June 12, 2025

New Zines, Award Nominations, and More!

New Zine Bundle Now Available

/If I could make zines for the rest of my life, I’d be a very happy man. And, y’all, this new zine bundle was a goddamn delight to put together.

Just like with the past two zine bundles, I wanted this one to have a lot of tonal variety, including the hilariously bizarre (our Strange World Records zine) alongside the mournful (Endlings), the erotic (Sexy Ghosts), the angry (Inside Thoughts), and the unnerving (Liminal Workplaces).

Among these stories and poems, you’ll find horror in an ever-shifting workplace restroom, a call of the void from deep in the ocean, a statue that appears everywhere on Earth without explanation, a showdown with your fascist grandson, and some truly moving ghostly erotica—plus a lot more (16 pieces in total).

I also drew illustrations for these zines, and some of them are bangers (see below, the most haunted porta potty of all time).

If you’re interested in picking up the zine bundle, it’s available exclusively in the Cursed Morsels store. Physical bundles are $6 plus shipping (US only) and digital bundles are only 99 cents.

Why Didn’t You Just Leave nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award

This past weekend, I got the news that Why Didn’t You Just Leave, edited by Julia Rios and Nadia Bulkin, had been nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award alongside several other banger anthologies. Naturally, I was fucking stoked!

We published this anthology last year to lots of acclaim from readers and reviewers, and let me tell you, it includes so many great ghost stories. Each one premises itself on the titular question of why someone doesn’t just leave a haunted place, whether that be their home, their work, or somewhere else they’re bound to. These stories provide wildly different answers to that question (e.g., a character who stays out of family obligation, another who does so due to agoraphobia, another who finds themself stuck in a government housing program, etc.), so there’s great variety here. Overall though, these stories do share two features: they’re dark and they’re scary.

If that’s your thing—and you’d like to weigh in on this excellent award-nominated anthology—you can snag the paperback here and the ebook here.

Congrats again to our wonderful editors and to each and every other who contributed a story!

What I’ve Been Reading and Listening To

Charlene Elsby first blew me away with Violent Faculties (an extreme philosophical horror novella with a wonderfully strange narrative structure), and she’s done it again with The Organization is Here to Support You, a corporate Weird horror novella.

I’ve read corporate horror before that fails to capture any interest because the way it dramatizes a bureaucratic, dull workplace winds up being kind of boring—big surprise! That isn’t at all the case with Elsby’s newest, which brings a philosophical, bizarre, and dark-humored approach to explorations of its corporate setting. It also goes beyond the typical trite observation that corporate workers often feel like drones. In Elsby’s hands, the examination of personal identity in a bureaucratic context is much more compelling and nuanced.

If Violent Faculties was too extreme for you, I totally get it, but I encourage you to give The Organization is Here to Support You a read. It’s not nearly as extreme, but it’s still deeply weird and enthralling. I absolutely loved it.

As far as listening goes, I’ve been spinning the new Vauruvã record over and over. I’m picky when it comes to black metal, but this band from Brazil hits the mark in every single way for me: soaring, otherworldly atmosphere; intense, catchy aggression; and brilliant, unusual instrumentation. It just fucking rules, y’all. I’ve been evangelizing about these guys for a while, and if you dig black metal, you really need to give this one a listen. It won’t disappoint.