DO YOU BELIEVE IN MISTER BONES?
Dear internet friends,
I wrote a new novel and it’s out now through Apocalypse Party. It’s called I Believe in Mister Bones and it’s about a married couple who run an indie horror press together. It’s about the internet, and the ghosts it’s left behind. It’s about the universal terror of the human skeleton, and the claustrophobic nightmare of body dysphoria. It’s about curses and belief and dreams and love and anxiety and the complete clusterfuck of the U.S. healthcare system. I guess it’s about a lot of things.
The email’s subject line reads: DO YOU BELIEVE IN MISTER BONES?
The recipient: Daniel Addams, one half of the Texas small press known as Fiendish Books, co-run with his wife Eileen.
Despite being closed for submissions, curiosity gets the best of him and he takes a look at the anonymous author’s bizarre manuscript—only to find himself obsessed with the titular Mister Bones, a mysterious entity rumored to steal your bones as you sleep, one by one, until he’s replaced your entire skeleton with an unknown substance.
But is Mister Bones real, and has Daniel unintentionally summoned him?
Or, as Eileen suspects, has he finally cracked from stress and lost his mind?
From the writer of WE NEED TO DO SOMETHING and ABNORMAL STATISTICS comes Max Booth III’s I BELIEVE IN MISTER BONES, a harrowing exploration of indie horror publishing, internet curses, and the universal terror of the human skeleton.
I wrote the majority of the book a few months ago while having a panic attack, which is the only way books ought to be written. Some of my big inspirations were The Ring, In the Mouth of Madness, & The Cipher. There’s also some The Empty Man, A Nightmare on Elm Street, & Wonder Boys in its DNA. Trevor Henderson painted the cover. Betty Rocksteady illustrated art for the interior. Lori Booth designed the interior text. Ben DeVos edited & published it.
Almost all of Betty’s interior illustrations are either massive spoilers or seriously NSFW, but there’s one I think is okay to share, which we’ve dubbed the “Burnt Face Lady”…
Betty posted the following on Facebook earlier this morning, concerning the illustrations:
The 9 illustrations I did for this are the best I’ve done in my career imho they are all insane, gory, and nsfw and I’m so proud of them.
The publisher and I decided to skip the exhausting campaign that makes up pre-order promo. Instead, we wanted to simply bring it into this weird little world and set it free. And now here it is. It’s out. If you want to read it, you can go ahead and do exactly that. No waiting necessary. It’s on Bookshop.org and Barnes & Noble and Amazon or you can contact your local indie and request them to stock it. Signed & personalized copies can be secured through my webstore (GHOULISH.RIP). If you’re local, we’re doing a book release party at Ghoulish Books in Selma, TX on Saturday, October 26th (6pm-10pm). We’ve love to see you there.
I Believe in Mister Bones is my first proper novel in almost 3 years and I’m excited for everybody to read it. I think it’s something special and I’m quite proud of how it turned out. If you read and enjoy it, or at least find yourself somewhat moved emotionally, please consider recommending it to someone else. Leave a review, share a link, scream about it from the rooftops until the police tackle you into a safety net or you splatter on the sidewalk below. If you happen to break a bone while reading, please tell everybody that it happened because of the book, even if it was totally unrelated. It’s okay to lie in this instance. Word of mouth is the only way something like this will survive. Thank you so much for everything.
—Max Booth III