TWO KALEIDOSCOPIC RIDES

KEEPING MY LITERARY HAND IN WITH “STORIES FROM THE MOTEL SICK” AND “SINISTER SOCIETIES”

For a guy who said he was “retired from publishing,” I sure published a lot this year! Not just The Ugly Truth, which came out in the summer, where I teamed up with Aron Beauregard and Shane McKenzie to slap the shit out of lying as a way of life. (I have a whole separate essay about this, here.)

Or my own book, This Is Splatterpunk, where I lay out my take on the wildass literary ship I sailed in on. (And which I’d be delighted to see you purchase here!)

But I also wrote pieces for two new books – one freshly out, one coming next week – that I’m extremely proud of, and excited to share.

The first is called Stories From the Motel Sick. It’s a brain-bending, genre-blending anthology of weirdness from the bent and blenderized brain of one Michael Allen Rose. And in exploring the endless corridors of this hole-in-the-wall-of-infinity, a bunch of really fine writers have a really fine time mixing horror, Bizarro, speculative fiction, and whatever other wild style they wanna throw at the walls of glory.

My own piece is called “The Last Room at the End of the Very Last Hall,” and it closes out the book with some horny hijinks, wacky laughs, no small amount of bittersweet sadness, and the kind of stripped-down soul transcendence I would wish for all of us, when we reach the end of our road. It’s one of my favorite short stories ever — I was honestly surprised by how hard I fell in love with it — and I can’t wait for you to read that crazy fucking thing.

Along the kaleidoscopic way, you get all kinds of other crazed shit from no less than Matt Dinniman, Brian Pinkerton, John Baltisberger, Christine Morgan, Jim Marcus, Christopher Hawkins, John Chambers, Cynthia Pelayo, David Agranoff, John Wayne Comunale, David Scott Hay, Garrett Cook, Jason Rizos, Jeff Strand, Bridget D. Brave, John Bruni, Elizabeth Broadbent, and Shane McKenzie. Finally reading it all now, and having a serious blast. Again, you can ORDER IT HERE!

And on this coming Tuesday, December 9th, I’ll be hosting the online launch party for Sinister Societies, a new compilation of six far-flung and stunningly-diverse novellas, which I suspect you may also enjoy like crazy.

Though I’m not one of the six fine authors featured, I did have the honor of writing the foreword, wherein I spilled a dark secret from my own unnerving past. A totally fucked-up true story, which I am pleased to have survived. Odds are really good that you’ll have heard it here first.

But the real attraction is the fiction itself. And on Tuesday the 9th, I’ll be conducting Q&As with these six talented writers, taking you inside their cunning puzzle-piece worlds.

Inside, you’ll find spies, stars, sex cults, secret families, Nazis, demons, giant spiders, and the king of the rats himself. You’ll find witches and crime lords and miners and monsters. Books that kill. Flowers with teeth. And moons that devour the sky.

You’ll also meet people both brave and tragic, some of whom you may come to love. Not all of them will survive, alas. (But if it’s any consolation, a whooooole lotta assholes die!)

With “Cult of Least Resistance”, Cindy O’Quinn brings her warm, soulful, authentic and chilling Appalachian folk horror voice to this fraught, tightly-wound but brutally untangling web of haunted mothers, sisters and brothers, betrayal, psychosis, and a love so strong it might even prevail. It’s a dark yet beautiful story, and a truly great way to begin.

“Agent Josephine Baker Against the Island of Horrors” is a super-fun pulp adventure, set to Errick Nunnelly’s zippy, vintage 1940’s jazz score. It’s playfully nostalgic and crisply textured, as fresh and full of surprises as our intrepid heroine, rollicking and replete with old-school anti-fascist thrills.

Mercedes M. Yardley brings her breathtaking vision of a natural world both insane and profound to her mindblowing fantasy, “The Secret Witches of Paradise.” It is, to me, the book’s most shocking and unsettling piece. But there’s a measure of the miraculous flowing through it that resonates hard in the collective unconscious. Which is to say, this crazy motherfucker runs deep.

Mike Burke is next with “Vengeful Spirits”, a perkily-brooding Prohibition-era puzzle box that twistily mixes noir and the occult. It’s a mystery packed with double-crossing mayhem, and impossible visions grounded in rich, vivid period detail, bringing us back down to earth with all cylinders firing.

Take a deep breath, and before you know it, you’re waaaay the hell down in “Tunnel 17”, Tom Deady’s creepily atmospheric deep-dive into the nightmare pit. This is a piece that benefits mightily from Deady’s dedication to getting the details right, juxtaposing supernatural horror with the economic horror of murderous union busters and unsurvivable working conditions.

Finally, we come face-to-face with Sarah Read’s freakily ingenious “Cult of the Rat King”, where a destitute young thief pickpockets far more than she bargained for. This fascinating mind-bender ping-pongs easily between photo-realism and total surrealism, bringing the book’s wild adventures to a perfect flesh-shredding punch-in-the-nose conclusion.

What the whole thing underscores is how lucky we are to belong to this society of the creative and strange. It is a society that spans the globe, through books and film and music and dance and every art form the human race has yet deciphered. Sharing our darkness, our light, and our dreams.

I don’t have a preorder page to send you to. But if you show up at Tuesday’s event, I’m sure they will by then! HOPE TO SEE YOU THERE!