The Divine Flesh by Drew Huff (Dark Matter INK)

This, quite frankly, one of the most astoundingly original books I’ve ever read.

We have a self-destructive drug addict (and mule) in Jennifer, who’s constantly fighting to control her own body because it’s also inhabited by a cosmic goddess older than anything. If that’s not enough, Jennifer’s former husband is in love with the goddess, and after he and his friends are killed by bigoted self-appointed vigilantes, Jennifer and the Divine Flesh go to track down the killers but end up dealing with conspiracies and festering human and non-human horrors while skirting ever closer to unleashing the Flesh on the world.

Both Jennifer and the Divine Flesh get first person POV treatment, and are often in conversation with one another, which adds to the interpersonal conflicts and motivations while furthering the plot.

It’s cosmic horror but built on a body horror framework, and how Huff manages to write so beautifully about the grotesque deserves five stars in and of itself, especially when the story becomes more abstract and dreamy (or nightmarish, depending on your perspective), reflecting more of what an immortal divine perspective must be like.

It was interesting how the Divine Flesh had a sort of adolescent attitude — after all, if you’re an immortal goddess, who’s ever going to tell you to grow up? But it explains her sort of playfulness when it comes to recreating and reimagining life forms; with no real limits on her power, she has a freedom to do things that would otherwise be unthinkable.

What’s monstrous to us is a game to her, and the concepts of good and evil are too binary to really apply to her.

I enjoyed also how the cosmic entities, despite their immense power and age, openly admit they don’t have all the answers, sometimes because they’ve been suppressed but at other times because they’ve forgotten things (which is kind of amazing as a concept).

Barring some unforeseen catastrophe, my debut collection The Ties That Bind will be out on December 31, initially through Amazon but hopefully through other outlets for ebooks not long after. I’m looking into places like Lulu for paperbacks as well just so there are options.

I am very proud of these stories and they cover a wide range of subgenres and a few different styles as well.

I promised myself I’d have a book out in 2024, and while I did shop collections around to a few publishers ultimately I went my own road. And December 31 gets it into 2024 by the skin of its teeth, so I’ve kept my promise to myself.

I’m looking into options for selling through the website and am experimenting with Woocommerce, which is why you see a “shop” tab at the top that’s not currently anything.

All my story collections will be gathered under the umbrella of Shadows and Starlight – originally that was going to be the title of this book, but I was able to forge more thematic links between the stories.

Volume II, What Gets Left Behind, is due out on March 31. Volume III, believe it or not, is in the process of being chosen, though I don’t have a title in mind for that just yet.

– David

Hello beautiful people,

I had a great time speaking to and with the Bottomless Book Club in Cork at the weekend. I gave an informal talk about my writing process, my work, and how my history and journalism work intersects with my horror stuff, plus a few thoughts on the subject while the club discussed Shirley Jackson’s beautiful Haunting of Hill House.

Meanwhile, I have two stories out now in Halloween anthologies from Wicked Shadow Press.

Flash of the Dead: Halloween ’24

You can read my piece of flash fiction, ‘Grave Tidings’, in Flash of the Dead: Halloween ’24. It’s about a paranormal and occult fixer, Liam Kincaid, who spends the night dealing with the ghosts in the Famine graveyard outside Skibbereen.

Halloweenthology: Witches’ Brew

Meanwhile, ‘Lantern Jack’ is out in Halloweenthology: Witches’ Brew, and is about two girls hoping to catch a glimpse of a folk figure while they watch the trick or treaters.

I’ve also got a piece of contemporary flash fiction, ‘Family Tree’, in the anthology Mono No Aware: the book is themed around the Japanese concept of the awareness of transcience and being softly sad about it passing.

Want to read my pieces but not able to buy the books? I got you. Mail me and I can send on the PDF, as the publisher has encouraged us to share.

Two more pieces have been accepted and are in the pipeline: one for CultureCult’s Haunted Haus anthology (this one also features Liam Kincaid, who is a recent creation of mine) and another for Wicked Shadow’s Petting Boo collection of animal-related horror stories.

More publishing news coming soon.

This anthology of previously never anthologised ghost stories is a gem of a find and is the first of the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series that I’ve read in full.

There are eighteen stories here from the late 19th century to the 1920s and cover all aspects of ‘horror’, from creeping supernatural to moody atmospheres that unsettle rather than terrify. That’s the joy of the genre, really, in that it can run the gamut without getting tiresome. We have everything from Gothic hauntings to Mesopotamian adventure stories; the editor is right to say that the last one could make a good Indiana Jones movie.

What I found especially interesting is how fresh and contemporary the stories feel. True, some of the settings are of their time, like duels with rapiers and the like or some dubious attitudes by male characters toward women (such as ‘The River’s Edge’ by Mary Schultze), but the actual writing styles are typically engaging and fluid.

As I’ve mentioned the fact that these stories have never been included in a book since their initial publication makes it part archaeological/archival retrieval. There’s a bio and potted history of each writer but some of the authors have no history that can be found, despite the editor’s efforts by going through census and other records to try and match bylines to verifiable historical figures.

There is something well, ghostly, about an author such as Eric Purves (whose story ‘The House of the Black Veil’ is one of the more innovative pieces) now existing solely in reference to the single story he/she/they seem to have published. Ashely in his intro to that story notes that “When John Reed Wade, the editor of Pearson’s Magazine, ran the following story in the May 1929 issue, he announced it as ‘One of the most original mystery stories ever written.” And yet there is no trace of any other Purves work. Was it a pseudonym? We’ll never know.

Not every reader will like every story, which is natural enough in an anthology, but lovers of ghost stories will have plenty to hold their interest here.