Read an exclusive excerpt from Valkyrie Loughcrewe's upcoming novella, PUPPET'S BANQUET

The Trans Rights Readathon is currently underway, counting down until the Trans Day of Visibility on March 31st!

To celebrate, we’re sharing the first “chapter” of Valkyrie Loughcrewe’s upcoming novella, PUPPET’S BANQUET, with our readers for free. It’s out May 14th and available to preorder now.

PUPPET’S BANQUET is a surrealist nightmare; a “diseased Gothic”; a hallucinatory treatise on medical abuse; the systemic disease of colonialism and patriarchy; and the limits of human perception. Equal parts Cronenberg’s The Brood, Scorcese’s Shutter Island, and Silent Hill.

Cover art by Donna A. Black.

Interior illustrations by Trevor Henderson.

About PUPPET’S BANQUET:

Married couple Celia and Martin are brutally attacked on their drive through the Irish countryside. The attack leaves Celia with a violent schism in her mind, seemingly existing in two places at once: one the “real” world, the other a howling maelstrom of abstract monstrosity. 

Of her husband, there is no trace…until weeks later, when Martin is discovered in a hospital for rare and abnormal diseases, his body spliced together with that of an unknown woman.

And they are very pregnant.

***

Now, please enjoy the disturbing early events of PUPPET’S BANQUET:


“Sub-Ornament Creaking Carcasses

Stagger Blackest Harbours

Moored Frothing Profuse”

  • Portal, “Werships”




“I’m coming home, I’m home, I’m coming home”

  • Axis of Perdition, “Heaving Salvation in the Paradise of Rust”





  There we are, coming back into the flesh.

  Were you dreaming?

  Still a bit groggy. That’s ok.

  No, don’t try to speak, you might damage your tongue

  Against the wire gauze, in your numbed state.

  Follow the light. That’s it.

  That’s it.

  It is a very special thing to have you here

  for you to be part of this procedure.

  Unfortunately, however we—or you, rather, do not

  have a lot of time before you begin to…

  Well,

  Let's try and keep things pleasant for now.

  I see you’re shifting a little in your bonds,

  I do hope the restraints aren’t too tight.

  Toxic shock would really interfere with what we’ve come to do here today.

  I’m going to put something up on the screen now and I want you

  to focus, 

  focus on the image, and the sound of my voice.

  Some of it will be pre-recorded,

  the rest of it will be alive,

  in here with you.

  With us.

  And hopefully, once this ends,

  you and I will finally understand

  why all of this had to happen.




Slide 1:   Verminations in the carrion infinity



 Humans were meant to exist in living tribes,

 gathered around the fire, bustling nonstop

 from sunrise through sunset and beyond

 children were meant to sleep to the sound of 

 crackling fires, murmuring conversation

 the tapping of drums and the flutters of music

 memory is a network of nodes reaching out to 

 one another, connecting through story and song

 when humans are separated, sorted into right-angled

 living catacombs, a kind of decay that sets in

 a decay of meaning

 and memory

 can you imagine the kind of things that 

 certain people might

 get up to? 

 in their desperation

 in search of a signal through the noise?

  

   First, we must draw our attention back to a large, well-kept house nestled in the misty veils of the Irish countryside, as the last clink of cheap porcelain on a tray of expensive silver signalled the end of the evening.

   It was followed by an exaggeratedly satisfied sigh, and an equally exaggerated rubbing of hands. It was not taken as obnoxious or unnecessary by the guests. The party had started at twelve in the day and it was approaching eight in the evening. The drinkers were drunk, the drivers were tired, and the gossip had long run dry. 

   Celia and Martin needed no excuse to be the first to filter out, though they did wait for a couple of the older family members to make their way out across the misty gravel driveway to their cars before they followed suit. They didn’t want to be rude, and it wasn’t as if they didn’t get on with Martin’s family, or his Uncle Paudy, whose birthday they had been celebrating. 

  

  There was, however, a kind of underlying tension to any sort of family gathering, on either side. They were from wealthy stock, our husband and wife, families with ties to heavy industry, real estate, pharmaceuticals, agribusiness and communications, ties to the twin dominant political parties which had robbed the countries blind for decades.

  So where did the discomfort come from? Were dear Martin and delicate Celia, beneath it all, revolutionary socialists in the time-honored tradition of their ancestors, aghast at the rape of their beloved green isle? Of course not, the truth was far more banal—the pair had fallen on hard times, their mortgage getting out from under them. Their meagre jobs—Celia a schoolteacher, Martin a middle manager in a floundering infrastructure startup—were not quite cutting through the rolling waves of debt.

  Being good Irish Catholics the pair of them, naturally they refused any offers of nepotism, plenary or partial, and by the point of the evening of Paudy Fitzmaurice’s seventy sixth birthday, the family had accepted their honourable stubbornness. 

  For the most part.

 “Do you not think maybe you could take yer man a little more seriously?” Celia said, in a small voice as the car door shut behind her.

  “Who now?” Martin asked, checking the rear-view mirror of his SUV to make sure there were no children standing behind it for him to reverse over.

  For what it's worth, if there had been, he wouldn’t have seen them.

  “Sean’s brother—what was his name?”

  “Hannon. Bit of an odd name.” Martin sniffed.

  “It’s a good job he was offering. You’re well cut out for it.”

  “He’ll have me doing nothing. Same as me father, sitting at a desk doing piss all while I rake in cash, it’s no way to live. I’d turn into a fat-berg and then shrivel up.”

  Martin chuckled to himself as they pulled out of the driveway, heading down the country lane. The light was failing, the sunset lost to wispy layers of cloud, all stacked on top of each other, such as the otherwise gorgeous view from the Fitzmaurice house was lost to the darkening grey haze.

  “A fat-berg?” Celia asked, sounding perturbed.

  “Ah, you don’t want to know what that is, you’d be put off your dinner, sorry I said it.”

  Celia would be put off making Martin’s dinner, more like. Inside her pale and pretty head, Celia weighed if she should wade into the thorny issue of the futility of Martin’s employment. She knew that eventually when the pay dried up completely, he would move on to something better, but his stubbornness, his insistence that the firm was going to have some kind of breakthrough success that would wipe their slate of debt clean, was a menace. 

  Said debt was always ticking up, as far as Celia was concerned, Martin’s machismo was not only prolonging their suffering, but inflaming it. As far as Martin was concerned, the worse things seemed like they were about to get, the more satisfying it would be when the dam broke.

  It would be damn near orgasmic, a hand delivered climax to his righteous suffering, eased into being by way of his diligent practice of prayer and Sunday worship. His faith was unshakable, unlike his wife’s confidence in her own assertions.

  All this aside, to call their marriage unhappy would be disingenuous. Life can’t be measured in pennies and pounds, and the pair were known to make each other laugh on occasion. They still enjoyed the warmth of each other’s bodies as they drifted off to sleep at night, and their fruitless attempts at fertility were for the most part adequately pleasant experiences.

  They were used to the deep, rich vein of discomfort and anxiety in their relationship. Its amniotic fluid carried them, floating, together, from day to languid day. 

 It is what it is

 Driving through the countryside, from lane-vein to road-artery, 

 to town-organ, barely conscious of the routes 

 patterns traced like the fingers of God

 grooves in the vinyl

 wrinkles in the brain

 in waking sleep

 until some external stimulus comes along

 to

  There is a featureless field, along an uninteresting road, through an uninteresting stretch in the countryside. The odd ivy-choked tree, decaying fenceposts being pulled into the earth by relentless vegetations. Rusted barbwire and unreliable electric wire.

 

  And gates, almost always closed, aside from when the local farmer, all crotchety gait and gaunt, tanned-pink skin, herds his local cows from place to place; always signposted by bright orange traffic cones, flimsy rope barriers. Always in the daylight.

  That night, a gate was open along the road, one that Martin did not expect. Darkness had long since fallen as they passed it, not far from the home-stretch, a cosy evening ahead of them of microwave mini pizzas and a glass of wine before bed.

  In the split second before the car drifted by the open gate, the driver in his comfortable state of road hypnosis, a pale figure came flailing out of the blackness. 

Just a flash of white and the impression of a figure,

the brain having barely a split second to alert the body

fragmentary instant of sheer abject rejection 

and the first collision, barely a thump,

she went up and over, 

to the second collision

the one against the windshield

turning the clear vision of the road

into a scattered  scrunch of bloody material

tumble tumble across the roof

to the third collision

flesh on tarmac

skin shredded and bones mangled

a body he didn’t need

for what was to follow

  Their screams were the kind of hysterical shrieks of panic you never hear in movies, the kind of animal sound that can’t be faked. You probably would never hear such a sound in your life, unless you happen to be in the vicinity of a car accident, or disturb a dreamer in the midst of a nightmare.

  Martin opened his door first, as he found himself beginning to projectile vomit on the dashboard, and figured such emissions were better suited for the tarmac. It wasn’t a conscious choice, he was still in shock, but his manners were impeccable, it must be said.

  Celia, ever the dutiful wife, followed suit, hearing the click and the hydraulic swing of the door. 

She gasped in the night air, seeing only the very edges of the plant-life at the edge of the road, picked up by the very outer limits of the SUV’s headlights. Milky-pale, jagged leaves, the impression of a rotted fencepost, and off to the side, the yawning of the open gate.

  A cool breeze from the field, the distant braying of the animals.

  While Martin knelt in his own vomit on the tarmac, besmirching his Sunday best, Celia walked as if in a dream toward the figure that lay broken behind the car, bathed in the red of the brake-lights.

  She was smiling, the body. A small pale dark-haired woman, facing Celia, almost a mirror of herself—in fact, for a moment, Celia did feel as if she was looking in a broken mirror, one arm bent backwards across a naked torso, legs positioned demurely, as if the body was just relaxing there. Most of the mortified flesh was hidden out of sight, but in the red light the body’s smile looked a little too wide, and it was true, the cheeks had been torn ragged.

  And the eyes were staring, glistening in the red light.

  “Oh God, Oh GOD” Martin howled.

  Celia turned and saw the passenger door of the car shut closed. She screamed, and Martin turned as well, ostensibly to look at her, but in the process he caught a glimpse of the man reaching across to him from the passenger’s seat. A haggard mask bedevilled by age and overgrown white hair, a shock on top of the head and growing from the lower half of the face.

  A baby’s glee in the expression, the body naked and pockmarked. All Celia saw was a pair of muscled arms reach out and pull her husband, struggling, into the car.

  

  Now, watch for this 

  because something fascinating occurs here inside Celia’s mind.

  the situation unfolding splits, duplicates, 

  mitosis of the consciousness

  It’s nothing like a split-image effect in a film, not as if the observer within her

  is sitting in a darkened, smoke-filled theatre watching a pair of screens

  each showing a slightly different cut of the same film 

  no, she is experiencing both simultaneously

  and fully

  In one life she screams as the SUV rocks

  Martin’s screams becoming strangled. 

  

in another, she screams for a different reason.

over the barbed wire, through the bushes,

from the gate, from the swung open doors

of the vehicle, come pale figures

like the one her husband struck

indistinctly formed, perfectly illuminated 

by no light, flailing toward her

as in the other life, she calls out for 

Martin one final, pathetic time,

hears the sound of the gear shift,

and the SUV reverses toward her at speed.



  A single neural impulse fired—shared across the vast gulf between those twin experiences, those parallel lives—to turn, and to run. Both instances were too slow, far too slow, as Celia turned in a blur, in slow motion, the red light of the SUV creeping up on her, the horde of flailing, drowning-victim screams just a breath away.

  The body stared up with the sightless eyes, smiling, as from the darkness above her another vision emerged, into the red light, a skinny body hanging from a bloated head, ballooning beyond the limits of her vision, pore-pocked with glistening black eyes, pulling the night around it like a cloak.

   and the fourth collision


***

Preorder PUPPET’S BANQUET here.

THE SKULL & LAUREL open for Short Story Submissions **BIPOC WRITERS ONLY, PLEASE**

We are looking to accept at least one extra Weird Folk Horror short story from a BIPOC writer.

SUBMISSIONS WINDOW: 11th of March to 1st of April

This submissions period is for Issue 004 of THE SKULL & LAUREL.

The theme connections can be vague, but submitting to this category counts as disclosure that the author fits the demographic for this specific entry.

Genres and forms: Weird Folk Horror/Folk SF/Folk Fantasy, broad interpretation, all kinds of folklore and lore welcome.

Word count: 100 to 4999 words

Payment: 3c/word (USD) originals; $25 (USD) reprints

Reprints: Yes (Please limit this to reprints that haven’t been originally published in the past 12 months!

Simultaneous Submissions: Yes, please

Multiple submissions: Please submit no more than one original story and one reprint at a time (one of each is fine).

Translations: Translations are welcome as long as the story has not yet been published in English.

Target Age Group: Mature audiences

AI Disclaimer: Machine/AI-generated content is explicitly forbidden. Authors and artists should anticipate contracts declaring that no part of their submission was machine/AI-generated. Those who submit machine/AI-generated content will be permanently blacklisted from Tenebrous Press.

Rights: World English first rights in print, electronic, and ebook, including a six-month exclusivity period. For reprints, World English reprint in print, electronic, and ebook, no exclusivity. All copyright belongs to the author. Estimated response time so far has been under three months for most passes, over that for shortlist. It’ll depend largely on volume of submissions, and it will be the best it can possibly be.

Please remember we love simsubs and will cheer you on if you need to withdraw for any reason. Withdraw your story by dropping an email to tenebrouspress.mag@gmail.com including the author name and story title as submitted.

Format: Any standard manuscript text format will suffice so long as your submission is readable. No preferences on things like font etc. For weird formatting or submissions that contain images such as comics or mixed media, please create a shareable PDF in a medium-to-low quality. Home address and legal name are not necessary and we’d prefer not to receive them. If you make mistakes with the form, have typos, misread instructions, or submit the wrong thing, it is not a big deal. Let us know if you need us to do anything about it, otherwise rest assured that we understand the level of stress, overwork, and exhaustion that comes with being a writer.

SUBMIT YOUR STORY HERE.

If you cannot access these forms for any reason, feel free to email us a submission at tenebrouspress.mag@gmail.com! Please try to include your byline, bio, title, word count, and for reprints, original publication venue. Make the subject line “SUBMISSION - TITLE”. However, if you can use the form, we’d be grateful. We understand and agree that this isn’t ideal but don’t have any plausible alternatives yet (see Q 1). However, we are constantly searching for other options.

Subscribe to the 2025 Tenebrous Book Club!

Wanna get all eight of our scheduled titles without even thinking about it, along with some fun bonus add-ons?

Let us answer for you: our upcoming lineup is friggin’ stacked, so yes, yes you do.

The 2025 Tenebrous Book Club is available in either Print+eBook or eBook-only options; Get all eight books plus:

  • A T-shirt or tank, your choice, that won't be made available anywhere else (available with print subscriptions only)

  • Exclusive add-ons and swag that won't be available anywhere else (comes with both sub plans)

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PLEASE NOTE: Print books will ship on a QUARTERLY basis, two books at a time. Expect shipments in March, June, September and November. Ebooks will ship upon release date (or often earlier to subscribers).

SUBSCRIBE TO THE 2025 TENEBROUS BOOK CLUB.

***

OUR 2025 Lineup:

1. CASUAL - a novel by Koji A. Dae (February)

cover art by Cristina Bencina; interior art by Helen Whistberry

ONE OF LITHUB’S MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2025!

Valya’s neural implant is amazing.

Casual has managed her depression and anxiety, stabilized her mood, and helped her get pregnant, but new laws forbid her from using the device when she's sole caregiver for her infant, so Valya needs to detox before giving birth. The full-blown panic attacks have her considering a controversial clinical trial that would place a tandem implant in her unborn baby and allow Valya to keep hers active. Her only options are to attempt solo parenting without Casual, or install a minimally tested device in her vulnerable child. 

CASUAL is a stark and cutting glance at a near future that looks uncannily like our present, exploring themes of bodily autonomy and the struggle for mental health in a world increasingly divided.

2. SPLIT SCREAM: Off the Map - two novelettes:

Sequoia Point by Íde Hennessy

Evergreen by John K. Peck & L. Mahler (March)

cover art by Evangeline Gallagher & Alex Ebenstein; interior art by Echo Echo

Two tales of nightmares on secluded streets, exploring grief and eco-horror in lonely locales.

In Sequoia Point, a grieving widow relocates to the Lost Coast region of California to rebuild her life, only to be swallowed up by a world of eccentrics, conspiracies, talismans, and strange doppelgangers.

In Evergreen, a woman returns to her family home to find a carnivorous tree growing within it, which feeds off of the emotions of her childhood memories and devours anything she commands it to.

3. PUPPET'S BANQUET - a novella by Valkyrie Loughcrewe (May)

cover art by Donna A. Black; interior illustrations by Trevor Henderson

Married couple Celia and Martin are brutally attacked on their drive through the Irish countryside. The attack leaves Celia with a violent schism in her mind, seemingly existing in two places at once: one the “real” world, the other a howling maelstrom of abstract monstrosity. 

Of her husband, there is no trace…until weeks later, when Martin is discovered in a hospital for rare and abnormal diseases, his body spliced together with that of an unknown woman.

And they are very pregnant.

Fans of Silent Hill, The Brood, Hellraiser, and Shutter Island will eat this up.

4. BRAVE NEW WEIRD: The Best New Weird Literature, Volume Three (June)

cover art by Matt Blairstone

The Best New Weird Literature published in 2024 in the realms of indie and self-publishing! Final Table of Contents will be announced in the first quarter of ‘25, we’re currently reading through hundreds of submissions. As in previous years, this will be a celebration of the myriad strange roads that Weird fiction can and should take, from voices (perhaps) familiar and (definitely) new, and fitting proof that New Weird Lit is healthy and vibrant.

5. WE LIKE IT CHERRY - a novel by Jacy Morris (July)

Cover design by Alex Woodroe; interior illustrations by Blacky Shepherd

Ezra Montbanc is burned out. The reality series he hosts—immersing himself into the cultures and celebrations of Indigenous tribes—borders on pure exploitation and has been relegated to tax write-off status by the network; this was not the prestigious journalism career he had long envisioned.

Everything changes when Ezra receives an invitation to document the rites of a mysterious, hitherto unknown tribe: the Winoquin, who reside in the harrowing, inhospitable Arctic. Ezra and his crew depart immediately for the home of the Winoquin, only to find themselves in a bloody battle for survival against a mythical horror with a serious grudge against modern man.

WE LIKE IT CHERRY is a story about identity and the quest for success, splashed with supernatural slasher vibes and the nailbiting relentlessness of survival horror.

6. REEF MIND - a novella by Hazel Zorn (September)

cover art by Becca Snow; interior art by Echo Echo

The coral reef rose from the seas, spreading across the land with incredible speed. A rapidly evolving invasive species.

It transformed the landscape. Mutated every living creature of the surface world.

We never suspected it had a plan.

Beneath the grisly body horror lurks a parable about delusion and how our self-images of nobility and heroism shatter in the wake of disaster.

7. CLAIRVIOLENCE: Tales of Tarot and Torment - a collection by Mo Moshaty (October)

(cover art by Bri Crozier; interior art by Mo Moshaty)

The Tarot holds mystery, prediction, and unsettling omens to those who practice, divine, or are keen to it. Each card in the Major Arcana holds a position in our lives, the many facets and personas we use to make it through this world.

Sometimes these personas can break us. They can plunge us into despair, fear, terror.

A turn of the cards weaves CLAIRVIOLENCE through space and time to delve into the stories of those shaken by life-shattering choices that threaten to tear their very souls apart:

A warring couple is forced to reconcile during what they believe is the end of the world.

A young man is drawn into the surreal prison-scape of an elderly woman.

A dead woman’s curse travels miles and decades to bring her killer to justice. 

CLAIRVIOLENCE unearths the hellish tales that lie beneath the exterior of an otherwise charmed and quiet existence.

8. DEAR STUPID PENPAL - a novella by Rascal Hartley (November)

(cover art by Carly A-F; interior art TBA)

An entirely epistolary Cosmic Sci-Horror novel in which Aku, an astronaut who absolutely hates space, his ship, and his crewmates, finds that as time unravels in hyperdrive, everyone else’s penpals back on earth have died off while his beloved closest friend, inexplicably, remains

***

Subscribe to the 2025 tenebrous book club here.

SPLIT SCREAM: The Parents Ain't Alright co-authors David Corse & Ryan T. Jenkins interview one another

SPLIT SCREAM Volume Six is out now. Purchase it here, or wherever you buy books from.

***

The SPLIT SCREAM series goes to its darkest corners yet with these twin novelette odes to horrible parents!

COME TO DADDY by Ryan T. Jenkins

A damaged man endeavors to put the pieces back together after a lifetime of destruction; to reckon with his wife and son leaving him; to attend to the dreams of his dead mother’s well-manicured hand scuttling around at night; and the impossibly large garlic bulbs growing in his backyard; and the haunted movie poster of a B-list actor coming to life before his eyes. 

It’s time, now, to confront how his marriage of eighteen years went to hell, all because of a trip to the store to buy avocados for his son’s college going-away party…or was it something more? 

There’s nothing more punk rock than being a deluded, strung-out, forty-four-year-old dad forced to face the helter-skelter truth. Distilled from the classic Gothic haunted house narrative comes this twisted ode to punk rock and fatherhood. 

MOTHER IS COMING HOME by David Corse

When Otis discovers an undulating, flesh-like portal near his barn, he believes he’s finally found a way to escape his hometown and travel the world. All he has to do is sell the oddity to the highest bidder and leave home for good. 

His plans crumble when, during a drunken argument, he tosses his sickly and cruel mother through the portal. The momentary elation is brief, and quickly swallowed by a gutting reality. Otis must rescue his mother and protect the strange opening from prying eyes, no matter the cost. The lengths he will go to to hold onto hope are endless in this tale of toxic relationships, failsons, and cowardice.

David Corse Interviews Ryan T. Jenkins

DAVID CORSE: What inspired you to write your novelette, Come to Daddy?

RYAN T. JENKINS: It started in a generative writing group, the Muckheads, where, every month, each member writes their own story based on a prompt. This prompt was to use pop culture—anything from a celebrity to a genre to a specific work—as an element of horror. I chose three elements: Elijah Wood, punk music, and the haunted house trope.

DC: When did you first realize you had to write this story? What made you say, “hell yes!”?

RTJ: I wrote a scene where the MC gets pelted with exploding rotten avocados by his wife. It was horrifying, funny, and peculiar all at the same time. Something about it—the cocktail of emotions it explored—dislodged a piece of my brain where this weird-ass story came pouring out.

DC: The movie Come to Daddy by Ant Timpson is integral to your novelette. How did you end up incorporating it into your story?

RTJ: It’s a little strange because it’s not the movie so much as the movie poster that inspired me. Yes, the movie explores fatherhood, but, in fact, I wrote the first draft of the story before watching the movie. Growing up a millennial, I always perceived Elijah Wood as the kid from Radio Flyer, Flipper, and LOTR. I’m not a movie buff by any means, and I don’t know all of Wood’s oeuvre; it’s just how I remember Wood. I found him to be a childhood companion, a brilliant actor. So it jarred me when, recently, I stumbled across the Come to Daddy movie poster online and saw Elijah Wood presented in a radically different way. His eyes are bulging out in horror and he’s holding a devil’s fork. I was like, Damn! Facing that version of Wood was confronting a part of myself that I’ve avoided thinking about: I guess some form of middle-agedness.

DC: Your MC is a middle-aged punk rocker. Were you involved in the punk scene growing up? How did that influence your story?

RTJ: Being a social outcast and a white dude growing up in the nineties, chances were very, very high that I dabbled in punk music at some point. And I did! I more than dabbled. For a short time as a teenager, punk music was my religion. The braying guitars, the bad-ass cover art, the chain wallets, the moshing, the mohawks. In seventh grade, I broke my arm at a Green Day concert! I loved it all and even played in a band or two myself. In hindsight, punk offered me so much: a way to confront aspects of my emotionally stunted masculinity, to challenge the conservative environment I grew up in, to question authority, etc. But it also came with a minefield of potential pitfalls, where sometimes the rebellious nature of punk makes a young man eschew his privileges and responsibilities. The MC in this story falls into these traps. He uses punk music to avoid his problems and to avoid the truth about himself. Exploits the chaos of punk to block all the other noise out, which becomes more complicated the older he gets.

DC: What was the most challenging part of writing Come to Daddy?

RTJ: Finding the MC’s voice. I think he’s a real asshole, mainly in how out of touch he is. He’s a lousy parent, if you ask me. But he also struggles with addiction and was neglected as a child, which feeds into this lousiness. I had to continuously find ways to bridge these two tentpoles, between unlikability and sympathy. Humor was a way to do that. But also writing from his POV seemed essential. Being around this guy you would think he was living in a different reality. But—or at least this was my goal as the writer—I wanted to create an experience for the reader where this unlikable dude’s internal life yields at least some complication to how he may seem from the outside.

DC: What’s the vibe of your story? How do you want readers to feel reading it?

RTJ: I honestly don’t know! I’ve heard different reactions. All I know is I want the reader to feel something, whether it’s nostalgia for nineties movies, or anger at how obtuse men can be, or sadness because it reminds them of their own failed relationship with their parents. Any emotion—anything but numbness. The MC in this story suffers from numbness, and it rots him from the inside out. As writing this story showed me, emotional numbness is one of the loneliest and destructive places that a person can be in.

Ryan T. Jenkins interviews David Corse

RTJ: Your story explores the figure of the overbearing, toxic mother. What are some of your favorite unruly mother characters in film/books, and did any of them influence your writing of the mother in this story?

DC: Where to even begin? There are so many bad moms I could talk about, but my favorites are Mama Fratelli from The Goonies, Margaret White from Carrie, Beth Jarrett from Ordinary People, and Mary Brady from Sleepwalkers. I’m a huge fan of Friday the 13th, so I have to throw Pamela Voorhees into the mix, too. 

To some extent, all of the moms I mentioned influenced the creation of Regina. She is overbearing like Mama Fratelli, a perfectionist like Beth Jarrett, and deeply in love with her son like Mary Brady.

However, the biggest influence on the character is Annie Wilkes from Misery. Annie is a force of nature who uses twisted logic that only she understands. Regina is similar in that she’ll gladly hurt someone she loves to get what she wants. 

RTJ: When conceiving the story, did you start with the characters or the portal first?

DC: The portal, of course! Most of my stories start with a compelling image. Characters and motivation come later. Sometimes much later. I’ll get an image stuck in my head, and I learned over the years that I can exorcise the image by asking questions. Sometimes, I ask enough questions that the image is no longer compelling, but other times, a story reveals itself. 

Mother is Coming Home started with an image of a white glowing orb next to a red barn. Once I realized it was one of those images that wouldn’t leave me alone, I started asking questions. Why was it there? Where did it come from? Who owns the barn? Would they go inside? Would anyone miss them?

As for characters, I start by asking what they are terrified of and why. Then, because I write dark fantasy and horror, I throw them into a situation where they must confront their fears. 

RTJ: Was the portal always flesh-like? And why so much ooze?

DC: No, it wasn’t. In the first draft, the portal was like the wormholes in Sliders and Farscape, two sci-fi shows from the ’90s and early ‘00s that I adore. As I developed the novelette’s themes, I thought it was important to drop hints about the opening and what it can do to people. I can’t say too much without spoiling the ending, but the opening is a thematic extension of motherhood and conception.

As for why so much ooze? Why not? If I thought the story could have handled it, I would have added even more slime and gunk. But my real answer is that I unabashedly love ooze. Slime offers a unique tactile experience. It’s sticky and stretchy and squishy. It can be all sorts of colors, from milky white to neon green. Because of this, it’s more fun to write about than blood. Blood is always red and smells like iron. It’s always in a pool. Ooze, on the other hand, is whatever you want it to be. 

RTJ: At one point, the narration describes Otis as a “possum in a steel trap.” The small town—and the inability to escape from it—becomes a horror device in your story. How much did you use the influence of your own hometown/background to hone elements of this story?

DC: I pulled on a lot of influences to create the sense of claustrophobia that’s present in the story. Mother is Coming Home takes place in a fictionalized version of Pulaski County, Kentucky. My extended family lives there, and while I don’t remember it well, I do remember stories my mother told me about how she felt judged when she visited. 

I added my mother’s stories to my own experience in high school. I attended a small, private Catholic school and felt constantly surveilled. My moral and political beliefs didn’t align with a significant portion of the curriculum. I’m liberal and skeptical of religion. There were many days when I contorted myself into a shape I didn’t recognize just to get by. 

The greatest influence, though, is from my experience living in San Francisco. I moved there after earning my Master’s degree and struggled to find a job. When I did find work, it was for a shady start-up that barely paid a living wage. I took the job because my partner and I were dead broke and eating oatmeal and canned green beans for more meals than I’d like to admit. It was a toxic situation I was trapped in for years. 

RTJ: Was this your first time working in the novelette length, and what, after writing one, did you find useful writing in this form?

DC: It was! Mother is Coming Home is my first novelette, and I loved the experience so much that I’ve drafted several more. What I love about novelettes is they are the perfect balance between character development and length. Speaking as a reader, novelettes let you inhabit an in-depth story and world for an hour or two in a way that short stories rarely do. 

As a writer, I love novelettes for two reasons. First, they let me write more dialogue. It’s one of my favorite parts of telling a story. Second, writing novelettes allows me to share more stories than writing novels. Don’t get me wrong, I love novels, but they take a long, long time to write. I can write two or three novelettes in a year, but only one novel—if I’m lucky. 

RTJ: What was your favorite part of crafting this story? 

DC: Adding the ick factor. The first few drafts of Mother is Coming Home were sterile and lifeless. I believed in the story, but something wasn’t clicking. It wasn’t until a conversation with Alex (Woodroe, Tenebrous EIC) that I figured it out. She told me to stop holding back, embrace being weird, and not give a fuck about what other people think.

I went back through the novelette and made it filthy. I added ooze, sweat, dirt, and blood. There were days when I’d finish a scene and laugh to myself while imagining someone gagging a little bit while reading my story. For the most part, all the gross stuff I added made it into the final draft. There was only one thing that Split Scream’s fabulous editor, Alex Ebenstein, asked me to remove, and I think he made the right call. I don’t want to share what we took out, but you’re free to guess! 

RTJ: What was the most challenging aspect of crafting this story?

DC: Mother is Coming Home is fun, but it’s also dark and disturbing. The hardest part of the process was putting myself in the right headspace to channel the main characters. They are the opposite of who I am, so writing them was challenging. I kept wanting to make the characters better people, but I had to remind myself that wasn’t what the story needed. 

I know this sounds like an exaggeration, but it isn’t: I felt physically lighter after I submitted the final draft of Mother is Coming Home. Now, all of you get to carry Otis and Regina with you instead of only me.

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SPLIT SCREAM Volume Six is out now. Purchase it here, or wherever you buy books from.