Epicenter

 I am happy to announce that my story Epicenter has been published by Hexagon Speculative Fiction Magazine!

Epicenter is about a crypto-seismologist (and if you don't know what that is, that's okay because she made up that title anyway) who gets in over her head investigating mysterious earthquakes she thinks are the result of the mythical Mongolian death worm.

With plenty of Tremors references and a horse named Rhonda, Epicenter is the answer to the question we've all been asking: "What if they let Jennifer Lee Rossman produce a really dorky and cute Syfy Channel Original Movie?"

(Hint hint, SyFy Channel. I'm totally available and have tons of weird ideas.)

Even though it has the general plot of a monster movie, Epicenter isn't very violent. One person gets eaten, but it isn’t graphic and nobody really liked them very much.

I love monster movies. I was watching Tremors when I was five. And while I can appreciate the surface fear—oh no, big scary thing is going to eat me—and enjoy that plot for what it is, I’ve always seen monster movies another way: they are allegories about how people are the real monsters.

(I wrote about this through the lens of the Jurassic Park franchise here)

Yeah, the monsters eat people and destroy things. But most of the time, it's because of bad decisions the people make. Jaws was only a problem shark because people were invading his waters, the dinosaurs only ate people because people decided to mess with nature and create dinosaurs.

So Epicenter is kind of my love letter to monster movies, just… much less metaphorical.