Raymond Brunell

Raymond Brunell writes literary and speculative horror from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where the mines closed but the paperwork never did. His short fiction has appeared in Horrific Scribes, Skeleton Flowers Press, Moss Puppy Magazine, TrashLight Press, and Across the Margin, among others, and he holds a Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy nomination with forthcoming work in 34 Orchard. He is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing and a member of the Horror Writers Association, currently at work on a novel about a public health nurse whose tidy recordkeeping turns out to be the murder weapon.

Read Brunell’s short story “We Have Not Died Yet” in Horrific Scribes October 2025.

Description: An archaeologist excavating a tar pit discovers impossibly preserved remains—human bodies from eight hundred years in the future, all frozen mid-run, fleeing something. When she recognizes her daughter’s dental work in one of the skulls, she realizes the pit doesn’t just preserve the future-dead: it’s already claiming them. This is a story about temporal paradox, the futility of warnings, and what it means to see your child’s corpse before she’s born.

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Read Brunell’s short story “No Exceptions” in Horrific Scribes July 2026.

Description: There is an office that only opens when the power browns out. You reach it through a corridor where a shoe store used to be, and inside the line never moves and every ticket in every hand reads PENDING. A city administrator goes in to take back one form—a single appeal, filed on his mother’s behalf, surely still reversible. The clerk is very patient. The clerk has all the time he doesn’t. “No Exceptions” is a quiet horror about waiting rooms, caregiving, and the precise machinery by which an institution declines to make one.