For many fans, the horror genre transcends the roller coaster-thrill of sitting in a dark theater, white-knuckling the arm rest. Given enough time, horror has a way of seeping into your bones and forming the lens of your perspective. Conversations on bodily autonomy reflect The Exorcist, consumerism becomes a re-enactment of Dawn of the Dead, and of course, death and human frailty loom over it all.

Horror becomes a tool, a series of building block-shaped tropes that fit together in such a way that we can assemble our own worlds and test our own dark hypotheses. We have no choice but to write horror—we know no other way. It’s become a part of us. 

I don’t know that Patrick Barb considers himself a postmodernist, but it’s worth noting that in his debut collection, Pre-Approved for Haunting, the lens applied is twofold—to that of the story and to that of its structural foundation. I’ve long been a fan of Barb’s unique take on horror fiction (read “Haunting Lessons,” please), because as an artist he is not only at ease with the fundamentals of the craft, but also: the reader gets the impression that he’s having fun while traipsing through the graveyard. Barb’s stories are full of human, lived-in moments, but these moments flourish in often absurdist distortions or deconstructed echoes of the genre itself. 

This is all to say that Patrick doesn’t just write horror stories—he also writes about horror stories. 

Pre-Approved for Haunting is an excellent collection of weird and dark fiction that explores both the genre and more immediate themes of violence, found family, and the supernatural. To say the collection is any one thing would be to discredit it—as there are a handful of stories in here that have little to say about the horror genre itself. But its heights are when Barb feels like a kid in a sandbox, a mummy in one hand and a vampire in another. The glee borne from this imaginative process is contagious. 

“A Portrait of the Artist as an Angry God” is an early standout that takes a haunted painting and runs it for the touchdown by emphasizing its father and son relationship, the idea of legacy, and some interesting insights into low and high art. “I Will Not Read Your Haunted Script” is a mind-bending monologue of sorts, as meta as the title announces, but extremely enjoyable nonetheless. The title story, however, might be the crown jewel of the collection, a brilliant deconstruction of the haunted house tale that asks poignant, yet simple questions of the reader to get them to consider what makes a house haunted. By the end, the story transforms from a playful romp through hallowed ground, into an exercise in inevitable dread. 

The final, and perhaps the most extravagant genre-experiment is “The Giallo Kid in the Cataclysm’s Campgrounds,” where Barb weaves together several disparate horror elements—the giallo, slasher, and apocalypse—to create a sort of Cabin in the Woods riff starring a killer in a Homer Simpson mask. It is, in a word, batshit. But in the good way. Barb excels when he’s juggling horror iconography, letting the pieces fall where they may, and then sketching in the sinew. 

My favorite story in Pre-Approved for Haunting though, breaks this mold in favor of bleaker subject matter and the elimination of genre navel-gazing. “Melvin and the Murder Crayon” is a dark tale about the death of a child by a trigger-happy resource officer and how the tragedy takes shape after the child’s death. The story is told across five pages, with plenty of scene breaks, creating the feeling of witnessing a flip book of snapshots—the initial violence, the press conference, the clean-up, and, of course, the titular crayon which takes on symbolic (perhaps supernatural) relevance. It’s a brilliant piece of horror fiction that is confrontational, empathetic, and sadly reflective of real life. 

As a whole, Pre-Approved for Haunting moves quickly. There’s a fair amount of flash fiction, and most stories run less than fifteen pages, giving the reader a sense of breathless revelation as they turn from one to another. I’m a big proponent of leaving novellas out of collections because of the dead stop they put on the pacing and I was happy to find that Barb’s debut is a well-sequenced sprint, rather than a stuttering crawl. 

Pre-Approved for Haunting is a book of horror stories written for horror fans. Barb dumps out his play-chest of slashers, hauntings, and monsters and asks you to see your own life built from the remnants of shrieking music stings and half-remembered direct-to-video rentals. Pre-Approved for Haunting shows us that horror, above all else, is a language. 

Weird fiction, so often, is a marriage between the supernatural and the absurd. It’s through this lens that we see some of its most striking works. Kafka’s Metamorphosis comes to mind, where a man becomes a bug and from that unreality blossoms a story that interrogates reality. This, ultimately, I like to think, is the goal of Weird fiction—to dismantle our surroundings with a soundly strange aberration. If you imagine your immediate world, and make one thing wrong, it necessarily calls into question the rightness of everything around it. Danger Slater’s House of Rot works in this vein, although to say it is a comrade of Kafka’s is to also say it has kin with Cronenberg, the bizarro movement, and many others who make ooey-gooey horror with social commentary. Ultimately though, most readers will just be satisfied with a fun, readable story, with gross-out moments to spare. House of Rot excels here as well. 

Slater’s novella centers around a young (but not that young) couple who have just moved into a new apartment. The first chapter explodes off the page with voice to spare. It is immediate, irreverent, funny, and slightly sinister. And really, I think it is Slater’s voice that is the unofficial third main character of House of Rot. He provides asides, dashes of humor, prophetorial exposition that makes the novella feel like it isn’t just a story, but an old story. A modern fable coming from the lips of an omniscient, streetwise smartass who’s seen it all before, and knows what horrors lurk beyond our immediate comprehension.

The crux of the story is our young couple coming to grips with the sheen of mold that at first appears as a disappointing flaw in their new living space, but then becomes its defining feature—locking them into their new apartment as the fungus spreads and spreads. All the while, their neighbor provides cryptic amusement while slamming down six packs of Hamm’s from a window. From there, things get gorey and gross as bodily functions are undermined in extravagant fashion. 

If this sounds strange, it’s because it is. House of Rot is a weird fucking book. But it’s also so grounded in the millennial experience it’s hard not to find it relatable. There’s lots of commentary in here about millennials growing older and still struggling to make good on the American dream. Our characters in House of Rot are in their thirties and still living in apartments. They shroud their frustration and insecurities with endless irony, even as they’re literally falling apart. Because of this, in spite of its exceeding weirdness, House of Rot feels deeply relevant. The rot here is imbued with a sense of time and place—namely, now—and through it we gain a thoughtful exploration of aging millennial malaise. 

But more importantly than all of that—House of Rot is plain old fun. I finished it in one sitting (In my apartment, two weeks from my thirty-third birthday. Yikes.) and found it to be lively and compulsively readable. It’s the sort of book that swallows you up, where you’re helpless to do anything but say to yourself: well, okay—maybe just one more chapter. 

House of Rot is a fast-paced, thoughtful, and hilarious novella that is an ode to a generation’s shared depression. Propelled by its author’s inimitable voice and energy, it manages to take the fun of body horror and elevate it into economic discourse that never feels like a righteous diatribe, or worse: an afterthought. 

Come for the Weird, stay for the ride—House of Rot drags its readers through a shared fever dream of apartment-sized proportions. 

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)

I’ve got a book coming out this month and the release date can’t arrive fast enough!

On September 27th, Split Scream Volume 1 will be released into the world. I’m so stoked that my novelette, “The Guts of Myth,” gets to stand beside Scott J. Moses’ “The Mourner Across the Flames.”

About “The Guts of Myth”

It’s 1973. British-American thug Byron is tasked with finding the occultist Allosaurus D’Ambrosere, given only handwritten instructions and two hateful associates. Where they’re going, they’ll find blood red skies, obsidian towers, and a deep thirst for violence. But will they find the man who calls himself the Golden King? “The Guts of Myth” is Weird horror that snaps like hardboiled noir with vistas lifted straight from Beksinski.

I’m also incredibly excited about the praise this little book has been receiving:

“I devoured ACE doubles back in the day, and SPLIT SCREAM feels like a sleek, bullet-sized iteration of those beauties. Winter and Moses go hard with transdimensional Lovecraftian body horror and far-future pulp evocative of Vance, Brackett, and the like. Excellent.”

—Laird Barron, author of Swift to Chase

“SPLIT SCREAM VOLUME ONE is an experience I can whole-heartedly recommend. The two works have distinct flavors but work well together, and you’d be right to expect to settle in for a bloody weird, but bloody good time with this duo. Just be sure to keep your hands inside the vehicle at all times.”

—Alex Woodroe, editor at Tenebrous Press

Dread Stone Press’s SPLIT SCREAM series is off to a wonderfully disturbing start with this double feature. I was immersed in Carson Winter’s weird noir…then chilled by Scott J. Moses’ stark dystopian.”

—Christi Nogle, author of Beulah

This book is up for pre-order right now from Dread Stone Press!

What creepypasta lends to its readers is a sense of the uncanny encroaching on reality. At its best, this distortion straddles the line between the unimaginable and the tactile. They work as constructed urban legends, where maybe it didn’t happen to you, but it did happen. In the age of the internet, where life has been thoroughly demystified, the creepypasta offers testimonial proof to the otherworldly. That it still exists, because something happened—to a friend of a friend of a friend. 

The Rules of the Road by C.B. Jones understands the mechanics that make creepypasta work, and it successfully utilizes them while expanding on their constraints and combining them with a sharp sense of emotional resonance. You could just as easily call Rules a novel as you could a short story collection, though I guess the most insightful of us would call it a mosaic novel. It manages to take the best of both worlds—flashes of instant familiarity torn from common experience and an obsessive wrap-around that grounds it all. The Rules of the Road does this without the usual negative trappings of the genre, feeling well-crafted under sure-hands throughout. The end result is a laudable ride down the schism between the known and the unknowable. 

The idea at the center of Jones’ novel is a self-propagating engine: a folksy voice on the radio, detailing the titular rules. If you follow the instructions, you have nothing to worry about. If you don’t? Well, Buck Hensley will let you know. The rules themselves are a highlight of the book—each of them mirroring the American Road Trip Experience. Everyone has seen the “For a good time call…” graffiti. Everyone has seen the lone shoe on the side of the highway. Everyone has held their breath while passing a graveyard. These images that make up the American roadscape, combined with automobile superstitions, form a new mythology under Jones’ expert hands. The acuteness of their observations are the perfect pathway to creating a sense of tension amidst our familiarity. 

The stories here are uniformly excellent, if sometimes a little overlong. Although Jones does an excellent job of using his formula without beating it into the ground. While each story is framed as a tale from the road, they’re all very distinct with unique characters, rules, and outcomes. It’d be easy to write a book where every character breaks a rule and dies (and that’d be a very boring book), but The Rules of the Road features a lot of diversity despite using the same set-up for a large portion of the book. There’s stories about touring musicians, survivor’s guilt, urban prejudice, and more. The Rule acts sometimes as a comeuppance, sometimes as a savior—but it affects each character differently. Which is why it’s hard to say Rules only takes its cues from creepypasta, as while the concept is a powerful driving force here, Jones never loses sight of his characters. 

These rules, delivered by eldritch radio DJ Buck Hensley become a familiar delight throughout the book, as well as sort of a running joke. By the end of the novel, where Jones takes us to a surprising emotional place, Buck’s voice is stuck in our heads. He’s the country-fried coyote of the airwaves, gluing together disparate tales with his folksy warnings. In my mind, he has the muscle to be every bit of the modern spook as Slenderman, something people joke about on the open road, when the radio turns to static. 

The Rules of the Road is a fantastic piece of horror storytelling that feels like a grand accumulation of influences—a meeting point between the modern literary horror short and the populist urban legend. C.B. Jones has written a book that melds these influences into something uniquely tuned into the horror zeitgeist, a call and answer to the unknowable—a yearning for blank spaces, tall tales, and rogue signals. 

I first discovered Kurt Fawver in the pages of Vastarien, where his story/play “The Gods in Their Seats, Unblinking,” left me feeling like I was in the presence of weird horror’s latest master. Here was a story that was Ligottian in all the most delicious ways—flexing its format to the breaking point while delivering legitimate existentialist chills. From there, it was no surprise that The Dissolution of Small Worlds became my new must-read. I had joined the cult of Fawver, and in my new devotion I proselytized his mastery to all of my weirdest friends. 

Fawver’s work, for better or worse, is almost designed to resonate with me. It’s absurdist, dark, sometimes funny, and oftentimes unrelentingly bleak. It’s the sort of fiction that reminds me why horror became a lifelong passion. And now, with the release of We are Happy, We are Doomed, I am once again in awe of what Fawver brings to the Weird. 

While We are Happy, We are Doomed is a short story collection, it feels unfair to directly compare it to The Dissolution of Small Worlds, because Fawver’s latest release is not quite as traditional of a short story collection. We are Happy… is hyper-focused on Fawver working in a particular mode—that of sociological horror. The stories here often focus on communities and are written almost as if they were non-fiction essays or snippets from a history book. If I were to describe this collection to anyone, I’d say it’s something like a meeting of Franz Kafka and Ken Burns. Many of the stories are told through a knowing eye-in-the-sky, describing the evolution of a community after coming in contact with some strange aberration. Absurdity lies at the heart of We are Happy, We are Doomed, and it’s this dissonant sense of oddity that teases out its horror. 

Opener, “The Bleeding Maze: A Visitor’s Guide,” guides the reader through its titular distortion, but doesn’t merely linger on it as an oddity. In Fawver’s fiction, there’s always a progression of strangeness that goes further than one can imagine. The way Fawver introduces these scenarios, then spins them out naturally toward unnatural conclusions, makes for compelling fiction. While these stories could be newspaper clippings from another dimension, they never feel dull or dry. If there’s one lesson to be taken from We are Happy, We are Doomed, it’s that strangeness begets more strangeness. 

While sometimes Fawver’s penchant for absurdity veers into the heavy-handed (see: “The Man in the Highchair”), oftentimes the stories straddle their sense of the uncanny with legitimate horror. “The Richview Massacre” is one that comes to mind, where despite the story unraveling from something as banal as pizza, there is still a real sense of the Weird at play. For me, Fawver’s writing is most impressive when it takes on silly topics and reshapes them into bleak visions of fractured communities. As many of us feel more and more divided and defined by our beliefs and locales, We are Happy, We are Doomed holds a mirror to our own connections, and forces us to consider not just the ones we have made, but the ones that may be demanded of us. 

To say that the dominant voice of We are Happy… is that of a history book isn’t quite true though, as Fawver also plays with form to get at his finest results. Two of my favorite stories in this collection deviate in delicious ways from Fawver’s bird’s-eye view of communities grappling with the strange. In “Extinction in Green,” the story is told through a series of sparse diary entries, providing a peculiar escalation of one distortion on a small group of people. This story, juxtaposed with the others in the collection, feels acutely claustrophobic. It’s a reminder that the scope of Fawver’s interest isn’t only towns and cities, but people joined by circumstances—no matter how minute. Another story that utilizes a meta format to great aplomb, is “Rule and Regulations of White Pines, Vermont.” This is one of the best stories in the collection, and it’s a great reminder that there’s no better narrative device than a ticking clock—which this list of peculiar rules and lore provides. We are Happy, We are Doomed has enough diversity in storytelling, that even with a collection that’s this cohesive, it never suffers the effects of feeling samey. Each distortive event is so specific and strange, that even next to so many similarly themed stories, they each manage to stand on their own. 

When we’re talking about modern weird horror, we can’t not talk about Kurt Fawver. His fiction is distinctive. It carries the torch of folks like Kafka, Ligotti, and Padgett, while expressing a singular obsession and perspective unique to the author. Fawver’s brand of absurdist horror is as bizarre as it is unsettling. It plumbs the depths of what makes us human, exploring the one thing about humanity that seems to define us—our relationships to each other. We are Happy, We are Doomed, in that respect, feels like an evolution of both Lovecraft’s and Ligotti’s cypher-like protagonists—the first person automatons that represent the individual as a speck in an infinite blackness. Fawver works in a similar manner, except the “I” becomes a “We.” In We are Happy, We are Doomed our collectivity is not enough to fight off the madness, it’s just more fuel for the fire.