The Night Deliveries
Marcus Thompson's knee was killing him again. The old factory injury always acted up when it rained, and Detroit in November seemed to exist in a permanent state of drizzle...
James Blackwood is a master of psychological suspense and atmospheric fiction. Born in a small New England town, he was surrounded from childhood by old legends and dark folklore. He worked as a high school teacher, which gave him deep insight into human psychology and the fears that shape us. His work excels at finding the extraordinary within the ordinary, transforming familiar situations into compelling psychological landscapes. He has a particular talent for exploring the inner demons of his characters and how ordinary people cope with extraordinary circumstances.
Stories by this author (43)
The Red Addresses
The first time Rajesh saw a red address on his QuickBite delivery app, he thought it was a glitch. Mumbai's monsoon had been particularly vicious that July evening, and water had been seeping into everything—phones, shoes, souls...
The Echo Wife
The smell hit Darnell first—green tea and jasmine, the exact same brand Keiko used to order from that little shop in Japantown before the cancer took her sense of taste along with everything else...
The Millbridge Prophecies
The dream came at 3:47 AM, precise as a scalpel cut. Dr. Amara Okonkwo jolted awake in her cramped apartment above the Millbridge Veterinary Clinic, her sheets soaked with sweat that had nothing to do with the Maine summer heat. In the dream, Mrs...
What the Dog Saw
The Border Collie's eye rolled back in its head, showing nothing but white, and that's when Dr. Priya Chakrabarti felt the first memory that wasn't her own slam into her skull like a freight train...
The Sound of Rain on Nylon
The GPS lost signal twenty minutes ago, but Mikhail kept driving deeper into the Oregon woods anyway, following the faded brown signs that promised Whisper Creek Campground ahead...
The Ghosts We Sell
The first pill went down easy, small and white like a grain of rice, which Duc thought was either deeply ironic or God's idea of a sick joke...
The Algorithm of Goodbye
The first message arrived on a Tuesday afternoon while Meera Patel was sorting through a box of photographs, her fingers trembling not from age but from the peculiar cocktail of medications Dr...
The Hunger Route
The vision hit Marcus Chen between the stairs and the doorbell, right when his left knee – the bad one from that old construction site fall – gave its familiar twinge...
The Night Shift
The notification pinged on Marcus Washington's phone at 11:07 PM, just as the rain started hammering his windshield like tiny fists...
The Night Addresses
The order came through at 11:47 PM, just as Keisha Washington was thinking about calling it a night...
The Loop
The broken doll was wedged between the back seat cushions like a bad omen, its porcelain head split clean down the middle, one glass eye staring up at Adaeze while the other had rolled somewhere into the darkness of her Toyota Camry's floor...
The Tuesday Passenger
The first time Malik Washington noticed something wrong with Mrs. Nguyen, she was missing her left pinkie finger...
Things That Burn
The package sat on Marlene Okoye's porch like a coffin for a child's doll, wrapped in brown paper that had no return address, no postmark, no evidence it had traveled through any postal system at all...
The Darkroom of Tomorrow
The blood wasn't there. Nora Okafor knew this with the same certainty she knew her own name, knew the weight of her Nikon D850 in her weathered hands, knew the way morning light broke over Whitefish Lake in November...
The Confession Route
The thing about driving nights in Detroit is that the city shows you its real face after midnight...
The Last Delivery
The smell hit Arjun like a physical thing, a wall of sweet rot that made his eyes water and his stomach do a slow, greasy roll...
Cold Cuts
The message was carved into the frozen meat like a scar, like something that wanted to be remembered...
The Tuesday Passenger
The notification pinged at 2:58 AM, just like it had every Tuesday for the past six weeks...
The Color of Silence
The wheeled mop bucket sang in B-flat as Esperanza Cruz pushed it down the corridor of Mercy General's long-term care ward, its squeaky wheel hitting the same warped tile every rotation...
The Night Queue
The fluorescent lights in the content moderation center hummed their familiar sick-green song, the kind that made Marisol's teeth ache after the first four hours of her shift...
The Weight of Other Sorrows
The first time it happened, Adaeze thought she was having a stroke...
Static Hearts
The cast-iron skillet hit the kitchen floor with a sound like a church bell rung by the devil himself, and Dolores Clearwater stood there in her wool socks, staring at the spreading pool of half-cooked ground beef and onions, unable to move...
The Brennan Girl
The first message came through at 8:47 PM on a Tuesday while Keisha was sorting Marcus's pills into the weekly organizer, each compartment labeled with days he increasingly couldn't remember...
Twenty-Four Hour Delay
The fluorescent lights in the content moderation center hummed like dying insects, casting everything in that particular shade of pale that made living people look like corpses...
The Thing That Learns
The smart home system arrived on a Tuesday, which should have been Marjorie Blackwood's first warning...
The Last Delivery
The order came through at 11:47 PM, just as Amara was thinking about calling it a night. Her Honda Civic's AC had given up around nine, and Phoenix in July was like driving through the devil's own furnace, even after dark...
The Night Shift
The first message appeared on a Tuesday night in Conference Room 7B, scrawled across the whiteboard in blue marker between flowcharts and revenue projections...
The Laundromat at the End of Time
The sneaker was small, maybe a child's size three, and it was covered in blood that hadn't been there when Mrs. Chen started her wash cycle forty minutes ago...
The Maintenance Man
Ernesto Reyes was mopping the second-grade hallway when he first saw the drowning boy. It was past nine on a Tuesday night in October, the kind of Maine evening where fog pressed against the windows like something trying to get in...
When the Sky Didn't Fall
Marcus Okonkwo had driven this stretch of Montana highway three times in the past two hours, and he was starting to think the universe was telling him to turn around...
The Night Shift Prophet
Marcus Okonkwo pushed his cleaning cart down the forty-third floor hallway of the NeuralSync building, the wheels squeaking in a rhythm that had become as familiar as his own heartbeat. Two-fifteen in the morning...
The Fortune Teller of Apartment 1408
The rain in São Paulo fell like judgment that Tuesday night, each drop a small fist pounding on Marcos Delgado's helmet as he weaved his bicycle through the sprawl of Bela Vista...
The Riverside Loop
The notification pinged at 9:47 PM, just as the wind picked up and started throwing ice crystals against the windshield of Yasmin's beat-up Honda Civic. Eight orders from Riverside Towers. Same goddamn building, different apartments...
The Fortune Teller's Burden
The first time Keisha Washington noticed the pattern, she was sitting in her dented Honda Civic outside Chen's Chinese Palace, waiting for order #447B to be ready...
The Weight of Knowing
The notification popped up at 5:47 AM, just as Marta Tadesse was setting up her ring light for her morning workout stream. Another five pounds down...
The Feed
The first video arrived at 2:47 AM on a Tuesday, sliding into Maritess Reyes' review queue like a snake into dark water. She almost didn't notice it at first...
The Wrong Order
The first wrong order arrived on a Tuesday night, and Keisha Washington almost didn't think anything of it...
The Wrong Door
The rain hammered Mumbai like a million tiny fists, and Rajesh Mehta's motorcycle sputtered through the flooded streets of Andheri, the food order growing cold in his insulated bag...
The Algorithm of Small Disasters
The first message came on a Tuesday night in October, buried in the special instructions of a Coney Island order going to Lafayette Park...
The 3 AM Prophet
The first time Rajesh Kulkarni delivered to Flat 1408 in the Moonlight Towers, it was 3:07 AM on a Tuesday that smelled like diesel fumes and disappointment...
When the Lights Went Out
The bell above the door jangled its familiar broken note—ding-da-ding—and Linh Nguyen's shoulders tensed before she even looked up from the register. She knew that shuffle, that wheeze, that particular way of clearing phlegm from an old throat...
The Fever Floor
The screaming started at 3:47 AM on a Tuesday that would later be remembered as the last normal day at the Henrietta Arms apartment building in Queens...