July 2, 2025
We are excited to announce today the tenth entry in the Killer VHS Series will be Simon’s Quest by Todd Keisling…
Simon didn't expect to find much in the ruins of his home town, years after a devastating fire claimed most of the population. But the town isn't dead... it's just been waiting for Simon's return.
Eight years ago, Simon Bell lost his parents to the fires that consumed his hometown of Stauford, Kentucky. Their deaths cast a shadow over his youth, a curse that years of therapy has failed to overcome. Now a college senior, Simon is desperate for release from the religious trauma and the nightmares that plague him. With the support of his girlfriend, Cassie, he decides to move on and leave the past behind.
When he discovers a dusty VHS cassette in the university's archives—one that reveals his parents in attendance at a cult leader's tent revival—Simon's world is upended, unearthing ghosts of the past, questions and suspicions he'd buried long ago. His curse won't go away no matter how far he runs. Returning to the ruins of Stauford may be his only way to break its hold over him.
But the town isn't dead. Far from it. And what he finds waiting there is something infinitely worse, terrible, and hungry.
Todd Keisling is a writer and designer of the horrific and strange. His books include Devil’s Creek, a 2020 Bram Stoker Award finalist for Superior Achievement in a Novel, Scanlines, The Final Reconciliation, and most recently, Cold, Black & Infinite: Stories of the Horrific & Strange. A pair of his earlier works were recipients of the University of Kentucky’s Oswald Research & Creativity Prize for Creative Writing (2002 and 2005), and his second novel, The Liminal Man, was an Indie Book Award finalist in Horror & Suspense (2013). He lives in Pennsylvania with his family.
