The Ghoulish Times | 03.23.24
Read to the end of this newsletter for 2 free books.
Hello and welcome to the latest issue of The Ghoulish Times. My name is Max Booth III and this is my spooky newsletter.
Last weekend was our third annual Ghoulish Book Festival in San Antonio. Going into it, I was very nervous, especially given the weather forecast, but it ended up being pretty successful overall. Hundreds of Texans showed up and bought books from all of our wonderful vendors. Here's a great pic of our Ghouls of Honor:
At the Ghoulish Books table, specifically, we sold a total of 398 items (includes books, shirts, & tiny coffins). A few people asked me if I thought we'd made a profit, and honestly it's unclear. So many different costs go into organizing a festival like this--from renting the venue, advertising, decorations, supplies, inventory restock, audio equipment, to travel/lodging for our guests of honor, to many other things, and none of that includes, like, the actual labor put into everything by myself and my wife Lori and our three volunteers Andrew, Miguel, and Zach (we do not pay ourselves to run the festival). In fact, next year (yes, we're continuing the festival) we will probably look into turning GBF into a non-profit and hopefully get help from the state as far as funding the event. But I promise I'm not complaining, even if I love to complain! The fest was a hit. Everybody, to the best of my knowledge, had a great time.
Here are a few write-ups I found from others who attended:
I wish I could post all of the fantastic photos taken during the festival, but it would crash your email browser. Instead, I encourage everybody to hop on over to the GHOULISH Discord and check out the #festival-pictures channel, which is where everybody has been posting them.
We had a little leftover stock of Daniel Kraus's novels WHALEFALL and THE LIVING DEAD, which he was nice enough to sign at the end of the festival, so if you'd like to snag a signed copy of either book, now's your time:
Also, because I am often credited as the sole reason these festivals seem to run so smoothly, I feel obligated to remind everybody that in both the festival and the publishing company I am in no way alone, and in fact have a partner who probably contributes far more than I ever do, so please, if you're going to congratulate me on anything, do the same 100x to my wife Lori Booth, the true reason all of this shit actually happens and doesn't result in catastrophe.
Additionally, Ghoulish would not be what it is today without the contributions of Betty Rocksteady (art ghoul), Mindy Rose (publicity ghoul), and our two copy editor ghouls Jennifer Malcolm and Emily McCorkle. I should probably also credit Miguel Myers, too, for helping on the podcast and bookstore sides of things, but it would just feed into his ego and I'd rather avoid that from happening. Thankfully he does not read these newsletters and we are under no serious threat here.
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GHOULISH GHOSTS
Announced during GBF weekend: the reason I forever punctured this design in my flesh:
Ghoulish Books and Little Ghosts Books (another indie bookstore/publisher combo up in Toronto) have joined forces to create a tiny lil' imprint called Ghoulish Ghosts. Here is our logo, designed by Chris from Little Ghosts:
Ghoulish Ghosts presents the ultimate spooky collaboration between Little Ghosts Books and Ghoulish Books; small press publishers and indie horror bookstores. Little Ghosts resides up in Toronto, Canada, and Ghoulish boils alive down in San Antonio, Texas. Together they have joined forces to create the Ghoulish Ghosts imprint, with their first release being a dos-à-dos collection of two novellas: ROOTS RUN DEEP by J. Krawczyk and THE DILLO by Max Booth III.
ROOTS RUN DEEP
Grieving the death of his wife, Edward finds solace in nurturing the primordial creature he finds in their garden. J. Krawczyk delivers a heady mix of sorrow and cosmic horror in ROOTS RUN DEEP.
THE DILLO
In Max Booth III’s THE DILLO, an alcoholic becomes obsessed with hunting down and killing an armadillo after his wife leaves him for another man.
For Canadian ghouls, please pre-order this novella duology directly from the Little Ghosts webstore.
For American ghosts, we recommend pre-ordering through the Ghoulish webstore.
I had the pleasure to meet both Chris and J. last weekend and I have to say, they are friends for life. I'm already impatient to hang out again and looking for any reasonable excuse to take a trip up to Toronto. They are, quite simply, the best.
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GHOULISH TALES UPDATES
Attention, writers: We have just under a week at this point before we hit the deadline for Ghoulish Tales Issue #3, and I wanted to provide a quick update on submission stats. Here is where we currently stand:
Accepted: 2
Shortlisted: 19
Withdrawn: 15
Rejected: 754
Unread: 6
I also want to drop a brief note about the future, specifically for when we reopen for issue #4 later this summer (probably in June but don't hold me to that). When we do reopen for issue #4, we will only be considering stories from never-before published authors. New Ghouls, one could say.
So, if that describes you, start preparing your submissions now would be my recommendation and stay tuned for further updates. We pay very good rates, we like to think, and we'd be honored to publish your debut story.
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FREE HORROR MOVIE & PIZZA NIGHT
If you are local to our bookstore in San Antonio/Selma, we're hosting a free movie & pizza night next Saturday! Our address is 9330 Corporate Drive, Suite 702, Selma, TX 78154.
Saturday Night Spookies is our monthly movie screening event! On the last Saturday every month, we host a FREE secret movie screening in our bookstore.
The movie title is always a secret until showtime. Saturday Night Spookies is typically hosted by Miguel Myers of the My Horror Confessional podcast.
Although these screenings are free, we do have limited seating, so show up earlier rather than later to reserve your spot. We also sell snacks & drinks in the lobby.
We will also have pizza available (for free!) but a limited amount--once we run out, we're out!
Pre-show: 7:30
Showtime: 8:00
We cannot guarantee the movies we show are child-friendly, so bring them only if they're responsible enough to handle R-rated material.
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TRANS RIGHTS READATHON (FREE BOOKS!!!)
It is once again one of the best weeks of the entire year: Trans Rights Readathon week! If you’ve never heard of this event before, here’s the description directly from their website:
March 22-29, 2024
The Trans Rights Readathon is an annual call to action to readers and book lovers in support of Trans Day of Visibility (TDOV) on March 31st.
We are calling on the reader community to read and uplift books written by and/or featuring trans, genderqueer, nonbinary, gender-nonconforming, and 2Spirit authors and characters.
They also highly recommend donating to trans resources, and have compiled a helpful Google doc of various organizations you can support. Click HERE to browse and please consider donating!
To celebrate this wonderful week, and to celebrate our wonderful trans friends, we have decided to make our brand-new anthology, BURY YOUR GAYS: AN ANTHOLOGY OF TRAGIC QUEER HORROR (ed. Sofia Ajram), free to the public during the readathon. And when we say brand-new…we aren’t exaggerating. This book only came out a couple days ago. It features some of the absolute best queer and trans authors working in the horror genre today, and we feel that it is far more important for these writers to reach new readers than it is to stress about whether or not it’s making a profit.
Additionally, we have made our 2023 anthology, BOUND IN FLESH: AN ANTHOLOGY OF TRANS BODY HORROR (ed. Lor Gislason), free to the public.
Both books (electronic copies) can be downloaded from this GoogleDrive link, which will expire on March 30. Please consider sharing!
Also, if you happen to enjoy the books, we would not hate it if you left reviews across the various websites that allow reviews (you know the ones).
More about BURY YOUR GAYS:
A manifestation of ecstasy, heartache, horror and suffering rendered in feverish lyrical prose. Inside are sixteen new stories by some of the genre’s most visionary queer writers. Young lovers find themselves deliriously lost in an expanding garden labyrinth. The porter of a sentient hotel is haunted within a liminal time loop. A soldier and his abusive commanding officer escape a war in the trenches but discover themselves in an even greater nightmare. Parasites chase each other across time-space in hungry desperation to never be apart. A graduate student with violent tendencies falls into step with a seemingly walking corpse.
Featuring stories from Cassandra Khaw, Joe Koch, Gretchen Felker-Martin, Robbie Banfitch, August Clarke, Son M., Jonathan Louis Duckworth, M.V. Pine, Ed Kurtz, LC Von Hessen, Matteo L. Cerilli, November Rush, Meredith Rose, Charlene Adhiambo, Violet, and Thomas Kearnes.
More about BOUND IN FLESH:
BOUND IN FLESH: An Anthology of Trans Body Horror brings together 13 trans and non-binary writers, using horror to both explore the darkest depths of the genre and the boundaries of flesh. A disgusting good time for all!
Featuring stories by LC von Hessen, Theo Hendrie, Derek Des Agnes, Winter Holmes, gaast, Charles-Elizabeth Boyles, Hailey Piper, Joe Koch, Layne Van Rensburg, Bitter Karella, Amanda M. Blake, Lillian Boyd, and Taliesin Neith.
A lot of presses tend to advertise their books as boundary-breaking, and usually they’re kind of full of shit, but we sincerely believe these two anthologies are exactly that: boundary-breaking. They mean everything to us, and it’s been a true honor to have published them through Ghoulish. Read them and share with others. That’s all we really ask. Because these stories are meant to be read. They are meant to be experienced.
Once again, both books (electronic copies) can be downloaded from this GoogleDrive link, which will expire on March 30. If you have any trouble downloading them, email us at contact@ghoulishbooks.com.
Also, if you’re interested in physical copies of these anthologies, BURY YOUR GAYS can be purchased HERE, and BOUND IN FLESH can be purchased HERE.
Thank you so much for supporting us enough that we could even fund these projects in the first place. With both of these projects, we were able to pay our authors pro-rates, which is also something worth celebrating, we think.
Now let’s go kickoff this readathon. Personally, I’ll be reading Alison Rumfitt’s BRAINWYRMS. What about you?