The Ghoulish Times | 07.18.25
Hello and welcome to the latest issue of The Ghoulish Times. My name is Max Booth and this is our free spooky newsletter. I am typing this on the morning of Friday, July 18th, drenched in sweat, which is a detail you either really don’t want to hear or really want to hear. I don’t think there are people neutral on sweat. There are those who despise it and there are those who are absolute freak-ass sweat perverts. Which one are you, comrade?
Lori and I are busy busy busy doing the work required to move a bookshop from location to another. If you’ve missed the news, we are relocating our physical retail shop from the outskirts of San Antonio (a small small town without a zipcode called Selma) to the vibrant downtown area of San Antonio. We will be located in Southtown, on St. Marys Street. If you’ve attended our previous Ghoulish Book Festivals, our shop will be on the same street as the festival venue, like half a block down from the festival hotel. Our new address will be: 628 S. Saint Marys, Suite 102, San Antonio, TX 78205.
Here are some pics of it starting to finally resemble an actual bookshop:
We still have a lot of work to do, of course, but I’m getting excited about everything. The biggest advantage this new spot will have, of course, is the location. Our current spot has zero foot traffic potential. But this new place? It’s downtown. We’re in the same building as a tattoo parlor and barbershop. People are constantly walking by on the sidewalk. Things, I hope, are about to improve drastically.
Unclear yet when, exactly, we will be opening. We have FIVE (5) different inspections scheduled for this upcoming Wednesday, and we need to be pretty much completely set up over there before they show up. So, assuming we pass everything, we might be soft-opening this upcoming Thursday (07/24) and then doing a more extravagant grand opening sometime early August (Saturday 08/02 maybe?). It really all depends on whether or not we pass inspection, which we should do, but who knows.
Needless to say, times are hectic over here. On top of the bookstore stuff, we’re also up to our necks in various publishing duties (royalties are due! so much editing needs to be done! marketing, we gotta market our books more! designing! emails! so many emails!), freelance work, writing (I swear I’m writing a new book. Two new books! I have a middle grade book due early next year and plus I’m writing a massive small-town horror novel that’s kinda like The Bad News Bears meets Demon Knight meets Needful Things), and fighting with strangers online about the dangers of ai usage (STOP! USING! AI!). We’re doing the Good Work, I guess you could say. But I imagine massive burnout is on the horizon. Just kidding, we will never sleep, we will never die, we will continue forever without anything ever going wrong again.
ICYMI, we are currently asking (if you can spare it!) for donations to help fund this Big Move. Anything is seriously appreciated, as Times Are Expensive right now, and also always. I don’t know why I keep capitalizing things Like That. My Brain Is Broken. i’m sorry. We will also be sending a sticker out to those who donate. Learn more details HERE. Yes, I linked the donation page twice in this paragraph. Let’s not make a big thing about it. Here it is a third time. Calm down.
GHOULISH BOOKS MOVING SALE
Today (Friday) and tomorrow (Saturday) are the last two days we will be open at the Selma location. To celebrate, we are hosting a big in-store only sale. Everything is currently 25% off. Come on down today (11am-5pm) or tomorrow (11am-8pm) and help clean us out. Our address is 9330 Corporate Drive, Suite 702, Selma TX 78154. Sorry for the last-minute announcement on this. We literally decided last night to do this sale. Do not let anybody ever say we aren’t great at planning ahead. One day we might even be able to plan a whole body.
Also, the sale is in-store only because everything is in chaos right now at the old location. Since we’ve already moved most of our bookshelves, our inventory is just stacked haphazardly on various tables. It reminds me of library booksales, if you’ve ever attended one of those. No real rhyme or reason for the way anything is displayed. That last sentence could also describe my brain—and, I guess, the physical hunk of flesh I move around in every dang day.
This also means, by the way, any current or future webstore orders may be delayed for a week or two until we get re-settled at the new location. Sorry! Unfortunately unavoidable.
OUR LAST MOVIE NIGHT
Okay, I lied. We’ll be opened one more day after this weekend. Saturday, July 26th, at 7:30pm we will host our Final Movie Night. Sadly, the new location simply does not have the space for us to continue movie night, so we’ll be ending it after this month. Our old shop will be stripped of inventory by the 26th, so don’t show up expecting to browse. We will simply have chairs and a projector screen in the empty shell of what once was Ghoulish Books. Bring your own drinks and snacks and enjoy one last secret horror movie with us. 7:30 is preshow, and 8:00 is showtime. It’s free! 9330 Corporate Drive, Suite 702, Selma TX 78154.
THE RETURN OF NIGHT FRIGHTS
Longtime fans will recollect we once had an annual magazine for children called Night Frights, edited by Lori Michelle Booth. We published two volumes and then kinda…fell quiet with it, for many years. Way too many years tbh. Longtime fans of the press will also recall we sometimes, uh, suck with deadlines? Anyway. To fast-forward through a variety of excuses nobody wants to hear, we are finally, at long last, back with issue three, and oh boy is it one heck of a good time.
In the 3rd issue of Night Frights we have stories by Tom Deady, Zary Fekete, Emma Kathryn, Julia LaFond, Amanda Cecelia Lang, Ken MacGregor, Michelle Muenzler, E. F. Schraeder, Roger Venable, and Lucy Zhang. Plus an excerpt from Say Uncle by Ryan C. Bradley!
The eBook edition is available right now and paperbacks are currently on the way from the printer, and will be sent out the moment they arrive. Order directly from our webstore HERE.
“ISSUES WITH AUTHORITY” HITS BOOKSIRENS
Psst…if you’re a book reviewer, Nadia Bulkin’s upcoming collection Issues With Authority just went live on BOOKSIRENS. Go get it while copies are available. Otherwise, pre-order HERE.
OKAY WHAT ELSE?
Also coming soon later this year, which you can (and should) pre-order right now: Jess Hagemann’s Mother-Eating, Bob Pastorella’s The Small Hours, Lor Gislason’s Cosmic Dyke Patrol. Next month will finally see the release of Ghoulish Tales Issue #4, and at some point before the end of the swear I swear to god I’ll get the first volume of The Best Trans Horror of the Year finished and published. Plus we have a few reprints we are committed to releasing. Everything is fine. EVERYTHING IS GREAT. We will never die. I’m not panicking. I NEVER PANIC. IT IS ONE OF MY QUIRKS. EVERYBODY ALSO SAYS “WOW, THAT MAX PERSON? THEY NEVER PANIC. IT’S NUTS. IT’S BANANAS. IT’S BANANA NUTS. I WISH I COULD BE LIKE THEM.” That’s what they say, anyway.
HERE IS THE DONATION LINK A FOURTH GODDAMN TIME.
Okay goodbye.
—max