The Ghoulish Times | 05.25.24
Note: before we get into anything else, urgent reminder that tonight (Saturday, May 25th) is our monthly movie night at Ghoulish Books. The title is a secret until it begins. Pre-show is 7:30pm and showtime is 8:00pm. Here’s our Facebook event page to learn more. For those unaware, we host a free (secret) horror movie screening on the last Saturday of every month at our bookstore. We also now offer free pizza. Well, it’s not free for us, but it is free for you. Please come down and enjoy!
Hello and welcome to the latest issue of The Ghoulish Times. My name is Max Booth and this is my spooky newsletter. I usually incorporate a suffix in my name, but today I’m not feeling it. It’s not a suffix kind of day, I guess. (The suffix being, for those unaware, “III”, as I am the third “Max Booth” in my family.)
I don’t think suffixes look the greatest on book covers, to be honest, but I think I prefer it over not having it in the case of my specific name, to decrease the percentage of people mistaking me for Max Brooks—or, in some cases on Twitter, some political writer named Max Boot. Sometimes people get really mad at that Boot guy, and their autocorrect often changes “Boot” to “Booth”—leading them to somehow tagging me in their weirdo hate tweets. I never respond or engage in them, though, which is a policy I wish I had embraced earlier on with other random bullshit on the internet.
The internet is mostly a black hole, a gravitational time-suck hell-bent on draining and demoralizing anybody within its orbit. An ugly, beautiful place that has ruined the world and also paradoxically improved it in so many wonderful ways. Being human is learning to accept that you can hate and love something equally. I think it’s important to remember this.
I wrote the above three paragraphs on May 8th, then thought, Right, I’ll continue this in a bit. It is now May 25th. Whoops?
I am going to spend a good chunk of this newsletter complaining about very mundane things, so before we get into that, here are some things I want to promote which I think you might enjoy:
Coming out next week is a brand-new novella from Ghoulish Books: Give Unto Us by Justin Lutz. (I love saying “Give Unto Us by Justin Lutz” out loud. It’s very satisfying to say and I recommend you give it a try if you also want to feel a brief pleasurable moment in your day.) It’s a sicko’s paradise of a novella about a family who discovers an endless sand pit in his back yard. Here’s the front cover by Matthew Revert:
There's something about the river house that calls to Trevor Davis. Moving here will restore him, will fill the hole he can't fill with beer, work, children. But what he gives the land, it takes, and when he discovers a seemingly bottomless sand pit in the yard, his obsession grows to grisly proportions. Part possession story, part body horror, GIVE UNTO US addresses the hole growing deep within us all.
Here’s what Aaron Dries (author of Dirty Heads) had to say about it:
"Justin Lutz, this generation's Michael McDowell, proves yet again that he is here to bash our minds with stories so wonderfully-almost gleefully-grotesque, and made all the more grotesque by the empathy with which he explores his characters and their worlds. Give Unto Us is immediate, wry, and made me literally squirm, as if gritty sand were being elbowed into a hot, septic wound in my side. Oh, and it's tenderly romantic at times. This is a story of love and parental anxiety and pus, written by such an empathetic writer whose work is so alive, and so very frightening. I loved it."
You can read an excerpt on the Night Worms blog HERE and pre-order it directly from the Ghoulish Books webstore HERE. Paperback pre-orders come with signed author stickers!
Recently announced through Dread Central: The cover reveal & excerpt for Danger Slater’s new novella Starlet, which we’ll be publishing in August.
Check out Matthew Revert’s jacket design:
Read the excerpt exclusively on Dread Central HERE and pre-order it directly from the Ghoulish webstore HERE.
By the way, do you happen to review books? We have copies of Justin Lutz’s Give Unto Us, Danger Slater’s Starlet, and Shannon Riley’s Pocketknife Kitty up on BookSirens eager for some hungry reviewers. Go give them a shot!
Our Ghoulish Books book club pick for May is Knock Knock, Open Wide. We’ve been discussing it heavily in the GHOULISH Discord. There will also be an in-person discussion at our bookstore on Thursday, May 30th, at 7:00PM.
Our book club pick for June is My Sister, the Serial Killer.
I have a lot of podcast stuff to promote now. If you like podcasts, you’re about to fucking OD on new stuff to listen to. If you don’t like podcasts, you are probably going to scroll over this section, which is totally okay.
Over on the GHOULISH Podcast Network, we released a live episode of Decayed Tapes, recorded at the recent Ghoulish Book Festival. Instead of discussing a specific SOV movie, we instead had more of a general conversation about why we love SOV horror. Featuring: Miguel Myers, Jason Krawczyk, Daniel Kraus, and myself. Listen to that episode HERE.
I’ve also released a couple new episodes of the GHOULISH podcast, after an extended break. I talked to Laurel Hightower about GHOSTS and to Preston Fassel about CURSED MOVIES.
Over on My Horror Confessional, our host Miguel Myers has been busting out episode after episode. I can’t keep up! This month alone he’s dropped the following episodes: Maniac Cop w/ Danger Slater, Willard w/ Dr. Kent of the Vet Med for Idiots by Idiots Podcast, and El Esqueleto de la Senora Morales w/ Mikey Peralta Jr of Dread Central. Listen to them all HERE.
I was honored to be a guest on the first episode of my friend Johnny Compton’s new podcast, Behind Your Face There is a Place, to discuss my favorite movie of the year: Love Lies Bleeding.
From my recollection, we also discussed cannibalism a great deal (unrelated to the movie). You can listen to our conversation wherever you get podcasts. I’m not sure he has a designated landing spot for it yet. Here’s the iTunes link?
Beyond the aforementioned GHOULISH episode about GHOSTS, Laurel Hightower has also appeared on many other shows recently to promote her recent Ghoulish publication The Day of the Door (which, by the way, was one of the May selections for Night Worms, so I hope all NW subscribers enjoyed getting the shit scared out of them this month). Here is Laurel on…
Apologies in advance if I missed anybody! I did not do a good job organizing these after they went live.
I’ve been caught in technology hell lately, which has predictably put me behind on things (more so than usual, which I admit is impressive). Here is a recap/breakdown of my recent experience with computers.
Earlier this Spring, while tabling at a popup event in the mall, I attempted to multi-task by also editing a manuscript with my laptop during customer lulls. At one point, someone texted me. I picked up my phone and immediately dropped it on my laptop keyboard, resulting in the laptop screen to just…implode. A couple days later, we managed to connect the laptop to a television screen and a bluetooth keyboard/mouse combo, which worked decently when the laptop was put into clamshell mode. So I brought my main desktop from the house to the shop, and used my clamshell laptop/TV at home. This wasn’t ideal but worked well enough, until last week (or was this the week before last?) while working on my next novel at home, a storm knocked our power out for just a couple seconds. Whatever this power outage did, it completely fried my previous laptop/TV system. It now refuses to connect like it once did. There’s probably about 1500 words on that computer that I’ve given up on saving. Thankfully just 1500. They probably weren’t even a very good 1500 words anyway, if we’re being honest. So then my system became writing on an iPad with an external keyboard using Google Docs. This worked okay except for one extremely annoying glitch that seems to be unfixable with the Google Docs iPad app when using an external keyboard. I’ll let this Reddit user’s post from over four months ago explain it, since it’s the exact shit I started experiencing:
After battling with this quotation issue for an embarrassingly amount of time, I finally surrendered and started writing in the iPad’s Pages app, which is a program I’ve never used before. I prefer writing in Scrivener, but I refuse to pay for the Scrivener app since I’ve already paid for the service to use on a desktop. So right now my system is, when I’m at home, writing on an iPad, then emailing myself a Word-converted doc from Pages, then when I’m back at the shop I download the file and copy/paste its contents into my ongoing Scrivener file saved on my desktop. Does this seem needlessly complicated? Yes. Is there a far simpler solution here? I am quite sure of it. Am I going to continue brainstorming and experimenting? Not a fucking chance. I’m sure the laptop screen could be fixed, but I did some brief research into what the issue could be, and what it could potentially cost to repair, and let’s just say that I am very poor at the moment and there’s no way I’m taking it in any time soon. Remember when alcoholic writers from the previous century would just scribble a bunch of nonsense onto notepads and then make their wives or assistants type it up as they puked into toilets the next day? I wonder how they’d handle this kind of situation. I would bet not very well.
Anyway, it’s been a frustrating, annoying time over here. We also had some unexpected vet bills, but some very kind souls donated to our Ko-Fi to help us cover the expenses. For those wondering, all of the dogs seem A-OK now. Thanks again, if you donated earlier this month.
Currently I’m attempting to finish writing I Believe in Mister Bones for Apocalypse Party. It’s a novel about indie horror publishing, internet curses, and the universal terror of the human skeleton. I think it’s going to be something really cool, personally. Computer issues have definitely put me behind on where I’d like to be with it, but I’m still pumping out words every day on it in between operating a small press and bookstore and family and also hunting scorpions every single night since our house is currently infested with the little bastards.
I also finished a new novella titled The Dillo, which will be published by Ghoulish Ghosts (the imprint of Ghoulish Books and Little Ghosts) along with J. Krawczyk’s Roots Run Deep later this year. Pre-order it HERE. I’ve already discovered most people misread The Dillo as The Dildo upon an initial glance. This was not my intention but I’m not mad about it, either. If fact, I’m a little thrilled.
Here is my short review of I Saw the TV Glow.