Dear Reader,
Are you one of those people patiently waiting for the blazing summer heat to be on its way so you can welcome the crisp fall air with open arms? Hey, us too! And we’re even more excited because our fall line-up has got us all giddy.
Before we dive in, I have to mention S.P. Miskowski’s latest novel, I Wish I Was Like You again, because, well, that starred review from Publishers Weekly has us tickled pink! For the full review, click here! (You can also buy the novel here.)
Are you a Joe Ledger fan? Then you’ll love what we’ve got coming out August 25th. JOE LEDGER: THE OFFICIAL COMPANION is every fan’s dream! The Official Joe Ledger Companion takes you inside the mysterious and dangerous world of the DMS: Department of Military Sciences. Featuring interviews and insight from Ledger creator Jonathan Maberry, background profiles on the heroes and villains, staff interviews with members of the DMS, and so much more. What are you waiting for, soldier? Pre-order your copy here.
We’ve also had an audiobook explosion (an audio-plosion, if you will)! That’s right, we’ve got audiobooks from Ronald Malfi, S.P. Miskowski, Adam L.G. Nevill, Laird Barron, Richard Chizmar, the list goes on and on. To check out our full audiobook catalogue, click here.
Have you heard about our newest imprint, Trepidatio Publishing? Much like JournalStone, the imprint will focus on dark stories from diverse writers. Want to learn more? Follow Trepidatio on Facebook! We’ll be debuting our new website soon!
JournalStone and Trepidatio are also open to novel and fiction collection submissions! For more information, please review our submissions page.
You may have heard by now that the forthcoming issue of Dark Discoveries magazine will be its last (for the time being). We can’t thank everyone enough for the support the magazine has received over the years. Fingers crossed that this hiatus won’t last too long and that we’ll be able to deliver fresh horror fiction and original articles to your door before you know it. In the meantime, back issues are available for purchase here.
The JournalStone Network is on the hunt for a Social Media Coordinator, and, as always, we’re looking for reviewers. Check out the full listings below, and join ussss!
Phew! That’s it, that’s all, folks. Until next month!
Jess
Assistant Publisher
NEW & UPCOMING RELEASES
I WISH I WAS LIKE YOU
By S.P. Miskowski
“First rule. Never open your story with a corpse. It’s a cliché. If you do it to be ironic, I’ll throw your manuscript in your face.”
Greta didn’t set out to solve a murder. But if the first thing you see when you come home after a long day at a lousy job is your own dead body, it can make even the most cynical non-starter in 1994 Seattle take an interest. Refusing to believe her dead eyes, the one-time theater editor at the city’s least noteworthy periodical – now a bitter ghost haunting the streets and busways of the Emerald City – will happily break every rule of crime fiction to tell her story and prove she didn’t die a lame-ass, suicidal Cobain imitator. If Greta manages to figure out who really killed her, in the process? That’s just an extra shot in her overpriced espresso.
Hauntingly scary, darkly funny, and occasionally nostalgic, I Wish I Was Like You is one vengeful spirit’s look at a city learning to embrace narcissism and the dead inhabitants who will always call it home.
OF MASQUES AND MARTYERS
By Christopher Golden
For the Shadows, nothing can ever be the same again. Their existence revealed to the world in Of Saints and Shadows, the truth of their divided heritage revealed to themselves in Angel Souls and Devil Hearts, they must now fight the hardest battle of all — against others of their own kind.
The fragile alliance of human and vampire was shattered forever by Hannibal, among the most ancient of Shadows, who turned on them both in their hour of greatest need. Driven by blood, he thirsts for dominion, and humankind to him will always be prey.
For those Shadows who walk a different path there is only one choice to be made. Hannibal must be destroyed before he destroys them all. But his followers are many, and those who oppose him are few…
JOE LEDGER: THE OFFICIAL COMPANION
Dana Fredsti & Mari Adkins
If they have to call in Joe Ledger and Echo Team then it’s already hit the fan!
The Official Joe Ledger Companion takes you inside the mysterious and dangerous world of the DMS: Department of Military Sciences. In here you’ll find the following declassified data:
- Mission files for each of Joe Ledger’s cases
- Biographies of the members of the DMS -get to know more about Mr. Church, Top and Bunny, Bug, Dr. Hu and all the others
- Background profiles on the madmen and terrorists Joe has fought – The Seven Kings, The Red Knights, the Jakobys, Majestic Three and more
- Meet the allies of Joe Ledger and the DMS – Violin, Arklight, Toys, Lilith, and others
- Specs and information on weapons and technology
- Comments from some of Mr. Church’s ‘Friends in the Industry’
- Staff interviews with the members of DMS –crawl inside the heads and hearts of Mr. Church, Joe Ledger and the rest of the team
- Get a complete list in reading order of the Joe Ledger novels, short stories, and even comic book appearances
- Journey into the expanded Joe Ledger universe by exploring tie-ins to the Pine Deep Trilogy, the Rot & Ruin series, the Dead of Night series, the case files of Sam Hunter and more!
The Joe Ledger Companion is the mission intel you need to roll out with the heroes of Echo Team.
Hooah!
COMING AUGUST 25th
CTHULHU BLUES
Douglas Wynne
THE CHILLING FINALE OF THE SPECTRA FILES TRILOGY
The Wade House has been reduced to ash, but the dreams that plagued Becca Philips and Jason Brooks when they slept in that abomination continue to haunt them. After years of facing trans-dimensional monsters in the service of SPECTRA, a few lingering nightmares are to be expected. But when Becca starts singing in her sleep—an ancient song that conjures dreadful things from mirrored surfaces—she fears that the harmonics she was exposed to during the Red Equinox terror event may have mutated not only her perception, but also her voice. It’s a gift—or curse—that she shares with a select group of children born to other witnesses of the incursion.
While a shadowy figure known as the “Crimson Minstrel” gathers these children to form an infernal choir, something ancient stirs on the ocean floor. And Becca, hearing its call, once again finds herself running from an agency she can no longer trust, into the embrace of cosmic forces she can barely comprehend.
COMING SEPTEMBER 15th
STRANGE IS THE NIGHT
S.P. Miskowski
Over cocktails an executive describes to a friend the disturbing history of a strangely potent guardian angel. A young mom tries to perfect and prolong her daughter’s childhood with obsessive parenting. A critic’s petty denouncement of an ingénue’s performance leads to a theatrical night of reckoning. A cult member makes nice for a parole board hearing years after committing an infamous crime.
A multiple Shirley Jackson Award-nominee, S.P. Miskowski serves up an uncompromising collection of thirteen modern tales of desire and self-destruction. Strange is the Night offers further proof that Miskowski is—as Black Static book reviewer Peter Tennant notes—“one of the most interesting and original writers to emerge in recent years.”
COMING OCTOBER 13th!
MAPPING THE INTERIOR (Audiobook)
Stephen Graham Jones
Mapping the Interior is a horrifying, inward-looking novella from Stephen Graham Jones that Paul Tremblay calls “emotionally raw, disturbing, creepy, and brilliant.”
Blackfeet author Stephen Graham Jones brings readers a spine-tingling Native American horror novella.
Walking through his own house at night, a fifteen-year-old thinks he sees another person stepping through a doorway. Instead of the people who could be there, his mother or his brother, the figure reminds him of his long-gone father, who died mysteriously before his family left the reservation. When he follows it he discovers his house is bigger and deeper than he knew.
The house is the kind of wrong place where you can lose yourself and find things you’d rather not have. Over the course of a few nights, the boy tries to map out his house in an effort that puts his little brother in the worst danger, and puts him in the position to save them . . . at terrible cost.
WE SHOULD HAVE LEFT WELL ENOUGH ALONE (Audiobook)
Ronald Malfi
A new mother is pursued by mysterious men in black. A misguided youth learns the dark secrets of the world from an elderly neighbor on Halloween night. A housewarming party where the guests never leave. A caretaker tends to his rusted relic of a god deep in the desert…
In his debut short story collection, Bram Stoker Award-finalist Ronald Malfi mines the depths and depravities of the human condition, exploring the dark underside of religion, marriage, love, fear, regret, and hunger in a world that spins just slightly askew on its axis. Rich in atmosphere and character, Malfi’s debut collection is not to be missed.
COMING NOVEMBER 2nd IN SOFTCOVER, HARDCOVER, AND AUDIOBOOK
THE NARROWS (AUDIOBOOK)
By Ronald Malfi
The town of Stillwater has a very unwelcome resident.
The town of Stillwater has been dying—the long and painful death of a town ravaged by floods and haunted by the ghosts of all who had lived there. Yet this most recent flood has brought something with it—a creature that nests among the good folks of Stillwater…and feeds off them. The children who haven’t disappeared whisper the same word—“vampire.” But they’re wrong. What has come to Stillwater is something much more horrific.
A LONG DECEMBER (AUDIOBOOK)
By Richard Chizmar
In 1996, Richard Chizmar’s debut short story collection, Midnight Promises, was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award. Publishers Weekly called it “a sterling collection” while singling out “The Silence of Sorrow” as “an understated masterpiece.”
Two years later, Subterranean Press published a mini-collection from Chizmar entitled Monsters and Other Stories. In his introduction, acclaimed genre critic Edward Bryant said, “When all is said and done, this book should leave you in utter silence, giving you time and opportunity to contemplate what you just read. Tough storytelling from a tough writer; but a writer who is not calloused. Chizmar possesses a finely honed gift of empathy. With utter grace and loving kindness he’ll put you right inside the life (and soul) of the monster.”
Now, nearly two decades later, Chizmar assembles thirty-five stories, including a previously-unpublished novella, and presents us with A Long December. This massive new collection features more than 150,000 words of Chizmar’s very best short fiction and includes 8,000 words of autobiographical Story Notes.
Eerie, suspenseful, poignant, the stories in A Long December range from horror to suspense, crime to dark fantasy, mainstream to mystery.
As New York Times bestselling author Scott Smith (A Simple Plan, The Ruins) notes: “It’s an idyllic little world Richard Chizmar has created. Boys fish in the shallows of a winding creek. A father tosses a baseball with his young son in the fading light of a summer day. There’s the smell of fresh-cut grass. And then, well…just beneath the surface? There are those missing pets whose collars turn up in a shoebox. Or the disturbing photos the dead can leave behind. Or the terrible thing you might find yourself doing when a long lost brother suddenly returns, demanding money. Chizmar does a tremendous job of peeling back his world’s shiny layers, revealing the rot that lies underneath. His stories feel like so many teeth: short and sharp and ready to draw blood.”
COMING JULY 28TH IN AUDIOBOOK FORMAT
BEYOND THE GREAT, BLOODY, BRUISED, AND SILENT VEIL OF THIS WORLD
By Jordan Krall
Find yourself on a starship as it lumbers across the desert.
Find yourself on a train looking out at the stars, the earth a blue marble in the infinite black abyss behind you.
Find yourself overdosing on narcotics in a bathtub at home.
The Red Planet.
Pharmaceuticals.
The Demiurge.
Assassins.
Suicide bombers.
Underground railroads between worlds.
What mysteries link them?
Pull back the veil and see.
In Beyond the Great, Bloody, Bruised and Silent Veil of this World, author Jordan Krall creates a wholly unique experience; all at once revelatory, hypnotic, and hallucinatory.
All literal, all parable, all a twisted drug-trip. So read on and know this; it’s all true, and it’s all in your head.
PSEUDOPSALMS: SOLOM
By Peter Adam Salomon
Bram Stoker nominated author Peter Adam Salomon returns to his examination of the human struggle for salvation in his third poetry collection, PseudoPsalms: Sodom. Exploring the realms of politics, religion, love, and more, this continuing search for light in the darkness discovers only shadows. When all else fails, at the final judgement, poetry is the ultimate sin.
LIKE FREE MOVIES AND BOOKS? HECK YES, YOU DO!
