Dark Entries is Coming Soon!

A strange thing happens when you spend enough time listening to music.

At first, songs are just songs. They're the soundtrack to road trips, long walks, late nights, and ordinary Tuesday afternoons. They fill the background while we're working, driving, doing dishes, or pretending to answer emails.

But if you stay with them long enough, something changes. A lyric catches your attention. An image refuses to leave you alone. A question lingers long after the final note fades away. Sometimes a song becomes a story.

For the last several months, I've been collecting those stories.

The result is Dark Entries, a collection of thirteen short stories inspired by songs from artists such as Bauhaus, The Cure, Project 86, Oingo Boingo, The Smiths, and several others whose records have spent far too much time spinning in my headphones.

Beginning October 5, subscribers will receive a new story every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, continuing all the way through Halloween. Before you start imagining chainsaw-wielding maniacs lurking behind every paragraph, I should probably clarify something:

Dark Entries isn't a horror collection.

Yes, there are ghosts. There are mysteries, abandoned places, strange encounters, forgotten histories, and more than a few moments that unfold after midnight. But these stories aren't really about monsters.

They're about the things hiding behind them. They're about fear, memory, belonging, hope, redemption, loneliness, faith, and the unexpected ways people find healing. In many of these stories, the darkness isn't the destination. It's simply the place where the journey begins. If anything, Dark Entries has more in common with a late-night conversation about life, faith, and the questions we carry than it does with a traditional horror novel.

The songs that inspired these stories have often lived in the spaces between categories. Alternative. Goth. Punk. New Wave. Music made by artists who looked at the world from slightly different angles.

I've always been drawn to people like that. The outsiders. The dreamers. The misfits. The doubters. The people standing slightly off to the side, asking questions everyone else seems too busy to ask. Many of the characters in Dark Entries live there too.

My hope is that these stories will resonate with readers who love music, mystery, imagination, faith, and the strange places where all of those things overlap.

And because every story began with a song, I'm also hoping this project introduces new readers to our growing community of fellow travelers who share a love for stories, records, conversations, and questions that don't always have simple answers.

As a thank you to the people who have already joined me on this journey, I've also created an exclusive bonus story available only to current subscribers: "Bring Me to Life," inspired by the Evanescence classic. Like the song itself, it's a story about awakening. About being seen when you feel invisible. About discovering that sometimes the thing that rescues us isn't escape from the darkness, but finding someone willing to walk through it beside us.

If you'd like to receive Dark Entries beginning October 5, you can sign up here: www.RandyRoss.me/dark-entries.

Thank you for reading these posts, subscribing to the newsletter, sharing my playlists, recommending my stories, and encouraging me to keep writing. I can't wait to share these stories with you.

See you on October 5.

P.S. If you know someone who loves music, autumn, mysteries, misfits, faith, or stories that refuse to fit neatly into a single genre, send them my way. I'd love for them to join us from the beginning.