Tenebrous090: Hibernation isn't taking.
Hey Ho Tenebrous Cult!
Of late, Alex and I are bemoaning that, for whatever reason, we’re both having a harder time than usual adjusting to daylight hours being about 100 minutes long, tops (feels like it, anyway). It’s cold and rainy in Portland, and cold and colder in Romania—yeah we get it, it’s December, what are you the weather police?—and none of it has been terribly wonderful on the ol’ headspace.
(A lot of research went into that paragraph; I just learned that Oregon and Romania are basically on the same latitude line. Neat!)
But, lemons and lemonade and all that: the cold and the grim have rubbed off on our cover art! Alex has finished designing Jacy Morris’ WE LIKE IT CHERRY, coming your way in the faraway, mythical, warm and sunny July 2025:
About WE LIKE IT CHERRY:
Ezra Montbanc is burned out. The reality series he hosts—immersing himself into the cultures and celebrations of Indigenous tribes—borders on pure exploitation and has been relegated to tax write-off status by the network; this was not the prestigious journalism career he had long envisioned.
Everything changes when Ezra receives an invitation to document the rites of a mysterious, hitherto unknown tribe: the Winoquin, who reside in the harrowing, inhospitable Arctic. Ezra and his crew depart immediately for the home of the Winoquin, only to find themselves in a bloody battle for survival against a mythical horror with a serious grudge against modern man.
This one’s a nerve-shredder, y’all. Jacy writes like he owes the devil money, and…I mean, I dunno, maybe he does? We’ve hung out a few times, but can you ever really know a Horror writer? Who knows what he gets up to the rest of the time?
Anyway: you could wait for July to get here, too—minute by agonizing minute, day after eternal day—before you buy yourself a copy of this Weird supernatural survival thriller; or you could just join the 2025 Tenebrous Book Club and not think about it at all; the books will just magically** come to you!
**Please don’t mock my understanding of magic. It’s cold out and my brain hurts.
Full descriptions of all eight of our 2025 titles are available here. We have packages for both print+eBook subscribers, and an eBook-only option that gets you all 8 titles for the price of 7. Print subscribers will get an exclusive t-shirt and some other physical goodies, but all subscribers will get some exclusive content.
Closing the Mausoleum Door on the Tenebrous Anniversary Bash
Bitter Karella, author of “The Ballad of Horse Girl” from SPLIT SCREAM Volume Five, and Chief Instigator of some little thing nobody’s ever heard of, summed up everything you need to know about us in this comic:
If you haven’t read “…Horse Girl” yet, or its companion novelette “The Girl With Barnacles For Eyes” by Lyndsey Croal, it’s not too late to remedy that!
We have one last anniversary story for you, this time from our favorite artistic polymath lunatic and Destroyer of Punctuation™, Valkyrie Loughcrewe, whose PUPPET’S BANQUET just so happens to be included in our 2025 Book Club!
Val blessed/cursed us with this final celebratory slab of New Weird Fantasy. Enjoy:
12:45 train to sligo
by Valkyrie Loughcrewe
CW: dead animal desecration, gun violence
I washed myself, on the morning of the Great Fuckup, with the last of my bottled water and the dew from the grass around the standing stones of Loughcrew. An old man, out for a sunrise jog around the barrows, stared at me. Standing naked in the golden foggy dawn, I threatened to shoot him if he didn’t fuck off. He shot back with some snide remark or another, I could barely hear him over my tinnitus, his accent as thick as a glass of Westmeath buttermilk.
So I popped back into my tent, pulled out my glock and shot him once in the chest. It took him a few minutes to die. I sung him some half remembered verse of an inane radio pop song as he flapped his mouth like a fish out of water. I made sure it was loud enough to drown out the dawn chorus. No way was that prick getting a poetic death. He should be glad to die in a place as nice as Loughcrew.
I fucked some dude the night before. Found him wandering in the mist. I wonder if he was as blasted out of his mind on artificial psilocybin as I was. I’m not even sure he was human. This is sidhe country after all. The baby didn’t seem to mind the sloppy fuckfest going on just a couple of feet away from its shroud, and the dude didn’t seem perturbed by the sinewy, oozing fetal ultraterrestrial wrapped up in black bin liner in the corner of my tent. Maybe he was too horny to say anything. At any rate, he was gone by the time I woke up.
Maybe the kid ate him?
I knew that something wild was going to happen later, that I was barrelling toward some singularity point that was going to change me so fundamentally that it may as well be my death. It was the price I had to pay for bringing The Baby into this world, and I was fine with it. That being said, I still took the time to take down and pack away my fucking tent. I’m not a scumbag. Those little sweatshop children spent all that time packing that thing neatly into the bag for me, I might as well respect their craftsmanship.
Nobody seemed willing to pick me up for a ride to the train station, but I didn’t mind. The air was crisp, the clouds were catching the light just so, and I was just generally up for a walk. People didn’t seem to notice The Baby, which was cool to find out after a bunch of sitcom-like attempts to keep it secret from people, but still nobody was giving me a lift. I started to get a little nervous about boarding this train. Maybe the kid was starting to phase more into consensus reality. I felt bad for it, but whatever. Reality was in dire need of more of this kind of thing.
Operative word being “was”.
The station was fairly buzzing with little groups of people assorted into different genres; a gaggle of football men here, a flock of business folk in their little suits there, a small horde of grannies. There were outliers too, the odd teen, mammy and kids, the ubiquitous guy in the black hoodie and headphones who thinks he’s mad cool going on the train by himself, probably listening to harsh noise or some shit.
Well I got The Baby through the station easy enough, nobody really clocked it, that was cool, but there was this one kid, this little girl dressed like a fuckin’ porcelain doll that I heard going
“Mammy! What’s that lady holding?”
Her ma told her off, which I thought was shitty parenting. Even if you can’t see what the lady is holding you should just make something up. Say a dinosaur. Parenting 101: any question your kid asks you, say it’s a dinosaur. If the kid asks what a dinosaur is, hit them. Simple.
When the train finally rolled up I found a seat across from a snoozing black lady in a blonde wig and sunglasses. She had a coat on that I could only describe as conspicuous, a light grey trench coat with a long collar. The way she was slumping, the collar was folding back and covering half of her face. I should have suspected that she was in fact my nemesis, the dark wizard Suspiria H. Odeda in disguise, but I was still coming down from the drugs.
“I suppose my ability to disguise myself is better than I thought.”
Odeda’s voice boomed out from beneath his blonde curls as I was shoving my tent bag up into the overhead compartment. I turned to see him pull the wig from his shiny bald head, grinning that lunatic grin of his. I rolled my eyes, very much not in the mood for this to happen.
“The magic finger’s in the tent, dude.” I groaned, flopping down into my seat. “Take it.”
He stared down at the squirming alien baby.
“Why do I feel like its power has already been spent?” He purred, arching one immaculately plucked eyebrow.
“You been practicing that eyebrow raise in the mirror, Odeda?”
Suspiria pinched the bridge of his nose.
“God, you are so fucking annoying, you know that?”
“Oh, be civil.”
“Civil?” His eyes bulged. Oh he was pissed. ”I trusted you, brought you into my inner sanctum and showed you this anomalous finger–this object of untold power–and what did you do? You gassed us all like the bloody Joker and stole it! And for what? To bring this hideous turd into existence?”
He gestured at the baby.
“Don’t pretend you’re not impressed,” I drawled, knowing full well that he had never seen anything even close to something this weird in his life.
“I’m too angry to be impressed, girl. I’m here to take revenge.” He pulled a pig fetus out from within his trench coat.
“Ooh what are you gonna do, put a little hex on me?” I mocked, reaching into the backpack on the floor for my gun.
“Something like that.” He smiled, and wrenched the head of the fetus off.
I watched as wasps began to crawl out of the neck-hole of the fetus, buzzing into the air. One of them flew toward me and I slapped it away with the muzzle of my glock. People started to panic, shrieking as the car filled with angry wasps.
“I’m going to subsume this whole fucking island into the Internet!” He bellowed.
There was a clap of thunder so loud and bassy that it made the windows rattle on the train. Torrential rain came down in sheets.
“Alright, that’s enough.”
I shot Suspiria H Odeda three times in the chest and once in the head for good measure. Now people were really panicking. The Baby started to cry for the first time. I could see its little face wrenched into a howl but the sound must have been on a wavelength undetectable to human ears.
People were shoving themselves into the doors, trying to get into another car, away from the wasps. The damn things kept stinging my face, and yeah it hurt but I didn’t care, I was focused on keeping them off The Kid.
The sky had been clear and blue a couple of moments earlier, and now it was a sickly gun metal grey. The bassy thunder had not stopped, either, for that matter, and continued in a ceaseless, low frequency howl. I don’t want to admit it, but Suspiria’s final act had me kinda scared.
“What the fuck is that!?” Some woman shrieked, her face pressed to the glass.
Ah fuck, I thought to myself, I’m gonna have to look at this aren’t I.
The iron grey sky looked like a crashing tsumani unbound from gravity, the hills and sparse buildings of the rural surroundings enveloped in suffocating mist. I didn’t know what to expect the ephemeral cyberspace and mundane physical realities colliding to look like, but a gunmetal horizon being pierced by hundreds of titanic, grasping metal arms reaching toward the ground was definitely not it. The people around me were utterly panicking now. People were trying and failing to wrench the doors of the train open. Some dude stood on top of his seat, swinging his shirt around, hooting. Fair enough.
As I was distracted trying to make out what the hell the weird visual effect happening in the negative space between the gigantic terminator-looking arms was, a couple of teenage girls jumped me, trying to wrestle the gun from my hands. They fought dirty. They bit and grabbed and twisted and, yes, they did manage to abscond with my piece, but not before shooting me once in the chest.
I deserved it. I fell back on my seat, next to the kid, ears ringing as the girls started firing into the crowd, laughing. I looked back out into the storm, choking on my own breath, and the shapes forming in the negative space between the arms began to coalesce.
They were red, raw, and fleshy, with huge toothy lipless jaws that seemed clenched in rage. I could make out elongated ribcages and tiny stubby arms. What the hell were they? I have no idea, even now, shit’s weird out there. It was around then that gravity inside the train started to go; people were getting picked up off of their feet. I watched the bubbling lung blood rise in bubbles and droplets out from my chest wound and started to realise that the world that I knew had only moments left, in more ways than one.
There was only one way to keep going in whatever this space was about to fold itself into, and that was in a form never built for the old world. I turned to the kid.
“You hungry?” I asked it. I shoved my hand into its mouth, and it began to chew.
Val’s first Tenebrous release, CROM CRUACH, really needs to be experienced firsthand. Synopses are always an adventure with this one; CROM exists at the natural nexus-point where Fulci’s Gates of Hell trilogy, Irish mythology and hyper-paranoid near-future political allegory cross, and that’s all cool and almost makes sense, but then it takes a bunch of LSD and starts reciting epic poetry. It reads a lot like Jonathan La Mantia’s cover art for it looks:
It’s also our first (and so far only) book with a map, and all sorts of other fun found-documents included throughout. Check it.
Goodbye for Now/Halloween Never Ends Around Here
I don’t remember why I asked SOFT TARGETS/A SPECTRE IS HAUNTING GREENTREE author Carson Winter to doodle us some Halloween children for this, but I most assuredly did, I have the Discord message to prove it:
But that seems as good a log-off cue as any right now. I’m not sure we’ll fit another newsletter in before the holidays, but we’ll cross paths before the New Year if nothing else. Maybe with another cover reveal? Let’s see if it comes together in time.
Weirdest—and Happiest—of Holidays to you, if we don’t talk before them!
Hail Indie Publishing.
Hail New Weird Lit.
Hail the Tenebrous Cult.
Hail the Winter Solstice, and longer, sunnier days to come.
Matt + Alex