SoulFire77

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I have 143 stories published in 10 collections on the site.
My stories have been read 42385 times and 148 of my stories have been cherry picked.
12 of my 79 comments have been voted Great Feedback with a total of 19 votes

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J. Oliver Padgett

J. Oliver Padgett writes horror and dystopian fiction from the North Carolina Piedmont. His work explores economic coercion, institutional complicity, and what people become when survival demands compromise. Novels include "Lily", "The Interview", and "Escape From Room 101". His prose favors psychological dread over graphic violence, working-class authenticity over literary posturing, and endings that deny comfort. By day, he works in warehouse logistics—a background that informs his fiction's attention to the quiet machinery that grinds people down. 

My stories

Gold cherry

Ridgeline - Part Seven: The Inside Place

The brush closes behind. Branches press along the flanks. The nose drops to the ground and the ground is a map — layered, dense, each inch carrying...
Cherry

Ridgeline - Part Six: The Only Warm Thing

She started talking because the silence was going to kill her before the bleeding did. Not to the dog. Not to Bree. To the air between them — the...
Cherry

Ridgeline - Part Five: Flinch and Hold

She didn't move. The dog didn't move. Ten feet of gravel between them and the dusk thickening into something heavier and the dog sat on its haunches...
Cherry

Ridgeline - Part Four: Wrong Direction

She picked left. No reason. The trail forked where she stood — not a real fork, just the loop continuing in both directions — and she picked left...
Cherry

Ridgeline - Part Three: The Cut

She didn't run. She should have run. The Civic was sixty yards ahead and the stroller was built for jogging and her legs had been running twenty...

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