L. Marie Wood is a two-time Bram Stoker Award® and Rhysling nominated author, screenwriter, essayist, and poet. She writes high concept fiction that includes elements of psychological horror, mystery and dark fantasy. Wood won the Golden Stake Award for her novel The Promise Keeper. Wood has penned short fiction published in groundbreaking works, including the anthologies like Sycorax's Daughters and Slay: Stories of the Vampire Noire. She is also part of the 2022 Bookfest Book Award winning poetry anthology, Under Her Skin. Her academic writing has been published by Nightmare Magazine and in the cross-curricular text, Conjuring Worlds: An Afrofuturist Textbook. Wood is an English and Creative Writing professor, a horror scholar with a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and an MFA in Speculative Fiction, and a frequent contributor to the conversation around the evolution of genre fiction. Learn more about L. Marie Wood at www.lmariewood.com.

12 Hours by L. Marie Wood

The cabbie only remembers taking a break, pulling over in an alley to catch both his breath and the sunrise. His windshield shatters, and two people dash away. He tries to scream, to move, but his neck won't turn. He can only stare at the cab's dirty ceiling. Finally, a deliveryman calls the cops. Surely, they'll arrive soon, but we're pinned in place right along with him as he tries to puzzle it all out. L. Marie Wood uses her descriptive powers to bring us fully into one incident in a person's life, and hold us there, transfixed, until we see it all, crystal clear.

CURATOR'S NOTE

A multiple Bram Stoker Award nominee shares a tale of psychological terror as we're transported into the mind of a cabbie stuck in an alley, unable to move, as he struggles to remember and to escape. – Mike Allen

 

REVIEWS

  • "Wood showcases the strengths of the novella as the perfect vehicle for horror storytelling, in a captivating tale that is in equal measures beautiful and brutal, presenting terror both terrestrial and supernatural…"

    – Library Journal

  • "Wood's haunting vision of the human journey through life/death and everything in between delivers riveting work that fascinates and thrills."

    – Linda D. Addison, HWA Lifetime Achievement Award recipient and SFPA Grand Master

  • "Suspenseful and gripping, Wood crafts psychological horror you can't put down!"

    – John Edward Lawson, author of Bibliophobia
 

BOOK PREVIEW

Excerpt

It's morning and the world is waking up. I'd better get my ass out of here and catch some of those fares, the folks who spent too much time in the bathroom mirror or at the breakfast table and know they'll be late if they try to take the train. I usually make a decent enough wage from 7 to 9 and I'll definitely need it today, after fucking off in an alley for over an hour. What the hell was I thinking? It might not have been much, but I could have gotten at least one fare in already and I probably would have picked up another one before the first let the door slam shut.

I tilt my head to look at the dash and see exactly how late it was, but I can tell by the sound of the store on the corner rolling up the security gate, the clink clink clink as the gate turned in on itself, that it was close to 8:00 a.m. That's when the restaurant opened to let the waitstaff in.

Resourceful.

Mama always said I was resourceful. I could have been a fucking Boy Scout.

There'll be a delivery soon and I'm blocking the back door, I reach for the steering wheel with one hand instinctively, mashing my foot on the brake and extending my finger toward the button for the ignition at the same time. But nothing happens. I reach for the ignition again, lamenting about how my legs must've cramped up because I sit behind the wheel of this shitty cab too long…how big my gut is getting. I need to get out and get some air, take a fucking walk sometimes. Karen likes to take walks. We used to do that all the time when we started out, taking the train just to be out together, get off at a random stop and walk city blocks we had never been on before. We would get coffee from one of the shops we saw along the way, would window shop, would daydream. I could climb the stairs to her fourth-floor apartment without breaking a sweat then and now I can't even reach over to turn on the goddamned car. I reached for the ignition button again with effort, tried to engage my abs, wondering if I had ever really felt my abs move in the first place, all the while repeating the familiar mantra, I'll start working out again. I'll start working out again…I mean it this time.

But nothing.