Books
This list describes books published by Horrific Scribblings and provides links to more information (including ways to buy them!).
Anthologies
Extremely Weird Splatter
For this book, weird horror isn’t weird enough, and the extreme needs to be more extreme: the nineteen stories in Extremely Weird Splatter take the “quiet” respectability that characterizes a lot of weird fiction these days and fuses it with the elsewhere typically grounded—but very loud—transgressions of the extreme and splatterpunk. The results are messy, fantastic, and nineteen kinds of bizarre and disturbing.
Join three Lifetime Achievement Award winners from the top of the horror game along with other decorated veteran authors, rising stars, and emerging talents in deep depravity as skin peels, eyeballs pop, innards become outards, and sex involves… twists… you’ll have to see for yourself.
The authors plotting against your wellness are a coalition from different parts of the US and UK as well as from Canada, Costa Rica, India, Ireland, Italy, and Nigeria: Nick Badot, L. Andrew Cooper, JB Corso, Suvajeet Duttagupta, JG Faherty, Angelique Fawns, Tom Johnstone, Leonardo J. Lamanna, Thomas C. Mavroudis, Christine Morgan, Jason Nickey, Monica J. O’Rourke, J. Rohr, C.M. Saunders, Dan Scamell, Steve Rasnic Tem, Vox Villalobos, Maxim Volk, and Etta Wynn.
Get a little turned on as a man mutilates himself in search of ultimate pleasure in Faherty’s “The Fishhook Prophecy.” Learn all about the historical process called “Scaphism,” perhaps the worst thing you can do to a person, in O’Rourke’s “Symmetry.” Take a frightening look at human skin with Steve Rasnic Tem in “Dermis.” Explore whether dismemberment and mutilation can help you get closer to God in Lamanna’s “How to Build a Meat Radio.” Explore liminal space that makes nasty connections between past and present through Nickey’s “Portal.”
Dive in and get Extremely Weird Splatter all over you. Why be normal? Read more!
Horrific Scribes Presents: Anthologies!
BOOK ONE: INVASIONS (So many boundaries to violate): Invaders threaten us from above, below, within, and beyond. Not scared enough yet? This anthology will help!
BOOK TWO: RULEMAKERS AND RULEBREAKERS (Order and chaos): Which is more terrifying, the imposition of order that might involve stifling limitations and repugnant values, or spiraling into chaos as order splinters or disappears?
BOOK THREE: WORLDS COLLIDE (Your reality shatters): The occult world collides with the everyday. The underworld runs over. Wild “nature” smashes assumptions about “civilization.” Old Worlds prey on the New. But some of the most devastating collisions occur between worlds within worlds…
See the Horrific Scribes Presents series page for more information!
Books by L. Andrew Cooper
Splatterpunk
Miasma
NOWHERE TO GO BUT UP
June and Michael, already tense from the problems in their marriage boiling over during a trip out, return home and find a strange smell in their house, which they trace to something yellow, fog-like, and rising in the basement. Whatever it is, it makes them lose consciousness, and when they wake, their world has become different. Threatening. Violent hallucinations tap into marital tensions and blend imperceptibly with the real world, which becomes more nightmarish as others in the house—first Frank, their ex-military basement tenant, and then their children, teenage Rachel and eight-year-old Anson—show signs of mental derangement along with grotesque physical reactions to the gaseous invader, which is not only rising in the house but surrounding it. The strained couple wants to grab the kids and flee, but the task becomes more and more difficult as they must move higher and higher in the house to stay out of the corrosive miasma. Scarier, perhaps, than the aspects of their situation that don’t make sense are the ones that do—Frank’s conspiratorial rambling, a mysterious package that arrives. They near mental breaking points as they not only must cope with an impossible situation but must also face the unanswerable: who might do such things to them and why. Read more!
The Skinner Effect
After university authorities observe a gruesome experiment that psychologist Dr. Stanley Burrows performs on rats, an experiment during which one of his graduate student assistants is injured, Dr. Burrows and his only loyal assistant, Edward Pine, accept exile from the academic world and embrace new supporters who want them to do different sorts of experiments on human subjects. Dr. Burrows has limitless resources to develop innovative processes for behavioral conditioning that achieve extreme outcomes. He programs his subjects with violence so they will commit violence. Spurred by conclusions drawn from the thinking of radical behaviorist B.F. Skinner, he will use his subjects to demonstrate not only the bloody extremes for which he can program a “human” but also a new understanding of “the human” susceptible to programming. Read more!
Father Is Pleased
After a bloody rite of passage, Felix becomes a True Son, one of Father’s chosen inner circle, someone with a special vantage on the secluded society of the Settlement of Passing in the Nothing Lands, where all brothers and sisters revere Father. Father is life, and Father is death, and Father governs rituals that guide his followers on their journeys to meet the void, as death is the greatest good and the only worthy desire. Felix witnesses and participates in many rituals: the violence and death linked to childbirth, the gut-ripping orgies that serve as theatre, the initiation of another young man in the art of sacrificing an outsider in a manner that will please Father, and more. Nothing pleases Felix like pleasing Father, and when Father takes notice, he points Felix toward a special destiny in the coming days when threats to their ways of honoring death will come from within. Read more!
Alex’s Escape
Fourteen-year-old psychopath Alex Packard has his own house, a shadow version of his parents’ house that they helped him build. He takes people there to kill them in the most entertaining ways he can imagine. After murdering his parents, he moves to Los Angeles to live with his married gay uncles, Bruce and Aaron. Alex bonds with his uncles immediately, coming out as gay, too. His bond with Aaron, a documentary filmmaker, tightens as he shares in Aaron’s passion for the camera, and he toys with both uncles, trying to ignite other passions. Meanwhile, he starts bringing beautiful boys and girls from school back to his house, staging more and more elaborate and violent scenarios with them to entertain himself as well as them… but his uncles have suspicions, and Alex leaves clues… and Alex might not understand the enormity of the forces that allow him to slaughter innocents in a shadow world. Read more!
Surreal and Psychological Dark Fantasy
The Middle Reaches
What is The Middle Reaches?
The Middle Reaches is a four-cycle epic of weird horror and dark fantasy.
What begins with a group of friends seeking the truth about an old disappearance leads into a dark and increasingly expansive journey through a dark realm called “The Middle Reaches” and beyond. As new characters and mysteries emerge, the paths established in earlier cycles continue to intersect, gradually revealing a larger story.
Combining horror, dark fantasy, strange worlds, monsters, mystery, and cosmic/weird elements, The Middle Reaches is designed for readers who enjoy ambitious stories that expand in scope as their deeper connections emerge.
Explore The Middle Reaches →
Crazy Time: A Bizarre Battle with Darkness and the Divine
WHAT IF OMNIPOTENT FORCES SOUGHT YOUR DESTRUCTION?
WHAT IF YOU COULD FIGHT BACK?
SECOND EDITION! On a dark urban highway, bright, introspective thirtysomething Lily Henshaw survives a brutal attack by men who announce that “It’s Crazy Time!” and kill her friends. Months later, still crushed by survivor’s guilt, Lily suffers another serious trauma—and another, and another, and another. Deaths, especially suicides, surround her, as do strange occurrences that, despite her agnosticism, seem to have Biblical import. She becomes convinced she is cursed like Job from the Bible, but unlike Job, she doesn’t assume God is the good guy. While intense stresses foster an unlikely romance with her boss, she goes on a quest for answers that involves a psychic, a Satanist, a Protestant preacher, and others, gaining resolve and a destination: the skyscraper where she might confront the supernatural forces aligned in a conspiracy to destroy her life. Read more!
Noir Falling: A Bizarre Mystery of Art and the Mind
COME SWIM WITH THE WEIRD FISH
Daniel Lowe, a presence but not a student at the prestigious University, keeps finding himself in strange situations, not sure how he got there. Color whorls devour people and places, a beautiful woman in a null space called The Blank asks him to save her from her corporate magnate husband, and dozens of missing students might somehow relate to these calamities. With companions such as Chuck Adair, a member of a philosophical Society that crams his head full of big ideas early on, and Voice, a young woman sprung from his head, he traverses hallucinatory landscapes, the interiors of famous paintings, and more on his quest to figure out where a growing mass of “clues” will lead.
Noir Falling is a horror story with doppelgangers, living statues, relentless stalkers, and an unstable reality that could betray Daniel at any moment. Noir Falling is noir, a dark, pulpy mystery like novels and films from the 1930s and 40s, with a femme fatale and clues that lead from small events to a dark, international corporate conspiracy, and Daniel is a detective—sort of—asked to unravel the affair. Noir Falling is an adventure, a quest, and Daniel is a hero who must face many adversaries on his path not only to save the damsel in distress and others, but to uncover truths about existence and, ultimately, himself. Noir Falling is a surreal mindbender that might make your head explode. Read more!
Descending Lines: Revised Second Edition
THE ONLY WAY OUT IS DOWN
Carter and Megan Anderson’s six-year-old daughter Caitlin is dying from bone cancer that has spread throughout her body. Medical science can’t save their little girl—but they know something that can. When they were in college, they discovered a book of rituals, The Alchemy of Will by Dr. Allen Fincher, that enables people to do almost anything when they combine the power of will with the right sacrifice. Carter and Megan can save Caitlin if they sacrifice their second-born. But Caitlin is an only child. How far would you go to save your child? They decide to get pregnant and begin nine months of hell, preparing for the unthinkable. Their urban apartment becomes a domestic nightmare as their relationship and sanity erode. The dark secrets of their past point toward a darker future, and as they get closer and closer to saving their daughter, they descend deeper and deeper into unimaginable horror.
The revised second edition of Descending Lines significantly expands and alters the first published edition, returning to the author’s original, more twisted vision of the story. Read more!