Our newest (very weird) release, upcoming horrors, and more
Shaky Pictures of Vanished Faces
This month, we released D. Matthew Urban’s debut fiction collection Shaky Pictures of Vanished Faces, a book in which characters twist in the grip of forces beyond their understanding. Infused with the weird and uncanny, these stories probe the crannies and dead ends where humanity confronts the implacably alien, where even the most familiar faces begin to change, waver, and fade.
These stories are often disorienting, nauseating, unsettling, and darkly humorous. Urban offers a cornucopia of horrors—from a folk horror tale of a family’s bizarre holiday traditions to a sci-fi nightmare straight out of a Neuralink testing lab. Consistent throughout these stories is a deep sense of strangeness and offness, a feeling that we can never truly grasp the slippery edges of our realities.
Consider the tremendously talented author J.A.W. McCarthy’s five-star review of the book in which she states, “Urban’s stories are the horrors you can’t quite grasp, slipping and slithering just out of mind’s reach. They lurk in corners, crawl over your flesh, scratch at the back of your subconscious months later. Shaky Pictures of Vanished Faces is a showcase of skill, restraint, and unexpectedly playful grotesquerie.”
Interested? Snag a copy from our store and get a free copy of the “Family Legends” zine Urban and I (Eric Raglin) put together just for this release. The zine features stories by Liam Hogan and Karlo Yeager Rodríguez, and illustrations by me.
Order the paperback here and the ebook here.
Gore Poetics
In great 2026 news (and god, do we need that!), we recently acquired Samir Sirk Morató’s weird, nasty, sexy, fucked-up, haunting collection Gore Poetics. I can’t share too much just yet since we’re in the very early stages of the publication process, but I will absolutely encourage you to read their mind-bendingly strange story “Shrike” published in ergot. Stay tuned for more news soon!
Dawn of the Read
In late May, we’ll be tabling at Minneapolis gem Odd Mart alongside a bunch of other horror authors and publishers. Join us to hang out, buy some books and zines, and connect with the horror fiction community!
Ridiculous ideas executed with complete sincerity
On my recent drive back to Nebraska, I listened to the audiobook of Shark Heart by Emily Habeck, a truly stellar novel about love, grief, and transformation. More specifically, it’s about a married couple dealing with the husband’s gradual transformation into a great white shark. The novel is well worth your time, particularly if you appreciate horror, romance, and literary fiction in equal measure, but there’s one particular aspect of this novel I want to praise: Habeck’s willingness to explore a concept that's ridiculous at face value and take it 100% seriously. There’s no smirking irony and no effort to defend this concept against a cynical imagined readership. As a result, the novel maintains immense emotional power and preserves a sense that the stakes are high.
All that to say, I love a book that stands by its ideas and feels no need to disparage them. Art made from a place of sincerity will always be better than art made from a place of detached self-contempt.