Lullabies for Suffering Preorder Promo

I hope you all had a very Merry Christmas (if you were celebrating). If you are looking to fill up that new Kindle or spend some of that Christmas gift card on books (what else would you buy?!), Wicked Run Press is having a preorder promo on Lullabies for Suffering: Tales of Addiction Horror. You may remember me raving on Garden of Fiends quite a few times in the past. This is the follow up anthology, and I can't wait to read it! Lullabies for Suffering contains novellas and novelettes from Kealan Patrick Burke, Caroline Kepnes, Gabino Iglesias, John FD Taff, Mercedes M Yardley, and Mark Matthews.

I offered Wicked Run Press some space to promote Lullabies for Suffering and here are the details they provided (a chance to win a signed book from one of the authors!)

It’s happening! 

Lullabies for Suffering: Tales of Addiction Horror,

is now available for presale for Kindle on amazon.

Kindle and Paperback Preorder on Amazon

Paperback Preorder on Barnes & Noble

I’m incredibly excited to unleash this work onto the world. I can’t wait for readers to feast their eyes on these Novellas & Novelettes. The table of contents includes:

                    Kealan Patrick Burke                   Caroline Kepnes

                    Gabino Iglesias                              John FD Taff

                    Mercedes M Yardley                     Mark Matthews

“Why preorder?” You ask. Two reasons:

A:  Save off the publication price. Just $4.99 to preorder for Kindle. 

B: Win a signed paperback copy from one of the writers on the table of contents. Yep! Signed copies from randomly raffled off.

Here’s what’s waiting: 

“How to win?” You ask. Two ways:  

A:  Email a receipt of proof of a presale purchase of Lullabies for Suffering (either paperback or Kindle version) to WickedRunPress@gmail.com with “contest” in the subject line.

(For best results, list your order of paperback preference, and 1st winner will receive top pick, 2nd winner will receive top available pick, etc..)

B: For an additional entry, send a screenshot of a Tweet, Facebook or Instagram post featuring this amazon link:  https://www.amazon.com/Lullabies-Suffering-Tales-Addiction-Horror-ebook/dp/B07Z5FXFJB/ with some variation of the phrase: “Come, listen to these Lullabies for Suffering” (or anything similar) (for a no-purchase necessary entry, simply email option B) 

Two ways to enter. Do one, or do both. 

Winners will be chosen at random on January 1st, 2020. Deadline is midnight on December 31st, 2019. Winning copies shipped shortly after.

There will be Six Paperback winners! 

Once again, Here’s what the treasure that awaits.

1. YOU, signed by author Caroline Kepnes

“Hypnotic and scary,” Stephen king said of YOU, now available as must-binge TV on Netflix. 

2. We Live Inside Your Eyes, signed by author Kealan Patrick Burke

His mastery of the short story is on display here, and this collection weaves the stories together with fantastic creativity. 

3. Apocalyptic Montessa and Nuclear Lulu: A Tale of Atomic Love, 

signed by author Mercedes M. Yardley

The whimsical, dark fantasist writes love stories like none other, and her Lullabies for Suffering story takes place within this same universe and includes a cameo by Montessa and Lulu.

4. Little Black Spots, signed by author John FD Taff (plus Book one of The Fearing)

Includes the Bram Stoker nominated story, “A Winter’s Tale.” You also get a copy of Book One of The Fearing (unsigned, but a must read) if you win this copy. 

5. Garden of Fiends AND All Smoke Rises, signed by author Mark Matthews (one copy of both)  

“Tense, imaginative, and empathic, Matthews is a damn good writer, and make no mistake, he will hurt you. ”–Jack Ketchum

6. Coyote Songs AND Zero Saints, signed by Gabino Iglesias

Win a signed copy of both Zero Saints and the ground-breaking, mind-blowing, beautifully lyrical, Bram Stoker nominated, Coyote Songs. Enter now! 

Two options to win. 

1. A presale purchase receipt, of either paperback or kindle.

Click here for Amazon

Click here for Barnes & Noble

2. A screenshot of a social media post which includes amazon presale link  https://www.amazon.com/Lullabies-Suffering-Tales-Addiction-Horror-ebook/dp/B07Z5FXFJB/

Put “contest” in the subject line and email to: WickedRunPress@gmail.com

Do one or do both. (For best results, list your order of paperback preference, and 1st winner will receive top pick, 2nd winner will receive top available pick, etc.. )

Deadline is December 31st, 2019, when the clock strikes midnight and the decade ends. 

Sorry, continental US only.

That’s it! Thanks for listening, and may the odds be in your favor.

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If you've already preordered or plan to order Lullabies for Suffering, be sure to send in your proof by December 31st and good luck!!

Book Review | Garden of Fiends edited by Mark Matthews

Garden of Fiends is an addiction themed anthology edited by Mark Matthews.

The intoxication from a pint of vodka, the electric buzz from snorting cocaine, the warm embrace from shooting heroin--drinking and drugging provide the height of human experience. It's the promise of heaven on earth, but the hell that follows is a constant hunger, a cold emptiness. The craving to get high is an intense yearning not unlike that of any other blood-thirsty monster.

The best way to tell the truths of addiction is through a story, and dark truths such as these need a piece of horror to do them justice.

The stories inside feature the insidious nature of addiction told with compassion yet searing honesty. Drug overdoses are now the leading cause of accidental deaths, and some of the most incredible names in horror fiction have tackled this modern day epidemic.

A WICKED THIRST, by Kealan Patrick Burke

THE ONE IN THE MIDDLE, by Jessica McHugh

EVERYWHERE YOU'VE BLED AND EVERYWHERE YOU WILL, by Max Booth III

FIRST, JUST BITE A FINGER, by Johann Thorsson

LAST CALL, by John FD Taff

TORMENT OF THE FALLEN, by Glen Krisch

GARDEN OF FIENDS, by Mark Matthews

RETURNS, by Jack Ketchum

Whoa.

Garden of Fiends is a really solid collection. I love the format of having such variable length stories, too. Two of the stories are novella length which is fantastic. The first novella is from Mark Matthews (also titled Garden of Fiends). There are so many layers to this story of a man trying to save his daughter from addiction.

The second novella is from Max Booth III.

Spiders, y'all. You haven't read a spider story like this one!

There are also short stories by Jessican McHugh (a stand alone excerpt from one of her novels), John FD Taff, Glen Krisch, Kealan Patrick Burke, and Jack Ketchum.

These are top-notch authors, and their stories are everything you would expect them to be.

There is also a flash fiction piece from Johann Thorsson which was the perfect offset to some of the longer works in the anthology.

I don't think this is a collection for everyone (nor do I think it tries to be). I do, however, think the audience it is intended for will love it. If you are a fan of any of these authors, I can't imagine that you would be disappointed.

Garden of Fiends takes on the horrors of addiction at full throttle, and I highly recommend it.

9/10: Highly Recommended

Review copy provided by editor/author

Planting the Seeds of the Garden of Fiends | Guest Post

Hi, guys! To those of you I promised an update, we were able to demolish our old house last week. Things are starting to settle down, and I will be back this Saturday with a much better update.

As for today, I'm very excited to welcome Mark Matthews to Book Den! Mark is the editor and a contributing author of the addiction themed anthology Garden of Fiends: Tales of Addiction Horror.

Planting the Seeds of the Garden of Fiends

By Mark Matthews, editor and contributing author

From an early age, books shaped who I was. Writers were heroes to emulate. I wanted to be Thoreau, I wanted to be Mark Twain. I wanted to be Jack Kerouac.

There was something inside me that only stories could reach, a music only literature could play.

A similar reaction occurred when I had my first drink. The warm confidence, the blissful contentment. A union with God. All my curses lifted, all my deficits erased. It was love at first sip. Other drugs soon followed. I said “no” to nothing, “yes” to everything.

Pretty soon, I needed it to function. I started drinking alone. Getting shakes. Sweats. I went on drug binges and mixed drinking with cocaine, acid, or crystal meth every chance I could. I needed substances to feel normal, otherwise, I had perpetual flu-like symptoms and was intensely angry and bitter at the world. I didn’t care if I died and was quite certain that, due to drugging and drinking, I would die before I was 30 years old.

I nearly proved myself right. By 23 years old, I had alcoholic hepatitis of the liver, a swollen pancreas, my stomach was bleeding and I was shitting blood (sorry, I know that’s gross to read). More than once I went to detox to sober up after the pain got too much, but then I would drink soon as they released me. When money got tight and I needed $1.89 for a half pint of vodka, I visited car washes since that was the best place to gather 10 cent cans. Crazy thing was, the more disgusting I became, the more I needed to delude myself about who I really was. In my twisted mind, I was some misunderstood genius who society hadn’t found a place for, and therefore drinking was my only crutch to live with lesser mortals. Truth was, I was a pathetic lump of flesh.

A turning point came when, rather than just detox, I finally succumbed and went to residential treatment for 3 weeks. I didn’t want to go, but I had no other options. My body could not take any more liquor in it. My spirit was drenched with despair. I remember sitting in the treatment center, unable to stop the tears, and looking out the window with plans to leave, but I had no place to go. Instead, I stayed put, endured the pain of living, and found some humility and some courage. Each day sober felt like a miracle. I learned so much about why I was doing what I was doing, how to stop it, and most importantly, decided my life was worth saving.

No way in hell did I ever think I would go back to college to help other addicts, but that’s what I did. I got a masters in counseling, became a certified addictions counselor, and worked in many different treatment centers. My curse had changed to my calling.

And I returned to my desire to write.

Once I got sober, I started writing again. Writing out the darkness I had experienced was incredibly therapeutic, for if you want to tell the truth, best to do so by making up a story. I wrote one novel, Stray, which was based on a treatment center where I worked that shared a parking lot with an animal shelter. Next I wrote MILK-BLOOD, which tackled poverty, urban despair, and heroin addiction with a supernatural slant. Many readers were shocked by the darkness in the book, but the crazy thing is, it was all true (even if it didn’t happen) and much of the darkness in the book was actually understated. After writing the sequel, All Smoke Rises, I decided to reach out to other authors of dark fiction to see how they would tackle the subject of addiction.

The blog post for ‘addiction horror’ received 10,000 hits. I received hundreds of submissions and had to boil these down to eight pieces, largely of long fiction and novellas. I can’t promise you’ll like this collection, but I can promise it is different. In scope, in length of stories, in content. I’m incredibly proud of what’s inside, since addiction and horror seem a perfect fit. In order to tackle the modern day epidemic of addiction, it takes works of horror to fully explore the devastation.

Addicts, in a certain sense, are not that different than vampires: they live within society but hide their true nature while they feed off the living, siphoning their money, their sanity, always safest in the shadows. They feel cursed with their affliction but unable to stop the compulsion to suck the blood out of others.

And the family of an addict suffers as if something monstrous has taken over their loved one. I can’t help but think of the movie The Exorcist, perhaps the most terrifying horror movie ever made, as an analogy of a family dealing with addiction.

In The Exorcist, a desperate mother seeks out every kind of professional help after her daughter starts acting strangely. Nobody has answers. Things get worse, the young girl’s behavior gets more bizarre. Her very skin seems to be changing. The last resort is to seek help from something spiritual. A war begins to save a life. This true horror story happens every day, probably on your street. Parents losing their child to an addiction that has possessed their spirit. Thankfully, there are parents who are having their child saved through recovery. I know it works. I’ve seen the horror and the damage done, and I’ve seen many come out the other side and survive. Not without their share of scars.

This is the story of some of them. Check out Garden of Fiends: Tales of Addiction Horror

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The intoxication from a pint of vodka, the electric buzz from snorting cocaine, the warm embrace from shooting heroin--drinking and drugging provide the height of human experience. It's the promise of heaven on earth, but the hell that follows is a constant hunger, a cold emptiness. The craving to get high is an intense yearning not unlike that of any other blood-thirsty monster.

The best way to tell the truths of addiction is through a story, and dark truths such as these need a piece of horror to do them justice.

The stories inside feature the insidious nature of addiction told with compassion yet searing honesty. Drug overdoses are now the leading cause of accidental deaths, and some of the most incredible names in horror fiction have tackled this modern day epidemic.

• A WICKED THIRST, by Kealan Patrick Burke
• THE ONE IN THE MIDDLE, by Jessica McHugh
• EVERYWHERE YOU'VE BLED AND EVERYWHERE YOU WILL, by Max Booth III
• FIRST, JUST BITE A FINGER, by Johann Thorsson
• LAST CALL, by John FD Taff
• TORMENT OF THE FALLEN, by Glen Krisch
• GARDEN OF FIENDS, by Mark Matthews
• RETURNS, by Jack Ketchum

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Mark Matthews has a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from the University of Michigan and a Master’s Degree in Counseling. He is the author of five novels, including On the Lips of Children, MILK-BLOOD, and All Smoke Rises. All of his novels are based on true settings, many of them inspired by his work as a counselor in the field of mental health and treatment of addiction. He's the editor of the anthology GARDEN OF FIENDS: TALES OF ADDICTION HORROR. He lives near Detroit with his wife and two daughters. Reach him at xmarkm@gmail.com

On Writing Dark Fiction | Post & Giveaway

I have the most amazing group of friends on Goodreads that I refer to as my "horror friends". They are invaluable to me for discovering the latest and greatest in the horror genre. One of the books I've recently discovered is Mark Matthews's On the Lips of Children. I invited Mark to share some thoughts with us here today. I feel very blessed that Mark has provided some wonderful thoughts on my favorite genre. He has also offered to give away an ecopy of On the Lips of Children to one Book Den reader! Be sure to enter the giveaway at the end of the post.

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On Writing Dark Fiction by Mark Matthews

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear.”

― H.P. Lovecraft

China Mieville is perhaps the coolest cat to ever write a sentence, and his goal is to write a novel in every genre.  Not sure if this means horror is on the way, or if he has counted one of his many novels which already include plenty of horror.

Horror appears in so many great pieces of literature, yet it still seems that calling a novel a piece of horror cheapens it in some reader’s eyes.  The more I swim in writer’s circles, I’m discovering some writers embrace the term Horror writer, some prefer ‘dark fiction’, others coin their own terms. All of this with the hope that their work is properly understood.  Well, whatever the term, it is my belief that horror provides perhaps the most powerful, visceral, and deeply moving ways to experience art.  Not only that, but the darkest of horror writers have the finest hearts around

Yes, in Horror, people are threatened. People get hurt. People are killed. There’s evil. There’s blood. You feel threatened by dark forces.  Well, I would argue that something gets cut open in any novel, each story has something that bleeds, (even if it’s just Holden Caulfield’s innocence, for example) and the hinge upon which all fiction swings is escalating conflict and the fear that the protagonist won’t  get what they want.

Fiction is the drama of life with the heat turned up, and when done right, it boils out the insides of characters and reveals who they are, and better yet, transforms them into something stronger, like metal into fire. Or perhaps when the novel ends in tragedy, they aren’t strong enough to handle the flames.  Horror does this wonderfully.

In this way, I think of horror as much as a literary device as a genre.   The term horror is just a marketing tool.   Put a different cover on the novel American Psycho, and it would no longer be read as an illustration of our society of privilege, financial cannibalism and materialism gone mad. Instead, it’d be slasher and torture porn.

Let me set the premise for an epic horror story. One which will be the tome upon which civilizations are built, wars are fought, children are baptized, and bodies are buried:

Imagine a story where the dead are raised, where babies are slaughtered, where plagues destroy cities, and where the main character has spiritual powers but is shunned, eventually betrayed, until the day comes he has to carry the device of his own torture.  A crown of thorns bloodies his head, his flesh is punctured by nails, and his body hangs until he dies. But wait, it’s not over, because then his very soul will have to harrow hell for 3 days, gathering the ravaged souls of those before him, until he finally ascends to a higher plane.

To commemorate this event, we all kneel in front of the same ancient torture device. Then we perform a cannibalistic ritual to honor his sacrifice in Holy Communion as solemn music plays in the background.

Yep, you got it (don’t throw stones, please) put a different cover on it, and you can market the Bible as horror.

The iconic horror writer Stephen King rewrote this story, only it was much more tame, and it stared Jon Coffee, instead of Jesus Christ, both spiritual superior beings put to death, just texts written at different times. Scour great horror and dark fiction, you’ll find great literature.

What makes Stephen King shine is his characters, not just the horror, and when his work is at its best, the macabre highlights the internal strife of the character. Horror works best when it is a metaphor for the dark places the character is already traveling through. It isn’t easy to draw a picture of our dark psychological recesses, so you pull the insides out, put different faces on them, and give them a name. Like It, or Cujo.

The story of Cujo serves as a model for me.  The huge, killer rabid St. Bernard who has trapped a woman and her young child in the tiny pinto of a car.  But it’s not about a dog; it’s about alienation, isolation. I am alone, everybody has abandoned me, and here I am suffocating in this car, alone, trapped, with the jaws of the world trying to kill my most precious child.

This is why I think horror writers have the finest hearts around.  The only way a writer can scare you is to first prove they understand you.  A writer must first be ultra-sensitive to the human predicament, and show they can get into the hearts and heads of humans.  Otherwise, it all falls flat. I would love my daughter to marry a man with the heart of a Stephen King.

To take a step further, it is by destroying your protagonists, after giving him hopes and dreams and struggles, that can make you fully empathize with him. None of our physical lives come to happy endings. No one here gets out alive.

Of course, there are works that exist simply for sake of a bombardment of the senses.  This still takes art, I would argue, even if it is horror just for horror sake. I love the Evil Dead, but I’m not going to say it has the same psychological layers, but it is incredible campfire storytelling.

Horror is seeing resurgence in TV, and not just because it scares us, but because it helps us relate. In Season one of American Horror Story, the real horror was dealing with infidelity, trust, anger, (perpetual anger) and all the shattered lives caused by the ripples of hurt. The horror of all this inner-psyche drama sticks around like ghosts in your basement in a house you can never leave. You can't just kill the past, you have to deal with it, otherwise, the ghosts in your basement remain. They haunt your psychological dark spots, always ready to fragment your spirit, destroy your dreams, and yes hurt your children.

Horror works best when you are watching it and realize that, “hey, that’s me; I’m living a life of fear. A life of quiet desperation - screaming in terror on the inside yet quiet on the outside”. Horror reminds us that We are all infected. Yes, the secret of season 1 and 2 of The Walking Dead, that we are all infected  is what makes horror as a genre thrive. We are all infected with this human experience. It's a virus that lasts approximately 70 years, give or take a few decades, and during that time we look for meaning. And when done right, horror offers us a great peek into this unique affliction, but if not, it at least gives us some riveting drama to enjoy and makes our predicament a little more tolerable.  At least for a few hundred pages or more.

Mark Matthews is a therapist and social worker in Detroit and is the author of STRAY and The Jade Rabbit. “On the Lips of Children” is his third novel and his first with Books of the Dead Press. He is an avid runner, and his non-fiction book, “Chasing the Dragon: Running to Get High” is also now available on amazon.

Follow him on twitter at @matthews_mark or his blog at Running, Writing, and Chasing the Dragon.

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On the Lips of Children

Meet Macon. Tattoo artist. Athlete. Family man.

He's planning to run a marathon, but the event becomes something terrible.

During a warm-up run, Macon falls prey to a bizarre man and his wife who dwell in an underground drug-smuggling tunnel. They raise their twin children in a way Macon couldn't imagine: skinning unexpecting victims for food and money.

And Macon, and his family, are next.

Mark Matthews is the author of the newly released novel, “On the Lips of Children” which has received wonderful reviews and has been called “dark fiction at its visceral, chilling best.” This novel is the story of a tattoo artist, his human canvass, and their child who get kidnapped by a bizarre family living in a San Diego to Tijuana Drug tunnel. Read more about this “terrifying page-turner” on Amazon.

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