Trash is Salad for the Soul
Hey Ho, Tenebrous Cult!
“If I'm willing to admit what I'm reading in a professional setting then it's not trashy enough and I need to scale up.”
Tenebrous Editor-in-Chief Alex Woodroe, certified trashhound
Alex is referring here to what she reads to unwind after the work is done, not to Tenebrous releases themselves; though I imagine at least half of our authors would be pleased as punch to be called “trash”. Really depends on the context.
It also sounds like I’m throwing her under the garbage truck, but that’s not fair; we’re both of us trashhounds. Certified and certifiable, unrepentant, unapologetic and proud of it.
We treat our business deadly serious. Tenebrous is our life. The Weirdness we shepherd into the world represents the blood, sweat and tears of multiple individuals: the authors of course, but also the artists and ourselves. These books are sacred to us, and they deserve to be treated as such.
They’re also, we hope, the absolute pinnacle of joyous trash to some of you. Many of you!
Look, my whole life has been one endless worship service to the Low artforms that are eye-rolled, stigmatized and scoffed at by certain circles to this day. Comic books, horror movies, Pulp paperbacks, punk and heavy metal records; basically all the things that had to be hidden from Satanic-Panicked parents.
Circa today, not a lot has changed, I’m proud to say. This goddamn newsletter is being written to a soundtrack of Ozzy’s The Ultimate Sin…hold on, gotta change the record to Cock Sparrer’s Shock Troops. On the nightstand are Slaine comics, Kull the Conqueror, an utterly battered copy of Brian Lumley’s Blood Brothers (100% Alex influence, that one, hails Alex)
My stalwart Trashhound Tenebrous partner shares the dirt with me about “werewolf thriller number whatever” that she’s reading, and the two of us pass NightFlight movie recommendations back and forth like we’re racing each other into the gutter.
And if I’m calling something “trash” that you call “treasure”…well that’s kinda completely my point. They even have an adage for it and everything.
I was hanging out with Danger Slater (House of Rot, Tenebrous) and Eve Harms (Transmuted, one of my favorite trashy books in recent years that we didn’t publish!) last week, and they opined that Tenebrous’ particular strain of Weird fiction tends often toward the Literary. And that’s absolutely true, there’s no denying it…but is it strange that I was almost a little offended by that?
The world is painful enough as it is; you don’t need to subject yourself to art that makes more demands of you than a six-year-old child. There’s plenty of room for challenging art too—I’m also intermittently poking at The Brothers Karamazov, and stop rolling your eyes, Alex, your werewolf paralegal is howling for you—but here at Tenebrous Manor, trash rules.
Soon as I’m done typing this, there’s a stack of Conan the Barbarian comics and an old Demolition Hammer CD waiting for me. Every day is Trash Day around here.
Share with us in the comments: what is your trashiest trash obsession? What should we gorge ourselves on? There’s no shame or fear here, this is a 100% Safe Trash Zone…unless it’s the Red Hot Chili Peppers. And they’ve made a gazillion dollars already, so what the hell do they care what I think?
Final BRAVE NEW WEIRD Table of Contents Coming Next Week
I can 94% guarantee.
…nope, 97%. Absolutely certainly. Probably.
It’s only because there’re so many good stories to whittle through. When no choice is the wrong choice…it can be hard to make a choice! But Alex has her final selections over 80% of the way there; I’ll weigh in soon and we’ll debate if there’s anything I absolutely, positively have to see get added to it; and that’ll be that.
A reminder to everyone who made the shortlist: The Best is relative. Our final Table of Contents is meant to serve as a glance at the state of Weird Fiction (spoiler alert: it’s healthy as f%$k). Final stories are chosen based on how they pair and puzzle together, and are reliant on variety in subject matter, length, style and voice.
As soon as the final ToC is announced, standard preorders will open. BUT! We still have a few copies of the limited-to-50 hardcover with signed bookplate available. Click the button up above to secure one, or preorder here.
Valkyrie Loughcrewe’s PUPPET’S BANQUET crashes into your brain, leaves scars, in 3 weeks
More than a couple early readers have described Val’s utterly gonzo upcoming novella as splatterpunk and…y’know what, I’m totally fine with that?
The term splatterpunk gets conveniently trotted out these days, interchangeably and exhaustively, and often slapped on whatever offshoot of extreme horror people don’t feel like describing further. But for me personally, “splatterpunk” is still the transgressive, psychologically jarring, not-afraid-to-get-politically-incendiary work that came of age in the early 90s. Young Clive Barker, Kathe Koja, the Dell/Abyss line of books.
PUPPET’S BANQUET is swarming with those Dell/Abyss vibes. This book is f$#king razor sharp and merciless. Val’s previous book with us, CROM CRUACH, is brutal and epic and utterly unique; there’s nothing else out there like it, and that ain’t hyperbole. If you’ve read it, you know I speak true.
PUPPET’S though…PUPPET’S just flat out terrifies me. It feels like bugs behind my eyes (I mean that in the best way possible, if such a thing can have a best way). It’s a hallucinogenic blast, medically tested in all the most unethical ways on filthy-human lab subjects.
I wanna go read it again right now.
We originally had a different interior artist lined up for this one, but some eleventh hour conflicts nixed that. Luckily, Nightmare Superhero™ Trevor Henderson was waiting in the wings to save our bacon, ready to utilize his specialized skills to drag the medical monstrosities lurking within the pages of PUPPET’S BANQUET screaming into the light.
Honestly, I don’t know why we didn’t just go with Trevor from the go:
We’re certainly not saying you shouldn’t go to the doctor; maybe just avoid these particular doctors in PUPPET’S BANQUET.
PUPPET’S BANQUET is out May 14th. Do you dig the darker side of what Tenebrous has to offer? This is the book you’re looking for.
Bonus Feature: Rooting Through Our Trash
Circling back to where we started this missive: I’m a junkie for the artifact, for physical media. Again, both Alex and I are. It’s why we care so much about things like interior art, and human made art in general; humanity is a fleeting species in the grand scheme of things—fleeting-er by the day, it feels!—but what we create, the art we make, is the crystallization of our imperfections, hopes, fears and brilliance. The stories we tell, the pictures we paint, the songs we sing, will reveal our true legacy to whatever extradimensional alien race is watching us, in far more detail than our rotting bones will.
I’m feeling extra hyped about all my trash media of late because I finally bought a new boombox (I know. Remember those? Ask your uncle. No…not that one. That guy’s…well, let’s just say he’s got problems.) so that my piles of cassettes and CDs were no longer just taking up Tenebrous office space. Now they’re taking up Tenebrous office space, and assaulting my ears, gloriously:
Add “after hours at the Kinko’s copy machine” to the outdated granddad-can’t-hear-so-well-anymore phrases in this newsletter, alongside “CD”, “Cassette”, “boombox”, and “Brian Lumley”.
These are a selection of demo tapes from central Illinois punk/metal bands circa 1988-89; also known as “Matt’s formative years”. And they all still play! A little warbly here and there, sure, but these were never meant for crystal clear modern stereos. A shitty boombox is perfect. And the painstaking adolescent care that went into the art, the photo-copying, the mixed fonts and scrawls and barely readable lyrics…it’s all so gloriously, perfectly imperfect. It’s so trashy and human.
BEFORE WE FORGET…
Buy some shit! The world’s going to hell, but at least the reading material is top notch.
Hail Trash!
Hail Indie Publishing.
Hail the Tenebrous Cult.
Matt + Alex
A piece of my trash salad -- whenever I hear the song "Semi-Charmed Life" by Third Eye Blind playing over the speakers somewhere, I am enraptured, and I stare off into the soul of the universe.
I can't be the only one who wants to exchange currency for merch with that flaming skull TRASH graphic...maybe on a cap for flaming summer sun protection?