"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.

Every once in a while something odd happens in our lives. Something that doesn't really make sense. You know what I'm talking about. It's happened to you. More than once. And it's going to keep happening. Because our lives don't make sense. Not really.

Mary takes coumadin to prevent clots from forming in her blood. Has since her stroke in 2002. Coumadin is a blood thinner. Because she's taking it, she has to have her INR level checked on a regular basis. Usually every other week. We perform the test at home, sitting side by side at our black breakfast nook table. I use a blood stick to pierce the side of my dear love's pink forefinger, then squeeze a drop of red, red blood onto the surface of a test strip, where it flows up into the meter, then displays her INR level. Because Mary had a heart valve replacement about this time last year, her INR needs to have a value between 2.5 and 3.5. Anything lower, and she could get another clot, possibly leading to another stroke. Anything higher, and her blood would be so thin she might bleed excessively from a simple cut, or bruise extensively from a simple injury.

Everything was going fine for all these years of making breakfast together, watching movies in bed, petting all our different cats, most of them now in the ground, until a few weeks ago. Mary's INR suddenly spiked up to over 12. That's dangerous.

She started bruising badly.

Dark, dark purple bruises along the lengths of both arms. Around her waist. Across her face.

Getting up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, she fell. Hit her head.

Had a subdural hematoma in her skull. With an INR level over 12, it caused excessive bleeding in her head.

Always a bad situation.

I called 911. An ambulance arrived, she was put on a stretcher yet again, rolled backwards under the ceilings of our unhappy downstairs rooms, and raced to the emergency room.

I followed behind in our car, no one in the passenger seat.

We spent about six hours sitting in a small cubicle in the emergency room. The neurosurgeon didn't want to drill into Mary's skull on both sides to drain the pooled blood because of her high INR. It was too risky. He and the ER physician decided the subdural hematoma was likely to resolve naturally over time. Mary was given a blood transfusion, one bag, which is protocol in this sort of situation.

She was admitted to the hospital, and in fact put in a room next to the room she had stayed in last year for her valve replacement. Some of the nurses on the floor recognized us from that visit.

After an IV drip of different nutrients, she was assessed as being recovered enough to return to our home. We were overjoyed! A hospital stay this time of only two nights, as opposed to last year's stay of 30 days in the hospital, and an additional 30 days in a skilled nursing facility.

Once she did return home, Mary of course initially spent a lot of time in bed, sleeping, building up her strength. To keep myself occupied, I decided to clean out the garage. Like a lot of garages, we had piles and stacks of stuff we bought over the years we no longer needed, which made it harder getting to the stuff we did need.

I figured I'd throw a lot of stuff out, tidy up, then when Mary could walk again, show her how organized everything was. Her hero.

It gave me something to do.

Something to avoid thinking.

A few weeks into her gradual recovery, I got really ambitious and gathered up all sorts of stuff we no longer needed.

Where we live, trash is collected once a week. You put your trash in a tall, 96-gallon hard plastic bin, roll it to the curb, place it one foot from the curb, at least five feet from cars, mailboxes, etc.

Which I did.

Each Thursday morning, when the world should still be quiet, steaming coffee cups on our bedside tables, local news on the 4K TV on the wall talking about traffic congestion, a truck comes around with a gripping mechanism on its side that noisily hoists the bin up in the air, tilts its contents upside down into the truck's collection space, then automatically lowers the emptied bin back to the green grass of the curb.

Trash collection used to be around seven a.m., but lately they've been picking up around eleven a.m.

I dumped all kinds of stuff into that tall bin. Including 2 huge, heavy yellow bags of Tidy Cat kitty litter, each bag weighing forty limp pounds. Like carrying a child's dead body, raising it up over my shoulders to release it down into the hard plastic bin, twice.

Done, I was breathing hard. But happy. I had cleared out so much of our garage!

Thursday morning at six a.m., I rolled up our garage door, exposing the quiet darkness of our neighborhood streets. Tilted the trash bin back, rolled its rumble to the grass of the curb, positioning it as I always did so many inches from the driveway, so many inches from the concrete street edge of the curb.

Went back inside. Made coffee. Turned on the morning news. Lit a cigarette.

Around noon I checked through the front window on the landing halfway up our stairs.

All the other trash bins on our street had been emptied. But not ours. Our trash bin had been passed over. Ignored.

I figured it must have been the weight of the combined eighty pounds of the two huge Tidy Cats bags. They made the bin too heavy to be lifted by the garbage truck's automatic hoisting arms. Stupid me.

Rolled the trash bin back into the garage.

Discouraged.

Whenever you have a setback, you come up with a new plan.

The following Monday, I laid the bin on its side in the garage, pulled out everything inside, so I could put the heavy Tidy Cats bags to one side, load the worst of the garbage back inside. I'd get rid of the kitty litter a little at a time.

Except, as I pulled the black bags out of the bin, emptying the bin until I got to its bottom, there were no Tidy Cats bags.

Which didn't make sense.

I know I loaded them in the bin. But where were they?

I stood in the garage, black garbage bags pulled across its concrete floor, trying to make sense of what I was seeing.

Where were the Tidy Cats bags?

I have no idea. Never will. Did the trash collectors dig through our garbage, selectively pull out both heavy bags, leave everything else behind? Unlikely.

Did a passing motorist decide to dig down through our bin, pull out the two forty-pound bags, sell them on e-bay? I doubt it.

It will forever remain a puzzlement.

Unexplainable things happen in our lives. Two forty-pound bags of kitty litter suddenly disappear.

Poof!

Karen Carpenter died because she didn't eat enough.