#small press horror

[wrongpublishing]

BOOK REVIEW: Salt Heart Press's Space Horror Anthology, The Darkness Beyond the Stars

by Elizabeth Broadbent, Staff Writer.

The Darkness Beyond the Stars (ed. P.L. McMillan, Salt Heart Press) has a simple but compelling premise: space horror. Space horror makes for a good sci-fi/terror mash-up, and this anthology dishes out stories that scream into the void. I expected aliens, and I got some aliens, but modern indie horror is too good for tired tropes to fly. So is this anthology, which takes high strangeness into the unknowable reaches of space. 

There’s far worse up there than little green men; in the hands of writers like Dana Vickerson, Rachel Searcey, and Patrick Barb, those aliens become weird, their terror twisted into heartbreak (if you’ve read more of Barb’s stories, especially Haunting Lessons, printed in a limited edition by Shortwave Publishing in a limited edition and available online from The Arcanist, you’re not shocked). In “The Weight of Faith,” Carson Winter, author of Soft Targets and Posthaste Manor (Tenebrous Press) delivers an emotionally devastating story about belief as tense and visceral as his longer works. You need this collection because you need this story, full stop.

But space holds more terrors than exobiology, and Darkness Beyond doesn’t stop at aliens. Bob Warlock serves up an itchy little tale about something in a space suit; several stories, including Jessica Peter’s “The Wreckage of Hestia” and Lindsey Ragsdale’s “A Voice from the Dark” play with emptiness and solitude—is it more frightening to be alone in the universe, or to find we have company? I can’t articulate a proper trigger warning for the horrors of Bryan Young’s “Son of Demeter” other than “I have children,” but it left me a weeping puddle of goo (a warning for “excessively heroic parenting,” maybe?). Bridget D. Braves yokes second person POV to amnesia in “Last Transmission from the FedComm Sargasso,” which gives this already great tale a kind of haunting sorrow. 

Packed with plenty of feeling, this tight anthology’s transmissions reach across worlds to find the same human feelings we left behind: the terror of the unknown, the fear of solitude, the heartbreak of loss. These authors use the void of space as a blankness on which to impose our darkest fears. What’s up there? Nothing is—and that’s the scariest part. Unless something is, and maybe that’s even scarier. 

Buy The Darkness Beyond the Stars:

[delilahdesanges]

[Publishing] FREE BOOK ALERT!

Fantastic news! In celebration of Sim Kern’s Trans Rights Readathon, Ghoulish Books are prereleasing a FREE ebook version of the Bound In Flesh anthology for Readathon participants. Click through to Sim Kern’s Trans Rights Readathon to learn what’s involved in signing up, and which charities you can donate to. My current preference is TENI, the Transgender Equality Network Ireland, but there are…

[americaneldritch]

A few sample pages from Abominable You: How to Drive Your Man to the Brink of Madness by Embracing the Void Within

[maybemockingbird]

Early Reviews Are In!

My first indie novel "The Scientist, The Spaceman, and The Stars Between Them" - a queer, slow burn cosmic eco-horror story about a mortician and their husband - is in the hands of ARC readers! So far, I've had some really great feedback and amazing praise, and I had to share some of my favorites with you all!

You can get a signed copy of my novel from my publisher Timber Ghost Press - and doing so get you a bonus short story zine, too! You can also add it to your TBR on GoodReads! The book releases on May 24th, 2024!

[toadlett]

I've updated my etsy! all six goblin zines are now available, and if you get the full set they come with a hand-printed belly band!

I'm also running low on some books, so if you want a copy of Commedia Dell' irium or Saint begone, don't hang about!

[emotionalsupportkelpie]

We have a cover, y'all!

The World As It Should Be is available for PRE-ORDER as a Kindle eBook on Amazon here!

PLEASE NOTE: There WILL also be a print edition, but it's not quite available for preorder yet. If you prefer a physical copy, I'll share the link for that order as soon as it's ready! (Of course, you could always order both a Kindle edition AND a physical copy. ;p)

Thank you so much to Maya Preisler, the wonderful cover artist, and to Mocha Memoirs Press, for making this debut author's dreams come true!

What would you sacrifice to change the world?

*Content warnings: suicidal ideation, supernatural horror, gore

Synopsis: Charity Olmstead wants to die. Despite being raised by two self-proclaimed psychics, she isn’t cut out for life in the new magic-ravaged world. When she meets a kelpie on a riverbank in Salem, she believes she’s found her exit. But it turns out the monster is hungry for more than a meal. Sensing Charity’s unawakened magic, he enlists her help in a quest for revenge against the hunters who slaughtered his mate, and in return he promises to grant Charity a swift, painless death once their job is done. As they track the hunters to their base, Charity and the kelpie uncover a terrifying truth: Salem’s corrupt mayor has joined a war that has been brewing for centuries, a battle for magical control that drove Salem's most powerful witch out of her mind and ended the world. Charity must take up the mantle of this fight, grow into her powers, and find a renewed will to live. But the war is not won yet, and its weight may prove too much to bear.

[katesheridanart]

a peek at some of what i’m whipping up for SPX this weekend! who’s coming? 👀

[ultratheatre]

Tickets now available

[lavendermoths]

Pencils for a zombie horror short comic that's taking me ages and ages to get done

[rebb003]

Book 14 of 2023: BRAVE NEW WEIRD: THE BEST NEW WEIRD HORROR VOL. 1, edited by Alex Woodroe. The title says it all, folks. Delightfully weird stuff.

[davidcwbriggs]

32 page black and white A5 sized horror/ sci fi comic. A collaboration between David CW Briggs and artist Andrew Walter. Worked on (and off!) over a 7 year period utilizing an equisite corpse process with each artist creating one page at a time with the narrative evolving organically.

Available here: https://davidcwbriggs.bandcamp.com/merch/occluded-machinators-comic-by-david-cw-briggs-and-andrew-walter

[wrongpublishing]

BOOK REVIEW: Ai Jiang's I AM AI

by Elizabeth Broadbent, Staff Writer.

Ai Jiang’s new novella, I AM AI, drops June 20th from Shortwave Media. It’s an anticipated followup to Smol Tales from Between Worlds (Tales from Between) and Linghun (Dark Matter Inc): short story collection, novel, novella, a neat trio in the past few months. Since its writing, the simmering anxiety over artificial intelligence has risen to a boil, with SAG strikers asking for assurances that they wouldn’t be replaced by AI. In the past few months, we’ve seen an open call for AI-generated pieces and editors inundated with Chat GPT submissions; the heads of OpenAI and Google Deepmind, among others, have warned that AI poses an existential crisis: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority along with other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” reads a statement they released with the Centre for AI Safety. 

To call I AM AI timely would be an understatement. It ferrets out our all-to-real dystopian anxieties and picks them bloody. Massively overworked and grossly underpaid, cyborg writer Ai masquerades as an artificial intelligence app not only to scramble by, but also to keep up with her massive (inherited) debt to New Era, a corporation that’s swallowed all but the underground economy. Life on Emit’s battered margins offers little food, meager shelter, and intermittent electricity, but life in Emit is worse: grueling fourteen-to-fifteen hour work days, which killed Ai’s parents. In this dystopia, people matter only as far as their corporate utility.

I AM AI posits a future set in our logical end, a slow-rolling apocalypse of corporate greed and dehumanization painted in spare, devastating prose. This chokingly close dystopia asks pressing questions: how will we live under late-stage capitalism? What will we value, and what will we lose? As Ai’s battery winds down, as her clock runs out, we wonder what, if anything, can save us.

It’s a beautiful meditation on harrowing, pertinent questions set in a neon dream-city. Sickeningly appropriate for this particular moment, I AM AI examines our community’s most urgent questions. What will we do as creativity is systemically devalued? How will we move through a world of spiraling economic need coupled with ravenous corporate greed?

Yeah, it’s really dark. You’ll need tissues for this extended narrative riff on our current dystopia, one populated by poignantly drawn characters (including Ai herself). But by using art to interrogate AI, Jiang’s already beaten it. Our community would do well to heed this novella-as-parable. As long as we keep making art together, the machines will never win.

Don’t let the machines win.

Twitter: @ AiJiang_ / @ shortwavebooks IG: @ ai.jian.g / @ shortwavebooks

[delilahdesanges]

[publishing] Get Your Fresh Flesh Here!

Rejoice, for it is publication day! That’s right! You can now buy the paperback version of Bound in Flesh from Ghoulish Books! HERE And hopefully from many bookstores both reputable and less so. Or pester your local library until they order it. Whichever you like, I’m not in charge here, I’m just the guy with the story in the body horror anthology, standing in front of a potential reader,…

[pleckthaniel]

uh why does every literary magazine on earth now have like 3 2-week capped reading periods per year. most of these same mags had rolling submissions when i was submitting literally Last Fall. what the actual fuck happened

[curseoftheeel]

You just run. Hello everyone, I hope your long weekend is off to a good start (I guess it's a long weekend in the US, but I hope you all are doing well). Also! I will be in Bethesda, Maryland at the Small Press Expo @spx this September 17-18th, so if you're in the area, come on by booth N-3 which I'll be sharing with my comics comrade, Crystal Jayme AKA @scottycomics ! We'll be selling our books there, so come by and say hello if and maybe pick up some copies of our newest releases!

Also, the gambling crime book I'm working on, Final Gamble, is in Previews this month! So please tell your local comic stores to preorder copies of Final Gamble! It's a thriller about raising the stakes to the highest level! https://www.previewsworld.com/Catalog?pub=BAND%20OF%20BARDS

Thank you for reading everyone and I'll see you next week!

[alexmooreillustration]

cover for the full collection of Dave Wimblett's HOARDS OF SURREY which i had the pleasure of doing this year. the book's what if the inbetweeners went treasure hunting in the english country-side and full of cheeky charm!

follow Dave on twitter; https://twitter.com/wimblett

interior art comes courtesy of Rory Donald; https://twitter.com/RoryDraws4

lettering by Ken Reynolds; https://kenreynolds.bigcartel.com