Dear Reader,
We here at JournalStone and Trepidatio hope you’ve had a lovely spring, and with summer just around the corner, now’s the perfect time to pick up some books you can enjoy outdoors (and indoors too, if nature isn’t really your thing).
Out on June 23rd is COME TO DUST from Bracken MacLeod.
Ever since her mother abandoned her, five-year-old Sophie has had to depend on her uncle Mitch for everything. Though their life is difficult, he works hard to keep their family together, despite the obstacles in their way. But just when everything seems to be looking up for them, it all comes crashing down when Sophie dies tragically. Mitch descends into a crippling grief, not knowing how to continue on without her.
When scores of children around the world begin to inexplicably rise from the dead—Sophie among them—everything becomes much harder.
Mitch rescues her from the morgue, determined to carve out a normal life for them no matter what, though it soon becomes clear that may not be possible. While the kids who’ve returned behave like living children, they still look very dead. And they can do something else that normal children cannot. Something terrifying. While debate rages over whether the children’s return is a mercy or a sign of approaching judgment, a congregation of religious fanatics determined to usher in the apocalypse has their own plan for salvation.
Now Mitch must find a way to save Sophie from an increasingly hostile world that wants to tear them apart and put her back in the ground for good.
If you’re looking for a new spin on the zombie trope, check out COME TO DUST.
Out July 7th is the latest from Shirley Jackson Award nominee S.P. Miskowski, I WISH I WAS LIKE YOU.
“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.
We’ve also had an audiobook explosion (an audio-plosion, if you will)! That’s right, we’ve got audiobooks from Ronald Malfi, Adam L.G. Nevill, Laird Barron, Richard Chizmar, the list goes on and on. To check out our full audiobook catalogue, clicky click here.
Have you heard about our newest imprint, Trepidatio Publishing? Much like JournalStone, it’ll focus on speculative fiction with a literary bend. 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.
The JournalStone Network is on the hunt for a Social Media Coordinator. Check out the full listing below, and join ussss!
Phew! That’s it, that’s all, folks. Until next month!
Jess
Assistant Publisher
NEW & UPCOMING RELEASES
COME TO DUST
By Bracken MacLeod
Ever since her mother abandoned her, five-year-old Sophie has had to depend on her uncle Mitch for everything. Though their life is difficult, he works hard to keep their family together, despite the obstacles in their way. But just when everything seems to be looking up for them, it all comes crashing down when Sophie dies tragically. Mitch descends into a crippling grief, not knowing how to continue on without her.
When scores of children around the world begin to inexplicably rise from the dead—Sophie among them—everything becomes much harder.
Mitch rescues her from the morgue, determined to carve out a normal life for them no matter what, though it soon becomes clear that may not be possible. While the kids who’ve returned behave like living children, they still look very dead. And they can do something else that normal children cannot. Something terrifying. While debate rages over whether the children’s return is a mercy or a sign of approaching judgment, a congregation of religious fanatics determined to usher in the apocalypse has their own plan for salvation.
Now Mitch must find a way to save Sophie from an increasingly hostile world that wants to tear them apart and put her back in the ground for good.
AVAILABLE JUNE 23rd
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.
AVAILABLE JULY 7th!
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…
COMING JULY 21st
DARK DISCOVERIES ISSUE #37
Supernaturalism
All new Fiction by: Paul Tremblay, Reggie Oliver, Brian Lumley, Bracken MacLeod, Barbie Wilde and Molly Tanzer
Interviews with: Paul Tremblay, Peter Levenda, Ellen Datlow and more!
Articles on: Fantasia Film Festival Reviews by Nancy Kilpatrick, Get out your Violin by Peter Levenda and Featured Film Reviews by Colleen Wanglund
Columns from Laird Barron, Robert Morrish, Donald Tyson, Brett J. Taleey and Richard Dansky!
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
SOME WILL NOT SLEEP (Audiobook)
By Adam L.G. Nevill
A bestial face appears at windows in the night.
In the big white house on the hill angels are said to appear.
A forgotten tenant in an isolated building becomes addicted to milk.
A strange goddess is worshipped by a home-invading disciple.
The least remembered gods still haunt the oldest forests.
Cannibalism occurs in high society at the end of the world.
The sainted undead follow their prophet to the Great Dead Sea.
A confused and vengeful presence occupies the home of a first-time buyer.
In ghastly harmony with the nightmarish visions of the award-winning writer’s novels, these stories blend a lifelong appreciation of horror culture with the grotesque fascinations and childlike terrors that are the author’s own.
COMING JULY 17th IN AUDIOBOOK FORMAT
IN THE VALLEY OF THE SUN (AUDIOBOOK)
By Andy Davidson
Deftly written and utterly addictive, this Western literary horror debut will find a home with fans of authors like Joe Hill, Cormac McCarthy, and Anne Rice.
One night in 1980, a man becomes a monster.
Haunted by his past, Travis Stillwell spends his nights searching out women in West Texas honky-tonks. What he does with them doesn’t make him proud, just quiets the demons for a little while. But after Travis crosses paths one night with a mysterious pale-skinned girl, he wakes weak and bloodied in his cabover camper the next morning—with no sign of a girl, no memory of the night before.
Annabelle Gaskin spies the camper parked behind her motel and offers the cowboy a few odd jobs to pay his board. Travis takes her up on the offer, if only to buy time, to lay low and heal. By day, he mends the old motel, insinuating himself into the lives of Annabelle and her ten-year-old son. By night, in the cave of his camper, he fights an unspeakable hunger. Before long, Annabelle and her boy come to realize that this strange cowboy is not what he seems.
Half a state away, a grizzled Texas Ranger is hunting Travis for his past misdeeds, but what he finds will lead him to a revelation far more monstrous. A man of the law, he’ll have to decide how far into the darkness he’ll go for the sake of justice.
When these lives converge on a dusty autumn night, an old evil will find new life—and new blood.
COMING SOON 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.
ARE YOU SOCIAL MEDIA SAVVY?
We’re looking for a Social Media Coordinator to assist with the following tasks:
-growing our numbers across all our social media platforms
-scheduling posts on multiple accounts (familiarity with Hootsuite is a bonus, but not a necessity)
-reading and responding to private messages
-interacting with other horror outlets
-plus more!
Does this sound like you? Then let’s talk! Send the JournalStone Network Editor-in-Chief, Stuart Conover, an email!
