Dearest Reader,
Did you know that JournalStone is currently open to fiction collections, novellas, and novel submissions? If you have a great story that’s dying to be read, send it our way. Submission guidelines can be found here.
Have you picked up your copy of Laird Barron’s Swift to Chase yet? Combining hardboiled noir, psychological horror, and the occult, Swift to Chase continues three-time Shirley Jackson Award winner Barron’s harrowing inquiry into the darkness of the human heart. If you haven’t, grab your copy here!
November sees some big releases coming our way. First off is Fragile Dreams from the insanely talented Philip Fracassi. When a savage earthquake rocks Los Angeles, buildings crumble and highways fall apart. Matthew Calvert, a young family man on the job interview of his life, finds himself at ground zero of the destruction – his building collapses beneath him and he wakes to find himself buried under a mountain of rubble, badly injured, trapped in the dark. As his injuries worsen with each passing hour, he clings to memories to fight off the fear of impending death, the hope for salvation. Soon, however, the memories turn dark and his terror escalates. There are things with him in the dark. Trying desperately to hold onto his sanity, Matthew clings to the barrier between this life and the next, his mind flipping between reality and delusion, before confronting a final horrifying truth: Sometimes the hallucinations are real. Fragile Dreams is available for pre-order here.
Also coming out in November is Jeff Pryor’s Chosen of Trees and of Talons. Book one of the Eagles of Eldara saga begins when the survival of a magical forest is in the hands of a young brother and sister. A father refuses to accept their destiny, and fights to protect them from the dark creatures who hunt them. A husband and wife only hope to reunite as he leads an army while she attempts to uncover spies for her king. Their futures, as well as the fate of kingdoms, hang in the balance as a boy fights to fulfill his destiny amid the gathering storms of war. Pre-order your copy here!
That’s it, that’s all, folks. Until next month!
Jess
Assistant Publisher, JournalStone
NEW & UPCOMING RELEASES
FRAGILE DREAMS
When a savage earthquake rocks Los Angeles, buildings crumble and highways fall apart. Matthew Calvert, a young family man on the job interview of his life, finds himself at ground zero of the destruction – his building collapses beneath him and he wakes to find himself buried under a mountain of rubble, badly injured, trapped in the dark.
As his injuries worsen with each passing hour, he clings to memories to fight off the fear of impending death, the hope for salvation. Soon, however, the memories turn dark and his terror escalates.
There are things with him in the dark.
Trying desperately to hold onto his sanity, Matthew clings to the barrier between this life and the next, his mind flipping between reality and delusion, before confronting a final horrifying truth:
Sometimes the hallucinations are real.
CHOSEN OF TREES AND OF TALONS
The Eagles of Eldara – Book 1
Hope is a fragile thread.
Imprisoned for over four-hundred years, the Arneisian people tenuously held onto that thread. Generations were born and generations died. Sons were Chosen and given to the sorcerers who imposed the chains of slavery on their people, hoping the one foretold would Return to lead them from their prison. The thread of hope is tested as a new group of boys is Chosen. Their secrets will free the Arneisians or break that thread forever.
The survival of a magical forest is in the hands of a young brother and sister. A father refuses to accept their destiny, and fights to protect them from the dark creatures who hunt them. A husband and wife only hope to reunite as he leads an army while she attempts to uncover spies for her king. Their futures, as well as the fate of kingdoms, hang in the balance as a boy fights to fulfill his destiny amid the gathering storms of war.
OUT NOW FROM BIZARRO PULP PRESS
STATIC/ORGONE
From Jamie Grefe, author of Domo ArigaDIE!!! (Rooster Republic Press), The Mondo Vixen Massacre (Eraserhead Press), and the man responsible for the official novelizations of Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington’s Adult Swim series Decker: Classified and Decker: Port of Call: Hawaii, comes a double-novella nightmare of fevered desire gone mad, trans-dimensional horror, and brain-smearing sensationalism.
In Static, a bewildered man stumbles through a hellish desert-mansion orgy in search of the woman he loves only to find a deranged complexity of fleshy doom, seedy motel rooms full of secrets, and the struggle to overcome the priestly fingers of fate’s sadism.
Orgone mesmerizes readers into the psychomagical world of a post-apocalyptic performance artist who takes vengeance on a spiritual assassin who may have murdered his wife, but when his vengeance awakens a mythical beast, the giant corpse of his dead wife, and Dr. Wilhelm Reich himself, he must harness the power of orgone energy to obliterate the trauma of his past.
With original illustrations by Luke Spooner, this is a literary experience not to be missed.
COMING SOON FROM BIZARRO PULP PRESS
WONDER WEAVERS
Starting in the fall of 1896, something very strange was going on in the night skies of the western United States. Newspapers and law enforcement were inundated with reports of bizarre machines flying over cities and towns, mostly in Texas. There are thousands of accounts in the newspapers from that time; no one knew what to make of them then, and today in the 21st century, we still don’t. There were also numerous reports of odd people or figures manning the airships of unknown origin and speaking in unfamiliar languages. What was going on? Were people on the ground just making up these stories or do we have a case of multiple witnesses to a major secret event occurring years before the Wright Brothers?
Matt Bialer, poet of the weird and unexplained, grapples with the mystery in his epic poem, WONDER WEAVERS. The narrator of the poem is writing a book on the subject while at the same time helping his extremely shy teenage son prepare a book report on HG Wells’ INVISIBLE MAN. He is also continuing his never-ending search for his long lost missing brother who loved airplanes and who first told him about the Wonder Weavers.
Then the key to the mystery of the airships is possibly found: A series of large old scrap books of esoteric drawings, collages and watercolors of these unreal flying machines are found at a garbage dump. The books are from another time and possibly even another realm. They turn out to be the creation of a reclusive old Prussian butcher who lived in Texas in the 1890s named Charles Dellschau. The drawings have German and some sort of code in them and many references to a “Sonora Aero Club.” The object here is to crack the code; the code of human ingenuity. And to soar to the heights of exhilaration and imagination and maybe something even well beyond.
