Spooks, Ghouls and Ghosts, Oh My!
By Lisa Truesdale
Halloween is right around the corner, and if you get a thrill from being scared right out of your shorts, grab yourself a book or two from Hex Publishers.
Dean Wyant, the company’s Longmont-based cofounder and editor, has also written some of the stories in the books, so he’s gotten pretty good at knowing how to frighten the bejeezus out of readers. Nightmares Unhinged, an anthology of 20 spellbinding, hair-raising horror tales, includes one called “Needles” that Wyant coauthored with his cofounder (and the company’s owner) Josh Viola; it’s about a young woman named Natalie who thinks needles are her friends. “She is very, very wrong,” Wyant says, but he won’t elaborate, so as not to ruin the suspense.
There’s also Georgetown Haunts, a collection of ghost stories straight from the streets of the infamously haunted mountain town about 50 miles west of Boulder County on I-70. “Big Veins,” Wyant says, is one of his favorite scary tales from that book. It’s about brothers Emmet and Frank, who go searching for gold in a Georgetown mine in 1861 “and end up releasing something that should have remained hidden.”
Since its inception in 2014, Hex has published crime thrillers, horror anthologies and science fiction, all by local and regional authors. Titles are available as eBooks or in print from Hex’s website (www.hexpublishers.com), and many are also sold at Boulder Book Store and Tattered Cover, or on Amazon.
Although Wyant lives in Longmont and Viola lives in a Denver suburb, their mail gets delivered to a post office box in Erie.
“As we always say, too bad it’s not spelled ‘Eerie,’” Wyant laughs.
