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the official website for the writings of
ralph robert moore
www.ralphrobertmoore.com
"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
Behind You is my latest collection. 18 stories and novelettes. 400 pages, 110,000 words.
Includes "Our Island", nominated in 2013 for Best Story of the Year by the British Fantasy Society.
What crawls after midnight on elbows and knees into hospital emergency rooms?
Who hides in the woods waiting for hikers who get lost?
How could a 90-year old woman get pregnant?
Is a bird really a bird if it has no feathers or wings or head?
Is there a ghost in your best friend's attic?
Do dolls get cancer?
Can sharks attack someone on a cobblestone street?
Is it wise to have an affair with your dental hygienist?
What should you do when you suddenly discover you are male, and have a penis?
How do priests protect Latino boys from a young girl who likes to put her pet tarantula inside her mouth?
Why are you so drawn to a red-haired computer nerd who is indifferent to your beauty?
How does a middle-aged couple appearing together in Italo-Spanish-German low budget horror films maintain their relationship when the wife is now being cast in movies as a witch, while the husband still has sex scenes with actresses half his age?
When your toilet tells you that you need to get a screening colonoscopy, can your toilet be trusted, especially when your life is being filmed every day by a reality TV crew?
How dangerous, and in other situations quite useful, are bananas?
How many versions of you and the love of your life exist?
Is the world just one island, and endless ocean?
What are you hiding, where are you hiding it, and are you willing to submit to a rectal exam?
Amazon Trade Paperback/Kindle US
Amazon Trade Paperback/Kindle UK
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"
Amazon Trade Paperback US
Kindle Edition US
Amazon Trade Paperback UK
Kindle Edition UK
The full text of Father Figure is now available in new trade paperback and Kindle editions, with a 2015 Author's Preface, and an appendix which includes 6,000 words in deleted scenes.
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."
From an editorial review
"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."
Peter Tennant, Black Static magazine
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 © 1997-2020 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
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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).
and after that?
These have been rainy weeks, here in north Texas. The coffee maker finally beeping that it's ready, me rising from the bed sheets to first bring Mary a cup from the kitchen, then me, often over the interviews and grim faces of the morning news a light tapping will rise, fade, come back, and by the time I've padded from the opened overhead cabinet by the sinks, one cup dangling from each hand, to the kitchen counter by the side-by-side where the coffee maker is talking to itself, over my head, landing on the shingled roof, there'll come that loud, relaxed drumming.
Mary and I went out yesterday for the first time in over two weeks.
Back then, when we went to the dentist for Mary's semi-annual teeth cleaning, coronavirus was definitely in the news, but mostly as an Asian, then European problem. The impact on Americans was primarily limited to cruise ships and people overseas trying to return home.
But in the ensuing two weeks, that quickly, the virus began spreading through America's larger cities, and more and more states reported infections, and a few days later, deaths.
Restaurants were ordered to close their doors. Gyms. Churches.
Idiots, mostly young, insisted on their rights to rub shoulders on southern beaches during Spring break. As selfish as that was on their part, I can't really get angry about it. I was young once, I was once an idiot myself.
People even more stupid than the Spring breakers filmed themselves on their phones coughing on fresh produce in supermarkets, uploading their hijinks to YouTube. And it's sad that the most powerful tool we as a species have ever developed, the ability to connect across the world, which initially produced personal websites, discussion boards, chat rooms, all of it sharing our common interests, fingertips touching against each other, tapping keyboards, from behind different curves of the globe, has now devolved into a phone-based narcissism of 'social influencers' and drunken frat boy disobediences.
So I was curious, and a bit trepidatious, to see what the local situation was.
We pulled into the parking lot of our local Kroger's. Lots of empty parking slots. I thought it'd be packed. Mary and I decided she'd stay in the car, and I'd go in by myself.
I didn't know what to expect.
Grabbed a metal shopping cart from the corral by the entrance, rolled its rectangular mesh past the glass doors sliding apart, like tall curtains at a theater.
Music from the ceiling.
There were a few signs posted inside about staying six feet away from each other, but not many. And in interacting with the pharmacist, fellow shoppers, and the check-out clerk, those distances weren't often observed.
One thing I did notice that was different was that shoppers were no longer looking at each other. Eyes down. Which was kind of odd.
We live in a community that has a large African-American population. I noticed that although no one was wearing gloves, quite a few shoppers were wearing face masks, and all the shoppers who were, were black women. No idea why. Maybe they're smarter than the rest of us?
A lot of the store looked like it always did. But once I got to the dairy section, there was a sign saying eggs were limited to three cartons per person.
Deeper into the store, the toilet paper shelves and Kleenex shelves were empty.
As were the bread shelves.
All those vacant horizontal spaces, like missing teeth.
The frozen food aisles, with tall glass doors in front of their cabinets, each cabinet lighting up as my shopping cart rolled in front of it, displayed metal shelves that had clearly been rummaged through. No more neat stacks. Just a lot of tilted rectangles with colorful images of food on their fronts. A lot of what I wanted to buy was gone, but I still found some dinners to take home. The frozen pizza section was hit the hardest, to where I had to slide out, from the rising vapors of the metal shelves, some secondary choices.
No children, anywhere.
We were going to go to McDonald's afterwards to buy some fish fillet sandwiches for lunch, some quarter-pounders with cheese for dinner, and white packets of French fries, but the lines were so long, because no one was allowed to go inside, and the service so slow, we eventually reversed our car in the McDonald's parking lot, and simply took off for home.
Very few cars on what would otherwise be busy streets.
My hands ten and two on the steering wheel, lighting a fresh cigarette, in the back of my mind trying to calculate how long our supply of toilet paper will last, and after that Kleenex, and after that paper towels, and after that?