Dillon Riley - Writer on Reedsy Prompts

3 Stories

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That's not my kids!.

Weekly Contest #376

That's not my kids!. The house was a single-story brick place just outside Columbus, built in the late sixties, with a maple tree in the front yard and a chain-link fence that had begun to lean. Carol had left for Ohio State in August of 2007. After that, the rooms she used to fill stayed mostly closed. Martha still folded the yellow blanket at the foot of the bed once a week. Tom still left the bedroom door cracked so the hallway would not feel sealed. They ate at the kitchen table with the radio low. Martha graded papers the way she had f...

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That's not my kids!.

Dillon Riley

The house was a single-story brick place just outside Columbus, built in the late sixties, with a maple tree in the front yard and a chain-link fence that had begun to lean. Carol had left for Ohio State in August of 2007. After that, the rooms she used to fill stayed mostly closed. Martha still folded the yellow blanket at the foot of the bed once a week. Tom still left the bedroom door cracked so the hallway would not feel sealed. They ate at the kitchen table with the radio low. Martha graded papers the way she had for thirty years at the...

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The Dragon Beyond the Sky

Dillon Riley

Weekly Contest #375

The Dragon Beyond the Sky Veyra had three moons. The largest was Auralis, a silver-white moon that lit the northern continents. The second was Neris, pale and blue, and the smallest was Voss, a moon the color of rust. For thousands of years the people of Veyra had lived beneath them, building cities into the roots of mountains, sailing oceans under Neris's light, and planting fields that stretched for miles across the southern continents. Their civilization had survived wars, plagues, climate disasters, and the collapse of empires older tha...

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Author bio

Dillon Riley writes horror that starts in ordinary rooms and does not stay there. The books open on a kitchen speaker, a snowy town square, an apartment hallway, a container dropped near a house - and then something answers. Always On is a slow burn in Marion, North Carolina, where the voice assistant Ona begins speaking in a dead woman's voice, and the only weapon against it is someone willing to sit beside you and not leave. The Iscream Man follows Detective Marcus Vale into a cold case that was never finished: impossible ice, no footprints, and a secret called Meridian that has been waiting fifteen years. The Nightmare Chronicles begins with a swarm of glowing insects called FlyZ and ends with a door humanity should not have opened. The Hunger Beneath listens for the residents of Blackwood Apartments who disappeared, and for the building that noticed before anyone else did. The through-line is grief, loneliness, and the things that reply when we ask. Code Solanum publishes on Wattpad, with The Nightmare Chronicles also headed to Royal Road.