Mark McNease's Fearsome Fiction Special Edition: Short Story 'Jawbone' from 5 of a Kind
Mark McNease's Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Mysteries, Thrillers, Rare Finds and More
Release Date: 05/13/2026
Mark McNease's Fearsome Fiction Special Edition: Short Story 'Jawbone' from 5 of a Kind
Mark McNease's Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Mysteries, Thrillers, Rare Finds and More
Today in this special feature of the Fearsome Fiction Podcast we’re offering another short story from Mark McNease’s collection, ‘Five of a Kind.’ Jawbone tells the story of young Richard who was eighteen years old when a head-on collision on a snowy Indiana road took the lower half of his face. He survived — and that, in many ways, was the cruelest part. We Richard Krump across the decades after his accident: the surgeries that promised normalcy and delivered nothing, the friends who never showed up to his homecoming party, the little girl in a drugstore who gave him his name, and...
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True Crime Tuesdays - A Fearsome Fiction Feature: Shot By a Killer Clown
Mark McNease's Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Mysteries, Thrillers, Rare Finds and More
True Crime Tuesdays — A Fearsome Fiction Feature: Shot by a Killer Clown It was Memorial Day weekend, 1990, in Wellington, Florida. Marlene Warren answered her front door to find a clown holding flowers and balloons — and was shot in the face at point-blank range. The clown got back in the car and drove away. Marlene died two days later. The case had a suspect almost immediately. It had circumstantial evidence. It had motive. What it didn't have — for twenty-seven years — was enough to make an arrest. This week on True Crime Tuesdays, we follow one of the most bizarre cold cases in...
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Mark McNease's Fearsome Fiction: Genre Classic 'The Mystery of the Yellow Room' by Gaston Leroux (Chapters 14 - 29_)
Mark McNease's Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Mysteries, Thrillers, Rare Finds and More
Welcome to Fearsome Fiction, the podcast that brings you mysteries, thrillers, rare gems, and a weekly True Crime Tuesday. Today we conclude our journey through one of the greatest locked-room mysteries ever written, with chapters 14 through 29. Published in 1907, Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room set the standard for a genre that would captivate readers for generations. A young woman is found brutally attacked inside a room locked from the inside. No one could have entered. No one could have escaped. And yet someone did both. Following the investigation is the brilliant young...
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Mark McNease's Fearsome Fiction: Night Flight to Murder Town, A Marshall James Thriller (Chapter 25 through 27)
Mark McNease's Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Mysteries, Thrillers, Rare Finds and More
Marshall James: Chapters Twenty-Five Through Twenty-Seven Chapter Twenty-Five finds Marshall waking up in Leland's apartment the morning after a drug-fueled night he remembers all too clearly. Filled with regret, he dresses, slips out, and returns to Trent Stoffer's Upper East Side apartment — where he finds the place ransacked and Trent dead, bound and tortured in his bedroom. Knowing the police will eventually trace him to the scene, Marshall grabs a hidden computer disk from his suitcase and disappears into the New York morning — just as Carlton the doorman picks up the phone. Chapter...
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True Crime Tuesdays - A Fearsome Fiction Feature: The Black Dahlia
Mark McNease's Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Mysteries, Thrillers, Rare Finds and More
True Crime Tuesdays - A Fearsome Fiction Podcast Feature: The Black Dahlia Welcome to True Crime Tuesdays. I'll be sharing a true crime story every Tuesday on Mark McNease's Fearsome Fiction Podcast. Narration is provided by my own Wondervox. Fasten your headphones for one of the most famous unsolved murders in the annals of American crime - or is it American madness? They found her on the morning of January 15th, 1947. A woman walking with her daughter through a vacant lot in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. She thought at first that what she was seeing was a discarded department...
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Mark McNease's Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Genre Classic 'The Mystery of the Yellow Room' by Gaston Leroux (Chapters 11 - 13)
Mark McNease's Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Mysteries, Thrillers, Rare Finds and More
Welcome to Fearsome Fiction, the podcast that brings you mysteries, thrillers, rare gems, and a weekly True Crime Tuesday. Today we continue our journey through one of the greatest locked-room mysteries ever written. Published in 1907, Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room set the standard for a genre that would captivate readers for generations. A young woman is found brutally attacked inside a room locked from the inside. No one could have entered. No one could have escaped. And yet someone did both. Following the investigation is the brilliant young journalist and amateur detective...
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Special Featured Story: 'The Gospel According to God' from '5 of a Kind: Short Fiction'
Mark McNease's Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Mysteries, Thrillers, Rare Finds and More
I'll be sharing one story at a time in audio version from my collection '5 of a Kind: Short Fiction.' “The Gospel According to God”, narrated by my own Wondervox, is the first story the collection. Spanning human history from primordial silence to a chance encounter on a Central Park bench, the story traces what happens when people mistake the infinite for a brick and the boundless for a rulebook — including Eric, a pre-literate mystic who discovers the divine lives inside every person and is killed for saying so. Threading through the ancient scenes is Melissa, a young theater...
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Mark McNease's Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Genre Classic 'The Mystery of the Yellow Room' by Gaston Leroux (Chapters 7 - 10)
Mark McNease's Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Mysteries, Thrillers, Rare Finds and More
Today we continue our serialized audio journey through one of the great classics of detective fiction: The Mystery of the Yellow Room, by Gaston Leroux — presented here in the Vivid Press Edition. First published in 1907, this novel gave the world one of its most enduring puzzles: a woman attacked in a room locked from the inside, with no possible means of escape for her assailant. No hidden doors. No passable windows. No explanation — until a brilliant young reporter named Joseph Rouletabille decides to find one. If you've never read it, you're in for something special. If you have,...
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Mark McNease's Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Night Flight to Murder Town - A Marshall James Thriller (Chapters 22 -24)
Mark McNease's Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Mysteries, Thrillers, Rare Finds and More
Welcome back to Fearsome Fiction, and to Night Flight to Murder Town: A Marshall James Thriller. When we last left Marshall, he was finding his footing in a New York City that was as thrilling as it was foreign — a city that moved faster than he did, that asked more of him than he expected, and that seemed to be keeping secrets at every turn. In tonight's chapters, those secrets begin to take on weight. Trent hands Marshall a small yellow envelope — a floppy disk he calls "insurance" — and refuses to say more. It's the kind of thing a man hands off only when he's afraid of what...
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Mark McNease's Fearsome Fiction: Genre Classic The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux (Chapters 1 thru 6)
Mark McNease's Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Mysteries, Thrillers, Rare Finds and More
Gaston Leroux published The Mystery of the Yellow Room in 1907, and it's been quietly influencing mystery writers ever since. In this episode we dig into chapters 1 through 6 — the impossible crime at the Château du Glandier, the locked room that shouldn't have an answer, and the arrival of the irrepressible young journalist Joseph Rouletabille, who is eighteen years old and already the smartest person in the room. This is the book that shaped Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, and the entire locked-room mystery tradition. It holds up beautifully, and it's a lot of fun. Get your copy...
info_outlineToday in this special feature of the Fearsome Fiction Podcast we’re offering another short story from Mark McNease’s collection, ‘Five of a Kind.’
Jawbone tells the story of young Richard who was eighteen years old when a head-on collision on a snowy Indiana road took the lower half of his face. He survived — and that, in many ways, was the cruelest part.
We Richard Krump across the decades after his accident: the surgeries that promised normalcy and delivered nothing, the friends who never showed up to his homecoming party, the little girl in a drugstore who gave him his name, and the slow, steady retreat of everyone he ever loved — until only his books, his silence, and finally his paintings remained.
A haunting, deeply human story about disfigurement, isolation, and the particular cruelty of surviving intact on the inside while the world refuses to see past the outside. Jawbone begins where a young man's life as he knew it ends.