Welcome back! So my latest article for The Lineup came out last month, and it focused exclusively on Bi+ horror authors. You can read the full list here, and I honestly hope you do because I’m so very proud to have put this article together. That’s because Bi+ authors are often overlooked in discussions of LGBTQ+ fiction.

Bi+ is an umbrella term that refers not only to bisexuality, but also to pansexuality, omnisexuality, fluid, and a wide variety of additional identities and attractions. (For more info, please refer to this much more in-depth definition.) As I mention in the article for The Lineup, almost no funding in America is dedicated specifically to Bi+ issues, despite the fact that those of us who are bisexual constitute the largest group of the LGBTQ+ community.

As I was working on the list for The Lineup, I put out a call on Twitter for Bi+ horror authors to share their most recent published works. There was a really wonderful thread of authors who responded to my tweet. Even once The Lineup article was published, it made me so happy that there was an even longer list for readers to use when seeking out Bi+ horror fiction. However, now that Twitter is going up in flames, I don’t want that extended list to be lost to the trolls of the internet. So once you read my aforementioned article on The Lineup and check out all those fabulous authors’ work, here are a few additional Bi+ horror authors to add to your reading list.

Angela Sylvaine is a Colorado-based horror, science fiction, and dark fantasy author. Her horror novella, Chopping Spree, came out last year through Unnerving’s Rewind or Die series.

Eva Roslin is a horror and dark fantasy author and reviewer. Her recent work has appeared in Alienhead Press’s Literally Dead: Tales of Halloween Hauntings and Black Spot Books’ Under Her Skin.

Tiffany Morris is Mi’kmaw/settler author of both speculative fiction and poetry, and her most recent collection, Elegies of Rotting Stars, was released earlier this month from Nictitating Books.

Avra Margariti is a prolific poet based in Greece, and her latest collection, The Saint of Witches, was released earlier this year through Weasel Press.

Rich Gerlach is a writer, reviewer, and a podcaster at Staring Into the Abyss. You can read his latest short story in Dead of Winter: An Anthology.

LC von Hessen is a Brooklyn-based author, musician, artist, and actor. Their collection of weird and gothic tales, Spiritus Ex Machina, was released last year.

Chloe Spencer is an author, filmmaker, and YouTube gamer and essayist. Her YA horror science fiction novel, Monstersona, is due out next year from Tiny Ghost Press.

Verity Holloway is a writer and editor. Her upcoming novel, The Others of Edenwell, is slated for release next July from Titan Books.

Rebecca Turkewitz is a writer and teacher based in Portland, Maine. Her short story, “The Elevator Girl,” appeared last year on the Lamplight podcast, and her collection, Here in the Night: Stories, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press.

Stephanie Rabig is a Kansas-based horror author of numerous books and short stories. Her horror western, On Stolen Land, is available now.

Briana Morgan is a widely published horror author from Atlanta. Her most recent book, The Reyes Incident, made its debut in April of this year.

Jaye Wells is a bestselling author and writing mentor. Her recent short story appeared in Sara Tantlinger’s anthology, Chromophobia.

Natania Barron is an award-winning author whose work explores monsters and mythology. Her first novel, Pilgrim of the Sky, was recently re-released through Falstaff Books.

So those are just a few of the amazing writers and books to add to your TBR pile. There are of course many more Bi+ horror authors working today, so please keep supporting the LGBTQ+ creators in the genre. Especially in the terrifying political climate we’re dealing with here in America, the only way to combat prejudice is through support, love, and acceptance. And after all, Pride Month truly lasts all yearlong!

Happy reading!

2021 is almost over, so I figure it’s a good time to do my annual award eligibility post here at the old blog. As always, if you’re recommending for awards and would like a copy of any of these works, please let me know, and I would be happy to send it over to you!

And now onward with what I’ve been up to in 2021!

“Sister Glitter Blood” (Violent Vixens, Dark Peninsula Press, August 2021)
Two lonely sisters discover a strange board game called “Sister Glitter Blood.” As they begin to play in their dusty attic, they soon realize this game is watching them closer than they could have ever imagined. Framed through the board game’s instructions, the story tracks the sisters as they try desperately to outpace the ghosts they’ve conjured, only to find themselves back in the attic years later with nothing to protect them besides the roll of the dice and each other. This has probably been my best-received work of the year with Reading Vicariously calling it “Genuinely creepy” and Rebecca Rowland of Ginger Nuts of Horror saying “it’s worth buying the collection for this tale alone.”

“The Mad Monk of the Motor City” (There Is No Death, There Are No Dead, Crystal Lake Publishing, August 2021)
The ghost of Rasputin descends on a broken-down apartment building in modern-day Detroit, and soon nearly all the tenants are under his preternatural sway. Only one withdrawn woman finds herself resisting his thrall as she does her best to solve the mystery of why he’s returned and how to stop him. This anthology of occult horror has a fabulous table of contents and was the first time I got to work with editor Jess Landry since The Rust Maidens, so this one holds a special place in my heart.

“The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own” (Liminal Spaces, Cemetery Gates Media, September 2021)
The famed Black Dahlia finds herself living and reliving different versions of her own death, all while demanding for her own voice to be heard and also searching for a way out of the purgatory the world has created for her. I’ve long been fascinated and horrified by the real-life murder of Elizabeth Short, and this story is my ode to her and her memory. Writing about actual people is always tricky, but I hope I did her some semblance of justice in this story.

“Things to Do in Playland When You’re Dead” (Shadow Atlas, Hex Publishers, November 2021)
An ethereal patron visits an amusement park called Playland-at-the-Beach on the final night before it closes for good, meeting a variety of strange specters along the way. San Francisco’s now-defunct Playland at the Beach is such a fascinating piece of Americana, and it was so much fun to craft this short story around it. This is also another amazing table of contents—truly all of these books have incredible tables of contents—so it was an honor to be part of this one.

“The 9 Ghosts You’ll Find at Mayfair Estate” (Nine, Editions du Chat Noir, July 2021)
So this one actually marks a first for my writing career: this story made its debut in French! A tour of a vast and haunted property slowly starts to unravel in increasingly horrifying ways, as one by one, a group of unusual phantoms introduces themselves.

In addition to my short stories, I also had four nonfiction pieces published this year, all of them featured at Tor Nightfire. My articles ran the gamut from fiction based on true-crime tales and the best witchy books to re-imagined fairy tales and the creepiest cats of horror. I think I say this every year, but I’m very hopeful that I’ll have even more short nonfiction out next year. That’s definitely the goal anyhow.

Beyond my new fiction and nonfiction, it was a busy year overall. The Invention of Ghosts was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award as well as a Ladies of Horror Fiction Award. The Spanish translation of The Rust Maidens was nominated for both an Ignotus and a Kelvin Award. Additionally, the Spanish translation of my Lucy Westenra story from Crononauta was also nominated at the Ignotus Awards. The French translation of Boneset & Feathers made its debut from Editions du Chat Noir, and the German translation of The Rust Maidens was released from Festa Verlag. I’ve made a number of sales for next year, including a new nonfiction article on Terrence Malick and the uncanny to Vastarien, and a new weird horror story, “To the Progeny Forsaken,” to Dim Shores’ Looming Low, Volume 2. My work will also have new translations in French, Spanish, and Italian next year and beyond.

Also, in what is truly a dream come true, my personal writing archive is now housed at the University of Pittsburgh’s Horror Studies Collection. The drafts of my short stories and novels are now living in the same space as work from George Romero, John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Linda Addison, Kathe Koja, and so many other horror luminaries. I used to daydream about being a writer who had their archive at a major university, and now I am a writer who can say that. It’s surreal and thrilling and I still can’t believe it’s really happened.

And of course, even more big news from the year: my third novel, Reluctant Immortals, had its cover reveal and release date announced: August 23rd, 2022! In case you haven’t already heard me screaming from the rooftops about it, Reluctant Immortals follows Lucy Westenra from Dracula and Bertha Antoinetta Mason from Jane Eyre as they navigate 1967 California while trying to stop the toxic men from their past who have returned suddenly to their lives. You can find out more and read an excerpt at the Tor Nightfire blog.

All right, so that’s more than enough for one year. I’m doing my best to stay hopeful overall for what 2022 holds, but with the current state of the world, hope is all I’ve got. Fingers crossed that next year will be much better than this one.

At any rate, happy reading, and happy New Year!

Welcome back for Part Two in our August roundtable! We’re celebrating this month’s release of Violent Vixens: An Homage to Grindhouse Horror, which made its debut last week and is already earning rave reviews. Today, I’m talking with eleven of the fabulous authors from the anthology about their favorite cult films and their best memories of the drive-in and midnight movie screenings.

So let’s take it away, shall we?

SARAH READ: My favorite drive-in movie memory is seeing Jurassic Park when I was 10 years old. It was nighttime in rural Colorado, and the only thing you could see was this giant, illuminated T-Rex stalking through the landscape. I also saw Twister at that same drive-in a few years later. There was a thunderstorm during the show, and then the scene where the tornado rips through the drive-in played (and bonus points that the movie they’re watching is The Shining–right at the axe-to-the-door scene). I guess I like it when the scene and setting blur a little and make things more immersive or scary!

I don’t know that I could pick a favorite cult classic horror movie. I like a lot of them! But the one I’ve certainly seen the most is The Exorcist.

ROB E. BOLEY: Probably my favorite cult classic is actually pretty recent. It’s the 2006 slasher mockumentary Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon. It’s a crying shame that more people haven’t seen this movie, because it’s truly a brilliant balance of horror and comedy. I’d say it’s mandatory viewing for any fans of the slasher genre. Another favorite is John Carpenter’s They Live. It’s maybe more sci-fi than horror, but wow, it’s scary how the film only gets more relevant with each passing year!

I’d say my favorite drive-in memory is the time a few years ago when my wife and I took my daughter to see a special screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Dixie Twin Drive-In here in Dayton. It was her first time seeing the movie, and I’ll never forget doing the Time Warp amidst all the parked cars. Unfortunately, it rained later, so we had to watch the rest of the movie in the car.

SOPHIE LEAH: My favourite horror movie // movies seem to vary at any given moment as I constantly watch new stuff or become particularly attached to old loves. As far as more ‘culty’ favourites go, I’ve always had a soft-spot for Rob Zombie’s The Devils Rejects and House of 1000 Corpses. I don’t think a day goes by where I don’t wonder what 3 From Hell would’ve been like had Sid Haig not died. Others – off the top of my head – would be: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Terrifier, I Spit on Your Grave, Inside (2007), A Serbian Film, Last House on the Left, From Dusk ’till Dawn, The Hills Have Eyes – I could go on and on. I’m also a huge fan of extreme cinema in general, which is pretty cult-based in itself (we seem to congregate a lot over at effedupmovies.com). The nastier, the better.

Unfortunately – all that said – I have no real experience with actually going to Grindhouse, or attending a drive-in movie, as here in the UK they’re not such a thing as they are over in the US. I guess my last fond ‘grindhouse’-esque experience was a first date at London’s Prince Charles Cinema (where they sometimes do Friday the 13th marathons) where we watched Kill Bill: Volume I and the volume with all the talking back-to-back. If that counts at all? I would love to go to America one day and do various horror-related things over there (from the Saw escape room in Vegas to Hollywood’s Museum of Death and more), so hopefully there’s still time to make some more spooky memories there!

MARK WHEATON: Not sure how culty it is anymore, but I’ve always been fond of The Devil Rides Out, based on the Dennis Wheatley novel. The great twist of having some innocent kid discovering that his girlfriend is getting caught up in a cult only for his own uncle, played by Christopher Lee, to turn out to be a more powerful practitioner of magic is so much fun. As for a favorite drive-in movie memory, I grew up next to a South Dallas drive-in, so remember countless nights seeing but not hearing endless movies projected onto screens a block over once the stars were out. Everything was quiet, both audience and picture, like some mysterious communion. It’d make anybody romantic about drive-ins.

MATT NEIL HILL: In terms of favourite cult classic horror movies, I’ll always have a soft spot for Evil Dead / Evil Dead II, and John Carpenter’s The Thing is perhaps the one I’ve watched the most. But Near Dark is the one that springs to mind in connection with this story—its explosive and remorseless violence, but also the quiet, melancholy moments; the simultaneously feared and longed-for dusk and dawn, the whispering dust and the letting of blood.

Growing up in the UK I have no drive-in movie memories, but I remember signing up for an all-night movie marathon at a comic book convention in London in the mid ‘80s. They played about six or seven movies I think, although I slept through a lot of them and can only really remember Crimes of Passion, Ken Russell’s lurid neon psychosexual drama starring Kathleen Turner and Anthony Perkins. It left an indelible impression on me—as you’d hope any movie with a death by vibrator would—before I drifted off into dreamland.

S.K. CAMPBELL: Besides the ridiculous romp of Planet Terror, I enjoy campy horrors like Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. We don’t often think of horror as funny, but grindhouse movies and parodies like Young Frankenstein really take advantage of the potential there. Both comedy and horror raise tension in their viewers, and have this inherent exaggeration of their subjects. So the genres can be married with fabulous effect. To that note, some of my favorite midnight movie moments have been because the audience laughed during what was supposed to be a horrifying scene. I have a fond recollection of a close-up of an demonic eyeball in The Grudge, a lingering shot which caused an eruption of giggles in the theater.

NIK PATRICK: My favorite cult classic horror is Behind the Mask. I hope more people watch that mockumentary classic.

My best memory of a midnight film was a one-weekend late showing of Midsommar Director’s Cut. I had watched the original version the prior month alone, so it was fun going with friends this time. My friends had not seen the original version so it was my job to tell them what was new afterward. The characters who were unpleasant in the original version were even more so in the Director’s Cut. This of course is a plus in the horror genre.

SCOTTY MILDER: My favorite grindhouse film is and will always be The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. But—like many children of the 80s—I came along just a little too late to catch it at the drive-in. Instead, I watched it on a washed-out VHS tape that I rented (way too young, thanks to the wildly irresponsible teenage clerk) at our local Safeway. I was nine or ten at the time, and the movie definitely bent my brain sideways. I made a secret dub and watched it over and over and over again until I finally got my hands on a legit copy when I was in high school. I did catch it in my late 20s during a Halloween midnight-movie showing. It screened as a double feature with Eaten Alive, and that was a truly glorious experience.

BUCK WEISS: I grew up in Southern Illinois, where Sammy Terry ruled the midnight movie every week. When I was seven, I had a friend stay over, and my mom let us stay up to watch Son of the Blob! I made it about halfway through before I was too freaked out to go on. It scared me to death and started my love of horror and grindhouse films. My favorite drive-in memory was seeing the movie Signs at a Drive-in surrounded by cornfields on all sides. Everyone was a little more on edge, knowing that anything could be standing just within the rows.

SHANNON BRADY: The cult classic that popped into my head first was Repo! The Genetic Opera. Set in a future where organ failures are an epidemic, a corporation promising cures becomes powerful enough to rule the world. If customers fall behind on payments for their new organs, Repo Men are deployed to repossess company property with lethal force. It’s one of my favorite horror musicals and by far the goriest I’ve ever seen. I think it’s very much a love it or hate it movie, and I fell instantly in love with it in high school.

My drive-in experience is sadly limited. The only time I’ve ever been to a drive-in movie was with my family in the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, in which we were hoping for a nice time while the theaters were closed, but ended up leaving early due to the promised safety restrictions not being followed at all. The movie we’d gone to see was The Sandlot, but when we got home my brother and I watched Dead Alive in our basement instead, so it was a considerably different viewing experience than expected. I’ve never seen a midnight movie screening, either, so that and a proper drive-in are two things I would love to attend someday.

PAUL MAGNAN: One of my favorite cult grindhouse movies is Death Race 2000. I’m talking about the original 1975 movie, not the recent remakes. The movie was made by grindhouse king Roger Corman and is set (well, obviously) in the year 2000. The world economy has collapsed in 1979, and the United States is now run by a totalitarian government. A violent, televised sport is created to placate the masses (a common theme for dystopian movies during this time. Another example is Rollerball). Thus, the Death Race. Each year, a number of drivers, with navigators, drive specially designed killing machines cross country, and the more people they kill with their cars, the more points they accrue. In a charming plot twist, children and the elderly are considered extra points. Also, they are not adverse to trying to kill each other.

In this, the 20th annual Death Race, the favorite to win is a driver called Frankenstein (played by David Carradine). He is dressed all in cool black leather, with a mask that hides most of his face, with only a hint of horrendous scarring underneath. This is Darth Vader before Darth Vader. Apparently, he has survived multiple catastrophic crashes, yet keeps coming back for more. This year, however, there is a new twist: a resistance to the government has formed, and they are taking out the Death Race drivers one by one. This, according to the TV announcers covering the race, is hilariously blamed on the French (there is a lot of dark humor in this movie). Another plus is that one of the other drivers is a young Sylvester Stallone, who plays a character called Machine Gun Joe Viterbo, a ’30s type gangster with a huge knife affixed to the hood of his car, which he uses to good effect when he takes out a man operating a jackhammer. The movie does have a bit of a surprise ending, and I highly recommend it.

Drive-in movie memory: oh, so many. Yet one that has stuck with me was when I had gone with my parents to a local drive-in to see Barbarella. I think my father wanted to see Jane Fonda in a barely-there space suit, and I’m sure he enjoyed the opening credits strip sequence. As it was 1968 and I was only 6 years old, I was probably playing with my toys in the back seat of the car at the time. My mother, not a movie person and undoubtedly not having any idea what this movie was all about, was probably looking back at me to make sure my eyes were off the screen during these credits. I did watch some of the movie, which went way over my head. But there was ONE SCENE that scared the living crap out of me and gave me nightmares for weeks. Even now, over 50 years later, I remember the fear my 6-year-old-self felt quite keenly: Barbarella, in the snow, meeting up with these creepy-ass children, who place her behind steel bars. They activate a horde of porcelain-faced dolls with sharp, steel teeth in jaws that snap open and shut, who wail like the damned and walk forward as she struggles against the bars. Once they reach Barbarella, the dolls continue to wail and take chunks out of her with their teeth, as the creepy, evil children smile and look on until Barbarella is rescued by adults. Yeah, dad, thanks for bringing me to see this movie.

And that’s our roundtable! Thank you so much to this awesome group of authors, and please check out Violent Vixens: An Homage to Grindhouse Horror, out now from Dark Peninsula Press!

Happy reading!

Welcome back for part two of the Mythic Delirium Roundtable! Today we talk a little more about these authors’ collaborative book, A Sinister Quartet, as well as their favorite horror films and how 2020 has affected their writing!

Since this book is more horror and dark fantasy, what’s your favorite horror film? Do you remember the first horror story or horror film that really captured your imagination?

C.S.E. COONEY: I remember a babysitter making me watch The Fly when I was four or five years old. I hated it, and wanted to leave the room, but she wouldn’t let me. It scared me for years! Not my favorite. I could probably watch it now and lance the boil of those early demons—but why spoil a perfectly wretched memory? Anyway, there are several horror films I’ve loved recently: I loved The Babadook and The Devil’s Backbone for their unapologetic primary metaphors—the monster in our own homes, our bodies, the phantom bomb in our midst—and I loved Midsommar because in so many ways it didn’t seem like horror at all. It seemed like paradise at a terrible cost, which is a little how I imagine Gelethel.

AMANDA MCGEE: Oh dear. So I can’t actually watch most horror films because I have too many nightmares. Like I will occasionally watch horror but I can’t do it alone and I have to be in the right headspace. But I will tell you that the first horror film I watched that really rattled me (and put me off of horror for a long time) was Resident Evil. I have a huge issue with zombies, actually. Super freak me out. It took watching Shaun of the Dead to get me to stop having nightmares about zombies, even years later.

JESSICA P. WICK: Hmm! Favorite horror film is tough, partly because I’m a huge wuss, so how do we define favorite here? Rewatchability? The degree to which it haunts me? I really liked the original Let the Right One In, ditto The Hunger with David Bowie, but if Pan’s Labyrinth — my all time favorite film — counts as horror (and I’d say it does), then Pan’s Labyrinth all the way. That movie has everything I want from darkness. As for what horror film first really captured my imagination, what a good question I’m not sure I have an answer to. The first horror images that really captured my imagination were the illustrations by Stephen Gammell from Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark, and one illustration of Odile by Trina Schart Hyman in Swan Lake. I was so scared of the Odile page and so fascinated-scared by the gruesome Gammell pictures.

MIKE ALLEN: It’s hard for me to pick a favorite horror flick because I enjoy many deeply flawed movies and can nitpick supposedly great movies, but my blighted soul often circles back to the Robert Wise-directed version of The Haunting, which I watched for the first time on grainy VHS as a jaded grown-up, and it still got under my skin.

My extremely traumatic first encounter with horror happened when I was in third grade, and our well-meaning teacher read us Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” for Halloween. Visions of that dismembered old man with the pale blue vulture eye consumed me. I didn’t shake the night terrors until my teen years, when I started to delight in the creative process behind horror. Clive Barker’s Books of Blood were the key to that transformation. Bonus points to the first horror movie that I deliberately went to see in a theater: Return of the Living Dead. BRRAAAIIINNNSS!

2020 has been an intense year on so many levels. How if at all has this year affected your own writing, either in productivity or in what themes you’re exploring in your work?

C.S.E. COONEY: 2020 in many ways has been incredibly productive, partly because it had to be. Both my husband and I are writers, and both of us were on constant deadlines, so in a way, writing became one of the stabilizing forces of 2020, even when everything else was melting down. I’ve not had much writing time to process current events; much of what I’m working on is several drafts old or to spec, but I have found some solace in journaling and poetry—when I can find the time at all.

AMANDA J. MCGEE: So 2020 has been ironically really productive for me. It might be the most productive writing year I’ve had for a while if we’re just counting new words. I think this is because the way I deal with stress historically is to read and write it out. Also not being able to go to the gym or hang out as much with friends means I don’t have my other coping mechanisms. I’ve mostly been writing more light-hearted stuff this go round, for obvious reasons. It’s a lot harder to put my characters in really disturbing situations when I am personally a little overwhelmed, so that’s been the biggest issue I’ve faced.

JESSICA P. WICK: 2020 has been just an awful gloom of uncertainty, occasionally punctuated by the hot radiance of anger. It’s been a struggle to write and to read. I think wistfully of those old stories of The Writer or The Artist, spilling their pain onto the page and shaping masterpieces. That’s not how I work at all. If I look back over the last few years at my projects, I’m often drawn to the question of how to do what is right. I write a lot about ‘good neighbors,’ about expectation and goodness, image and what it really means, a lot of careful what you wish for, consequences exist but they’re often unintended. I don’t think this awful year has changed any of that. I’m still interested in writing characters who are ultimately hopeful although they might not be in a very hopeful world.

MIKE ALLEN: I have to say, the stress of the pandemic and the roil of civil unrest and electoral uncertainty ground my writing down to a level of near nonexistence. (In a sense. In my day job, I’m a newspaper reporter, and in that role I’ve written plenty.) Most of my writing and publishing-related effort has gone into promoting A Sinister Quartet and my new collection of horror fiction, Aftermath of an Industrial Accident, and advertising and selling other titles in the Mythic Delirium Books catalog.

I have in 2020 managed to write a handful of new short stories, one of which I sold to Lackington’s. And it’s another “Button Bin” story, this time a prequel, called “The Feather Stitch.” It crosses over with another quasi-popular story of mine, “The Cruelest Team Will Win,” and thus ties in another monster mythos that I originally conceived as completely separate. I seem to be doing that more and more in my dotage — linking stories that originally I had no intention of tying together.

As an aside, I feel a need to step more fully into my editor hat here (hello, mixed metaphor) and note that C.S.E.’s “The Twice-Drowned Saint” in Sinister is very much of the 2020 moment in its plot and themes.

What do each of you have planned next?

C.S.E. COONEY: I have to finish edits for my novel Saint Death’s Daughter, which is coming out in Spring 2022 with Solaris. I have an idea for an 8-episode radio play/podcast called The Devil and Lady Midnight. I have a concept album I’d like to complete called Ballads from a Distant Star. I’d like to finish up a collection of novellas called Dark Breakers—which means finishing a novella I started for it, and also one last short story. I’d like to start the next novel in my Saint Death trilogy. And, oh! Various and sundry!

AMANDA J. MCGEE: Plans…yeah. I don’t have anything set in stone right now. No contracts. I’m working on a novel that ambushed me back in August. Kind of a Labyrinth meets Lord of the Rings scenario, for lack of a better way to describe it. It’s been a lot of fun. I’ve got another couple of novels at various stages of editing I need to get polished and out to query. So hopefully one of those projects goes somewhere, but I’ve been focusing on making new words this year more than anything.

JESSICA P. WICK: My plan is to finish what I call ‘the swashbuckly novel,’ which is a tale of revenge, atmosphere, carnivorous mermaids, fate witches working for a decadent government, sleeping curses, bureaucratic evil, dangerous nationalism, theatre troupes, pirates, repartee both with words and blades.

I’ve also been playing with drabbles expanding some of the folklore from my horror story, ‘The Husker,’ which is up at Strange Horizons, and I’d like to put together a collection of oddities …Possibly to go along with a poetry collection. That’s my big 2021 goal: Put out a collection of poetry.

But there are other things I’m working on (in theory), too. A murder ballad card game, a novel about Brinedrift House (it will involve devils), a horror story about a goose. You’d think I wouldn’t need to write more. Say ‘goose’ and have people sagely nod ‘ah yes, the devil bird,’ but I have a goal of getting my friend Christa to never look at geese the same way again.

So many plans! I just hope I’m ready for 2021.

MIKE ALLEN: I have a fully drafted novel, working title These Bloody Filaments, that I haven’t touched since January, in part because of the 2020 miasma, in part because I felt like I had to see how this election turned out in order to choose the directions the revisions should go, as racism and police brutality figure strongly in its warp and weft. I hope to find the strength to get back to it soon. In the meantime there’s an older novel to perhaps dust off, a new novel idea to start on, other stories to finish, future Mythic Delirium Books to discuss — and of course more promotion for both Aftermath of an Industrial Accident and A Sinister Quartet.

Where can we find you online?

C.S.E. COONEY: https://csecooney.com/ and @csecooney on Twitter and Insta.

AMANDA J. MCGEE: You can find me all sorts of places! My website is http://amandajmcgee.com, where I blog weekly, and I’m also on Twitter (@skylit1) and Instagram (@amcgee.writes) and I have a Facebook page, and technically even a Patreon where you can read little snippets of things I’m currently scribbling on.

JESSICA P. WICK: You can find me online at jessicapwick.com, foamlyre on instagram, and @lunelyre on twitter.

MIKE ALLEN: As a publisher at https://mythicdelirium.com/, as a writer at http://descentintolight.com/, on Twitter at https://twitter.com/mythicdelirium and on Facebook as https://www.facebook.com/time.shark.

Tremendous thanks to the authors of A Sinister Quartet for being part of this very fabulous roundtable!

Happy reading!

So today is the day! Boneset & Feathers has officially made its witchy debut in the world!

So many thanks to the amazing Scott Gable at Broken Eye Books for bringing this book into existence! It was such a wonderful experience working with Broken Eye again after the release of Pretty Marys All in a Row back in 2017. Also, tremendous thanks to gawki for their amazing cover art. Behold the cover in all its vibrant glory!

Pre-orders have started making their arrivals in readers’ homes, which is always an exciting thing for writers. If you ordered the book, please tag me in any pictures you post, as it will do my witchy little heart good to see them!

As for advance reviews, here are a few lovely quotes about the book from reviewers so far!

“Kiste casts a spell with this original and suspenseful horror story, but it holds more than meets the eye.” — Library Journal (starred review)

“A gorgeous book featuring magic, witches, ghosts and revenge turned sour.” — S.J. Budd of Come and Behold My Dark World

“Kiste is a versatile and engaging author making this book definitely one to check out. Recommended for fans of coming of age, witches, and more.” — Sci-Fi & Scary

“By the time you hurtle toward the epic conclusion, you will be wowed and left wanting more from this master storyteller and weaver of magic tales. Buy all of Gwendolyn Kiste’s books if you haven’t already.” — A.E. Siraki at Cemetery Dance

So just where can you find this strange little book with its ghost birds and witches and witchfinders? I’m glad you asked!

Boneset & Feathers at Amazon

Boneset & Feathers at Broken Eye Books

The ebook version is also on its way and will be available shortly as well!

As always, happy reading, and thank you so much to everyone who’s already ordered and supported this novel! I know 2020 has been rife with uncertainty, and today in particular is a very tense day, so for everyone who’s shared in my book’s release, I appreciate it so much more than you know!

Stay safe, and stay witchy!