Twisted Treatises

Cover Design by Kasey Hill Nothing. But he thinks there is. At least for a while.  When you're high on meth and heroin and whatever else while you're out there, and the only rules are: 1. Defend yourself. 2. Stay on your hustle. 3. Show respect to the block. You feel like royalty. Never mind if/that you're having a schizophrenic break, that bullshit doesn't matter. What matters is you know everyone else lives a life where they have to do what they're told while you, royal addict, flit about as a bohemian with no one who can't kick your ass or throw you in jail able to tell you diddly squat. The world is your playground. You can go wherever you want, and do whatever you please.  Of course that's total bullshit. What good is total freedom when you have fuck all to do with it or show for it? You have to make your own stuff to do all the time, and when the steel fish aren't biting and your pockets are empty, there's a lot of just staring and shaking (amo...

And I'm only partially through with it. Halfway, I believe. It came to pass that I signed an agreement with Godless, so all effort is going toward final edits, formats, and cover creation for my first full-length novel. A beast at over 166,000 words, it's taking everything out of me. Except for one thing, and that's my love of the book I'm taking the time to write about now. This anthology from Dark Moon Rising Publications and editor J.C. Macek is a masterpiece of, like Nature Triumphs, dark speculative horror fiction. Hybridized. Pulpy. Surreal. Gritty. Many of the  stories are positively trippy. David Tamarin and his Wizard doing the reverse of what the song says a Wizard ought to do. Mawr Gorshin and his beautifully nonbinary rendition of a romantic Lucifer. Don Webb brings Ozzy himself to a parallel dimension where everything is more fucked up than the old singer's past dope trips. From Rhys Hughes, a tennis pro whose wife becomes the net a la Super Blockout be...

Nature Triumphs: A Charity Anthology of Dark Speculative literature had a very rocky birth. Most of you know why. But luckily, the brave tenacity of our publisher coupled with the courage of the editors involved made sure this wonderful book saw the light. And I couldn’t be happier with it. A mixture of short fiction and poetry grace these pages. The stories in there will surprise you. Hallucinogenic frog soup. Night of the Living Dead Deer. Trees fed up with human catharsis and taking matters into their own branches. Weed that smokes you. A yard whose practical joke against its owner drives him to madness. A vengeful beekeeper and his buzzing warriors. An elite group of military “Reapers” work to rid the world of infected zombies in what becomes nothing short of a Heinlein-esque gorefest. And then there is my tale, “A New Mom for the Bee Boy” in which an exploited orphan with an affinity for bees becomes the downfall of a powerful family of Satanic hedonists. These and more gems awai...