Showing results by narrator "Darren Todd" in All Categories

From sex-crazed gods to ravenous monsters, Ben Thompson brings legendary titans to life in tales of adventure, bloodlust, and unrelenting badassitude. Since the beginning of human history people have created myths, tall tales, superheroes, and arch-villains - men and women who embarked on insane adventures, performed extraordinary feats of unparalleled awesomeness, and overcame all odds to violently smite their foes into bloody pulp.

Colonel Mark Kenslir is the last of the Cold War supersoldiers - and he's just come back from the dead. Sent to Arizona to hunt a heart-devouring shapeshifter, Colonel Kenslir and his team of supernatural-smashing soldiers thought it was just another mission. But instead of stopping the monster's murderous rampage, Kenslir and his stone soldiers became the latest victims in a trail of carnage blazed across the southwest.

Duncan Cochrane is set on being the next governor of Illinois until his daughter is murdered six weeks before the election. Then the candidate can only focus on finding her killer. As the police investigation follows a trio of unlikely leads, Duncan realizes that his best shot at justice is the bully pulpit of the campaign trail, so he returns to the race and makes crime-fighting his mantra. Soon he discovers that his own ambitions may have caused her death, yet by then he knows that he must win the election or risk political and personal failure.

Was the troubled young Tammy Taylor a victim of an exorcism gone horribly wrong or cold-blooded murder? John Jordan must exorcise his own demons to find out. Following a particularly brutal and costly case, John Jordan goes to a secluded retreat center and encounters one of the most bewildering and haunting cases of his career: the suspicious death of a troubled and sexualized young woman undergoing exorcism.

Two years have passed since the murder of Duncan Cochrane’s daughter. As governor, he now holds the power to punish all criminals, yet he cannot prosecute her killer without destroying his political career. Then two new threats emerge: A sniper begins targeting people in Chicago’s most notorious housing project, Cabrini Green, and a blackmailer plans to reveal his ruinous family secret. He moves into the tenements and begins parallel manhunts for both enemies.

Following his dad's death, Remington James returns to the small North Florida town where he grew up to assume his father's life - taking care of his dying mother and running the local gun and pawn shop. Picking up a camera again after a long hiatus, Remington returns to his first love, pursuing in earnest his lifelong dream of becoming a wildlife photographer. One fateful evening, while checking his camera traps, scanning the eerie images of overexposed deer and bats and foxes, Remington comes across the most haunting images of his life - the frame-by-frame capture of a shocking crime.

In Kole’s quest to reunite all six gods, he’s led to a distant city where magic and technology have merged and proven as a combatant against the spread of the Black Wall. Yet the god he seeks lies beyond the border of the black wall of fire encroaching on the continent.

Terror reigns over the North Florida National Forest, the coastal town of Bayshore, and the barrier island of Pine Key - a fiery terror whose flame threatens to consume the whole world. An exacting and methodical killer whose weapon is fire is working on his masterpiece, and only a wounded and scarred FDLE agent and a retired ritual crimes expert hiding from the world in a cabin in the woods have any hope of stopping him.

Peace has returned to Kole’s city, yet day by day, the world dies. Only the gods can return balance to Ohr. Kole has already found one, Russé, his mentor. Together they decipher the cryptic map in Kole’s head to locate the others, but they aren’t the only ones searching for the gods.

Todd elevates genre short fiction beyond entertainment. Whether it's the titular story of a haunted mug driving the new office hire mad, or a worrisome look at the near future where the guilty simply hire someone to do their prison time, these stories will challenge as much as engage.