Broke Down House

A house decays. So do the people inside.

Broke Down House is a collection of sharp, unsettling stories that peel back the façade of ordinary lives to reveal what squirms beneath. The tales move from crumbling rural towns to haunted bridgeworks, from childhood regrets to cosmic dread. These are not monster stories in the usual sense — the horrors here are slower, more human, more intimate. But that doesn’t make them less monstrous.

An abandoned farmhouse might harbor a generational curse. A man stumbles into his own past on a collapsing railway bridge. A teenage boy’s first kiss comes with blood and myth beneath a graveyard moon. A grieving musician listens too long to metal fatigue and Puebloan ghosts. In other stories, memory becomes a trap, love mutates into something predatory, and physics turns on the body like a hungry god.

C. S. Hughes writes with a poet’s scalpel and a junkman’s eye — salvaging dark beauty from the wreckage of guilt, grief, and decay. These stories echo with loneliness, hallucinatory horror, and a sense of the uncanny that is never quite explained. The prose is fractured in places, delicate in others — a style that shifts with the wound it’s examining.

There’s body horror. There’s grief horror. There’s rural horror, psychological horror, cosmic horror. There are no easy resolutions.

And just when you think it’s safe to stop reading — the house remembers. The stairs creak. The windows look back.