Parlor Tricks

ABIGAIL has been away from the small city of North Rites since high school, bidding it adieu in celebratory fashion. However, when a famous traveling horror show comes to town, she reunites with her former classmates to see what they have instore. They soon discover a newfound horror beyond simple make-believe and parlor tricks. In this slasher thriller novelette, writer McConnaughay expresses his love for the slasher subgenre, all while imbuing it with surrealist, eccentricities that subvert the genre's formula in unique ways. The novelette is the third installment in Readers Digested (dot) com's [Select] series, a collection of horror stories created by the website's crew of talented storytellers, each offering their own unique brand of things that go bump in the night.