Tenebrous081: It's the End of the Weird As We Know It, and We Feel Fine
jk nothing is ending, but here's a free story & some cool art!
Hey Ho, Tenebrous Cult,
Today is a highly charged, stressful day for a lot of us. So let’s spend it with the people, books, stories, and art we love, yeah?
On that note:
It’s November! Happy Birthday, us!
So what did we get ourselves?
Here, this envelope just arrived from Portugal! Leaking something viscous that makes my skin feel kinda funky to touch and it’s pulsating in a way that envelopes really shouldn’t…
Be right back, just gonna go get this tattooed across my entire chest.
Thank you, Echo Echo; you always get us exactly what we wanted, even if we didn’t know it at the time.
In case you’ve somehow missed us raving about Echo’s work in the past, she’s the closest thing to a “house artist” that we have; she’s illustrated covers, interiors, or both, for over a third of our books to date: IN SOMNIO; ONE HAND TO HOLD, ONE HAND TO CARVE; CROM CRUACH; HOUSE OF ROT; THE BLACK LORD; TRVE CVLT; SPLIT SCREAMS Vol. 4, 5 & 6; and the forthcoming ALL YOUR FRIENDS ARE HERE. There’s never a time when we don’t have work queued up for her, except for-
…Hey, right now it looks like. Heads up, Echo! Next assignment is incoming!
We’ve got another fun birthday present to share with you below, but first let’s take care of some business:
One Week From Today, It’s Time to Lock Up Your Parents
COME TO DADDY by Ryan T. Jenkins
A damaged man endeavors to put the pieces back together after a lifetime of destruction; to reckon with his wife and son leaving him; to attend to the dreams of his dead mother’s well-manicured hand scuttling around at night; and the impossibly large garlic bulbs growing in his backyard; and the haunted movie poster of a B-list actor coming to life before his eyes.
It’s time, now, to confront how his marriage of eighteen years went to hell, all because of a trip to the store to buy avocados for his son’s college going-away party…or was it something more?
There’s nothing more punk rock than being a deluded, strung-out, forty-four-year-old dad forced to face the helter-skelter truth. Distilled from the classic Gothic haunted house narrative comes this twisted ode to punk rock and fatherhood.
MOTHER IS COMING HOME by David Corse
When Otis discovers an undulating, flesh-like portal near his barn, he believes he’s finally found a way to escape his hometown and travel the world. All he has to do is sell the oddity to the highest bidder and leave home for good.
His plans crumble when, during a drunken argument, he tosses his sickly and cruel mother through the portal. The momentary elation is brief, and quickly swallowed by a gutting reality. Otis must rescue his mother and protect the strange opening from prying eyes, no matter the cost. The lengths he will go to to hold onto hope are endless in this tale of toxic relationships, failsons, and cowardice.
SPLIT SCREAM: The Parents Ain’t Alright arrives November 12th to tell you what a disappointment you are in front of all your friends. And then, I dunno, flay your skin off with a carrot peeler; it’s Horror, after all.
One Month From Today, M.Shaw returns to the Tenebrous Fold
Every new Tenebrous release gets me Christmas-excited—that feeling of so-amped-I-may-just-throw-up-instead—but I’m feeling a little different about this upcoming collection from M.Shaw. It feels like the closing of a circle that began with ONE HAND TO HOLD, ONE HAND TO CARVE, the first novella we released and the book that still serves as a sort of mission statement for Alex and myself.
Most of these stories have appeared in slightly different guises, in magazines and anthologies over the years. But the experience of reading them all gathered in one volume…the emotional range on display is almost overwhelming. These stories are horrifying, agonizing, heart-wrenching and hilarious. And very, very Weird.
And all the tastemakers seem to dig it, too:
Your new favorite assortment of stories about fascist deer, car-vampires, memory-devouring tree gods, and the torment matrix, from Wonderland Award-winning author M.Shaw.
At last we can confirm what you’ve always dreamed of: All your friends are here!
Why leave your apartment ever again? All your friends are here.
Why go to outer space? All your friends are here.
Why grow, or dream? Why take that vacation you’ve been saving up for? Why set yourself free?
All
Your
Friends
Are
Here.
Contains Ready Player (n+1), a novelette written especially for this collection.
Here’s what some other awesome people you may have heard of have to say:
ALL YOUR FRIENDS ARE HERE is out December 5th, to close out our publishing year in style.
Happy Birthday Us, Part Two! An Exclusive Short Story from Carson Winter
A slew of Tenebrous authors past and present were incredibly generous with their celebratory musings; today we’re honored to share this unreleased tale from Carson Winter (SOFT TARGETS, POSTHASTE MANOR, A SPECTRE IS HAUNTING GREENTREE)!
THE FINAL CIRCUS
CW: Child Endangerment
We heard about the circus from the lips of our brethren. In bars and bookstores, from wide-eyed addicts, tattoo artists, and mordant dreamers. It was on the lips of every angry man, every scorned woman, every screaming child. It started conversations; it ended conversations. For those who were primed for its allure, the very mention of this particular circus inspired conspiratorial whispers, wicked smiles, and earnest, unabashed longing. Irony gave way to sincerity, veins opened. And for those of us who cared for such things, we put our lips to flesh and let the blood rush in.
I was one of these. I was all of them. Knowledge of this impending circus followed me everywhere I went. I found torn handouts on light posts during my midnight walks. The radio crackled to life and I heard advertisements between growling static. On television, the news anchors directed their eyes right at me, staring through the screen, announcing its presence.
The promise of the circus did not offer me any nostalgia, first or secondhand. Still, curiosity gripped me. With repetition, this impending event slithered to the forefront of my mind. It was no surprise then that when the day came, I put aside my usual nervous disposition and decided to attend.
I arrived in an empty dirt lot. The tent in the center of it was large and black, but weathered. Dust clung to it like mold. I had the immediate impression that this was a traveling troupe, that they likely had been to many cities just like mine, where they had performed for many people just like myself. In line, I saw a small cross-section of these walking hypotheticals. They stood in line with straight lips and wet eyes, murmuring to themselves in one-sided conversation. Every so often, they would look in either direction, to see if anyone was watching them. In a fit of self-consciousness, I realized I was doing exactly as they were and when I made this realization, so too did the rest of the people that were like me. And in our shame, we stood like statues until the box office opened.
The line moved quickly and we shambled forward in near unison. The ticket seller was a woman who spoke in an accent. She had gray hair pulled into a bun, held together with two twin daggers. Her glasses fell to the tip of her nose and she tutted at each of us with barely withheld disgust. “No pay,” she said. “Go in.”
“How much?” I said, not fully understanding.
But she said the same thing to the person behind me and I was swept up in the momentum of the crowd and unable to argue. I plodded forward into the dark mouth of the circus.
The tent was hot. Inside it, crimson lights magnified this effect. Each of us tugged on our collar, fanned ourselves theatrically. Silently agreeing that we were all indeed very warm. We found seating on hastily erected bleachers that wobbled and clanked from the collective weight of its patrons. There were so many of us—sitting together, huddled tight. Sweat dewed our foreheads and we gazed upon the empty stage while dissonant chords thrummed from invisible speakers.
After everyone was seated, the ringmaster entered the circular stage. He wore a black top hat and a long cloak that dragged on the floor behind him. His face was painted to look like a skull. Between his fingers, a long red cane twirled. He said nothing.
Timidly, we applauded.
A wave of smoke crept onto the stage, and the deathly ringmaster took off his hat. The smoke rose to obscure the bottom half of his body. In an act of submission (to what I could not say), he then removed his cloak. It was now that we saw that the man was nude and that it was not only his face that was painted, but his entire body. Ribs were painted along his flank, bones were painted along his arms. He spun slowly so that we could see him. Again, we clapped.
Then, the mute ringmaster closed his eyes and his face paint became all the more striking. Where his eyes were, were now empty sockets. The performer took a deep breath, and without hesitation, he fell backwards into the smoke.
We all held our breath waiting to hear his impact.
We heard nothing.
We cheered.
This was a place for people like me. It was tailored to us like our very skin.
Next, we saw a series of acrobats. We ooh-ed and aah-ed as they clumsily jumped from one floating ring to another. Their feet were leaden; their faces terror-stricken. So precarious was this display that there were numerous times when an acrobat fell and was never to be seen again. They would leap out into the air, faces twisted with fear, and they would desperately reach for safety and miss it every time. At first, we thought this was a mistake. That the performers had not been trained well, that perhaps they were new or only remarkably unskilled, but it soon became apparent that this was the act. That their ineptness was the key to this whole bizarre routine. And soon we began to feel the swell of laughter in our stomachs as we recognized this. We clapped as another scared performer missed their mark and fell into the all-consuming fog. The act culminated with one young woman, probably no more than seventeen, walking on a plank that stood well over thirty feet from the stage floor. Her legs trembled; her expression was one of acute anxiety. Constantly, she looked down and had to steel herself as the height shifted from an abstract to a reality. She would lose her footing and regain it, with no less consternation. Eventually though, she too did fall and her fall was the greatest of them all, for it came with an ear splitting scream that ceased suddenly as she disappeared into the swirling fog below.
Our hearts beat in unison, enamored and enthralled by this sudden end and fearful preamble.
The lights went out and we all sat together in blackness, wondering what we would see next. If the lights had come up and the ringmaster returned to say, “Thank you for coming, but that’s all for tonight,” I think we all would have been dutifully impressed with the spectacle so far. But just as the thought entered our head (that’s it, time to go), there was a low voice that growled from the blackness.
It said, “We are coming to our terminus. This is our last stop. Can you believe it? This is it for us. This is a necessary sorrow. It is a curse. Farewell.”
When the lights came back on, there was a stone pedestal in the center of the stage. On it, a pink infant cried. I leaned in, squinting, as I could not tell if the child was real or merely a prop. It wriggled and whined as infants do, clawing at the air in extended colic. Around it, out of the fog, there emerged a quintet of dancers. We clapped. Their faces were covered in dirty bandages, their bodies were lithe and light. Each of them held a sickle.
The dancers did not move in unison. In fact, they seemed to move in defiance of unison. Each of them adopted their own pace and rhythm, their own jerky movements to correspond with the steadily accelerating beat of manic drums that pounded through the loudspeakers, slobbering out of the darkness.
They swung their blades in wide, wild arcs, each time coming closer to the child whose cries only increased in volume. Then as the drums reached a frenzy, the dancers each touched the tip of their blades to the child’s flesh. The child stopped weeping and giggled, batting playfully at the sharp glimmers.
The music stopped. The dancers stood still and from the back of the stage four pallbearers emerged—dour men dressed in black suits who went about their work with grim determination. They carried a child-sized casket.
One of the dancers left their place beside the infant and went to lift the lid of the tiny coffin. The others silently dropped their sickles and lifted the child up high, together, circling the stage, showing its happy face to the entire crowd. When it was turned to us, we cheered.
Finally, they laid the child to rest, in the coffin.
The lid slammed shut and we clapped until the dancers all rushed to the edges of the stage and held their hands up, motioning for us to stop. We fell quiet. We strained to listen. Faintly, I could hear the infant’s screaming begin anew.
And just as I heard it, the pallbearers carried the tiny casket offstage. The crying ceased.
The stage was empty and now was the time for the finale. Smoke clung to the stage floor but soon it lifted. It was a normal sort of floor that you’d expect to see at a traveling circus. One made of hastily assembled plywood—designed to be torn down and rebuilt every night. Designed to capture the imagination of a certain kind of person. When the smoke was cleared, we saw a regular floor with no obvious trap doors. It was as ordinary as they come. We all stared in wonder, searching the grain for a trace of the performers. But the more I searched the more I realized the impossibility of this, as the dirt below the stage was perfectly visible. The stage was lifted above the ground only six inches.
The lights went out and we all stood in perfect blackness.
A gravelly voice broke through the crowd again. “Thank you for coming and thank you for leaving. It is always sad to watch someone go. It is always so, so sad.” The voice paused and a single sign that read EXIT glowed green in the blackness. “We hope you enjoyed your time with us.”
After, we waited in the dark. Surely there was more? Surely there had to be more? But we waited and waited and there was nothing. Soon though, we gathered our things and stood up, a curious malaise overcoming us. A sense of finality, and with that a sense of sorrow.
We moved in droves to the exit, hands on each other’s shoulders as we passed in absolute blackness. The sound of our bodies became silence.
It started as a joke. You should know how those things turn out.
So that story up there was written by Angel Carson.
Now, as for Devil Carson? Well, he and P.L. McMillan, his equally depraved Dead Languages Podcast co-host, have recently launched the—ahem—Cummies, a new award for Horror literature!
There’s actually some fun Cummies Categories to be nominated for, despite/in addition to the name (hmm, Press Least Likely to Fuck You Over sounds like a good one.) But if you’ve got some favorite recent horror books that have slipped through the cracks, here’s your chance to get them in the spotlight.
Read the rules and get to nominating right here.
Friends, the world is still going to be here tomorrow, no matter what happens today.
Hail the New and the Weird.
Hail the Tenebrous Cult.
Breathe, hydrate, eat something.
Matt + Alex