Posts Tagged ‘spiders’

“Symphony for Walpurgis:” Six Weeks Till Release!!!

Posted: March 20, 2025 in Novelette, Progress Report, Scary Stuff, Writing
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I’m at the point in my marketing plan where I get super annoying with reminders that I have a book coming out. But hey, can you blame me? If it gets one more person to read the book, then it’ll have been worth it.

So, if you’ve been living under a rock, I have a new book coming out on Thursday, May 1st, 2025. The book is a new collection called Symphony for Walpurgis. What’s Walpurgis, you ask? You can find out here. But back to the collection. This is a collection of nine novelettes, four previously published and five original, that I’ve gathered together because there’s just not enough publishers of novelettes out there these days. So, if you can’t find homes for them, make a home for them yourself and show the world how awesome they are!

At least, that’s what I’m hoping to accomplish, along with letting people read some amazing stories.

Here’s the back cover blurb for the collection:

What’s the difference between humans and monsters? Is there a fine line, or is it more gray and blurred? Rami Ungar, author of Rose and Hannah and Other Stories, explores this question in his latest collection, Symphony for Walpurgis. From legendary cryptids to malevolent spirits and from Ohio in the 1950s to modern-day California, readers will be treated to nine terrifying stories of the weird and macabre. So settle down and be prepared. For you have bought your ticket to Symphony for Walpurgis.

Sweet, right? And get this: the collection already has some reviews on it! Yeah, a couple of advanced readers posted their thoughts on Goodreads, and they really liked the collection. So much, in fact, they each gave it five stars! Considering that the book is not even out yet, that’s a really good sign of things to come!

And I really hope good things will come with this collection. I like sharing my stories with people, and I’ve noticed that short story collections tend to be very popular, especially at events. Maybe that’s because you’re getting several digestible stories in one package, rather than one gigantic story in a single package. If that’s the case, perhaps the release of this book will not only be well-received with readers, but will help me get closer to writing full time (that’s the dream, after all).

Careful, folks. There’s a lot of these beasties in one of the stories!

Besides, what horror fan could resist a collection featuring tales of several college-age kids waking up in a strange jail (“Blood and Paper Skin”); a teenage girl becoming an unwitting accomplice in a revenge plot using occult means (“Disillusionment and Trauma Sometimes Go Hand-in-Hand”); a Jewish exorcism (“The House on Lafayette Square,” and yes, Jews have exorcisms on occasion); a town filled with spiders and sordid history which is quickly catching up with the residents (“Mother of Spiders”); a Las Vegas performer who will do anything to make her mark on the world (“Famous”); an interview revolving around an unusual actress (“The Little Goddess of Horror”); a family under threat by multiple parasites (“The Parasite Man”); a young man who discovers a mermaid in his uncle’s basement (“Cressida”); and a campsite becoming ground zero for a new pandemic (“Natural Predators”)?

I couldn’t , that’s for sure.

And if you can’t, either, I’ll include links for the book, including its Goodreads page. Right now, it’s only available in ebook from a few stores, but more stores and a paperback edition will be available soon, so keep an eye out for that announcement.

And if you like what you read, please leave a review online. Positive or negative, I love reader feedback, and it helps me and other readers in the long run.

Thank you for your support, my Followers of Fear, and I look forward to sharing with you Symphony for Walpurgis. Until next time, good night and pleasant nightmares.

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Apple Books
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New Story Finished! Now Back to the Great Editing

Posted: April 2, 2023 in Progress Report, Scary Stuff, Writing
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Well, I’m feeling pretty good. Tired, but good.

As many of you know, I’ve been caught up in editing a bunch of stories, both for my upcoming collection Hannah and Other Stories, and others I hope to submit to various publications and magazines. For all the obvious reasons, I’ve been calling this the Great Editing, and it’s been a lot! I think I’ve edited about six stories by now, and that was just in the first two months of 2023.

Needing a break, I decided to write some new stories. Sure, they’d become part of the Great Editing at some point, but it just feels good to work on new stuff sometimes. Anyway, I wrote “The Hunting Party,” a Christmas horror story (you can read all about that here), and I just finished “Mother of Spiders,” a novelette set in the 1950s and about a town whose history comes back to bite them in the worst way: with eight legs and some scary fangs!

Yeah, it’s a spider-based horror story. I did say in previous posts that this story would tap into a common phobia, after all. And I think the overall concept of the story is good.

That being said, I really struggled with this story at times. Not because I didn’t know where it was going, because I’m an obsessive plotter. I always know where my stories are going. I think it was just finding the right words for the story and figuring out how to convey it. That was a struggle, and it wasn’t until the final scene of the story that I really felt like the story was flowing out of me. I have a feeling that when I edit this one, it’s going to take several drafts before I can start submitting it for publication. And most of it will just be figuring out how to better tell this story.

But hey, it’s a good sign when you recognize your own story’s shortcomings and are already thinking of ways to improve the story. Hopefully that means when I get around to the second draft, I’ll be prepared to turn this story into something worth reading.

For now though, I think I’m ready to get back to the Great Editing. Let’s face it, the number of stories requiring my attention have only grown since I started my break, and I want to get at least one or two out of the way before the next draft of Hannah lands in my inbox. I’ll start with “The Hunting Party,” because there are a couple of Christmas anthologies already looking for stories and I want to submit this one before they fill up. Then I’m going to get into the third draft of “They Sleep Within the Rock,” AKA the novella where I put neo-Nazis through some well-deserved hell. After that, if it isn’t time to work on Hannah again, I have a few stories to choose from.

For now though, I’m going to chill the rest of the weekend. I have some scary movies from the library, so I think I’ll have a double feature before bed. So, until next time, my Followers of Fear, good night and pleasant nightmares. And if I don’t catch you before Passover starts this Wednesday, may the matzo monster get you and ruin your digestive system with more cracker-like bread than you could ever want to eat.

Cheers!