Dread Unlocks

In Los Angeles, everyone knows Ms. Tarbell dispels dread. She finds an amazing amount of it in that sunlight-filled city, but nothing like the unnamed horror she faces on her current case. It arrives in a van. It has cameras, an agenda, and the ability to change her life in awful, nasty, inconceivable ways.

First written for a Lovecraft celebration, "Dread Unlocks" reveals the creeping uncontrollable dread in modern life, a dread Lovecraft himself might find too horrible to contemplate.

"Kristine Kathryn Rusch integrates the fantastic elements so rigorously into her story that it is often hard to remember she is not merely recording the here and now."

—Science Fiction Weekly