Ginger Nuts of Horror is honoured to bring you the exclusive cover reveal for The Butcher by Laura Kat Young, as well as an extract from this intriguing new horror novel publishing from the ever dependable Titan Books. 

When Lady Mae turns 18, she'll inherit her mother's ghastly job as the Butcher: dismembering Settlement Five’s guilty criminals as payment for their petty crimes. But then their leaders, known as the Deputies, come to Lady Mae’s house, and there in the living room murder her mother for refusing to butcher a child.

Within twenty-four hours, now alone in the world, Lady Mae begins her gruesome job. But a chance meeting years later puts her face to face with the Deputy that murdered her mother. Now Lady Mae must choose: will she flee, and start another life in the desolate mountains, forever running? Or will she seek vengeance for her mother’s death even if it kills her?

The Butcher by Laura Kat Young


The children crowded around her in a circle. They shouted at her, kicked rocks and dirt into her face. They pulled her long curls out from under her bonnet and stomped on her back. They thought they had won—the butcher’s daughter lay prostrate on the ground—but as their taunting let up, as they turned to walk away, Lady Mae dragged herself up out the dust. She crawled first to her hands and knees and spat. She put her hand to her skull, the warm blood stuck between strands of hair. The children stared at her, nudged each other with their elbows and walked back, silent and wondering, towards Lady Mae.

“I ain’t afraid. You ain’t nothing to me.”

Her lips moved, and she heard her own voice as the words drifted in the still summer air towards the children’s ears. The children stopped moving and stood, hands hanging from their sides, their tiny fists clutching stones. They watched Lady Mae stand up and take a step forward, dragging her back foot to meet her front. Closer and closer she got to the beasts, their eyes, their little bodies, their heads shifting towards one another unsure of what to do, as though scared that they weren’t as strong as they thought. She was Lady Mae, the butcher’s daughter after all. But what they couldn’t know is that something had unmoored inside of her, and as the hot wind blew the dust up around her, she wiped the blood from her mouth leaving a grotesque smear that went down the edge of her chin. The children, who thought themselves safe from any punishments—safe because Lady Mae had never told the Deputies of the treatment she endured—saw a flicker in her eyes. She’d felt the rush before, many times in fact, but always it seemed too dangerous to embrace. When it bubbled up, she tried to push it back down for it went against her mother’s words instilled in her so long ago. It ain’t going to change nothing, her mother had said. You’re better than that Lady Mae, she’d said, those kids need forgiveness just like everyone else. But in that moment, Lady Mae wondered if she was any better than the savages and how hard she could throw a fist-sized rock and how much blood would pour from their small heads. They didn’t deserve forgiveness, and Lady Mae was tired of blaming her injuries on chores, the woodpile, her own clumsiness. Her mother never believed her anyway. She was tired of running, and so as she squared her body towards the small group of children, she felt her fear unravel and make its way out of her.

“You better watch I don’t tell my mama,” she said. “Assault’s against the law.”

She’d never spoken to the children other than to yell stop you can’t no please. She’d never threatened them, and because of that they thought themselves invincible. Maybe they were. But maybe she was, too. After all, she had come from her mother, had inherited her eyes and mouth and high cheekbones; might she also have gotten the same strength that allowed her mother to go to the depot day in and day out?

“You ain’t gonna say nothing. We’ll make sure of that,” a boy called. It was the older Thompson boy, the meanest one, and he stood stuffed into an old shirt, dirt on his cheeks. He was ugly, and it wasn’t just because he was cruel. The younger one—too young to understand just how awful his brother was—ran up to Lady Mae and pushed her hard, back onto the ground. Edith Cummings, the only girl in the group, threw a handful of gravel at her face. But Lady Mae, whose ears still rang and with eyes still blurry, rose to her knees again, the tiny stones cutting through her skirts, and looked the awful girl in her narrowed eyes.

“I ain’t afraid.”

She brushed the dirt from her hands. But she was weak, and the children were losing interest, calling to one another to leave her, that she ain’t nothing but a poor girl whose mama ought to be hanged. As quickly as it had churned through her, the strength vanished, and in its place, she felt the familiar fear, the sticky panic underneath her fingernails.

“Come on,” yelled Balthazar Jones. “Let’s get out of here.” Being the oldest he gave the orders and the others listened. They backed away slowly, keeping their eyes on the butcher’s daughter. When they were far enough away, they turned and broke into a run.

“We’ll get you Lady Mae! Ain’t nowhere to hide.”

“Come and get me,” she called after them too softly for them to hear. “Come and get me if you think you can.”

And as they disappeared from her view she felt her body again, bloodied and bruised. She rose to her feet, each step like fire whipping around her bones. She turned in the direction of the depot and began walking, knowing that when her mother saw her she would take Lady Mae into her arms and press her head against her chest. There she would hear the rhythmic beating of her mother’s heart, the life inside of her undeterred. But as Lady Mae approached the depot, she slowed. What would she say to her mother this time? How would she explain the blood, the bruises, the torn dress? Lady Mae didn’t know how to hold the rage that had filled her—her mother hadn’t taught her that, and she could not tell her mother of the burning resolve she’d felt to fight back, how though she’d felt it before, that this time it was different. You ain’t give me words for it, Mama.

She walked gingerly up the depot’s porch steps, her feet heavy and hot. The door was open, but before Lady Mae called to her mother, she heard a man’s voice, low and growly. Peering through the window, she saw her mother bent over the man. Her mother’s back was to the window, and the man sat in the chair, a tourniquet around his forearm. Her mother held a saw in her left hand—the same kind of saw that was in her bag at home— and the sun, which had just lifted high in the sky, glinted off the blade. The man sat still. Lady Mae ducked down and leaned her back up against the splintered wood of the shack. She wasn’t allowed in the depot, and most likely she’d be in trouble if she was found peering in through the window. So she crouched and listened to her mother’s voice.

“You move the worse it’ll be,” her mother said.

“I ain’t gonna move,” the man said.

“That’s what you said last time.”

“Just do it already.”

“On three, then. One, two—”

There was a choking scream, one that gurgled far back in the man’s throat, and then Lady Mae heard a familiar sound, a grinding of metal to bone that was not unlike that which she heard when it was her turn to clean the chicken for a special meal. She listened: four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. And then her mother’s voice humming softly. In the sky, a small murder of crows bent and rippled, but none cried out.

She looked down at her own fingers and wondered how many layers of skin and muscle and bone there were. Would hers be warm and sticky where the skin pulled back, the phalanges jagged and sharp? What if the blood wouldn’t still and it flowed out of her until she was as dry as the earth? She felt a tightness in her jaw and the bubbling of spit in the back of her throat. Earlier that morning as she watched her mother ready herself for the day, she had wanted her mother’s hands to cup her face as she used to and tell her it was nothing, that it was just her job, that the patients really did deserve their atonements. But instead, her mother had grabbed her daughter’s wrists with each of her hands so tightly that Lady Mae saw the blood slowing as her mother’s knuckles turned white. Their arms held there, heavy and alike, in the empty space between their bodies. Lady Mae did not dare pull away.

“You must believe,” her mother had said. “You must trust. But above all, you must be careful of the questions you ask; the wrong one can lead you to the butcher, even if it’s me.”
​
Lady Mae lay the bag next to the door and crept away from the depot. The man in the chair—she hadn’t expected that, though she couldn’t be sure of what she expected. It was both exactly and completely unlike what she had envisioned in her mind. Her mother had looked exquisitely barbaric standing over him, her toes inches away from the blood on the floor. She knew there was blood—always there was blood; there wasn’t a single dress of her mother’s that didn’t have faded stains on the sleeves. But that wasn’t what had jarred her—it had been her mother’s singing, the song she then recognized as the one her mother sang her when she was hurt or tired or sad; it was her mother’s job to maim, to console, and it would soon be Lady Mae’s job, too.

Someone asked me recently in an interview, “Why horror?” 


A fair question. Over the last decade, I’ve written in a variety of genres from young adult science fiction to adult romance. 


“Because I’ve been afraid my whole life,” was my rather glib on-the-spot response. 


But, glib or not, it happens to be true. I wasn’t officially diagnosed with an anxiety disorder—Generalized Anxiety Disorder with OCD—until I was in my early thirties. However, it’s been part of my life since my early teens or possibly before. 


One of my earliest memories is searching my neck for strange bumps or lumps—my beloved grandfather had just been diagnosed with cancer and I was convinced I had it as well. For whatever reason, my anxiety tends to present itself as worry about diseases. 


For years, before I started therapy, I couldn’t watch or read stories about illnesses—no matter how rare or uncommon—without obsessing over my potential symptoms. If there was a Purple Freckle Syndrome, I could find you a freckle on my skin that matched the description. And then I would spend hours obsessively symptom-checking in a sweaty anxiety spiral, imagining my eventual diagnosis and demise with Purple Freckle Syndrome. 


In school, I was the shy bookish kid—I read Star Trek novels in class—and I was frequently the new student in class, thanks to my family’s frequent moves. In high school, I would script interactions in my head, coming up with conversational prompts and imagining the resulting scenarios along with my response(s), so that I would never feel caught off guard or out of control.  Hello, OCD!


In college, one of my best friends would gently tease me about my need to have certain shirts on certain hangers. Logically, I knew that that flannel on that hanger wouldn’t have any bearing on my day being good or bad. But it felt wrong. Like, that tight feeling in your chest when you think you left the house with the door unlocked or the stove on. Just inviting destruction and danger. 


It was easier to put the shirt on the right hanger. Every time.  


As you can imagine, uncontrolled and endless anxiety at that level can take over your life. Clinical anxiety is not something you can dismiss by “thinking positively” or “focusing on something else.” Everyone has moments of anxiousness for various reasons—health concerns, job interviews, relationship issues—but one of the ways in which Generalized Anxiety Disorder sucks is that it doesn’t have a root cause. Anxiety because of a job interview goes away when the interview is done. GAD is just…there. Always. 


When I discovered horror novels in middle school, I couldn’t get enough. Christopher Pike (Remember Me and Weekend), Steven Charles (the Private School series), V.C. Andrews (Flowers in the Attic and My Sweet Audrina), Dean Koontz (Strangers) and then, of course, Stephen King. I read It over and over again.  
  
I’m fairly sure I was drawn—am still drawn—to horror because it made sense of my world. I could relate to the characters who were terrified and out of their depths. Their formerly safe, familiar world had become one full of dangers they couldn’t escape and didn’t know how to handle. But, unlike in real life, there was a concrete reason to be afraid. These characters would eventually determine the source of their terror and attempt to stop it. And one way or another, their fear would end. They would have closure—frankly, in most of the books I liked, they would triumph over the evil thing/person trying to hurt them. I loved that. 


It’s taken me years—and professional help—to see that while anxiety has certainly made my life harder, it has also had a huge influence on my writing in a mostly positive way. My obsessive focus on detail is an advantage when it comes to describing scenes. All that advance scripting I did in high school? Great practice for dialogue. That part of the book where the situation just gets worse and worse for our intrepid hero or heroine? Worst-Case-Scenario Girl to the rescue!


But primarily, I think it’s led me to focus on characters who struggle with their own fears, characters who may not entirely trust themselves. 


In Dead Silence, Claire Kovalik, reluctant team leader of the LINA, struggles with her past trauma and she doesn’t trust her own perceptions of reality. She sees things—ghosts or hallucinations, manifestations of her own guilt—and she can’t tell which they are or what to do about them. 


I know that feeling. I know what it’s like to have a doctor ask about symptoms and not be able to accurately describe my own condition because I can’t tell if what I’m feeling is “real” or caused by my anxiety and obsessiveness. (Not that anxiety-induced symptoms aren’t real, but they certainly make it more difficult to accurately report what’s happening. Has that mole changed shape or color? Maybe…but I’ve also been poking at it for three weeks.) 


Because of my anxiety, I have trouble telling when a situation is worth worrying about. Which, basically, translates to being unable to trust my own perceptions. 


I love writing about an unreliable narrator because, well, I have experience with being one. I find writing about fear and uncontrollable situations therapeutic, in a way, because it makes me feel less alone. 


So, why horror? Because, in a small but very real way, it’s what I know. 


______
Dead Silence by S.A. Barnes will be available from Nightfire Books in hardcover, eBook, and audio digital download on January 25, 2022. 


 

Blimey.
​
So by this point, I’m sure we’re all well aware of the many, many (many) pitfalls of social media. However, one of the good things about it, for me, is finding good things to watch. For various reasons, my meatspace social life doesn’t contain a huge number of genre fiction enthusiasts; whereas my digital friend circle is chock to the brim with sci-fi, fantasy, and horror mega-enthusiasts. And it was absolutely social media buzz that drove me to my last two horror TV shows - Squid Game (which really deserves its own essay) and Midnight Mass.

Mike Flanagan seems to have been building up to this for some time; his last two movies, Gerald's Game and Doctor Sleep were superb King adaptations, the latter especially. Trying to splice a novel clearly in part still reacting to King’s distaste for Kubricks' version of The Shining with a movie that is, notionally, also a sequel to that self-same film was a pretty unenviable task, and Flanagan’s execution far exceeded not merely my expectations, but what I even thought would be feasibly possible with such a brief.

And of course, his last two TV outings have drawn deserved critical acclaim; personally, I dug Hill House more than Bly Manor, but both were exquisitely made pieces of television.

But, I mean, Midnight Mass… holy shit.

Shall we start by listing the classic horror tropes? Isolated community, shrinking population, empty houses, blue-collar lives being eroded by outside forces (the emergent backstory about the oil spill and the company payout twinning the destructive forces of rapacious and indifferent capital and environmental catastrophe in a way that would feel painfully on the nose if we weren't, you know, alive in 2022), a religious revival, the new handsome stranger also a priest, the returning prodigal son with the dark past... shit, we’ve even got teenagers sneaking off to an even more isolated spot to get fucked up, and an actual, old school bloody Vampire. Looked at like that, well, why wouldn’t I like it?

Then again… well, let’s just say the horror genre is not short of works that end up considerably less than the grab bag of tropes they employ. Midnight Mass is playing with a lot of classic influences but, for me, the reason it was so successful was the way those tropes interacted with the themes of addiction, regret, and religious faith


Zach Gilford’s Riley Finn and Hamish Linklater’s Father Paul form the two sides of the coin. Riley’s recovering alcoholic, haunted every night by the ghost of the woman he killed, taking the twelve steps but lapsed in his faith, forced to return to his family home following his prison sentence, is a bold choice for a protagonist; drunk driving being among the more venally selfish crimes a person can commit. Gilford plays it well, as does the script, letting his guilt play out in the nightly shots of the dead woman as he lays down to sleep, her face lit by the blue/red lights of the police car. It’s a striking image, but it’s also a canny choice; by not having Zach articulate his guilt, the implication is that it’s too big for words, his stoic acceptance of the nightly visitation seeming to be a tacit acknowledgment that he’s getting nothing he doesn’t deserve.

It’s obvious he’s on a collision course with Linklater’s Father Paul, replacement for the beloved aged village priest who got ill on a recent pilgrimage; a charismatic, confident preacher with a pleasantly goofy, slightly awkward speaking manner. It’s an absolutely stunning performance from Linklater, giving a painful nervousness and odd, yet somehow charming cadence to his sermons and conversations. The first encounter between the two men sets out the territory they’ll spend most of the show sparing over; Zach has been talked into attending the church by his father, who has also asked him not to take communion - ‘it would be disrespectful’, his Dad tells him, if he doesn’t believe - and when Father Paul mentions it on their way out after the service, the moment of silence that spins out is exquisite. Paul lets it hang, before turning the moment around with a comment on the people Jesus preferred to hang out with, and Zach’s weary respect and acknowledgment felt thrilling to me; in real life, that’s normally where such conversations end, but by this point, it’s already clear to me that things are going to go very deep indeed, and, as you might expect, I Am Here For It.

The show didn't disappoint, delivering a ferocity of argument that can only occur when the writer has enough respect for both sides of the debate to give each the strongest possible case to make. But as electrifying as I found those scenes, they ended up just one glittering piece in the overall mosaic; there’s basically no part of the story that didn’t work for me. It’s a huge ensemble cast, and there really isn’t a weak link; Robert Longstreet puts in a heartbreaking turn as Joe Collie, the town drunk who put Leeza Scarborough (played by Annarah Cymone) in a wheelchair; The doctor and her near-the-end senile and bedridden mother, Zach's mother and father, the new, recently widowed Muslim sheriff and his son… There are a lot of paired characters, and the way all those pairings play out impact on the narrative and provide emotional weight; weight that, by the end of the final episode, feels very heavy indeed.

And honestly, each of those pairings could fuel an essay, so exquisitely are they drawn, so brilliantly are they written and performed; and each one opens a window into a tension, an argument, a philosophical or emotional question of weight. What does forgiveness mean, for both the victim and the transgressor? When a child becomes curious or starts to pursue a faith that is not that of the parent, how do you begin to navigate that (from either side)? What does love look like across the divide of faith and unbelief? These and many more, each given space to breathe and explore, and all while driving the narrative, slowly but inexorably, towards an apocalyptic finale… Yeah, as you may have realized by this point, I was really impressed.

That said, it’s the ending that stuck with me the most, for probably obvious reasons to those of you who have read my recent piece on Don’t Look Up: because, in addition to all the things I’ve listed, Midnight Mass is absolutely about the end of the world.

The island serves as a pretty good microcosm for this vast-yet-fragile ecosystem we all live on. Before the story starts, big oil has already devastated the community, via an oil spill that killed the fishing and a settlement that simply didn’t make amends the way it needed to, and gosh, it’s almost like there are things money can't replace, isn’t it? There’s a truly vicious and delightful subplot here about how Bev Keane, arguably the woman who runs the church and the nearest thing the show has to an outright villain both persuaded the islanders to take the settlement and to donate a large part of it to the church to build a rec room/social space.

And then, here comes the vampire.

The villagers are all vampirized via an act of deceit, remember. An act of desecration, in fact; a perversion of the sacrament that, for people of genuine faith, I imagine is about as profane and awful a thing as it’s possible to imagine. The islanders are poisoned, robbed of their humanity via a ritual of trust and faith. The betrayal of their trust by Father Paul is absolute. They see benefits, initially, improvement in their health and wellbeing, a de-aging, to be precise, that feels to be restoring a sense of hope to a community in sore need of it. Rather like the ‘miracles’ and baubles of late-stage capitalism, it seems too good to be true, and just like late-stage capitalism, it turns out it is, indeed, too good to be true.

Like. They’re infected, via an institution they trust implicitly, with an illness that leads them to need to murder to survive. Oh, and they are now lethally vulnerable to sunlight.

*Looks to camera*

This one landed hard. Because it’s 2022 and oil companies don’t merely still exist, they still fund political parties across the increasingly inaccurately titled ‘democratic world’ while extracting and refining the fossil fuels the consumption of which, left at current unchecked levels, will render the planet uninhabitable by humans and most other lifeforms before my kid gets to what we, but she almost certainly will not call retirement age. Our already laughably weak and ineffectual ‘democratic institutions’ and ‘checks and balances are so hollowed out they’re practically shades of whatever they were meant to be in the first place; our international press draws ever-narrower borders around what is even permissible as ‘political debate’, our police openly conspire with a supine press and a corrupt governing class, so that the only time a member of the ruling class falls prey to the laws the rest of us live and die by is when Kremlinology decrees It’s Time For Them To Go.

Not to put too fine a point on it, we’re fucked, people. And it’s still getting worse, still accelerating when we should be slamming on the brakes. And in the UK and the US, the specter of fascism feels increasingly present; infecting already viciously conservative power structures and parties. The historical comparisons with the 1930’s are stark and terrifying, and the reason we’re snoozing on them so badly is because, unlike the historical test case we’re all so familiar with, this time, those forces are emerging not in a separate party, but in existing ones; in the US Republican party and the UK Conservatives, repressive and oppressive policies are stoking the fires of racial and national division at the same time they’re increasingly outlawing even peaceful demonstration or protest. Both groups are funded by the companies whose emissions will kill us all. Both groups are supported by media outlets owned by billionaires whose sole interest is in preserving the existing economic status quo at literally any cost.

THE FIRST HORROR BOOK I REMEMBER READING

As I’m sure is the case for many people, the first horror books I remember reading were Goosebumps and Point Horror. Although I loved both series, I must admit that I was probably a little fonder of the Point Horror books. They were more adult than Goosebumps, and they did have some pretty cool cover art. The Train seems to stand out in my memory, and I remember The Cemetery had a hand with long, pointed fingernail tearing through a wall. That one always made me think of Freddy Kruger!

As a young teenager, when I arrived in high school, I found that the library there was pretty well stocked with ‘real’ books. Immediately, I went and found their Stephen King books. I seem to recall them having quite a good selection. The only problems was, pupils needed a permission slip from their parents in order to be allowed to borrow them. My parent gave their consent of course, and the first book I borrowed – and, therefore, my first foray into Stephen King - was Pet Sematary. It’s still my favourite of King’s books, along with ‘Salem’s Lot.


THE FIRST HORROR FILM I REMEMBER WATCHING

I can only have been around six when I first watched A Nightmare On Elm Street. At the time, I believed that Freddy’s knives we extendable, and that they grew out of his fingers, like Wolverine’s claws! I also remember watching Halloween around the same time, and talking to my friends about it the next day in school.

Not long after that, I was allowed to stay up and watch Friday The 13th Part 6: Jason Lives. It was that film that really made me fall in love with the horror genre.


THE GREATEST HORROR BOOK OF ALL TIME

I’ve read so many good horror books, that picking one that I would call the greatest is almost impossible. Having said that, I do own The Complete Fiction of H. P Lovecraft. As I feel he is the greatest horror writer of all time, I guess that would, by default, make this collection the greatest horror book of all time. The book itself is huge. It’s hardback and it weighs about a ton!


THE GREATEST HORROR FILM OF ALL TIME

In my opinion there are three films that all deserve the title of the greatest horror film of all time. They are The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Night of the Living Dead and Halloween. I believe that these are the most important films to the genre. Without them, I don’t believe the horror genre would have become what it is today. Interestingly, in all three, you hardly see a single drop of blood spilled.

The is another film that I feel also deserves a mention. The Exorcist is probably the film that I find the most horrifying. As such, perhaps this should be considered the greatest.


THE GREATEST HORROR WRITER OF ALL TIME

Again, Lovecraft is amazing. I just don’t understand how he was able to come up with some of the things he wrote. This was back in the twenties and the thirties too! The stories he was telling, the creatures he was creating, there was (and still is) nothing else quite like them. As a storyteller, there is nobody better. And he still influences horror writers today, almost an entire century later!

Oh, and like most horror fans, I do have a soft spot for Stephen King.


THE BEST BOOK COVER OF ALL TIME

Once upon a time, my sister gave me a hardback copy of Stephen King’s It. The cover featured a house, where the building is twisted and distorted into the face of pennywise. I used to love that book. Unfortunately, I no longer seem to have it in my possession...


THE BEST FILM POSTER OF ALL TIME

Have you seen the poster for I Spit On Your Grave? It’s great. As is the original poster for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Back then, in the seventies and eighties, film producers had to rely on exploitation to try and sell their films. These two are absolute prime examples. I absolutely love them!


THE BEST BOOK I HAVE WRITTEN

I don’t like to blow my own trumpet too much, so I’ll just say that, if somebody wants to start reading my work, then Idle Hands might be a good place to start. It’s a collection of short stories, which would definitely give a reader a strong indication as to my style and the sort of content I include in my books.


THE WORST BOOK I HAVE WRITTEN

I once wrote a novella that even I thought was a bit too extreme. Well, perhaps not too extreme, but maybe a little insensitive, considering the subject matter at hand. I still believe the concept I came up with was good, and I may still revisit it one day. I decided not to publish that one.


THE FILM THAT SCARED ME THE MOST

People may laugh. They may call me a wimp. But the film that has scared me the most is The Blair Witch Project. At the time, there was nothing else like it. I knew it wasn’t real (no, I didn’t fall for the excellent viral marketing), but it still felt real to me. It is the perfect example, in my mind, of being able to terrify the audience, without actually showing them anything.


THE BOOK I AM WORKING ON NEXT

My next release will be a book entitled In The Name Of The Devil. It is about a family who are taken hostage in their own home, by a gang of teenage Satanists. However, the family have some dark secrets of their own...
After that will be Shotgun Nun, an over-the-top violent thriller, about a vengeance-seeking nun. Then, my intention is to release a sequel to my most popular novella, In The Valley Of The Cannibals.


My most recent novella, The House Of Rotting Flesh, can be found here, available in both ebook and paperback format:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08X6Z4791/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i2

​WARNING: This book contains scenes of explicit violence and gore.

Nobody knew where the virus had come from. All they knew was that everybody - save for a few million people - was dead.

But the dead didn't stay dead for long. They rose from their graves to feast on the flesh of the living. Giant concrete walls were built around the cities, in an effort to keep the dead out.

With little else left to look forward to, people turned to their TVs for entertainment. The most popular show was THE HOUSE OF ROTTING FLESH - a show in which a group of convicted criminals was forced to compete in a series of horrific tasks, all while being watched by hordes of the infected. If they failed to complete the task set out before them, that would only lead to their certain death - as food for the hungry dead.

Can anybody survive a night in THE HOUSE OF ROTTING FLESH?

If I had to choose a single film whose impact was the most potent and defining influence on me as an author and film director, I wouldn't have to think twice. There could be no debate: it was David Lynch's Mulholland Drive.


Having been a fan of Lynch since Twin Peaks made its television debut in 1990, I knew very well that he was capable of conjuring terrifying spectacles. But while Twin Peaks only scratched the surface of something in me which I longed to know better, Mulholland Drive tickled that very same elusive thing on a much deeper spiritual level. 


How could something so seemingly nonsensical and esoteric be so profoundly unnerving? I'm hard pressed to think of a scene in any other film more visceral and frightening than the Winkie's Diner scene from Mulholland Drive, the analysis of which has inspired prolific internet speculation and yet, to defy definition, Lynch clearly had tapped into something both sinister and meaningful beyond words.


My first introduction to a non-linear narrative was Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, and I've favored the storytelling device in books and films ever since. In Mulholland Drive, Lynch (a master of meditation and metaphysics) takes non-linear to the next level, giving rise to the extra-dimensional. The layers unfold into intangible realms, obscure places that feelings call home. At first viewing, I couldn't begin to guess how he was able to achieve that, but wanting to learn and master the technique became my grail.


Many other directors inspire me in the art of abstraction – Jordan Peele, Terry Gilliam, Christopher Nolan, to name a few. But for me, Lynch is king of his craft, in a way that none others can approximate. And yes, I’ve seen Lost Highway, but maybe by way of its anima, its feminine touch, for me Mulholland Drive takes the cake.

Are some beliefs worth the risk of losing it all? How far can you go before there's no turning back? Special Agent Rochelle Roy must confront skepticism and family tensions when four sex trafficking victims claim to be the reincarnated souls of women who died during the Salem witch trials. A paranormal drama, featuring a diverse cast, which takes place in the aftermath of human trafficking, touching how it impacts both victims and law enforcement, and feeds into cycles of trauma, addiction, spiritual crisis and transcendence.


Excerpt from Prologue:


I had met Ms. Titi Beaumond and her cousin Ms. Rochelle Roy more than a decade ago, when I was studying journalism at the University of New Orleans. Back when we met, she was known locally as Madame T, which was the name of her Voodoo/Hoodoo practice on Bourbon Street for readings, rootwork and spells. Many years after we had become good friends, and knowing me to be a writer, she asked me to put together a complete accounting of some paranormal events she and Rochelle had experienced which took place in the fall of 2016, two months before the United States of America would hold a historic election between the first female candidate for president in U.S. history and the first male candidate for president in U.S. history to run without any prior political experience.

I like to be scared. I’m not alone in this, not by a long shot. A 2019 survey by the market research company OnePoll showed sixty-two percent of the population enjoys frights, thrills, and chills. Some people satisfy this need for terror through rollercoasters, or rock climbing, or becoming a parent. Being a parent, I should know. I’m not a potential bodily-harm thrill seeker; I look for my horror in books, movies, television, and hanging out in cemeteries (nice places, and quite peaceful).


However, there wasn’t just one bit of media that pushed me into becoming a horror writer—the horror genre came at me from many directions: Kaiju monsters, the classic Universal monsters, the Mugato from the original Star Trek series episode A Private Little War, and newspaper accounts of Bigfoot. Yes, in the early 1970s, the United States press printed serious newspaper articles about sightings of Sasquatch. I wish it still did.


As much as I enjoyed them all, none of the movies, TV shows, or Bigfoot reports caused fear, that deep, primal terror that makes the heart pound and the bladder weak. Enter the 1973 made-for-television movie Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (called Nightmare in Europe).


The movie stars Kim Darby as Sally Farnham and Jim Hutton as her husband Alex. The couple inherits, and begins to restore, a Victorian mansion, when Sally discovers a locked door. After unlocking the door, the Farnhams find a fireplace sealed by brickwork. When Sally receives subtle hints (high, whispering voices imploring “Sally, set us free”), she has the fireplace opened, which releases small demonic entities that terrorize the couple. I won’t go into any more of the movie. Sure, it’s forty-nine years old, but Jason is always one-hundred percent spoiler-free.


Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark did what Godzilla, Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man couldn’t. It scared the hell out of me—and I wanted more. (What were my parents thinking, letting an eight-year-old watch that kind of movie? Eh. I’m happy they did.)


For years after, I devoured all the Lovecraft, Howard, Jackson, Mathewson, and King I could, piling on my horror needs with the movies of Carpenter, Craven, Hitchcock, Romero, Cronenberg, Scott, etc. So, it wasn’t just one catalyst, it was many. However, I credit Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark with showing me how fun horror can be.


This all led me to where I am, writing about the unknown, the creepy, the sinister. I’m so happy to share my stories with you. Happy reading.


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Beware of what lurks in the corn.
Fairies don’t exist. At least that’s what Thomas Cavanaugh’s parents say. But the events of that one night, when he follows a fairy into the cornfield on his parents’ farm, prove them wrong. What seems like a destructive explosion was, Thomas knows, an encounter with Dauðr, a force that threatens to destroy the fairy’s world and his sanity.

Years later, after a troubled childhood and a series of dead-end jobs, he is still haunted by what he saw that night. One day he crosses paths with a beautiful young woman and a troubled young man, soon realizing that he first met them as a kid while under psychiatric care after his encounters in the cornfield. Has fate brought them together? Are they meant to join forces to save the fairy’s world and their own? Or is one of them not who they claim to be?

[An] unholy mash-up of creepy, high-body-count paranormal thrills. —Publishers Weekly
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[A] haunting, unsettling, gripping novel [with] such original, disturbing beasts—I was hypnotized by their presence on the page.—Richard Thomas, Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson nominee
Norse mythology gives this story . . . a unique touch [with] an exhilarating conclusion.—Booklist

BIO
Jason Offutt grew up in a haunted farmhouse in rural Missouri. Not that the rest of the family knew (or would admit) the ghost of a little boy haunted the house; he was the only one who saw the full-bodied apparition, after all. Over the years Jason’s fascination grew for horror and dark fantasy where things never are what they seem. The Girl in the Corn is Jason’s first horror/dark fantasy novel. He is best known for science fiction, such as So You Had to Build a Time Machine, Bad Day for the Apocalypse, and How to Kill Monsters Using Common Household Objects. Jason teaches university journalism and cooks for his family.