072. Welcome to Greentree: Please don't feed the scarecrows.
Plus The Skull & Laurel Table of Contents and more
Hey Ho, 10p Cult!
A SPECTRE IS HAUNTING TENEBROUS
…and has been for awhile now.
We’ve worked with Carson Winter a number of times now and, to be honest, the timeline has become a bit muddy in my brain. I know the first book submitted, and published, was SOFT TARGETS; but that was also the first book we rejected (that saga has been recounted in an old newsletter that I can’t seem to track down; TLDR: I was squeamish with the gun violence side of it; Alex knew it was great and wanted it; I eventually saw the light.)
SOFT TARGETS was so great, though, that we made sure Carson knew the door was propped open to him any time. I think he and Jolie Toomajan next pitched us POSTHASTE MANOR before it was fully written, and that one went through a yearlong gestation period before its release last October. And then somewhere in there we un-rejected SOFT TARGETS and-
…what the hell does any of this matter, anyway? Point is, Carson has been Tenebrous Cult for a stretch now; it didn’t hurt that, until last month, he lived just across the river from me, in Washington state (he’s now split the PNW for WeirdPunk country) and would regularly huck manuscripts out his window in our general direction.
The real reason Carson keeps popping up like a bad punk rock penny is because the mofo can flat out write the kind of stuff that Alex and I drool over. We call ourselves the Tenebrous Cult? Well, Carson is very much that Cult-level writer. The writer that other writers dig; and when he eventually breaks through to the mainstream, you’re goddamn right I’ll be waving a giant sign that says “WE WERE THERE FIRST”.
Is A SPECTRE IS HAUNTING GREENTREE gonna be that break-through-to-the-mainstream book? I mean, in a fair balanced world, absolutely; but indie presses—all indie presses, mind you; I’m not just woe-is-me-ing for poor 10p—are fighting an ever-shifting terrain where the only constant is that the hill we’re on seems to constantly grow steeper, and the gate at the top grows ever more impenetrable. We definitely do alright by ourselves and our creators, but we’re a niche publisher in a niche genre, with the resources to match, and we have stubbornly refused to play the game the mainstream way, so who knows?
It sure as hell deserves to be a hit. A SPECTRE IS HAUNTING GREENTREE plays with a lot of elements that are catnip to horror fans: small town conspiracies, retro-vibe videostores, secret histories, cults. Its central supernatural menace is old-school simple, underutilized in popular Horror, and forehead-slappingly awesome. Its lead characters—Carina, skittish and damaged and bent but refusing to break; Hazel, defiant, full of piss and vinegar, and sharper than she lets on—are extraordinarily rich and multi-faceted.
But if you know us, and Carson, then you also know: it’s Weird. It’s unapologetic. Much like SOFT TARGETS, it wears its ethos brazenly on its chest (for those of you rolling your eyes right now, I’ve got some sorry news for you: your favorite classic Horror writers were political too.)
But let’s hand it over to Carson himself to tell you the other side of the story:
Her heart clenched like a fist.
She fell to one knee, then to the other. The other shoppers, who just moments before had been oblivious, took notice. They stopped and stared at the woman who held her chest, hyperventilating. Carina swiveled her head wildly looking for help. She couldn’t breathe. She was gasping and tears ran down her cheeks. With some effort, she managed, “Help me.”
In my late 20s, I was having small micro-lapses in consciousness. My heart would be pumping; then suddenly, the record would scratch and I’d feel like I’d just been dunked into the void for a second. Here one second—gone the next—back again.
It was so brief it was mostly easy to ignore; so that’s what I did. A manageable inconvenience. I googled it and everything. Hearts skip beats all the time. It’s nothing. Just a fluke.
But eventually, it was more than just skipped beats. My heart was pounding. Right out of my chest, into my ears. Nausea was constant, along with an exhaustive lightheadedness.
I left work to go to the ER and they told me what I already knew—yes, my heart rate was high, but not the highest they’d seen. I was resting at a breezy 120 beats per minute, which meant all they could do for me was give me a low-grade anti-anxiety, a heart monitor, and tell me to see my regular doctor.
Still, I felt perpetually sick. And if I did anything but lay still, my heart would jump even higher. I couldn’t eat, because it would raise my heart rate and then the skipping, galloping rhythm would only increase and I’d lock onto my ultimate fear—that I was dying. Not in an abstract way, that everyone dies someday way. But in a very immediate oh shit this is it I can’t have more than a week tops way.
Twenty-seven is much too young to fully comprehend the clockwork mechanics inside one’s body. You don’t think about it at that age. You set it and forget it. The heart beats because that’s what the heart does. Your lungs take in air. Your stomach digests. These things just work. But for the first time, I had opened up the clock and seen the gears. I was acutely aware of every rumbling my body made, every minor discomfort.
Luckily for me, my problem had an eventual solution. I went to a regular-ass doctor and got put on a medication that makes the heart beat weaker and helps with arrhythmias. Within a minute of taking it, my heart slowed.
But the thinking didn’t stop. The awareness of my gears was persistent. And I ended up going to the ER seven more times that year alone. Every time, the same thing—you’re fine, go home.
My diagnosis was supraventricular tachycardia—a short circuit that makes your heart beat fast for no reason. But at this point, what I was really dealing with was hypochondria.
Health anxiety is one of the more expensive anxieties, and all the more frustrating because it is a liar. It will tell me that I feel tingles in my arm. Twinges of pain in my chest. I’d reach for something and it would tell me, That arm feels weak, right? That can’t be right. And suddenly I was spiraling again. Despite my diagnosis, despite my doctor’s reassurances, I was in a constant battle with my mind. I couldn’t shake the fear that I was about to have a heart attack and die.
It took a long time to trust my body again, and even now there are good days and bad days. The bad days are the ones where my heart skips and gallops in defiance of Metoprolol, and I spend the rest of the day with two fingers to my neck, waiting for the Big One to strike. But most days I don’t think about it, and compared to where I was five years ago, that’s good enough for me.
If you’ve seen the cover of A Spectre is Haunting Greentree, you likely know that it’s a horror novel about revolutionary scarecrows. That’s the fun part of the book, the part where you smile and say fuck yeah as scythes glint in the sunset and stir up blood and guts in small-town Oregon. That shit is cool, I know.
But Greentree is as much about my heart as scarecrows. In fact, I’d say my heart is its stuttering engine.
At its core—like many horror novels—Greentree is a novel about fear. Namely anxiety. That restless fear that defies control, that circles around, dwells on the worst case scenario. That fear that keeps you eyes-wide awake in bed because your brain won’t stop, no matter how much you beg it.
The main character of Greentree, Carina, is unlike me in many ways, but we share anxiety. Carina isn't scared for the same reasons, but her reactions are the same. We both know what it feels like to be under something’s thumb, unable to free ourselves.
A Spectre is Haunting Greentree will always be a healing book for me, as it was the first piece where I really examined myself, dismantled this part of my life, and was able to engage with it in a productive way. That’s not to say Greentree is a story of catharsis—it’s not that either. It transforms an experience that I found traumatic, transubstantiates it into a King-ian romp through small-town horror (and yes, killer scarecrows). Thomas Ligotti says that the best we can do with our existential terror is sublimate it into art. I think with this one, I did that. And now, as we approach release day, I smile rather than cringe. Because I’m proud of it. The journey, the distance, the work.
Because it’s honest. It came from the heart.
Excellent. We did it. We just launched you into the mainstream, Carson **knuckle daps and belly bumps all around**
And you, yes, you: you wanna preorder A SPECTRE IS HAUNTING GREENTREE now, don’tcha?
But wait, check this first! Carson, battle-vested, trve cvlt—wait, wrong book, more on that next time!—punk rocker that he is, was a bit miffed that we haven’t offered a custom patch deal with any of his books, like we did for a couple other titles last year.
So he came up with a design; I illustrated it; and-
…now you can get the socialist scarecrow patch by itself or combo-meal’d up with the book. Or just get the book; we’ve got options!
Extended Tenebrous Cult family member P.L. McMillan, who co-hosts the highly profane and highly uproarious horror fiction craft podcast Dead Languages with Carson—Alex and I have been guests a few times, and they’ve made my brain freeze and my tongue dry up in my mouth more than once—will be hosting an online release party for GREENTREE as well; on Release Day, natch! Registration is free, and there’ll be giveaways, a Q&A, a reading, and more promised shenanigans.
Sign up for the free …GREENTREE online release party here.
A SPECTRE IS HAUNTING GREENTREE is out August 15th everwhere. The Revolution is near.
THE SKULL & LAUREL Table of Contents, Release Date, Subscription Info Coming Soon
We’ve been holding our Halloween-ish slot open in the hopes that all the chips would land where they’re supposed to; and wouldn’t you know it? They have.
New subscribers to this newsletter may be unaware, but this past March we successfully Kickstarted the first year of our upcoming quarterly New Weird Fiction magazine (in about eleven hours, but who remembers those little details?) and we’re thrilled to share the first issue’s release date—October 15th—and Table of Contents:
Fiction:
The Blind Cannot Judge Me, For They Cannot See I'm Good Inside - Rain Corbyn
The Sea-Hare - Wailana Kalama
Dermatillomania - Renan Bernardo
CARTESIANA - Abigail Guerrero
If We've Never Been Gone - Jeannie Marschall
The Halved World - Samir Sirk Morató
Variations on the Memory Palace - Avra Margariti
Dose of Dread: Never Waste A Drop - Tiffany Michelle Brown
Exquisite Corpse: This is not a dog - Various
Nonfiction: Breaking Bad Habits: Chasing Autonomy in Nunsploitation and Religious Horror - Mo Moshaty
As you can see, we’ve got quite the feast of unearthly delights prepared.
The eagle-eyed among you will see we’ve resurrected SPLIT SCREAM editor Alex Ebenstein’s Dose of Dread feature from his much-missed Dread Stone Press website. We’ll also be printing the result of our Exquisite Corpse collaborative storytelling exercise as well. And if you don’t know Mo Moshaty…well, you’re gonna get to know her a whole lot more soon, and her exceptional essay here is a great place to start.
The entire creative team has utterly blown me out of the water. Tenebrous EIC/Heart & Soul of this entire enterprise, Alex Woodroe; S&L Editor Cameron Howard; Designer Braulio Tellez; cover artist WolfSkullJack; interior artist Samir Sirk Morató; our entire associate editor team of j. ambrose, Michael Bettendorf, Emma Cole, Kriston T.G. Evenson, Zachary Gillan, Fi, Christian M. Ivey, Dany M., Sara S. Messenger, and Hazel Zorn; every contributor in the ToC; you can feel the passion breathing in every page of this thing.
This magazine is alive and wild.
It may just be the greatest magazine in the history of the world.
Next newsletter we’ll be opening up subscriptions and single issue preorders. I promise you’re gonna want to be with us from the get-go; THE SKULL & LAUREL is going to be the place to find the finest in New Weird Speculative Fiction of every stripe. This is where you’re going to find—not stars, not the Same Big Names™ designed to draw you in—but the Horror and Sci-Fi and Fantasy writers of the future. The ones who will carry the mantle ever forward.
And you’re gonna get the opportunity to see them at their Weirdest.
I’m hyping this up ridiculously, aren’t I? Trust me, it’s all that and more. Get ready.
**A QUICK NOTE RE: SUBMISSIONS:
If you’ve submitted a story and haven’t heard back from us yet…you will! Fear not! The first submissions call was to cover both issues 001 and 002, and Cameron and the team are hard at work prepping for the next issue already. Thank you for your patience!
The Tenebrous World Tour: The Rest of 2024
We’ve got two more shows coming up this year, on opposite sides of the US; and they’re back-to-back weekends, so you’ll have to forgive us being a little loopy at times. The general joie de vivre should more than make up for it.
First up, we’ll be hitting the mystical, the arcane, the perhaps-slightly-perilous VoidCon. The Void crew shrouds themselves in a brimstone-thick aura of mystery, but I’m gonna spoiler-alert the shit outta them right now: I’ve met and hung out with every last one of ‘em and they’re all delightful chaos gremlins. And we’ll have enough Tenebrous-adjacent folks on hand—SPLIT SCREAM editor & author Alex Ebenstein, SPLIT SCREAM Vol. 6’s David Corse, TRVE CVLT’s Michael Bettendorf, and Weirdo Supremo Joe Koch, who we’re co-claiming just because—to just about even the odds if it comes to a pickup basketball game (though it might be the saddest, wheezing-est basketball game you’ve ever seen). Panels, readings, live music and some special events that promise to make VoidCon something unique from your usual cons. I’m all in on this one, and I hope it’s a success, because I want to see these lunatics continue it into the future.
And we just locked in confirmation last week on this one: both Alex and I will be holding down the 10p table at HP Lovecraft Film Festival here in Portland, Oregon, the weekend of October 4-6th. I had an absolute blast last year at this fest, getting our books in front of an audience with a similar aesthetic but from a completely different perspective; and I’m doubly glad to have Alex alongside me, back in the Rose City for an encore appearance this year. Gwen and Brian Callahan have been tireless acolytes of Weird Horror in the Pacific Northwest for years, shepherding both this branch of the HPLFF, as well as the Portland Horror Film Festival, and we’re grateful to bring Tenebrous back under their banner for a second go-around. Both fests are destination events for Weird enthusiasts from all over the world; I can’t wait to recruit some fresh blood to the Cult (not to mention another opportunity to see some of the finest off-the-radar Horror cinema out there).
We’ll see you back here next week. Do yourself a favor—hell, do a writer a favor, someone who’s in it because they have no choice but to write the story in their mind into existence—and buy a book by someone you’ve never heard of.
Hail the Tenebrous Cult.
Hail Indie Horror.
Matt + Alex