Bøger udgivet af Apocalypse Party

"Meghan Lamb's debut novel is a marvel. It's an indelible portrait of a nearly forgotten place, full of stunted lives and desperate hopes, decaying homes and fading memories, ghostly presences brought vividly to life. It's a timely exploration of the failures that seep into our lives like slow leaks and the systems that intensify them. It's a haunted landscape made luminous by Lamb's exquisite prose."-Jeff Jackson, author of Destroy All Monsters"Failure to Thrive captures slow collapse like nothing else I've read. It is packed with heartbreakingly acute observation, and yet it is uncrowded and spacious, with a gauzy, hallucinatory quality. Both expansive and economical, it does more with the form of the novel than most books will ever attempt. It's a gem glittering in the dark."-Lindsay Lerman, author of I'm From Nowhere"Meghan Lamb is such an exquisite, comprehensively intelligent, dreamy writer. Failure to Thrive exudes utmost pleasure and a defying ache from every dot of its ink, like the sun."-Dennis Cooper, author of The Marbled Swarm

Winnie Campbell is sixteen and a burgeoning serial killer. Her father blames her for her mother's death, dotes on her little sister, and executes increasingly cruel punishments meant to humiliate Winnie. As the punishments morph into torture, she begins fantasizing about regaining some semblance of power, eventually working through her rage by killing small animals.When her violent games escalate and she accidentally kills an infant while babysitting, Winnie gets a taste of a power she doesn't want to let go of. Her obsession with killing grows, and so does her fascination for Leigh, a girl that reminds her of her younger self.Winnie wants to kill. She wants to die. She wants to be someone other than herself. And killing Leigh, a symbolic suicide, could be the key to her metamorphosis."A shocking and utterly harrowing examination of the creation of a murderer. Although Crushing Snails excels in many areas, this novel is perhaps most skillful at effectively illustrating the very human compulsion for violence and depravity. Murray's excellent novel showcases the very human possibility of carnage-the horrifying prospect of brutality-when curiosity is sated and when we finally surrender to our most feral desires."-Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke"Masterfully executed and chilling to the core, Crushing Snails is a terrifying look into the darkest depths of the human mind and the ways in which monsters are formed. With the intensity level set to high, Murray draws you into complicity as you witness one girl's spiral into obsession and depravity, culminating in a horrifying conclusion you'll never forget."-Kelsea Yu, Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of Bound Feet"A nightmare of power and control, or perhaps even something more wayward. Crushing Snails is provocative and demanding, spiraling and unapologetic. Emma Murray is an exciting emerging voice in horror challenging what is normal and what is safe."-Cynthia Pelayo, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Crime Scene"Sick, twisted, and compulsively readable-Emma E. Murray's Crushing Snails is a coming-of-age story that goes to dark and darker places, leaving me constantly hanging between two modes of thought: one-more-chapter and holy-fucking-shit." -Carson Winter, author of The Psychographist

"Explosive and propulsive, The Devil Thinks I'm Pretty proves Charlene Elsby to be a formidable talent. This book will haunt you."-Juliet Escoria, author of Juliet the Maniac¿"Depraved, stark, and dripping in blood, The Devil Thinks I'm Pretty by Charlene Elsby is an experience that demands to be felt. Unique prose, dark musings, and an experimental structure blend beautifully with the layers of grief and bodily autonomy. In the main character's labyrinthine mind, readers will find themselves seduced into what I can only describe as a really messed up coming-of-age story (in all the best, gory ways)."-Sara Tantlinger, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Devil's Dreamland"The Devil Thinks I'm Pretty is an astonishing mirage, a novel full of dish soap and restaurant clothes, of summer months and arcane sex, of trailer parks and dishcloths, or cocks and thighs and food processors, fryer grease and the coal-black bodies of Erinyes, of maintenance fees and telephone bills. Elsby taunts and teeters on the rock face of reality and delirium, chaos carnivals where words transmute into data dumps of unreliable memory, into unapologetic rebellion against the literary mundane. A supernatural work of cigarette attitude and wit that shatters the cosmic rollercoaster, a seismic flare-up that left me exhilarated and questioning my own framework of despondency. A welcome addition to the Charlene Elsby manifest. Take a cool walk among the home décor of the Devil, it's lustful, you'll quite like it."-Shane Jesse Christmass, author of Belfie Hell"Unlike Plato's realm of eternal forms, which he associates with the sun, Charlene Elsby's Devil lurks in the solar eclipse, in the eternal shadows that undergird existence. A bildungsroman unlike any other, The Devil Thinks I'm Pretty had me laughing out loud & deeply disturbed. Through surgically precise prose, Elsby conjures a lean & mighty novel set in a trailer park full of memorable characters, devilish disruptions, & a plot that thickens towards an unforgettable finale. I read it in one sitting."-Logan Berry, author of Run-Off Sugar Crystal Lake"As the unnamed narrator of Charlene Elsby's The Devil Thinks I'm Pretty so wisely observes, "We do define people according to what's been done to them, not what they've done." There are those who fuck, and there are those who are fucked. There are performers and there are objects. And at the center of it all, like the brilliant, blinding core of a burning star, there is the image of Marilyn Monroe, whose beauty belonged only to those around her. With intense and direct language, Elsby reminds us that corrupting forces are always at work, howling mockery at our very desire to be loved."-David Peak, author of Corpsepaint

"Abnormal Statistics takes us on a desolate walking tour of the everyday American nightmare. Come see what's happening behind the closed doors and shuttered windows of your neighbors, your best friends, the people you trust most. Bleak and bloody horror that's as raw and immediate as a pile of yellowed teeth, roots and all." -Trevor Henderson, creator of Siren HeadSuburban decay, familial horror, bleak lullabies. Abnormal Statistics is the debut story collection from Max Booth III. Bad times are waiting for you. Featuring 10 reprints and 3 stories original to this collection (including a brand-new novella called Indiana Death Song).

"Rainbear!!!!!!!!! is writing at its wildest, maddest, furthest, goofiest, most blatant, most shameless, most free."-Daniel Handler, author of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events"North's gonzo eclecticism only partially camouflages her penetrating insight and masterful command of language. With Rainbear!!!!!!!!! she has created something part fairytale, part Old Testament parable, and entirely unique, a heartbreaking creative vision of regression."-Gretchen Felker-Martin, author of Manhunt"I can't tell you what happens in Rainbear!!!!!!!!!, and if someone tries to, good luck to them. Frank Stanford once said "It wasn't a dream, it was a flood," and I have spent most of my life believing I knew what that meant, but it turns out I didn't. This is what that means. This isn't a dream. This is a flood. And we should all be so lucky as to drown in Never's waters."-Sasha Fletcher, author of Be Here to Love Me at the End of the World

A girl drinks river water that gives her good advice but a bad reputation. A young woman's job at a make-up counter ends in disaster. Car accidents and cornfields cause siblings to disappear while, up above, airplane banners advertise hair care products. Welcome to Beside Myself, Ashley Farmer's debut collection of short stories. These brief, lucid dreams illuminate the moment the familiar becomes strange and that split second before everything changes forever.

"Joe Koch is a phenomenal talent who writes with poetic fury. Heart-rending and fearsome, Convulsive joins a handful of collections that show off the range and importance of contemporary horror."-Laird Barron, author of Swift to Chase "The stories of Convulsive dazzle and stun the reader with brutal beauty and surreal intensity. This collection's deftly subversive themes and stylistic complexity dare you to witness its unique and transgressive radiance."-Tiffany Morris, author of Havoc In Silence"I'm awestruck by Joe Koch's nonstop spellbinding, almost paralyzingly inventive and yet propulsive, ultra-focused prose. The Wingspan of Severed Hands is a truly amazing find."-Dennis Cooper, author of The Marbled Swarm, I Wished, The Sluts"Prose so evocative black letters on white pages become as vivid as leaves of an illuminated manuscript. If human bodies are temples, The Wingspan of Severed Hands is holy writ delivering the glorious news that the dawn of flesh and blood and dreams of grotesque wonder has arrived. Stunning book."-Christopher Slatsky, author of The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature"Convulsive is packed with stories that are as bloody as they are poetic. This is at once a celebration of horror, an exploration of humanity, and an explosion of beautiful language. Darkness rarely shines so bright. Koch will sear their name inside your heart."-Gabino Iglesias, author of Coyote Songs

"Maggie understands that splatter for splatter's sake is boring. Psychopathy is boring. Coldness is boring. She's interested in feeling, and when her stories turn violent (as they frequently do), it's with a surreal emotional barbarity that distorts the entire world. You can mop up blood with any fabric. Maggie's concern is with the wound left behind, because the wound never leaves-it haunts. As a result, each of these stories leaves a wound of its own. Some weep, watching as you try (and fail) to recover. Others laugh. But never without feeling."-B.R. Yeager, author of Negative Space "And once finished, I felt like my tongue had been misplaced, guts heavy and expanded ... gums numb with a tongue that'd been put elsewhere, my mouth clean around a pipe weaving up through pitch and shadow ... and well past ready, primed for delight, waiting but knowing I had already been filled to skin; crying shit, hearing piss, fingernails seeping bile, pores dribbling blood, soles slopping off and out to meet a drain mid-floor ..."-Christopher Norris, author of Hunchback '88

This World. This world as it is right there now. Some instruments behind it there. The abrasive throat against it. Where to put it? Where to align these things with these other things? Patricia Lee Smith screaming. Who is there screaming now? The figure still standing, hovering over the microphone, and the room is circling around him in a sweaty fugue. Someone of the people. The ones there needed this release, we're not sure who. I try to write to someone, I try to create this construct of writing to someone to tell them about this thing, and I'm not sure how exactly to explain it. Dear Al, from rehab, have you heard about this? Are you still living? Were you the one in the Jeep that flipped and killed you? Was that someone else? I want to show him this clip but I don't know why, I don't fully understand myself. I want to say something to this person to give them light or levity. I want to put myself out there in the world and go walking for ten hours straight. Ten hours, listening to the music over and over and over again, listening to the repetition until it becomes something else, something not repetition, something pushed through repetition, indifference, or difference, or caring, or disinterest. The drugs in Baltimore. The drugs in Washington D.C. The disparities there. The places being torn open there and made to rot there on their vines.

"A brilliant and flayed slice of Midwest gothic. While one might find traces of Poppy Z. Brite or Michael McDowell here, The World Below is wholly its own beast. Peak laces the classic premise of feuding, cursed families with high-potency LSD, forming something fresh, potent, and filled with ache."-B.R. Yeager, author of Negative Space"Violent, noir-soaked horror infuses every page of David Peak's astonishing The World Below, coiling like a serpent around love: first and lost loves, love of family and the land, love of darkness and blood. Peak mixes the most primal of emotions like an alchemist, leaving every reader transformed."-Livia Llewellyn, author of Furnace"The World Below is an incredible page turner of a novel. The fascinating, well-rendered characters, all members of two long-feuding families, clash with pyrotechnic, psychedelic, and dynamic results. The World Below puts in mind an unholy but glorious union of William Faulkner's Light in August and Grant Morrison's The Invisibles. Peak's prose is wise, mysterious, and philosophically deep, but is always riveting. My highest recommendation. Don't miss this one!"-Jon Padgett, author of The Secret of Ventriloquism

Two friends wait for god beside an x-ray-cum-time-machine, eating invisible shirts and speaking into their bras like megaphones. They're joined in their theological vigil by a man named after a vegetable and a narcoleptic goat who just might be god. Welcome to the sixth dimension of time, a place where cartoon physics rules and the stage collapses into the page. Bodies fold into fictions. Samuel Beckett switches places with Sarah Kane. Welcome to Waiting for God, a realm where the laws of literature are superseded by apocrypha's fever dream."Vi Khi Nao's latest is a closet drama in which the closet is the mind, the mind's eye, the cosmos, an x-ray, an x-ray machine, an intimacy, a little cell that wants to split in two but can't make up its mind. Is it I, or is it AI? Only the most infinitesimal instrument can tell, and she's not telling."-Joyelle McSweeney, author of Toxicon and Arachne"In Waiting for God, Vi Khi Nao blows up the "who's on first" humor of Beckett's classic, creating a hypertrophic aperture through which all of our current moment-our disappointments, our romances, our violences, and, yes, our deities-pours out. At times it is philosophical, hilarious and dadaistic. It is a bawling, brawling portrait of our time that refuses to ever cohere into the kind of static quality that "portrait of our time" suggests."-Johannes Goransson, author of Poetry Against All: A Diary"Take this x-ray / time machine. This body. Its desire to reconcile its inner and outer selves. It's gender that misses its old gender. An ancient depression. A conversation about God or a goat or a goat God and the myth that we most constantly live in through all dimensions-the one about how and why we go on if no one loves us. If not ourselves. In Waiting for God, Vi Khi Nao brilliantly calls into question all of our beliefs, our many ways of being, with a blood-thinning, acid-slick humor that tremors through a lively wild and sometimes wooly cast of characters as they quite literally roam across the page. Vi Khi Nao's work demands a kind of attention we so rarely give to the multilayered reality written into the body. Is this a play that queers Beckett? Perhaps. Is this a play passionate about the art of carrying story? Its shock collar of pain? Its screaming into the bra cup void of delight? Absolutely."-Jen Rouse, author of Riding with Anne Sexton"Nao's play takes Beckett's canonical Waiting for Godot and masterfully has it perform magic she taught it in secret (via radiography, in the galvanic space between surgeon and patient). You may find yourself flabbergastedly confronted with the cinema of time. It is an absolute delight."-Sarah Burgoyne, author of Because the Sun

"Fully exploiting the Gogolesque conceit of a cephalophore whose body and head go their own separate ways, Cephalonegativity reads like Beckett's Play (with M reprised as an even more slippery version of himself) or Not I as if performed by the secret society of Acéphale. Archaic turns of phrase and elision combine with post-cinematic headlessness to produce a stage play that plays with stages and stages play, a lesescenario from the velveteen tongue of an heretical zealot, its phrases as if slurped up off an abattoir floor, or off the rotted walls of a theatre-cum-poisoned-amniotic-sac where the performers have all become kuroko. Read out loud, at speed, in honour of its progenitors, the words turn into "chunks of hot pomegranate meat" in your mouth-turned-anus, with your gills agape, your mutinous soma exsanguinated, levitating above you, your head on fire singing like litel clergeon from the catacombs."-¿Gary J. Shipley, author of 30 Fake Beheadings"In pursuing a theatrical treatment of the Self's head and body and self-selves, through a Bataillean notion of headlessness, through typographical humor and rupture, through a Dada-esque document of volatile mirror-pages and chorus, Cephalonegativity makes of itself a gaping gesture: a neck-stub that is a mouth that is singing out and commenting on the ritual of being present. The reader dials in via "a rotary anus" and watches a body hanging as a tail in its coprolalic spooky plastic underwater gloom psychedelia cum outer space inside of a mouth cum cult orgy. "DO/ YOU SEE THE END OF TIME? THE APPROACHING/ WALL? WHEN THE THEATRICAL BECOMES THE/ APOCALYPTIC? ENACTING A DISTORTED REALI-/ TY AS THIN LAYERS OVER THIS ONE?" This text is a porous fabric through which we might perform the wound of the stage as we watch it rot."-¿Olivia Cronk, author of Womonster¿

"Just when you think Kelso has taken you as far as he can, he proves you wrong, setting off in a bold new direction." ¿¿-¿John Langan, author of The Fisherman"Lyrical, intelligent and deeply astute" ¿¿-¿Laura Mauro, Black StaticInterrogating the Abyss is the first volume in the collected interviews, essays, and fictions of Chris Kelso. It's an exploration of darkness and a dissection of human relationships and obsession, featuring conversations with writers such as Dennis Cooper and Matthew Stokoe, and culminating in Voidness, ten sessions of psychic intervention by some of literature's most compelling storytellers.

Over a decade's worth of M Kitchell's writing on film. The collection includes the novella Paul Garrior in Jacques Riverrun's "The Abyss is the Foundation of the Possible", a formalist collage story about the vampiric pull of the filmed image, the creative process, and the human voids of isolation and loss. The accompanying film essays that follow all expand cogently on Kitchell's vision, often locating alienation and isolation in seemingly utilitarian genre fare of the 80s and early 90s, erotica from Japan's pink cinema or the bloody edges of outsider horror films. As a whole, this collection explores the territory between desire and obsession, absence and presence, and the expression of what is often deemed inexpressible.

"Troy James Weaver's novel unravels the typical coming-of-age story. It erases the distinction between finding and losing your voice, becoming enlightened by a vision and swallowed by darkness. The plot moves at a breathless pace and the unsettling details linger, hovering at the edge of what can be fully understood."-Jeff Jackson, author of Mira Corpora "A noir fueled as much by the dread of what might happen as what actually occurs, with a narrator teetering on the edge of something very dark indeed. Beautifully sparse and precise, like someone tapping softly on your skull with a ball-peen hammer trying to feel out the perfect place to crack it open."-Brian Evenson, author of Windeye and A Collapse of Horses

"This book is a book of poems." - God"This book is a book of poems." - Water"This book is a book of poems." - Gravity

"There's just something weirdly perfect about Troy James Weaver's stories. Perfect because they are, down to their syllables. Weird because what they do feels so broken it hurts. It's a kind of double whammy effect, part awe, part ache, that's truly singular as far as I know."-Dennis Cooper, author of The Marbled Swarm"I don't like telling people what to do and I don't like being told what to do. But right now I'm telling you to read the stories of Troy James Weaver. From the beginning, Weaver's been unafraid to show us humanity in all its grotesque, stupid, and beautiful glory. His stories are for the young and for the old, for the strong and the weak, for the sick and the dying and the dead. Luckily, if you're reading this, you're alive and you're holding this book in your hands. Read these stories and learn a little bit about what it means to be alive."-Joseph Grantham, author of Raking Leaves