Here are a few nice ways to help a writer:
-buy their book
-review their book
-draw fan art based on their book
-construct a diorama based off a scene in their book
-juggle copies of their book at a haunted circus
-feed their book to a cosmic bookworm with a billion teeth
-read their book aloud to a basement of faceless mannequins
-gift them a cursed pen that periodically grows tentacles
-bribe a trio of sirens to sing about the book to passing sailors
Good things are coming to me. I am attracting success into my life. I am channeling an abundance mindset. Human-faced beetles are burrowing under my skin and vomiting eldritch chemicals into my bloodstream. My teeth are becoming serrated. I speak in cosmic riddles.
You are fantastic. You are an enchanted pinecone. You are a gargoyle spitting out endless cocktails. You are a troupe of cryptids performing Shakespeare in an abandoned Blockbuster. You are a tide pool filled with bioluminescent anemones and human-faced crabs.
During renovations of our small Victorian farmhouse, we came across a mound of ash in the attic. Something moved inside the mound, and we were positive it was some sort of animal. But when we searched the ash, all we found was an old doll.
The attic doll has been with us ever since. I interviewed her recently, and here are the results:
Me: People all over the internet have expressed interest in learning more about you, so I appreciate you taking the time to answer my questions.
Attic Doll: No prob, blood giant!
Me: I’ve been meaning to ask, why do you call me that?
Attic Doll: Why wouldn’t I call you that? You’re a giant and you’re filled with blood. You’re a weird creature. All the mannequins in the attic think you’re weird too. You don’t even eat spiders or insulation.
Me: Okay, enough about me. We’re here to learn more about you. So, you’re a possessed doll, right? Who or what are you possessed by?
Attic Doll: Wha? I’m not possessed! I’m animated by cosmic powers beyond human comprehension. I thought that was obvious.
Me: I see. Can you tell me a little about what you do for fun? What are your hobbies?
Attic Doll: I like lots of things, giant. I like looking at rotting oranges. I like riding the skeleton dog around town and throwing acorns at random humans. I like decorating my hair with burs and goat heats. Oh, and I love the electric drill. She’s a beautiful machine. I like drilling my way to the center of things and peering inside. There’s much to see.
Me: Speaking of that, is there any way you could stop drilling into our undrunk soda cans?
Attic Doll: Wha? How else am I supposed to set off the soda geysers?
Me: The geysers are the problem.
Attic Doll: That makes no sense, giant. You’re speaking in riddles.
Me: We’ll discuss this more later. Anyway, I was curious if you’d like to be called anything other than Attic Doll? Have you given any thought to a name?
Attic Doll: Nah, I haven’t thought about that, but I could think about it now, if that would make you happy. Do you want me to think about it?
Me: Sure.
Attic Doll: I’m going to crawl into my thinking squash. I’ll be right back.
Me: I thought I told you to throw that rotten squash away. It stinks like all hell.
Attic Doll: Quiet, blood thing. I’m thinking.
Me: Fine.
Attic Doll: I’m done thinking now. I think I would like to be named Jeremy.
Me: Don’t you think that would be a little confusing if we’re both named Jeremy?
Attic Doll: You can be called Weird Blood Creature Jeremy. I can be named Regular Jeremy.
Me: I don’t know. Are there any other names you like?
Attic Doll: I like the name Blorgatorga for you. You look like a Blorgatorga.
Me: I wasn’t asking you for another name for me. Let’s just move on to the next question. I’ve noticed a massive ball of entangled, human-faced worms in the attic, and the ball seems to be growing every day. What’s that about? Should I be concerned?
Attic Doll: Nice try, Blorgatorga! I’m not going to spoil your birthday surprise. The mannequins told me you might try to compel answers from me before the big day, but I will not be persuaded. I have the will of a cosmic space lobster.
Me: I’m assuming cosmic space lobsters have strong wills?
Attic Doll: Yeah, of course.
Me: Well, those are all my questions for now. Thank you for the interview.
Attic Doll: Thank you for letting me chew on your eyelashes and nose hairs while you sleep.
Me: Wait, what?
Attic Doll: Bye bye!
Here are five new horror books to read before the lunar behemoth awakens and chews up the planet:
A HOUSE WITH GOOD BONES by T. Kingfisher
A haunting Southern Gothic from an award-winning master of suspense, A House With Good Bones explores the dark, twisted roots lurking just beneath the veneer of a perfect home and family.
“Mom seems off.”
Her brother’s words echo in Sam Montgomery’s ear as she turns onto the quiet North Carolina street where their mother lives alone.
She brushes the thought away as she climbs the front steps. Sam’s excited for this rare extended visit, and looking forward to nights with just the two of them, drinking boxed wine, watching murder mystery shows, and guessing who the killer is long before the characters figure it out.
But stepping inside, she quickly realizes home isn’t what it used to be. Gone is the warm, cluttered charm her mom is known for; now the walls are painted a sterile white. Her mom jumps at the smallest noises and looks over her shoulder even when she’s the only person in the room. And when Sam steps out back to clear her head, she finds a jar of teeth hidden beneath the magazine-worthy rose bushes, and vultures are circling the garden from above.
To find out what’s got her mom so frightened in her own home, Sam will go digging for the truth. But some secrets are better left buried.
A HOUSE WITH GOOD BONES on Amazon
A HOUSE WITH GOOD BONES on Bookshop
SISTER, MAIDEN, MONSTER by Lucy A. Snyder
Sister, Maiden, Monster is a visceral story set in the aftermath of our planet’s disastrous transformation and told through the eyes of three women trying to survive the nightmare, from Bram Stoker Award-winning author Lucy A. Snyder.
A virus tears across the globe, transforming its victims in nightmarish ways. As the world collapses, dark forces pull a small group of women together.
Erin, once quiet and closeted, acquires an appetite for a woman and her brain. Why does forbidden fruit taste so good?
Savannah, a professional BDSM switch, discovers a new turn-on: committing brutal murders for her eldritch masters.
Mareva, plagued with chronic tumors, is too horrified to acknowledge her divine role in the coming apocalypse, and as her growths multiply, so too does her desperation.
Inspired by her Bram Stoker Award-winning story “Magdala Amygdala,” Lucy A. Snyder delivers a cosmic tale about the planet’s disastrous transformation … and what we become after.
SISTER, MAIDEN, MONSTER on Amazon
SISTER, MAIDEN, MONSTER on Bookshop
CONJURING THE WITCH by Jessica Leonard
There are witches in the woods. These are the words the reverend of the Lilin Assembly of Our Lord repeats to his parishioners each week. Steve and Nicole Warby think it’s just a metaphor, until Nicole takes a walk in those woods and comes back changed. Something came out of them with her, and the simple small-town life they’ve always known is forever altered when they discover the dark secrets buried deep and those intent on keeping them there. Fearing for his wife’s sanity, and his own comfortable status in the church, Steve is unsure if he wants to help or ignore the problems. The reverend believes there are witches in the woods, and he thinks Nicole is only the most recent.
Conjuring the Witch is a dark, haunted story about what those in power are willing to do to stay in power, and the sins we convince ourselves are forgivable.
CONJURING THE WITCH on Bookshop
THE MARIGOLD by Andrew F. Sullivan
In a near-future Toronto buffeted by environmental chaos and unfettered development, an unsettling new lifeform begins to grow beneath the surface, feeding off the past.
The Marigold, a gleaming Toronto condo tower, sits a half-empty promise: a stack of scuffed rental suites and undelivered amenities that crumbles around its residents as a mysterious sludge spreads slowly through it. Public health inspector Cathy Jin investigates this toxic mold as it infests the city’s infrastructure, rotting it from within, while Sam “Soda” Dalipagic stumbles on a dangerous cache of data while cruising the streets in his Camry, waiting for his next rideshare alert. On the outskirts of downtown, 13-year-old Henrietta Brakes chases a friend deep underground after he’s snatched into a sinkhole by a creature from below.
All the while, construction of the city’s newest luxury tower, Marigold II, has stalled. Stanley Marigold, the struggling son of the legendary developer behind this project, decides he must tap into a hidden reserve of old power to make his dream a reality — one with a human cost.
Weaving together disparate storylines and tapping into the realms of body horror, urban dystopia, and ecofiction, The Marigold explores the precarity of community and the fragile designs that bind us together.
THE TREES GREW BECAUSE I BLED THERE by Eric LaRocca
A beautifully crafted, devastating short fiction collection from the Bram-Stoker finalist and author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke and Other Misfortunes. Includes an introduction from acclaimed bestselling author Chuck Wendig.
Eight stories of literary dark fiction from a master storyteller. Exploring the shadow side of love, these are tales of grief, obsession, control. Intricate examinations of trauma and tragedy in raw, poetic prose. In these narratives, a woman imagines horrific scenarios whilst caring for her infant niece; on-line posts chronicle a cancer diagnosis; a couple in the park with their small child encounter a stranger with horrific consequences; a toxic relationship reaches a terrifying resolution…
Originally published under the title The Strange Thing We Become and Other Dark Tales, this is a much-praised collection of deeply unsettling, painfully dark tales.
The attic doll is riding her dog around town selling copies of my book to random passersby. She’s so supportive.
Update: the attic doll is apparently filling my book with “plot holes” as she calls them. She thinks this is helpful. I don’t have the heart to stop her.
Thanks so much to Clare Rhoden for her lovely review of The Merry Dredgers in Aurealis Magazine 160.
Here are 10 new horror books to read before the cosmic crabs travel through the bioluminescent wormhole and take over the world:
SISTERS OF THE LOST NATION by Nick Medina
A young Native girl’s hunt for answers about the women mysteriously disappearing from her tribe’s reservation leads her to delve into the myths and stories of her people, all while being haunted herself, in this atmospheric and stunningly poignant debut.
Anna Horn is always looking over her shoulder. For the bullies who torment her, for the entitled visitors at the reservation’s casino…and for the nameless, disembodied entity that stalks her every step—an ancient tribal myth come-to-life, one that’s intent on devouring her whole.
With strange and sinister happenings occurring around the casino, Anna starts to suspect that not all the horrors on the reservation are old. As girls begin to go missing and the tribe scrambles to find answers, Anna struggles with her place on the rez, desperately searching for the key she’s sure lies in the legends of her tribe’s past.
When Anna’s own little sister also disappears, she’ll do anything to bring Grace home. But the demons plaguing the reservation—both ancient and new—are strong, and sometimes, it’s the stories that never get told that are the most important.
Part gripping thriller and part mythological horror, author Nick Medina spins an incisive and timely novel of life as an outcast, the cost of forgetting tradition, and the courage it takes to become who you were always meant to be.
THE HAUNTING OF ALEJANDRA by V. Castro
Alejandra no longer knows who she is. To her husband, she is a wife, and to her children, a mother. To her own adoptive mother, she is a daughter. But they cannot see who Alejandra has become: a woman struggling with a darkness that threatens to consume her.
Nor can they see what Alejandra sees. In times of despair, a ghostly vision appears to her, the apparition of a crying woman in a ragged white gown.
When Alejandra visits a therapist, she begins exploring her family’s history, starting with the biological mother she never knew. As she goes deeper into the lives of the women in her family, she learns that heartbreak and tragedy are not the only things she has in common with her ancestors.
Because the crying woman was with them, too. She is La Llorona, the vengeful and murderous mother of Mexican legend. And she will not leave until Alejandra follows her mother, her grandmother, and all the women who came before her into the darkness.
But Alejandra has inherited more than just pain. She has inherited the strength and the courage of her foremothers—and she will have to summon everything they have given her to banish La Llorona forever.
From acclaimed author Ai Jiang, follow Wenqi, Liam, and Mrs. to the mysterious town of HOME, a place where the dead live again as spirits, conjured by the grief-sick population that refuses to let go. This edition includes a foreword by Yi Izzy Yu, Translator of The Shadow Book of Ji Yun, the essay “A Ramble on Di Fu Ling & Death” by the author, and two bonus short stories from Jiang: “Yǒngshí” and “Teeter Totter.”
EVEN THE WORM WILL TURN by Hailey Piper
Four years after the events of The Worm and His Kings, Donna Ashton ekes out a life far removed from her troubled past, only to be abducted one December night by a monster in man’s skin.
Held prisoner by operatives of a clandestine research facility and drugged into a sickened state, each day brings questioning and punishment. Escape should be possible when Donna faces only mortal hands this time, but the more she sees, the worse her mind splinters with horrific understanding.
This facility has punched a hole in space and time. Within it lie secrets mankind should never know of a darkness beyond the universe, the legacy of the almighty Worm, and revelations behind Donna’s ordeal four years ago which now might get her killed.
NATURAL BEAUTY by Ling Ling Huang
Sly, surprising, and razor-sharp, Natural Beauty follows a young musician into an elite, beauty-obsessed world where perfection comes at a staggering cost.
Our narrator produces a sound from the piano no one else at the Conservatory can. She employs a technique she learned from her parents—also talented musicians—who fled China in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. But when an accident leaves her parents debilitated, she abandons her future for a job at a high-end beauty and wellness store in New York City.
Holistik is known for its remarkable products and procedures—from remoras that suck out cheap Botox to eyelash extensions made of spider silk—and her new job affords her entry into a world of privilege and gives her a long-awaited sense of belonging. She becomes transfixed by Helen, the niece of Holistik’s charismatic owner, and the two strike up a friendship that hazily veers into more. All the while, our narrator is plied with products that slim her thighs, smooth her skin, and lighten her hair. But beneath these creams and tinctures lies something sinister.
A piercing, darkly funny debut, Natural Beauty explores questions of consumerism, self-worth, race, and identity—and leaves readers with a shocking and unsettling truth.
THIS DELICIOUS DEATH by Kayla Cottingham
From the author of the New York Times bestselling My Dearest Darkest comes another incredible sapphic horror. When four best friends with a hunger for human flesh attend a music festival in the desert they discover a murderous plot to expose and vilify the girls and everyone like them. This summer is going to get gory.
Two years ago, a small percentage of population underwent a transformation known as the Hollowing. Those affected were only able to survive by consuming human flesh. The people who went without quickly became feral, turning on their friends and family. Luckily, scientists were able to create a synthetic version of human meat that would satisfy their hunger. As a result, humanity slowly began to return to normal.
Cut to Zoey, Celeste, Valeria, and Jasmine, four hollow girls living in Southern California. As a last hurrah before graduation they decide to attend a musical festival in the heart of the desert. They have a cooler filled with seltzer, vodka, and Synflesh… and are ready to party.
But on the first night of the festival Val goes feral and ends up killing and eating a boy in one of the bands. As other festival guests start disappearing around them the girls soon discover someone is targeting people like them. And if they can’t figure out how to stop it, and soon, no one at the festival is getting out alive.
THE SALT GROWS HEAVY by Cassandra Khaw
From Cassandra Khaw, USA Today bestselling author of Nothing But Blackened Teeth, comes The Salt Grows Heavy, a razor-sharp and bewitching fairy tale of discovering the darkness in the world, and the darkness within oneself.
You may think you know how the fairy tale goes: a mermaid comes to shore and weds the prince. But what the fables forget is that mermaids have teeth. And now, her daughters have devoured the kingdom and burned it to ashes.
On the run, the mermaid is joined by a mysterious plague doctor with a darkness of their own. Deep in the eerie, snow-crusted forest, the pair stumble upon a village of ageless children who thirst for blood, and the three “saints” who control them.
The mermaid and her doctor must embrace the cruelest parts of their true nature if they hope to survive.
GRAVEYARD OF LOST CHILDREN by Katrina Monroe
At four months old, Olivia Dahl was almost murdered. Driven by haunting visions, her mother became obsessed with the idea that Olivia was a changeling, and that the only way to get her real baby back was to make a trade with the “dead women” living at the bottom of the well. Now Olivia is ready to give birth to a daughter of her own…and for the first time, she hears the women whispering.
Everyone tells Olivia she should be happy. She should be glowing, but the birth of her daughter only fills Olivia with dread. As Olivia’s body starts giving out, slowly deteriorating as the baby eats and eats and eats, she begins to fear that the baby isn’t her daughter at all and, despite her best efforts, history is repeating itself.
Soon images of a black-haired woman plague Olivia’s nightmares, drawing her back to the well that almost claimed her life—tying mother and daughter together in a desperate cycle of fear and violence that must be broken if Olivia has any hope of saving her child…or herself.
Baby Teeth meets The Invited in a haunting horror novel about the sometimes-fragile connection between a woman’s sense of self and what it means to be a “good” mother.
THE VILE THING WE CREATED by Robert P. Ottone
Lola and Ian had what they thought was the perfect relationship. Vacations. Fine dining. A healthy sex life.
But when their childless lifestyle begins impacting their social lives, they decide to take the natural next step.
But what happens when that next step cracks the perfect foundation Lola and Ian have built? What happens when that next step is anything but natural?
Robert P. Ottone’s The Vile Thing We Created is a terrifying vision of parenthood in the tradition of Ira Levin and Thomas Tryon.
MONSTRILIO by Gerardo Sámano Córdova
A “genuinely scary” horror debut written in “prose so beautiful you won’t want to rush” about a boy who transforms into a monster, a monster who tries to be a man, and the people who love him in every form he takes (Ana Reyes)
Grieving mother Magos cuts out a piece of her deceased eleven-year-old son Santiago’s lung. Acting on fierce maternal instinct and the dubious logic of an old folktale, she nurtures the lung until it gains sentience, growing into the carnivorous little Monstrilio she keeps hidden within the walls of her family’s decaying Mexico City estate. Eventually, Monstrilio begins to resemble the Santiago he once was, but his innate impulses—though curbed by his biological and chosen family’s communal care—threaten to destroy this fragile second chance at life.
A thought-provoking meditation on grief, acceptance, and the monstrous sides of love and loyalty, Gerardo Sámano Córdova blends bold imagination and evocative prose with deep emotional rigor. Told in four acts that span the globe from Brooklyn to Berlin, Monstrilio offers, with uncanny clarity, a cathartic and precise portrait of being human.
I’m thrilled to share this blurb from Eric LaRocca for my newest novel The Merry Dredgers:
I went to the thrift store today. Which item would you say is the most cursed: Mrs. Claus, Santa axe, or the vintage doll?
Jeremy C. Shipp 