I won't lie. I sorta kinda need this post for my LinkTree thing. 😂
But since you're here, I'll guess you have some curiosity about my books. Here ya go! Just click on the cover and it should take you to the Barnes & Noble site (if you're so inclined). Thanks! - MM
This is pretty much where it started. A collection of short stories. I've been pleasantly surprised at how well-received it's been.
There are moments when something changes. Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just enough to notice. A conversation that feels slightly off. A familiar place that no longer feels quite the same. A small event that lingers longer than it should. In BODIES, Michael C. Metzger explores those quiet turning points where ordinary lives brush against the strange, the unsettling, and the unexpected. These eighteen stories are rooted in familiar ground: small towns, aging neighborhoods, workplaces, relationships, late-night conversations, and everyday routines. Beneath the surface, however, something is always waiting. A forgotten memory. An uncomfortable truth. A dark joke. A moment that refuses to stay buried. Drawing from Rust Belt life, folklore, horror, dark humor, and the peculiar rhythms of working-class America, Metzger creates stories that feel both familiar and slightly askew. The horrors found here are not always supernatural. Sometimes they are found in memory. Sometimes in loneliness. Sometimes in the stories people tell themselves. From unsettling encounters and strange coincidences to reflections on mortality, regret, absurdity, and survival, BODIES presents a collection where the ordinary and the uncanny share the same space. Sometimes the most unsettling changes don't announce themselves. They simply begin.
What do a beloved groundhog, hallucinations, the King of Rock & Roll, and voices no one else can hear have in common?
They all inhabit the world of Michael C. Metzger.
In this latest collection, Metzger once again wanders the back roads, forgotten neighborhoods, and fading towns of the American Rust Belt - and beyond - where folklore lingers just beneath the surface of everyday life, where humor and heartbreak often occupy the same room, and where the impossible is never quite as impossible as it seems.
Inside are tales of quiet hauntings, lingering myths, forgotten places, strange encounters, and ordinary people who stumble into extraordinary moments.
Sometimes unsettling.
Sometimes funny.
Sometimes unexpectedly tender.
Always unmistakably Michael C. Metzger.
This collection went through a few different forms before I finally published it. Stories were added, deleted, rewritten, reimagined even!
I personally believe these are some of my best. DESDEMONA has an Edgar Allan Poe feel to it. Reading this collection, you'll probably guess that I grew up with a deep love for horror films, comic books, ghost stories, etc...and you'd be right.
What if the most frightening thing isn't the monster...
...but the place that remembers it?
In The House Remembers (The Myths & Monsters We Create), Michael C. Metzger returns with a collection of eerie, atmospheric stories where abandoned homes, forgotten neighborhoods, lonely forests, fading towns, and old folklore refuse to stay buried. These aren't tales built on endless gore or predictable jump scares. Instead, they draw on the quiet traditions of Poe, classic radio mysteries, local legends, and the unsettling realization that ordinary places often hide extraordinary secrets.
Inside you'll encounter haunted buildings that refuse to surrender their memories, ghosts lingering in forgotten taverns and flower shops, creatures waiting high in the forest canopy, old Balkan legends, strange encounters in Eastern Europe, post-apocalyptic loneliness, and people confronting the monsters within themselves as often as those lurking in the darkness.
Blending horror, dark fantasy, folklore, humor, melancholy, and a deep affection for overlooked people and overlooked places, Metzger once again wanders the edges of the familiar, where the impossible feels just believable enough to keep you awake a little longer.
Whether you've followed his previous collection BODIES or you're discovering his work for the first time, The House Remembers offers stories that are unsettling, compassionate, occasionally funny, and always deeply human.
Because some houses remember.
And sometimes...
they remember you.
Finally, the big daddy! My first novel! I often describe my writing as "What if? And then what?" At least that's my approach. The original idea hit me in 2004 while on tour in Australia. One day while taking a walk and looking for somewhere to grab lunch, I happened upon a little neighborhood shopping plaza. It looked eerily familiar. Kmart. Taco Bell. Pizza Hut. McDonalds. 7-11. It was like finding Little America 10,000 miles from home. It was disconcerting, to say the least. (I opted for Red Rooster for lunch)
So, I asked myself, 'what might cause millions to flee America?' What would it be like? How would they fit in wherever they land?
What happens when Americans become the immigrants?
For generations, Americans have grown up with the idea that people come to the United States looking for a better life. But countries are not permanent. Governments fail. Economies collapse. Borders change. People leave.
And sometimes, the people leaving are Americans.
In Tales From Americatown, the country once known as the United States has fractured into the American Territories, the remains of a nation slowly consumed by political extremism, economic inequality, religious nationalism, environmental neglect, disease, war, and the concentration of power in the hands of a ruling class.
It wasn't one event that destroyed the country.
It was thousands of smaller ones.
Some people saw the writing on the wall and left while they still could. Others stayed because they believed things would eventually return to normal. Some couldn't afford to leave. Some fought. Some adapted. Some simply survived.
Eventually, Americans began appearing elsewhere.
In Bulgaria. Britain. Canada. Mexico. Ireland. Across Europe and beyond.
They opened businesses. Raised families. Learned new languages...or stubbornly refused to. They carried recipes, music, traditions, prejudices, memories, arguments, and stories from the old country. They celebrated Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July. They searched for familiar foods. They complained about the strange customs of their adopted homes. Their children grew up speaking differently, thinking differently, and sometimes wondering why their parents and grandparents remained so attached to a place that no longer existed.
And, as immigrant communities have done throughout history, Americans began gathering together.
Neighborhoods formed.
Little Americas.
Americatowns.
Tales From Americatown is the story of those communities and the people who inhabit them.
An old man remembers the country before it fell. A family discovers that leaving early may have saved them. Refugees encounter borders that no longer recognize their passports. American customs survive thousands of miles from the land that created them. Younger generations inherit stories about a homeland they have never seen. Some refugees desperately preserve their American identity while others would prefer to leave it buried with the country itself.
And through it all, the rest of the world continues.
People still go to work. Children still go to school. Diners serve food. Families argue. Neighbors gossip. People fall in love. They laugh, mourn, celebrate, remember, and forget.
America may have ended.
Human life didn't.
Told through interconnected stories, personal accounts, historical fragments, official documents, memories, and ordinary lives, Tales From Americatown looks at national identity from the outside in. The familiar immigrant story has been turned around: Americans must learn new languages, navigate foreign bureaucracies, confront stereotypes about their homeland, decide which traditions are worth preserving, and discover what it feels like to be the outsider.
Some adapt.
Some don't.
Some discover that "home" isn't necessarily the place where they were born.
Blending speculative fiction, social satire, political commentary, dark humor, tragedy, and moments of unexpected tenderness, Tales From Americatown isn't simply a story about the collapse of a country.
It's about what comes afterward.
It's about migration and assimilation. Memory and nostalgia. The stories immigrants tell their children. The strange little pieces of a vanished homeland that survive in kitchens, songs, accents, holidays, arguments, and family traditions long after the homeland itself has changed beyond recognition.
Most of all, it asks a question that first inspired the book more than twenty years ago:
What if there were "Little Americas"?
What would have to happen for Americans to abandon their own country and seek new lives elsewhere?
Would they learn?
Would they adapt?
Would they be welcomed?
Would they recreate the very culture they had fled?
Or, given enough time, would America become what so many ancestral homelands have become for generations of immigrants before them...
a place remembered mostly through stories?
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