Tenebrous096: And the Award for Oi! You Gave My Nightmares Nightmares! Goes To-
CW: Discussion of Unpleasant Flavors of Baked Goods
Hey Ho Tenebrous Cult!
I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned it in this newsletter before, but CROM CRUACH, Valkyrie Loughcrewe’s first book for us—first published book period, I believe!—
…did not win a Stoker Award.
That in itself isn’t particularly noteworthy; most books don’t win Stoker Awards. Like, practically all of them don’t. But CROM was disqualified not for its literary quality, but because its narrative is written in verse as opposed to traditional paragraph formatting.
(Though the head of the eligibility committee was, uh, kind enough to reach out after the fact to inform us that they were changing the eligiblility rules the next year so that another situation like this wouldn’t happen. It’s called the Crom Cruach-Ception, look it up!**)
Anyway. Valkyrie is back with a new Tenebrous book, and sweet beautiful chaos has once more returned to our shores! I’m not sure this one’s breaking (as many) formatting rules this time around, but it’s definitely breaking brains. Unsurprisingly.
And it’s available for preorder now.
**Don’t actually look that up.
About PUPPET’S BANQUET:
Married couple Celia and Martin are brutally attacked on their drive through the Irish countryside. The attack leaves Celia with a violent schism in her mind, seemingly existing in two places at once: one the “real” world, the other a howling maelstrom of abstract monstrosity.
Of her husband, there is no trace…until weeks later, when Martin is discovered in a hospital for rare and abnormal diseases, his body spliced together with that of an unknown woman.
And they are very pregnant.
PUPPET’S BANQUET is a “diseased Gothic”; a hallucinatory treatise on medical abuse; the systemic disease of colonialism and patriarchy; and the limits of human perception.
Cover art by Donna A. Black.
Interior illustrations by Trevor Henderson.
As you can see in the graphic up there, a bunch of cool people took the PUPPET’S BANQUET Challenge™ and came out with just enough of their brains intact to say some really nice things about it!
PUPPET’S BANQUET is out in May. Preorder it here:
Your first chance to get a copy of SPLIT SCREAM: OFF THE MAP…
…will be at Ghoulish Book Festival, in just three short weeks! Alex and I will be tabling alongside a host of rad Horror publishers and writers, so if you’re in the San Antonio vicinity, come see us! We’ll have a handful of copies on hand to sell.
Book Club Subscribers—and general preorders—will also be receiving their copies a bit early, if all goes well; otherwise, SPLIT SCREAM: OFF THE MAP will be available everywhere on March 27th!
The always wonderful NIGHTTIDE has Q&A discussions with all of the OFF THE MAP writers here and here.
About SPLIT SCREAM: OFF THE MAP
Volume Seven of our ongoing series of paired New Weird Horror novelettes takes readers on nightmare excursions to lonely locales
Íde Hennessy - Sequoia Point
California's rugged “Lost Coast" has long been a treacherous place where dreams—and people—go to die. Meg's adrenaline junkie husband had been so drawn to Sequoia Point’s beaches that he'd requested his ashes be scattered on their black sands. Reeling after his death and a miscarriage, Meg decides to put down new roots in this strange place.
What she finds is a van-life conspiracy theorist seeking refuge from 5G radiation; mysterious packs of roving dogs; cryptic talismans on doors; and a mute woman who looks exactly like her. When a mudslide cuts the town off from civilization, Meg must overcome her debilitating fears to unravel the mysteries of Sequoia Point.
John K. Peck & L. Mahler - Evergreen
Wrapping up the loose ends of her mother's death, Deirdre makes a startling discovery: a tree growing in the closet of her childhood home, and a bizarre collection of knick-knacks buried in its soil. She soon learns that her mother had a hand in her hometown’s long history of odd disappearances and misfortune, and that this ominous tree is her legacy.
Nurturing the tree's soil with filched mementos, Deirdre learns that she can control the vast system of roots thriving beneath the town to a terrifying degree, and she soon finds herself fighting her darkest desires to wreak terrible vengeance on the town that wronged her.
YOU BUY IT, YOU OWN IT.
So, megacorporations continue to divvy up the entirety of the world like the most disappointing kind of pie (…I dunno, beet and sprouts?) and making everything shittier in the process. If that kinna thing comes as a surprise to you, I’m sorry to say it might be bucket-of-ice-water-down-your-pants-wake-up-call time.
You may have heard, but Amazon recently announced that you won’t be able to download the ebooks that you’ve bought and paid for anymore.
So first, to clarify: you can buy our books on Amazon. You’ve always been able to. It’s critical to us to meet our readers wherever they are, wherever they have access. Amazon is horrifically convenient for just about everyone; and in some places they’re the only convenient option. And for droves of indie and self-publishers, it’s the most logical option.
But we don’t have to like it, and we don’t ever push that as the best place to support our authors. Those would be directly from us and from awesome independent bookstores.
So two quick reminders:
#1: As always, if you buy an eBook directly from us, YOU OWN IT.
#2: As always, if you buy a PRINT book directly from us, YOU AUTOMATICALLY GET THE eBOOK FREE TOO.
So, uh, keep buying direct from Tenebrous! And direct from all your other favorite indie publishers too, if you can, and if they offer the option. None of us think we’re gonna stop Amazon from trying to serve up seven shades of unseasoned beet-and-sprout pie, but we can at least hold our own line.
FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS
We wanna draw attention to a couple pals, and the Good Work they’ve got going on.
First up:
The Weirdos over at COSMIC HORROR MONTHLY are launching a second magazine: Goblins & Galaxies!
G&G will be—at least initially, it looks like—a quarterly endeavor rather than monthly, showcasing “the very best of new-wave sword & sorcery, dark fantasy, and science fiction, while paying tribute to the look and feel of turn-of-the-century pulp magazines!”
Go give them a follow for updates on launch and submission windows.
Second up:
Have we—well, Alex started it, but I was a gleeful and immediate convert—told you about our NightFlightPlus jones? We’ve def got one, and if you’re not careful, you could get one too. Not a bad thing, in our opinion.
If you’re an old-ish, you might remember the OG Night Flight programming that aired in the twilight hours on the USA channel in the 80s; that’s my hazy recollection anyway. If you’re not an old-ish, it’s a mix of “cult classics, avant-garde films, obscure documentaries, lost TV treasures, rare music performances, and much more.” And it’s been refurbished and dragged into the modern streaming age without losing any of its eclectic charm.
You can browse for what you want in the app, but personally I like to just tune into one of the two streaming channels and slip into whatever’s on at the moment: docs on Black Sabbath (the band), Aquarius Records (the store), Russ Meyer retrospectives, a variety hour from 1940s Harlem, Basket Case, etc.
Anyhoo. Something fairly brand new and shiny caught our attention: PATER NOSTER AND THE MISSION OF LIGHT, written and directed by Christopher Bickel.
It’s a no-budget horror film, punk-as-fuck in both vibe and methodology: it’s Tenebrous without the Skull & Laurel logo. Not so far removed from how we felt when we first saw the Joshua Hull-written Glorious, Alex and I thought, “this is us through and through; this is New Weird Horror on the screen.”
Anyway: I’m not gonna gush about Pater Noster anymore. I’m gonna let its figurehead, Christopher Bickel, do it himself:
I've been asked by Alex Woodroe to introduce myself and talk a little about my movies for the Tenebrous Press posse.
I'm a "no-budget" filmmaker based out of South Carolina. A nobody from nowhere making little feature films with friends out of begged/borrowed/stolen scraps.
I've recently released my third movie, PATER NOSTER AND THE MISSION OF LIGHT, which is a folk-horror-ish movie about an aging hippie cult and their dark secrets which are uncovered by a group of record collectors hunting for an elusive vinyl grail. It was made for a crowd-funded $21,000 with all of the distribution being done ourselves. It's a rather gory affair, with a lot of inside-baseball nerdery for record collectors and record store employees. It's not likely to find a wide audience, but it wasn't intended for that purpose.
We call our genre "Horror In Opposition." That is to say that not only do we operate completely outside of the Hollywood system, holding the feeling that the "industry" stifles expression and honesty, but also operating under the principle that art should react against the ills of government/society/pop-culture. We call our movies "punk rock demo tapes." Some people connect with the rawness of a great punk demo and there are others who find it abrasive and noisy and not fit for human consumption. Our intended audience is the former.
We release our own blu-rays and records. PATER NOSTER AND THE MISSION OF LIGHT is on a double-disc loaded-down blu-ray and there is a double LP vinyl record release of the soundtrack. We love physical media and are collectors ourselves. The mass movement toward streaming has created a situation, not only with filmmakers, but also musicians and writers, where a handful of content providers make bushels of money controlling the flow of content while creators make very little. When we sell a blu-ray we made ourselves, we can double our unit cost, keeping a healthy profit that allows us to continue making movies. When someone streams our movie, we might make 3 cents if we're lucky! That's not to say we don't do streaming—we want to find our audience!—so we're on Amazon and Night Flight and a few others. But we try to make our physical releases so great that there's a reason to choose them over streaming. Not that money matters much to us outside of its usefulness in being able to continue doing art.
Would you like our movies? Maybe if you don't mind a little of the unintentional camp that comes from unprofessional acting and cheap sets. Maybe if you don't mind a lot of excessive violence. Maybe if you're looking for something that's not a sequel/franchise/remake/reboot whathaveyou. Then, yeah, you might like them and I hope you do!
-Christopher Bickel
Intrigued? You should be. You can watch the trailer and buy a copy of PATER NOSTER AND THE MISSION OF LIGHT, here.
Now, go preorder PUPPET’S BANQUET and SPLIT SCREAM: OFF THE MAP, or get a copy of Koji A. Dae’s CASUAL if you haven’t yet, and support the Filthy Humans making Filthy Human independent art.
It’s a balm for the soul. It’s a small resistance against the homogenization of culture. It’s a ticket out of this madhouse, at least for a while.
See you next week, Weirdos.
Hail the Tenebrous Cult.
Matt + Alex