Mental manipulation is a psychological process in which a person attempts to influence another person's decisions, actions or thoughts through manipulative techniques. It can be used for a wide range of purposes, such as gaining control over another person, conditioning a situation to one's advantage, persuading someone to do something, or even to cause harm or abuse.Mental manipulation can have a significant impact on the mental health and well-being of those involved. People who ...

Castle Black is a series of surrealistic poems I started as a teenager about my experiences in New York City as a rock musician and singer. I continued writing these throughout my twenties. Influenced by Jack Kerouac, Jim Morrison, Arthur Rimbaud, and Ginsberg to name a few, Black Castle is a metaphor for a world I created to escape the real.

James, an employee dispatched abroad by a UK tech consultancy firm, never expected to be battling for survival in the wintry depths of a north-eastern European forest—severely drunk and heavily armed—alongside his enfeebled colleague, Kieran, and a Russian guide. A spur-of-the-moment, absurd hunting adventure that was meant to cap a week of business meetings quickly crescendos into a hellish nightmare, complete with a shooting, a skeletally redefining car crash, and a chance encounter with...

An award-winning Scottish and Sierra Leonean novelist “brilliantly portrays the atmosphere” of Croatia in this haunting tale of war, history, and secrets (The Guardian).Visitors are not common in the small Croatian village of Gost, so Duro is surprised to see a strange car pull up to a well-known farmhouse just outside of town. Laura, a British woman, and her two children are refurbishing the home to be their summer cottage, and Duro agrees to lend a hand,...

Life is about the interplay among people. Mom always used to say to me "It takes two to tango", and "There are two sides to every story". For me, it's about all of us being our full selves, communicating as best we can with others, while earnestly listening to the other "Voices of Reasons" out there. That works on building a sense of understanding, acceptance of, and mutual respect for one another.

Corey White was a golden child. He knew this because his father would hit his mother and his sisters but not him. And his mother adored him so much she let him drop out of primary school.After losing his father to jail and his mother to heroin, though, he became a target for cruelty and dysfunction in foster homes. A scholarship to a prestigious boarding school lifted him out of foster care and awakened a love of learning and reading for him, but this was soon overwhelmed by a crus...

Autumn is upon us, and to celebrate, we have three micro stories for you to introduce you to everything we have in store this season. Season 2 of Deadguy starts HERE!

Escape to Mulberry-on-Sea…It’s summer in Mulberry-on-Sea and with the arrival of warm, sunny evenings and happy tourists full of candy floss and ice cream, Bridget’s Bicycle Bakery has gone from strength-to-strength. There’s only one small croissant-shaped problem – her cosy kitchen isn’t big enough for all her delicious bakes!The seaside-town’s old, boarded-up bakery would be perfect for Bridget’s scrumptious sausage rolls and sourdough loaves but she’ll have to breathe li...

In Fauxccasional Poems, Daniel Scott Tysdal imagines himself into poetic voices not his own, writing to commemorate events that never occurred, for the posterity of alternative universes — and the delight of our own. From the reign of the first philosopher king once envisioned by Plato, to the twelfth-century Iroquois colonization of Europe, to Barack Obama's career as a poet, to the lasting peace to come under the rule of the Democratic Kampuchea Global Party, Tysdal envisions the paths n...

Caution: Contains incidents of insane motorcycle antics, drug use and swearing.'Boris has more fun on two wheels than should be legally possible.' - Richard Fidler, ABCHis mother may not know it but Boris Mihailovic has lived a fast, furious, often politically incorrect life chasing the epiphanies of speed (the sensation not the drug). For Boris, motorbike riding was the rite of passage into manhood he'd been searching for. Now, nearly 40 years sin...

Chronology offers a wonderful framework for observing human emotions. While I was reading each poem, I often found myself thinking about my own emotions and experiences. It was refreshing that I wasn't the only person with those feelings.

Taken from The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 22, edited by Stephen Jones.As Smith recalls: "This story came about in the simplest way, the way I always enjoy most - something happening in real life that makes you think 'What if?' "Our household gets a lot of its food via an online delivery service, and one day when I was unpacking what had just been dropped at our house I gradually realised there was something...not quite right about the contents of the bags."Ther...