Saving Granny from the Devil (Dread Digest)

A young boy is raised by his great-grandmother. He ends up making a deal with a blue-eyed devil and we follow the effects of this deal throughout the boy's life.

This is, hands down, my favorite piece by Todd Keisling. It's chilling, brutal, evocative, and still manages to be infused with warmth.

Todd does something unusual in that he takes actual moments from his life and tangles them with fiction. In this way, it's vaguely reminiscent of Paul Park's Nebula-nominated piece "Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance." Dark with a thin vein of sweetness running through it, "Saving Granny From the Devil" is a deceptively deep and intriguing tale that tells us more about the author than perhaps even he realized. His love for his Granny is so genuinely demonstrated that it's enormously touching. Juxtapose this with the horrifying, creepy elements of the story and you have a quality tale that any author would be proud of.