I am so excited to announce that SOFT TARGETS will be coming out via Tenebrous Press on March 22. This is a very personal book that is filled to the brim with strangeness, alongside some very person subject matter.
About SOFT TARGETS:
You know that office bromance: two of a kind, always taking their lunch together, always wearing the same sly grin. Only ever a hair away from a cold joke about how spreadsheets are a living hell; about taking a bullet if it means going home early on Friday. Sometimes in these fantasies, they’re heroes being hauled out on a stretcher.
Sometimes they’re the ones pulling the trigger.
Now, say these guys discover a loophole that makes some days less real than others—less permanent—and start to act out their violent fantasies without fear of reprisal. Why shouldn’t they? Tomorrow, everything will go back to normal, with no one the wiser but them.
They’ll always remember what it felt like to act on their basest impulses. They’ll know how it could feel to do it again.
Maybe you don’t know these guys. Maybe you don’t want to.
SOFT TARGETS is a reality-bending novella about malignant malaise; the surrender to violence; and the addictive appeal of tragedy as entertainment.
Praise for SOFT TARGETS:
“A hell of a story…and damned funny—one of the most difficult things to pull off in a horror story, let alone one with such grim and taboo subject matter. I already knew Carson Winter was one of the best newer writers of the Weird, but with Soft Targets my admiration and expectations of his work have skyrocketed. Read this book.”
- Jon Padgett (author, THE SECRET OF VENTRILOQUISM)
“Carson Winter has crafted a stunning, darkly funny, and intensely disturbing look into the psyche of two young men barely getting by. At times, it feels like Fight Club for a new generation. Other times, it feels like the evening news…will make you laugh, cry, gasp, and scream HOLY SHIT.”
- Joshua Hull (Screenwriter, GLORIOUS)
“SOFT TARGETS is a story about the power of friendship—a sickly force unmoored from reality. Steeped in alienation and despair, Winter skillfully details this diseased folie à deux until it finally ruptures.”
- Andrew F. Sullivan (author, THE MARIGOLD and THE HANDYMAN METHOD)
“A cautionary tale about the dangers of staring too long into the abyss and of becoming self-righteously in love with your own pain. [Carson] Winter gives us a narrative that is truly transgressive—it’s shocking because it reveals something fundamentally wrong with reality, a level of normalized sickness and violence that we put out of our minds to function in the day-to-day. The result is a story that is haunting, stomach churning, and will sit with you for a long, long time when you’re done.”
- Jolie Toomajan (editor, ASEPTIC AND FAINTLY SADISTIC)