The Ghoulish Times | 06.29.24
Hello and welcome to the latest issue of The Ghoulish Times. My name is Max Booth and this is my free spooky newsletter. If you are receiving this email, that means you are a very beautiful person with a wonderful soul, and I love you.
Now here are some things I must talk to you about:
URGENT REMINDERS
MOVIE NIGHT - First, if you’re a local ghoul, don’t forget that our monthly movie & pizza night is tonight (Saturday, June 29th) at our bookstore in Selma. Our pre-show kicks off at 7:30pm and showtime should hit around 8pm. The movie choice is a secret until it begins, but I will say if you’re a fan of underground queer cinema, especially rare shot-on-video stuff, you definitely do not want to miss tonight’s movie. Here’s our EVENT PAGE to learn more about attending.
GHOULISH TALES DEADLINE - The submission deadline for our unpublished authors open call is coming up very quickly. Like, this Sunday, June 30th, at 11:59pm CST. That’s tomorrow, babe! If you have something ready to send, head over here for the full guidelines (please read them before submitting).
BOOK SUBMISSIONS - Just a reminder, we will be opening for book submissions on August 1st, and remain open until the end of August. We will be considering novellas, novels, and story collections. Min. word count 25k and max. word count 95k. We don’t open for book subs very often, and probably won’t again for a long time, so if you’ve ever wanted to submit a full-length manuscript our way, you won’t want to miss this August’s open call.
GHOUL GAB w/ Shannon Riley
Shannon Riley is the author of Pocketknife Kitty, a novella about how far one woman is willing to go to save her own skin. Reviewers have generously compared it to It Follows, Promising Young Woman, and Cabin Fever. We published the novella through Ghoulish Books earlier this week and we happen to think it's a lot of fun and hope you consider ordering a copy.
Mindy Rose is on staff with Ghoulish Books as our publicity ghoul. She helps manage our social media feeds, yes, but also so much more that we legally can't disclose in this post, and we appreciate her spooky enthusiasm immensely. One new thing we're forcing her to do is interview our authors for the GHOULBLOG and our free newsletter The Ghoulish Times. We're going to call these interviews GHOUL GAB because can you think of a cuter name? Doubtful.
Earlier this week, Mindy hopped into Shannon's DMs, and this is what happened:
mindy: hello shannon riley! how was your day today?
Shannon: Hey! Great, I actually snuck out of work a little early today and got a tattoo, so hopefully I'm appropriately swollen, bloody, and in pain for you
mindy: that is how i prefer my interview subjects, thank you for making the effort! what is the tattoo?
Shannon: Believe it or not I got a GHOUL tattoo as a little nod to the book being published (not sponsored)
mindy: holy shit does max know?
Shannon: no haha
[I know now, and Shannon has just set a new standard for all of our authors. I'm in awe. —Max]
mindy: okay well i can't wait for their reaction pls let me know if they cry
[I did. —Max]
Shannon: It's not nearly as big or impressive as theirs THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID
mindy: sensible chuckle! ok speaking of crying did you cry more on "hey shannon we're gonna publish your book" day or on actual book release day?
Shannon: hey we're gonna publish your book day, a million percent. I remember that I had submitted during the open call and immediately did not expect to make final selections. Like it wasn't even a reality for me, I was just happy to have written it at all. But then somehow I kept making it through cuts and cuts and cuts and cuts. And every day for months I kept expecting the "Thank you for submitting your piece, HOWEVER..." email, but it never came. And that August, eventually Max tweeted that they were making final decisions and that all emails, yesses and nos, were going to go out that evening. I remember being at the mall at an Old Navy with my best friend when I got the email and I just refused to open it because I truly only expected a rejection, and christ, can you imagine crying in an Old Navy? It wasn't until I got home and downed a whole bunch of parrot bay that I ultimately made my husband and best friend open the email FOR me.
mindy: to be honest i cannot imagine you in an old navy. also this made me a little emotional. what's your experience working with ghoulish been like? feel free to spill tea if there's tea to spill, i'm sure max won't edit it out for the newsletter.
Shannon: Truly, I wish there was tea, but ultimately, the experience has just been really easy. I really appreciate being allowed to be involved at every step of the way. It's really cool to be part of cover design and interior formatting and marketing, and while of course none of those were ever an outright responsibility of mine, I was always encouraged to express my opinions if I ever had them. It's, in my opinion, one of the best parts of working with an indie publisher.
mindy: right? i can't imagine writing a whole ass book and then having your trad publisher tell you you don't get a say in the cover. has there been a previous ghoulish title that has particularly rocked your world?
Shannon: let's go with Moonfellows by Danger Slater, what a bizarro, dark fantasy fable. And if we're talking about sensational covers, wow, I mean, that's one of my favorite book covers that came out that year.
mindy: are there any of max's books that you've really enjoyed?
Shannon: I remember getting an advanced reader copy of Abnormal Statistics and I was totally blown away by it. Indiana Death Song in particular was one of the most deeply personal novellas Ive read. It was fiendish and raw and vulnerable in all the right ways. It was like a 200 page therapy session.
[Whoops I'm crying again. —Max]
mindy: what do you think our holy mother gerard way would think of pocketknife kitty?
Shannon: I'll be honest, I hold him in such high respects that I'd be delighted to hear that he hated it if it meant he read it at [all]. But in all seriousness, he'd probably appreciate the themes of revenge and justified female rage, but ultimately conclude that it could use decidedly more orcs and dragons.
mindy: since this is your first book, was there anything about the book-writing process that surprised you?
Shannon: I think I was mostly surprised by two things. First I realized about myself that it is VERY hard for me to write out of chronological order. I'm very much a planner, I have chapters basically planned out before I even sit down to write, and then I go nearly through the book in order. It is REALLY hard for me to skip a chapter, work on something else, and come back at another time. It makes the process incredibly slow, would not recommend. Secondly, I didn't realize how much Googling I'd have to do, particularly for the mundane stuff: standard doorknob heights, commonly prescribed antibiotics for UTIs, local weather trends in a given area, banking laws. Oh yeah, and also no matter how clean a writer you think you are, you're going to still find typos up until mere weeks before your book goes to print.
mindy: this all makes me feel like i will never be a writer.
Shannon: No way no how, anyone can write if you're patient and delusional enough. That's all it really takes.
mindy: last question: what is your favorite critter?
Shannon: Critters! I love BATS so much. I'm convinced people that hate bats don't actually know anything about them, they've just bought into all the mush brained anti-bat propaganda out there.
Order Pocketknife Kitty directly from Ghoulish Books.
THE DAY OF THE STAFF PICK
Some cool news! Laurel Hightower’s The Day of the Door is a staff pick over at the Lahaska Bookshop.
Here is what bookseller Marguerite had to say about it:
Omg, what a roller coaster ride of grief and familial abuse! Four siblings go through years of abuse from a narcissistic mother until one night something horrible happens behind the door. Laurel creates a a suffocating atmosphere where you’re afraid to breathe!! So much sadness and grief, but a buildup that you won’t want to take your eyes off of! A terrific ending, and characters that I felt so much for.
We love to see it!!! Also, it was just Laurel’s birthday??? HAPPY BIRTHDAY LAUREL HIGHTOWER!!!!!!!!
REVEALING THE FLESH INHERENT
Hello, cowghouls! It is with great pleasure that I finally introduce you to Perry Meester’s debut novella, The Flesh Inherent, a gay cowboy western bursting with delightful body horror grotesqueries. First, I want to show you the front cover, courtesy of the one and only DOOMED SARCOMA:
On a hot summer night, something enormous screams down from the sky and pierces into the desert not far from the small town of Farchapel. The stories that trickle back from the crater are strange indeed—those who find it and return claim to be forever changed, transformed into the better, ideal versions of themselves they’ve always wished to achieve.
Jamie, recent mysterious visitor in town, is a man on the run, all too eager to escape his current form no matter the cost. Sidney, local drunk, would rather face a hole in the ground than the things he’s done. As the two men venture into the desert canyons in search of their better selves, they soon discover that what hides there is much more terrible—and eager to lure them in.
Folks, can we get a big fuckin’ yee-haw?
YEE-HAW
Here is what Perry Meester had to say about The Flesh Inherent:
This book is a snapshot of a very specific time in my life. My world was getting brighter and clearer and more terrifying all at once, and writing The Flesh Inherent was a place to funnel that nervous energy. I was starting to figure out what kind of a man I wanted to be — so I was looking at the men in my life and the men I grew up watching and reading, wrapping my head around what I loved about them and what scared me, what I wanted to do differently. I’ve never written a Western before, but falling into that genre came naturally out of all those thoughts. I grew up watching old Western films with my dad, and the particular models of masculinity you’d find there were fascinating to me even before I had words for why. Of course, I had to put a nasty horror spin on it to make it mine.
It’s not exclusively a “trans story” — though it certainly is in parts. First and foremost I wanted to write the kind of messed-up horror I want to see in the world, something tight and gross and horny in a genre mash-up I hadn’t explored before. It’s a little bit of a love letter to the body horror stories that inspire me, and to the queer men and trans folks I’ve been lucky to have around me so far.
Above you’ve just read the second draft of what Perry sent me. Here was his first draft:
Perry’s novella drops on September 10th through Ghoulish Books, and you can pre-order it from our webstore right now. All paperback pre-orders will come with a signed bookplate sticker from the author.
And now, here’s the opening chapter of The Flesh Inherent:
I.
Somewhere past midnight on August the 5th, three things happen in the tiny town of Farchapel: a stranger leans out a window and envies the brawl collapsing onto the street below, one man shoots another dead, and something falls from the sky.
The third event stops the first two in their tracks. It sends the stranger scrambling in a panic, lurching backward until he trips onto the bed and lies there heaving, hands over his ears. It gives the owner of the smoking revolver enough time to escape a crowd moments from becoming a mob, his indiscretions temporarily forgotten in the wake of a screaming howl that splits the night apart. The noise goes quick, but it leaves behind an arcing scar of violet light that takes hours to fade. By morning the news tells itself: something fell from heaven, something large, and judging by the rumbling in the ground, it must have landed somewhere in the desert. Somewhere nearby.
Very little worth telling happens in Farchapel. A stranger coming into town and a shooting occurring on the same day is bad enough. But something huge and dark hurtling down to earth like God kicked it, well, that’s enough to terrify, titillate, and inspire in equal measure.
By noon, public curiosity is a thing with teeth, eager to bite down. Three of the sheriff’s men — one of them his pimple-faced son, just old enough to be counted a man at all — saddle up and ride out toward the rocky slopes and winding canyon to the east. Folks watch until men and horses alike are lost to the red and orange outcroppings and brittle plant life that pockmark the landscape. Over the next three days they hold a funeral, a questioning, an extra church service. They watch the road and the skies in equal measure.
Over the next three days, a stranger paces back and forth in his room, back and forth down the streets, runs his finger back and forth across cool drops of liquid forming on the outside of unfinished glasses of beer while he lurks and listens. Over the next three days, an empty revolver gathers dust while its owner waits for a noose, a bullet, bare fists, and finds nothing but the bottoms of bottles.
At sunset on the third day the sheriff’s son walks back into Farchapel on foot. He is as clean and spotless as the day he left. His shirt is tucked into his pants. His hair is combed. His companions are nowhere to be seen. Once they’ve sat him down and forced food and water into him, he looks them in the eyes and shakes his head, and they discover that is voice is nowhere to be heard, either, only a soundless rasp coming from his healthy throat. All he can manage is a tuneless whistle.
When pen and paper is fetched he writes nothing about the missing men — all he has is a shake of his head and a shrug, the sense that he’s walking circles around every question they can ask. What he does write is direct in a way the boy has never been: he tells his father straight that he’s always hated it here, that he’s always hated him, that he won’t be pushed around anymore, that he’s going to be his own man.
The sheriff’s son has always been quiet. He’s the type to flinch when spoken to and buries his nose behind a book far more often than his father would prefer. Against the good sheriff’s best efforts he’s never been fit for a town like Farchapel. Now he walks with his head held high and his shoulders back. He ignores questions on the street. He gathers every penny he’s ever saved and spends it on a horse and supplies for the road. He writes to Ms. Lillie who works down at the general store that he’s always thought she’s mighty pretty, and he writes to his father that he’s headed north to go to college like he’s always wanted, and the morning after returning from the canyon, he takes off, whistling the whole while.
A rescue party is sent after the rest of the sheriff’s men. No one returns but their horses, still tacked up, eyes rolling back in their heads, necks flecked with foam. They wail and scream through the night, not a scratch on them, until a consensus is drawn and they’re put out of their misery.
The night sky is clear and silent as ever, conceding nothing.
The next day: Old Mrs. Marshe is missing. She’s snuck away in the dead of night, on foot, no less. She’s known for slipping candies to children after Sunday services and humming little ditties as she goes about her errands. She’s known as much for her superstitions: a cross on every wall in her home, a prayer over every meal. When the sky screamed she watched with a rosary clutched to her chest. Her absence is noted first by her husband, a man of notorious temper, the town’s resident drunkard and layabout. His primary complaint is missing her cooking.
A second and more hesitant party finds Mrs. Marshe halfway back from the canyon two days later. She hobbles homeward on her familiar walking stick, and greets them cheerfully, uninjured and well. She blesses them for coming to get her while regaling them with the intimate details of her nice, long walk. She prays for each of their souls in turn. When the sheriff arrives at her doorstep the next morning to see how she’s getting on, he finds the dead body of her husband of twenty-five years slouched in a kitchen chair and Mrs. Marshe cleaning the floor around him. A fist-sized purple bruise swells her eye shut.
He hit her, she says. He hit her again, for running away, and she’d had the last of that, thank you. Twenty-five years and she’d had enough. Stabbed him once in the chest for each of those years, the blade punched through wrinkled skin with miraculous strength.
No one much has it in them to hang or jail or whip old Mrs. Marshe. A few parties would go so far as to commend her for it. She’s back in church the next morning, belting out hymns, and afterward when the first hesitant voice asks her what happened in the desert she’s more than happy to testify.
“It’s God out there, it’s God who sent it,” she creaks, shaking her finger at her rapt audience. Her voice has gotten lower, more graveled, like sandstone scraping against leather. “It’s made me the woman I always wanted to be, I’ll tell you that, that’s what it’s done. God’s given me the courage now. Transformed me body and soul.” For good measure she picks a branch off the ground and snaps it in two, with hands that used to shake uncontrollably.
In a town like Farchapel, rumors have traveled far further on far less.
The sheriff forbids anyone to venture out toward the canyon and what lies there. Old Mrs. Marshe continues to prosthelytize. No more rescue parties are sent out. Their families mourn them quietly.
Hours before dawn, eight days after something fell, two individuals on two separate sides of town drag themselves from sleep — one on a still-unfamiliar rented mattress, the other curled on an all-too-familiar kitchen floor. They button up shirts, pull on boots and hats, whisper sleep-fogged words to restless mounts. In the minutes before their paths cross each fancies himself the only man in the world, alone on the single wide street that makes up the majority of town, the sky a deep hazy blue above him. It’s only him, the comfortable lurching of the animal beneath him, the smell of leather, the dew in the air. It’s only the sharp twang of nerves and the thick layer of sleep across his thoughts.
It’s only him, until he reaches the outskirts of town, where a bare attempt at civilization makes way for endless plateaus and scrub-brush and the canyon in the distance. It’s only him until another horse whickers nearby.
It’s only him, until it isn’t.
Don’t forget to also track it on Goodreads.
Additionally, Perry’s debut short story “Swerve” will be published soon in Ghoulish Tales Issue #3, which you can pre-order here.