I'm really, really pleased to announce that my latest collection, Our Elaborate Plans, is now published and ready for purchase, in Kindle and trade paperback editions.

This is my tenth book, and my largest collection to date. Twenty stories and novelettes. 550 pages. 160,000 words. It's a mix of horror/weird/slipstream stories.

A boy who likes digging holes, has a little sister who adores him, and a mother who is dying.

Someone who while urinating feels a lump on one of his testicles.

A magician and his monkey assistant, who absolutely adores him, and a top hat that allows him to pull out all sorts of unexpected objects.

A man who comes back after peeing in the middle of the night to his bedroom and finds a strange woman in bed where his wife had been.

An old man journeys to an abandoned factory in upstate Michigan to an unusual safari where the wildlife driven past isn't animals, but ghosts.

A young boy who has to go in for some medical tests, and a neurotic woman who 'meets' him years later.

What happens when a wife realizes her older husband is showing signs of dementia?

How do you cope when a noise from the sky keeps getting louder and louder, causing more and more people to lose their sense of hearing?

What are you willing to do to appear in a porno as a way to escape working as a short-order cook for a racist employer?

What happens when you rehearse lines in an abandoned model home for an upcoming part and a stranger shows up?

How do you cope when the ghost of your dead dog keeps nipping at you?

Is it really safe to visit with the father of a girl you just met in his workplace far under the Hudson River?

A man who starts following a woman who likes to insert herself into wedding photographs at the local park.

Someone who has to deal with little men running like cockroaches across his ceiling.

An old man who's woken at night by naked men barking behind his backyard's fences, pretending they're dogs.

A man in a wheelchair who wants to bring his lover, seated in a chair in his motel room with a blanket over his body, back to life.

Is it really a good idea for two boys who watch a TV show that gradually gives directions on how to reach a secret house hidden in the woods to seek out that house?

Have you really considered all the precautions you need to take when a freak snowstorm blows through Texas?

What could possibly go wrong when you take your kids and your second wife on a vacation in the islands?

When you see something pass by outside the front glass of an ice cream shop, why do you go to the restaurant's restroom, lock yourself inside a stall, get down on your knees, and start slapping your forehead down on the porcelain edge of the toilet?

About Ralph Robert Moore

Ralph Robert Moore, nominated twice for Best Story of the Year by the British Fantasy Society (2013 and 2016), has been published in America, Canada, England, Ireland, France, India and Australia in a wide variety of genre and literary magazines and anthologies, including Black Static, Cemetery Dance, Shadows & Tall Trees, Nightscript, Midnight Street, Chizine, and Sein und Werden.

His books include the novels Father Figure, As Dead As Me, Ghosters and The Angry Red Planet; and the short story collections Remove the Eyes, I Smell Blood, You Can Never Spit It All Out, Behind You, and Breathing Through My Nose.

"Moore's work is consistently fascinating, original and devastating. His characters speak to you from whatever hell they inhabit, with clear, unambiguous voices."-Trevor Denyer

"[Moore's] work is not quite like that of anybody else. He is a true original."-Peter Tennant

"Moore's work is always heartfelt, deep and superbly executed…a writer everybody with an interest in dark fiction should be reading."-Grim Reader Reviews

"Disturbing. Nightmarish. Terrifying. And above all, original...reinforces his reputation, amongst those in the know, that here we have a genre-storytelling giant in our midst."-AJ Kirby

"Moore's writing is consistently powerful, his descriptions (even of the smallest minutia) terrifically rendered. He is not afraid to tap into his darkest imaginings and to go places most writers might very well shy away from. Indeed, he is one of the most singularly powerful authors I've encountered in a long, long while."-C.M. Muller

Breathing Through My Nose documents eight cases in which Donald Duke entered someone's life.

"RRM always makes you think. No political correctness here." - Des Lewis, Gestalt Real-Time Reviews

Roy took a deep breath. "There's something else."

"You want me to have your babies?"

"No."

Her face registered hurt surprise that he didn't laugh at her joke.

"While we were making love? I felt a small lump in your breast."

She said nothing. Tilted her coffee cup towards her, saw it was empty. "Wait. What?"

"I felt a small lump in your breast." He pointed at her right breast. "Is that something you're already aware of?"

She stared at him, eyes reddening.

"I didn't mention it at the time. For selfish reasons. And I thought maybe you already knew."

She slipped her left hand under the top of her blouse.

"Do you want me to show you-"

"Shut up."

He sat across from her at the small table, watching as her five fingers, underneath the front of her blouse, moved from one side of her right breast to the other.

Anger and relief in her voice, she said, as her fingers kept pressing, "Son of a fucking bitch, Roy, if this is some kind of sick, fucking joke-"

Her voice stopped. Her fingers stopped.

Her dark eyes looked across the table at him.

Fingers moving again under her blouse. In one spot.

He could tell she was pressing against the lump with her fingertips, trying to gauge its submerged size, and to see if it was painful.

"We used to finish each other's sandwiches."

Harry and Edna are a middle-aged married couple who probably did love each other when they were young and just starting out, but now maybe don't any longer? Or possibly still do, in some ways? It's so hard to tell sometimes, with people who have shared their lives for so many years.

Harry, a big, angry, disappointed man with a sarcastic sense of humor, flips houses for a living in the greater Dallas area, buying run-down homes, supervising his crew as they go in and renovate the properties, reviving them so they're once again a thing of beauty.

Edna, his wife, has become increasingly promiscuous, and has had to undergo more and more invasive surgeries to try to eliminate an infection that has taken hold in her body.

The Angry Red Planet is a sad, funny, scary exploration of the changing relationship between a man and a woman, and the daily social irritations that slowly grind them down, like they grind all of us down.

About Ralph Robert Moore

Ralph Robert Moore, nominated twice for Best Story of the Year by the British Fantasy Society (2013 and 2016), has been published in America, Canada, England, Ireland, France, India and Australia in a wide variety of genre and literary magazines and anthologies, including Black Static, Shadows & Tall Trees, Nightscript, Midnight Street, Chizine, and Sein und Werden.

His books include the novels Father Figure, As Dead As Me, and Ghosters; and the short story collections Remove the Eyes, I Smell Blood, You Can Never Spit It All Out, and Behind You.

"Moore's work is consistently fascinating, original and devastating. His characters speak to you from whatever hell they inhabit, with clear, unambiguous voices."-Trevor Denyer

"[Moore's] work is not quite like that of anybody else. He is a true original."-Peter Tennant

"Moore's work is always heartfelt, deep and superbly executed…a writer everybody with an interest in dark fiction should be reading."-Grim Reader Reviews

"Disturbing. Nightmarish. Terrifying. And above all, original...reinforces his reputation, amongst those in the know, that here we have a genre-storytelling giant in our midst."-AJ Kirby

"Moore's writing is consistently powerful, his descriptions (even of the smallest minutia) terrifically rendered. He is not afraid to tap into his darkest imaginings and to go places most writers might very well shy away from. Indeed, he is one of the most singularly powerful authors I've encountered in a long, long while."-C.M. Muller

10 horror novelettes by Ralph Robert Moore. 400 pages. 120,000 words.

Includes "Dirt Land", nominated in 2016 for Best Story of the Year by the British Fantasy Society.

Children born with four feet. A man physically attached to three other men. A pushy waitress. A woman who dresses up as Santa Claus on Halloween. An off-campus NYC apartment overrun with tiny, crawling faces. A tomato with spikes sticking out of its red skin. A third rate stand-up comic who insists he isn't gay. A lonely woman who constructs a tabletop village of miniature buildings wherever she moves. A widow who's visited by God in a dream, singing instructions to her about the structure He wants her to build. A psychiatry student who has to convince a handcuffed serial rapist to sit on a toilet seat to reconnect with his childhood.

Featuring 3 novelettes from Black Static, "Dirt Land", "Kebab Bob" and "Drown Town"; 3 novelettes from Midnight Street, "They Hide in Tomatoes", "Nobody I Knew", and "Suddenly the Sun Appeared"; 1 novelette from Hellfire Crossroads, "She Has Maids", and 3 novelettes never before published, "During the Time I Was Out", "Imperfect Boy", and "Boyfriend".

"Up on the mountain, not everything that gets born is human. Or at least, human enough. That's just the way it is. Some of them are kept, if they look close enough, but a lot are taken down to the river before they get big, and drowned. Shaken out of a blanket. If you go downstream, you'll find all kinds of dead babies bumping against the gray river rocks. Stiff limbs, open mouths. Getting picked at by fish. Of course, up on the mountain, the people who live there catch that fish, like they catch all fish. Fry it. Eat it. That may be part of the problem."

--Opening paragraph of "Dirt Land"

Father Figure is also available at all other Amazon sites worldwide, and additional online venues. 175,000 words, plus 6,000 words of deleted scenes.

South of Anchorage, accessible only from a mud-rutted road off Seward Highway, lies the town of Lodgepole. After midnight, among the blueberry bushes of White Birch Park, a man climbs on top of a woman and begins making love to her. As her orgasm rises he puts his hands around her throat, shutting off her air. She struggles, not to stop him, but to stop herself from trying instinctively to pull his hands off her throat. As the top joints of his thumb meet at the front of her throat she comes, her cry of orgasm ricocheting around inside her forever.

Daryl Putnam, handsome, bookish, wakes up from a nightmare and decides to do something he hasn't done in years. Take a walk outside at night. Down in the park, at the lime green shores of Little Muncho Lake, he comes across the body of the strangled woman.

The next morning, at the coffee shop of the hospital where he works, Daryl meets Sally, a pretty, dark-haired girl. He's intelligent, she's outgoing. What they have in common is both are living lonely lives. Until today.

Also in the hospital coffee shop, shaking half a can of black pepper onto his tomato soup, is Sam Rudolph, a fiftyish man with eyes like an angry dog's, who has spent over twenty years quietly manipulating events in Daryl and Sally's lives to have this seemingly chance encounter among the three of them occur.

And who is actually a lot older than fifty.

"It is easy to see why Father Figure has become an underground classic over the years. It is a dark, extremely disturbing but completely gripping suspense thriller with a strongly erotic subtext...Moore is an extremely talented writer with a gift for pushing the reader's emotional buttons...certainly liable to become a cult classic, and deservedly so."

"Immensely readable and informed by a lucid intelligence, Father Figure belongs up there with the likes of Delany's The Mad Man, Bataille's Story of the Eye, Sade's oeuvre, The Story of O, and other works of transgressive literature that challenge our assumptions as what is normal and what goes beyond the pale."

When someone you love dies, are they gone forever?

Meet the Ghosters, and the desperate people who hire them.

In our modern world, only Ghosters know what comes after death. What stays behind. And what dwells between.

Ghosters are a small, loosely-connected group of individuals who travel the highways of America curing people of their hauntings. For as much money as they can negotiate from each client. They are legitimate. But they are not nice.

If you're here, it's probably night. You can see a window from where you sit, and the window is dark. Who really knows what's outside?

I write. If you read, we've just made a connection.

SENTENCE is the forest you fall asleep into.

I created SENTENCE back in 1998 as a way of letting readers know a little bit more about me. Here you'll find about a dozen of my stories, the complete text of my novel Father Figure, essays of mine, videos I've made, photographs I've shot, 20 years of my on-line diary entries, some of my favorite recipes, and much, much more. I don't fear plagiarism. Ideas can be stolen-- a simile, a description, a plot, a joke-- but that will happen regardless of the medium in which your luggage is left alone on the airport floor. The truth is, fear of plagiarism is fear of readership. To be plagiarized is never fatal. What is more important is to be read. Because if it's in a box, and no one but you knows about the storms raging through the paragraphs, the footsteps plodding soggily down the sentences, water dripping off the rims of words, that's the biggest shame of all. A fizzle. Because the real achievement of writing is not the writing. The real achievement of writing is someone else reading the writing.

SENTENCE started as an island. Over the years, its accumulated bulk, added to each month, became a continent.

Art is an invitation to go inside someone else's mind. To see our world as they see it. SENTENCE is my mind.

I've been published in America, Canada, England, Ireland, France, India and Australia in a wide variety of genre and literary magazines and anthologies. I've been nominated twice for Best Story of the Year by the British Fantasy Society, in 2013 and 2016. My fiction has been called "graphically morbid". My writings are not for everyone. Are they for you? Find out.

I'm glad you came. I just lit a cigarette. I just made a drink. I hope you enjoy your exploration.

And to see what I'm up to right now, and what currently interests me, visit my page.

Webmaster Ralph Robert Moore at robmary@swbell.net. Entire contents Copyright © 1997-2023 by Ralph Robert Moore, All Rights Reserved.

Established January 1, 1998.

To buy my books, please go to BUY MY BOOKS

To see where I've been published, please go to BIBLIOGRAPHY

For samples of my writing style, please go to WORDS WALKING NUDE

For a complete chronology of site updates, please see HISTORY

SENTENCE Publishing

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"All was chaos, that is, earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and out of that bulk a mass formed-- just as cheese is made out of milk-- and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels."

-- Domenico Scandella, 1599 (Two years before being burned at the stake).