a thunderstorm that brought dead things back to life. I printed it out and handed it off to one of my best friends who took it home that night and read it...until the power went out in his house due to a raging thunderstorm. The next morning, a dead squirrel had been washed up on his front porch. It wasn’t the zombified version that appeared in my story, but it was close enough to cause him some consternation.

            Sometime later, I wrote a story about a group of friends who fight a monster, and at the end of the story, one of the characters, who was based on one of my best friends, moves to California. About a year later, that friend’s family indeed picked up and moved. To California. The remaining friends, who thought I had conspired with my typewriter to make this happen, blamed me for a while. 

            Soon afterward, I wrote what, at the time (I was still a high-schooler), I considered my epic story. At 500 pages, I had written a manuscript called The House in the Woods, and had used all my friends as characters in it. (Many, many years later, a very different version of this original manuscript would be published as what I currently consider my epic novel, December Park.) There is a scene in the original manuscript where the boys tromp through the woods surrounding their town and come across the burnt-out hull of a 1957 Chevy. A very random scene. The woods were a real place in the town where I grew up, and we frequently ventured into them, but of course we never found the cannibalized corpse of an old car...until after I’d written that scene. But then there it was, written into existence, an old Chevy in the woods, just as I had written it. (It was too decayed to tell if it was exactly a 1957, but it was close enough for government work.)

            Things only got worse from there.

            Once I got married, settled into real life, and began publishing on a regular basis, the prophetic nature of my fiction only seemed to increase. I wrote a novel called Passenger, which included a fairly gratuitous dog-fight scene, something I knew existed but was rarely if ever talked about on the news. Soon after, Michael Vick was on all the TV channels. After that, I wrote a novel called Snow, and although here in Maryland our winters are generally mild, we were unapologetically crushed by a terrible snowstorm later that year.

            “Cut it out,” my wife told me. “I know you’re doing it. And I hate the cold.”

            She knew of my friends’ claims that what I wrote about back in high school came true, and I thought maybe she was starting to believe it. As for me, I just attributed it to coincidence, like how, back in the 1980s, all those switching-bodies movies came out at the same time. Coincidence, right?

            My wife was pregnant with our first child while I was writing Cradle Lake, which focuses on a couple who have suffered a series of miscarriages. Our daughter was born without a problem, but it wasn’t until the book was published and my wife got pregnant a second time that the doctors alerted us to all the possible “problems” we might face this second time around. Of course, my wife and I were upset. “It’s your book,” said my wife. “It’s happening again. Please stop.”

            Thankfully, the pregnancy scare turned out okay and our second daughter was born happy and healthy, which is much better than how the Hammerstuns of Cradle Lake turned out, but it was still too close for comfort.

            Which brings us up to date. Perhaps it’s hypersensitivity on my wife’s part or perhaps I’ve surrendered to the superstition and finally bought into it, but with the looming publication date of Little Girls, my wife and I have found that our own little girls have been acting...well, strangely. They have begun waking up in the middle of the night and walking about the house, as if in search of something. Twice, I’ve opened my eyes to find my four-year-old daughter staring down at me in bed. She seems to intuit when the mailman will come, and stands by the door mere minutes before the arrival of the little white truck. And my one-year-old daughter has been mumbling a phrase that sounds disconcertingly like, “kill Daddy.”

            “It’s happening again,” says my wife. “Your book...”

            I try not to think about it too much, even when my daughter starts humming a song in the car, and when I turn on the radio, that song is playing. Or how she seems to know of distant relatives whom she’s never met that have died, and how she claims my wife and I will be seeing them soon...

            These anecdotes are frightening enough, but I feel I must apologize to the public at large. Not for Little Girls, which I think is a perfectly fine book, and not for my little girls who, most of the time, are also perfectly fine, but for next year’s release—a book titled The Night Parade. Which, dear readers, I’m sorry to report, is about the end of the world.

            Nice knowing you.

From Bram Stoker Award nominee Ronald Malfi comes a brilliantly chilling novel of childhood revisited, memories resurrected, and fears reborn…

When Laurie was a little girl, she was forbidden to enter the room at the top of the stairs. It was one of many rules imposed by her cold, distant father. Now, in a final act of desperation, her father has exorcised his demons. But when Laurie returns to claim the estate with her husband and ten-year-old daughter, it’s as if the past refuses to die. She feels it lurking in the broken moldings, sees it staring from an empty picture frame, and hears it laughing in the moldy greenhouse deep in the woods…
 
At first, Laurie thinks she’s imagining things. But when she meets her daughter’s new playmate, Abigail, she can’t help but notice her uncanny resemblance to another little girl who used to live next door. Who died next door. With each passing day, Laurie’s uneasiness grows stronger, her thoughts more disturbing. Like her father, is she slowly losing her mind? Or is something truly unspeakable happening to those sweet little girls?

Praise for Ronald Malfi and his novels:

“One cannot help but think of writers like Peter Straub and Stephen King.”
—FearNet

"Malfi is a skillful storyteller."—New York Journal of Books

"A complex and chilling tale….terrifying."—Robert McCammon

"Malfi’s lyrical prose creates an atmosphere of eerie claustrophobia…haunting."—Publishers Weekly

"A thrilling, edge-of-your-seat ride that should not be missed."—Suspense Magazine

Links to Pre-Order or Purchase:

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Or pick up or ask to order at your local independent bookstore or anywhere e-formats are sold!

Ronald Malfi

Ronald Malfi is an award-winning author of many novels and novellas in the horror, mystery, and thriller categories from various publishers, including Little Girls, this summer’s 2015 release from Kensington.

In 2009, his crime drama, Shamrock Alley, won a Silver IPPY Award. In 2011, his ghost story/mystery novel, Floating Staircase, was a finalist for the Horror Writers Association Bram Stoker Award for best novel, a Gold IPPY Award for best horror novel, and the Vincent Preis International Horror Award. His novel Cradle Lake garnered him the Benjamin Franklin Independent Book Award (silver) in 2014. December Park, his epic childhood story, won the Beverly Hills International Book Award for suspense in 2015.

Most recognized for his haunting, literary style and memorable characters, Malfi's dark fiction has gained acceptance among readers of all genres.

He was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1977, and eventually relocated to the Chesapeake Bay area, where he currently resides with his wife and two children.

Visit with Ronald Malfi on:

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