Skankin' to the Tenebrous Beat
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Hey Ho, Tenebrous Cult!
In a shocking reveal that wasn’t really so shocking to begin with, but nonetheless managed to gain steam this weekend in the Tenebrous Discord…it turns out that Alex is not a fan of ska.
I’m not even really a ska fan per se (though I’m sure Murphy’s Law counts on a couple songs), but in this binary, black-and-white-ska-flag-checkered modern world, to not hate ska means to love ska til your dying breath. Sorry y’all, it’s all or nothin’ here.
Eventually Annika swooped in with the perfect closer:
…which segues perfectly to this (I was sure I was goin’ somewhere with this, phew!)
THE SKULL & LAUREL Issue 004 is Out Next Month!
Mx. Morgan G Robles is back with another stunner of a cover; that color palette is to die for, right?! Assuming we stick the landing on this one—insert knocking on all of the wood in sight here—this will tie one Weird-ass bow on a successful full year of THE SKULL & LAUREL. A fact I’m still a little dumbfounded by; I mean, we hatched this crazy shit about 16 months ago, said we were gonna put out four issues in a year and then…did. Huh. Cool. Go us?
I’m currently making uncomfortably lascivious eyes at magazine Editor Cameron Howard; Designer Braulio Tellez; interior artist Samir Sirk Morató; Dose of Dread editor Alex Ebenstein; and our murderer’s row of associate editors (deep breath):
junkyard ambrose, J.W. Bodden, Emma Cole, ZE Coonen, Kate Dudley, Elim Geary, Catherine Gorman, Abigail Guerrero, Jim Horlock, Christian M. Ivey, Dany M., Fox Nichols, Leo Oliveira, Tanya Pond, Michael A. Reed, Mirela-Andreea Rotariu, Harrison Stypula, Aditya Sundararajan, Hazel Zorn, Michael Bettendorf, Kriston T.G. Evenson, Zachary Gillan, Finja Hennicken, Sara S. Messenger, and lord I hope I didn’t miss anyone. Next time we see any of you at a convention or on the street, we owe you drinks.
And of course, as always and above all else, my partner Alex for steering this entire thing and shouldering the load of it (but you get to hear more from her below! And it’s not her opinions on ska music!)
We’re currently figuring out which direction to point the sails of the THE SKULL & LAUREL next; as soon as we’ve decided, we’ll let you know. In the meantime: I sure as hell wouldn’t be opposed to y’all continuing to support it. You can order each issue of THE SKULL & LAUREL a la carte, or save a few bucks and get all four right here.
…Wait, shit! you probably wanna know what’s in this issue, don’t you?
Well, it’s loaded. Unsurpringly.
We’ve got original comics by Carl Antonowicz; a role-playing game from M. Belanger; an essay on "Polite" horror from CJ Subko; and of course the absolute finest selection of New Weird fiction that you can find, slicing across Horror, Sci-Fi, Fantasy and beyond:
Table of Contents:
Alligator Uniform by J.B. Kish
Prostheses by Mar Vincent
Dose of Dread: Big Blue by Allie Bustion
The Night Market by Erin Brown
Stigm- by Allison Mick
My mother was born from an apple by Tehnuka
"Again!" Atabey Commands by Chey Rivera
Kapre's Calling by Kyle Tam
No Treaty for Old Gods by Jacy Morris
THE SKULL & LAUREL issue 004 is out in late July.
Editor-in-Chief Alex Woodroe doesn’t stick her head into this newsletter foolishness too often, unless she’s got something important to say.
Well, she’s got something important to say, so pipe down in back!
Here’s Alex With the Weird Weather
We just had a seance, and Hodgson said yes.
Okay, not really—or did we? We would. You know we would—but we are gonna be doing something supremely fun, Weird, and so very Tenebrous, to a Hodgson volume.
Specifically, The Night Land; lovingly known as The Greatest Weird Book You've Never Read.
If you're not familiar with The Night Land, it's a magnificent and gargantuan manuscript by English writer William Hope Hodgson, first published in 1912. It's officially classed as "a work of fantasy and horror" and you bloody well know what that means. It's a Weird-o. Clark Ashton Smith called it "the ultimate saga of a perishing cosmos, the last epic of a world beleaguered by eternal night and by the unvisageable spawn of darkness". Neat, huh?
The problem is, many many people—often despite being told over and over again to please, please give it a chance *coughs looking at you writing group coughs*—just can't read the bloody thing.
And that's in some part due to the fact that it's enormous, and in some part due to the fact that it sounds like this:
"Yet, in truth, as I do now have knowledge, it was the North that drew; and I do seem to make a great telling about this little matter; but how else shall I show to you mine inward mind, and the lack of knowledge and likewise the peculiar knowings that did go to the making of that time, and the Peoples thereof, which is but to say the same thing twice over.
And now, as I did say, I made to compose myself for sleep; and to this end, I took a cloak-matter which did cross my shoulder and hip, and wrapt it about me, and lay down there in the darkness of the Night, by that strange fire-hole.
And I lay the..."
I didn't even pick that passage to be particularly dense, I just opened the manuscript and scrolled to a random one. "BUT I SWEAR IT'S SO GOOD" is what I've been telling everyone around me for a long long time until I finally decided: you know what? We can do something about it.
In fact, we want to do a lot of things about/to it.
We're going to illustrate it. We're going to illuminate it. We'll give it comic panels. We'll annotate it. We'll reformat it. Maybe give it more spacing. Maybe footnotes. We'll use fonts that improve readability. We'll remix it, remaster it, and reanimate it. We're going to do every single thing we can think of to make it easier for brand new readers to get into, and stay into, this monstrous world.
The end result should be pretty magnificent. We'd like to think that if Hodgie was in indie horror now, this manuscript—like so many of our titles—would come to us because the author thought, 'this is insane and I love it and nobody else would ever take it.' Join us on the journey of finding out exactly what that would have been like/will be like, because time is a flat circle and we’re in it right now.
Without further ado:
Coming in 2026: This one is gonna hurt.
I warned you last week that we were loaded up with news this time out. Here’s more:
Santiago Eximeno is a Spanish genre writer who has published several novellas and collections, mainly horror literature. His work has been translated to English, Japanese, French and Bulgarian. His last book published in English was Umbría from Independent Legions in 2020.
ALICIA IS IN THE BASEMENT was previously published in Spain, ten years ago; but it’s never been published in English. I’m going to avoid using sweeping hyperbole like “This is the scariest/most disturbing book you’ll ever read in your life!!!” Instead, I’ll share my experience reading it in the submissions pile, knowing nothing about it beyond a tagline:
50% of the way through: I don’t know that we can publish this, but damn am I hooked as a reader.
75% of the way in: There is absolutely no way we can publish this, I can barely bear to read it; I CANNOT STOP READING IT.
Finished: Welp. There’s not a chance in hell that we’re the publisher for this. But that is one of the most devastating, brilliant books I have ever read.
Six hours later, lying awake at three in the morning, unable to get it out of my mind: We’re totally publishing this. We have to. How could we not?
Needless to say, ALICIA IS IN THE BASEMENT disturbed me profoundly. I felt off-kilter for two days after finishing it. If “my insides felt like scorched motor oil” is a vibe, than that’s the vibe it gave me.
And yet, I was dazzled. Despite the extraordinary pain that howls throughout this brief book, I felt exhilarated. There’s a quality to it that frankly, I’m not sure I’ve ever felt before in prose. Santiago’s harrowing tale, combined with an absolutely masterful translation by Alicia L. Alonso that simply cannot be overstated—I’ll tell you this for free, if I never fully appreciated the skill set of translation, I sure as hell do now—is a meditation on evil and loss that is stark, unfussy and propulsive. It cuts remorselessly, like Jack Ketchum or a Richard Stark crime novel. It’s Weird and it’s very, very Horror.
ALICIA IS IN THE BASEMENT will release in early summer of 2026.
You can subscribe to the TENEBROUS BOOK CLUB all year long!
With the release of the latest BRAVE NEW WEIRD (on sale now!), we’re officially halfway through our 2025 publishing calendar.
But if you think that means it’s too late to get in on the action…boy are you wrong. It’s never too late!
Well, someday it’ll be too late, but today is not that day.
Get all eight of our 2025 titles, plus some exclusive bonus material courtesy of both us and the authors.
If you wanna stick to just grabbing the occasional book, that’s a great option too. Honestly, there’s not a bad way to support Tenebrous; it’s all appreciated more than you know.
It appears we’re out of room this week! More announcements coming next: another 2026 titles, a cover reveal, who the hell knows what else.
Hail all y’all!
Matt + Alex