Clash Books

From British and World Fantasy award-winning writer and editor Dan Coxon, Come Sing for the Harrowing is an uncanny folk horror collection for fans of John Langan and Robert Aickman. A young man working at a tourist attraction is singled out for unholy transformation, a gang of burglars are ambushed with something unworldly when they attempt to rob a local farm, and a daughter seeks revenge on her abusive father after his death. Invoking the sense of natural surreal found in Midsommar, these stories are always a little to the left of what’s expected. Weaving macabre contingencies into realities, Dan Coxon crafts unsettling and eerie worlds through hauntingly literary prose. Including a featured story from Ellen Datlow’s “Best of Horror” round-up and a foreword from Brian Evenson, Come Sing for the Harrowing will haunt your dreams and gnaw at you during the daylight.

In this coming-of-age romantic comedy, a 17-year-old virgin film nerd, Joseph Caldo, who sees himself as a real-life art film, experiences first love, first sex, and first heartbreak in the surreal setting of South Florida while trying to make sense of Shakespeare’s stupid plays. Caldo has no real social life, unless arguing about film online counts. Having seen so many films while struggling romantically, he has formed a theory that women pick romantic partners the way they pick which movie to watch. He’s definitely not a blockbuster, a rom com, or even a horror film, he’s more of an indie art film that is unfortunately funny. He worries he’ll never find the person who will accept and love him, the way that he accepts and loves his favorite obscure films. That is until he meets Alexia at his grandmother's retirement home. Alexia was court-ordered to do volunteer work for her DUI but it's cool, Caldo has issues too, and it feels like they have a real connection. But there's also Valerie. The new girl at Caldo's awkwardly small school. She's a straight-A student who is attending on scholarship and is assigned the difficult task to mentor him in Shakespeare's plays. The two opposites have nothing in common except for being romantics who do nothing but fail at romance. With first jobs that go very wrong, untimely food poisoning, and fake prom dates, Caldo unintentionally reenacts Shakespearian tropes in the heart of South Florida. Humor award-winning author, Christoph Paul, and Caroline Macon Fleischer's Shakespeare in South Florida is a quirky romantic comedy about being 17 and falling in love.

A picaresque debut of forbidden desire, in which a young woman escapes NYC to work on her novel in the Hamptons, falling into a downward spiral of lovers and other destructive behaviors. In the closing days of summer, ‘lover girl’ arrives at the sprawling, neglected home of her wealthy friend, Lucas. What to him is an empty house is to her an act of generosity that comes with blurry expectations. The arrival of an ex-boyfriend, Cameron, makes things even more complicated. How can she give both men the things they assume they can take from her? What she calls ‘love’ will take her to the bedrooms of New York City, the decadent parties of upper-class America, and, eventually, to Paris. Lover Girl is a lesson in the schooled indifference and the complicated dynamics of the super-privileged and the meaning of real love as a twenty-first century girl.

In this queer horror novel debut, a priest falls in love with the antichrist and even God can’t stop the horror it will bring. Dante, a protestant young man, and Jude, a sadistic pastor of a small Texas church, harbor a terrible secret from the world; they’re together. The two share a taboo and passionate relationship in hidden peace, until the dreams start. God speaks to them in visions of smoke and fire, night after night, until the two of them come to a truth they cannot ignore; Dante is the Antichrist, sent by God and urged to start off the apocalypse. Dante refuses to participate in the end of the world and the damnation of souls. But Jude is a loyal pastor, indifferent to the suffering of others, and is compelled to do what God tells him; even if it means killing the love of his life. This queer horror love story hones in on the humanity of the Antichrist, a half-human entity as flawed, complex, and doomed as any other soul. With lyrical prose reminiscent of Clive Barker, blasphemy is redefined and love is tested. In Of Beasts, Worma explores if love is enough for someone born to be evil.

In this collection of poetry, collage, and nonfiction prose, Séance of the Bees summons the flight patterns of image and text as they move oracularly across collective grief, histories, mouths, rivers, and memory. Taking the planchette as tongue, this work proclaims "I sought to enter her archive. / To lean up against an embankment of self." It speaks to the singular and multiple simultaneously via a lens of ice, the rhizome, a flower, the hive, and of course, the bees. Through vivid artwork and melodic prose, Andrea Rexilius does a close study on craft and self: interrogating where one ends and the other begins. Stemming from mythology and bee shamanism, this collection engages with themes of grief, drag queens, and family history, all the while staying rooted in ecological feminism.

From international cult author, Tea Hačić-Vlahović, comes a dark literary comedy celebrating and damning both coasts, following Val from LA where drug dealer crushes and cute homeless boys distract her from writing her next book, to NYC for a funeral for her writing career and love life. Val’s debut hit novel earned her a glamorous beach house, but it left her desperate for legitimacy. Now, she’s pinned her hope for literary clout to Leonardo, a New York publishing legend, who has accepted her second novel. Unfortunately, before he finishes editing, he dies in a shocking twist, leaving Val to attend his memorial in search of answers. At the Roxy Hotel in NYC, she runs into rivals and shady people from her past and befriends a rat, who may or may not be the late editor reincarnated. Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, a homeless kid and drug dealer meet under unlikely circumstances, in Val’s living room. Doom looms on the horizon, as people on both coasts try to make peace with their ambitions, failures and horoscopes. For readers of Anna Dorn’s Exalted and Mona Awad’s Bunny, Give Me Danger is a keening exploration of what happens when success is not enough.

The author of home invasion horror hit, Anybody Home?, brings murder to the publishing sphere in On Submission, where Scream meets Yellowface when an A-List agent’s top clients all end up dead. Hotshot literary agent Henry Richmond Pendel knows how to find the next big thing and is even better at selling them. But a perfect career becomes increasingly disconcerting as he begins to feel like he’s being watched. There are rumors of a boogeyman in publishing, a rejected writer who has cracked and started killing off writers. When Pendel’s star clients turn up brutally murdered and unsolicited queries become more and more frantic, Pendel must decide whether to act out of safety for himself and his clients or to capitalize on the attention. Is it worth a few more casualties if it means inking a few seven-figure deals? Part slasher and part scream at the publishing industry, Michael J. Seidlinger, the master of psychological terror, offers a brutal new take on the relationship between art and commerce. On Submission is full of villains, where some harm with a pen and others with a knife.

Meet Jefferson Van Helsing, descendant of the greatest vampire hunter of all time, as he faces horrifying monsters and even more terrifying first dates in Portland, Oregon. Polite conversation is quite limited when you’re a descendant of the man who hunted Dracula, and it makes going on nice dinner dates damn near impossible. But Jeff, Portland''s local monster hunter, revels in the gore of his not-quite-day job. In this guidebook, Jeff teaches the reader how to face an encounter with the most evil creatures of darkness, be they an 800-year-old blood-sucking fiend or a finance major who only has "coffee!!!" listed as their interest. He may still be learning the ins and outs of romantic etiquette, but killing monsters is in his blood. Van Helsing’s Guide to Monsters and Dating is an illustrated monster/dating companion where readers will learn how to identify and fight ghouls, ghosts, vampires and more. In this harrowing debut by Ben Crew, Jeff stumbles into true love, discovers the importance of bro-time, and accidentally triggers a century-old prophecy all in a good-natured attempt to better the world by bettering himself.

8114 is a terrifying horror novel investigating the mysterious death of a high school friend through an embattled podcast and hallucinatory hauntings at the abandoned house of his childhood.After returning to his hometown, Paul, the beleaguered host of a small-time podcast, discovers a longtime friend committed suicide in the dilapidated ruins of Paul’s childhood home. Desperate to find answers, Paul interviews friends and locals hoping to find closure. He finds himself in a chilling downward spiral of his memories and the land he grew up on. Has his past caught up with him or is there something far more sinister at play?Joshua Hull, screenwriter of Glorious, brings an edge of horror film expertise to this story of small-town haunting, trauma, and grief that just won’t let go. 8114 roots out the rot of a small town’s past and unravels the memories we must face to survive the present.

“It was the year us girls had a feminine desire to go missing,” Vanessa Roveto, acclaimed author of bodys, begins her book within the remnants of a car crash, fragmenting identity, grief, and heart.Beginning with the death of daddy, the “I” soon meshes with whatever and whomever she comes into contact with—strangers, actors, a Covid crush. She absorbs these people and objects, dispersing them into the Southern California landscape, the Uncanny Valley, warping time and naturalizing dreams.Documenting a period of both global and personal loss, Roveto crafts a book-length poem that weighs heavier than the Ego in L.A. Splintering Self between Other and palm trees in the summer heat, Mulholland Dive spins a Lynchian setting within a feminine eruption of alluring language, fluked romance, and the aftershocks of grief.

Weird fiction icon and award-winning author Michael Cisco''s Black Brane, begins with the physical pain of a bad foot and later voyages into absurdity, mad science, occultism, and existential dread.A man lying in a bed of pain flees from physical torment into his own memories, and into speculations about life and reality. He was, once, employed by the Temporary Institute for the Study of Holes, a think tank pursuing research that ranges from occult studies to advanced physics, including black holes—or, as they are known in string theory, black branes.He meets and interacts with the various other members of the institute. Its founder, Dr. Marilyn Shitansky, a formerly homeless woman who claims to have a thinking hole in her brain; its resident occultist, the chain-smoking Daladara with his magic abacus; Ernie Allegre the engineer, who designed and built a decoherence reactor to power the institute; Dr. Liu, the string theorist; the linguist Dr. Corngholm, who can''t sit still; and Dr. Shitansky''s secretary, Renbrui, who seems to carry a mystery with her wherever she goes.In memory, the speaker finds them again, in a story of physical and emotional pain, of social and quantum entanglement, that turns comic, speculative, and nightmarish. Echoing the work of Blake Crouch and Thomas Ligotti, Michael Cisco shows in Black Brane why he’s beloved by weird fiction and horror readers.

Pushcart Prize-winning author Chris Campanioni tells a story about the silences of generational trauma and the tenuous conditions in which stories get passed down in migration, a surface flimsy enough to allow the traffic between novel, notebook, reportage, and myth.While collecting the scattered stories of his parents’ entangled passages to the United States, the narrator begins to record the material onto videocassettes through a series of cutting and grafting, splicing footage of his present dislocation and overlaying on the audio track the polyphonic voices of his inherited exiles.VHS reminds us, in its narrative’s insistence on mediation, that the slippage between speaker and listener, experience and memory, is also a fault line that can reveal our own prior movements.

In Amy DeBellis’ debut novel, The Hours meets My Year of Rest and Relaxation as, sometime in the near future, three Gen Z women ride the throes of late capitalist life in New York City.In All Our Tomorrows, Janet, Anna, and Gemma lead separate lives, each ground down by the weight of the world they were born into, lost against the dazzling pixelated backdrop of the city. Too young to remember life before the iPhone 4, they think the real world was destroyed long before they were born.Janet is an underpaid gig therapist who spends her time as a mental health matchmaker, responding to grievance letters from faceless online avatars. Anna is a model-turned-sugar-baby who dissociates during dates with her aging daddy, hoping to save enough not for a Birkin bag, but for the water wars of the near future. And Gemma is a freshman at NYU who aspires to become an influencer, but is so haunted by a recent loss that she can’t even film one video.Sharp, incisive, and sparkling with dark humor, this is a novel for the age of the doomer generation. DeBellis delivers an unflinching examination of three young lives as they circle closer and closer to the drain of nihilism, climate anxiety, isolation, and grief. All Our Tomorrows is about finding yourself in a broken world, and the small but mighty decisions that can save you from leaking down the drain.

Two-time Bram Stoker Award-nominated author, V. Castro dims the lights in a collection where you might devour your next lover or meet your next meal.Readers are invited to The Pink Agave Motel,where brutality and intimacy ooze across the pages, exploring the depths of the unhinged imagination and how human desire unlocks the impulse to bite. Castro?s voice, influenced by Mexican folklore and a feminist perspective, illuminates a deeper view of how unrequited love affects every type of being alike.The titular story focuses on Valentina, the proclaimed leader of a creature cohort, who manages hotel guests, until she is enlightened to a carnivorous death on the property. To avoid exposure that threatens her existence, she partners with (the hauntingly handsome) grieving friend of the dearly departed to solve the murder. Further within these tales, discover a woman who is a fish out of water drinking at a seaside honky tonk, the trapped guests who undergo sexual liberation, and aliens who find the sexiest of disguises.These short stories evoke an alluring voice, sure to make the reader shiver in arousal and horror, never quite knowing what could happen next. Castro pushes past the limits of gothic terror and fantasy to carve a dangerous path of lust and violence, all throughout the reader?s charming stay at The Pink Agave Motel.

Pushcart Prize Award-winning author Elizabeth Ellen?s American Thighs tells the darkly comedic story of a thirty-one-year-old former child star?s journey from Hollywood to Elkheart, Indiana, experiencing for the first time the off-screen life of a high school sophomore.Tatum Grant spent the first years of her life on various film sets and locations in Hollywood, never knowing a real childhood, before becoming impregnated by an older, award-winning actor. Fifteen years after his death, experiencing an existential crisis, Tatum leaves Hollywood, her mother and her daughter behind, on a quest to find herself. Posing as a 16-year-old student with the help of her daughter?s stolen identification, Tatum uses the talents she learned portraying various film characters to earn a spot on the cheer team, date a football player, and befriend the most popular girl at school.Like Tom Perrota?s Election, the novel is told through the voices of students and teachers at Dobson High, as well as social media influencers, actors, and celebrity children back in Hollywood, readers follow as Tatum?s past catches up with her amidst a cross-country road trip turned police chase.Elizabeth Ellen manifests typical teenage woes into a breathtaking, rib-breaking story of love, loss, and media. American Thighs strikes the same chord as Heathers but for the TikTok generation.