Broken Eye Books is publishing Gwendolyn Kiste’s folk horror novel Boneset & Feathers, releasing November 3, 2020.

You don’t know their fire is coming until it’s too late. That’s exactly the way the witchfinders like it. As an isolated enchantress, Odette knows this too well—she lost nearly her whole family to the last round of executions, barely escaping with her own life. All the magic she could conjure wasn’t enough to protect her mother and sister, a burden that leaves a despondent Odette practically wishing she’d burned with the rest.

Now it’s five years later, and as the last witch left from her village, Odette has exiled herself to the nearby woods where she’s sworn off all magic, hoping instead for quiet and for safety. But no witch has ever been permitted a peaceful life.

It starts with crows tumbling out of the clouds and spectral voices on the wind that won’t leave her alone. Then there are those midnight visits to the graveyard that she can’t quite remember in the morning and the strange children following her everywhere she goes. Odette wants to forget magic, but her magic doesn’t want to forget her. Meanwhile, the former friends she left behind in the village are cowering together, hiding from the ghostly birds they believe she’s sent to torment them for abandoning her. But that’s only the beginning of their problems, as Odette soon discovers their worst nightmare is about to come true—the witchfinders are returning. And this time, the decree is clear: to burn the witch that got away.

With the men drawing nearer to the village, Odette must face the whispers from the dead and confront her fear of her own growing power if she wants any chance of stopping the army of witchfinders determined to rid the countryside of magic once and for all.
 
​FROM THE AUTHOR
“Horror can revolve around so many things,” says Kiste, “from the cosmic to the mundane, but for me, as both a reader and a storyteller, the greatest horror of all is the threat of losing one’s self. That fear was at the forefront of my mind as I was writing Boneset & Feathers: how the whole world can strip you of your identity and how painfully hard it can be to fight back when the odds are so overwhelmingly against you.

“Witch hunts in particular exemplify all these horrors. That is without a doubt one of the periods in world history that terrifies me the most, and it wasn’t just a single time frame or area; it went on for centuries across numerous countries. Sometimes it was sporadic, sometimes it was horrifyingly routine, and in some places, witch hunts still happen to this day.

“With Boneset & Feathers, I wanted to capture the horrors of being a persecuted witch but also touch on the wonder of witchcraft as a practice too. To balance the deeply somber theme, this story incorporates some of my very favorite things: ghosts, birds, witches, and weirdness. After my novella Pretty Marys All in a Row, which was a bit of a fairy tale in its own right, I knew I wanted to write a full-length novel with that same kind of mythic, folkloric vibe. Boneset & Feathers has been in the making for over a year now, and I’m so excited to be sharing this story with everyone as well as to be working with Broken Eye Books again.”

Pre-order today and books will ship to you as soon as they are available. 

Hope you're all finding some joy in these strange times! Perhaps we can help with a big sale of our older titles in stock (40% off paperbacks, 30% off hardcovers) through April: 

• The Package from Desertshore: Joseph S. Pulver's surreal tale of the Night Museum!
• Tomorrow's Cthulhu: Modern tales of the mythos!
• By Faerie Light: The fair folk are coming!
• Ghost in the Cogs: Steam and the supernatural!
• Never Now Always: Strange post-apocalyptic mystery!
• Izanami's Choice: Samurai versus robot!
• The Hole Behind  Midnight: Hilarious, foul-mouthed and irreverent!
• Royden Pooles's Field Guide to the 25th Hour: More of same!

It's been a challenging season for us (and other creators) as all of our conventions are getting cancelled. For good reason, for sure, but for us, convention sales typically make up half our yearly sales, so it's a big hit. If you've been holding off on any of our titles, now would be a great time to buy.​

Broken Eye Books is an independent press, here to bring you the odd, strange, and offbeat side of speculative fiction. Our stories tend to blend genres, highlighting the weird and blurring its boundaries with horror, sci-fi, and fantasy. Discover our books at brokeneyebooks.com.

Support weird. Support indie.

Broken Eye Books is publishing the serial novel Better Living through Alchemy by Evan J. Peterson, a fabulist mystery exploring the boundaries of science and magic.

Kelly Mun operates Non-Linear Investigations out of a small office in misty, steam-heated Seattle. Using esoteric techniques taken from Dadaism as much as from occultism, Kelly makes the connections others ignore. When a young woman dies under impossible circumstances at a crowded show, Kelly is hired by a mysterious businesswoman to find out all she can about a new recreational drug that may have been involved. Kelly will have to face down monsters, but that's just business. In this parallel Seattle, monsters can be allies and lovers, and they're not the scariest things lurking in the shadows. 

​"Better Living through Alchemy comes from several points of inspiration," says Peterson. "My curiosity around the merger of magic and science, my fascination with the work of William Burroughs and David Cronenberg and their slippery, queer genres and social satire. I also wanted to add more diversity and dignity to such stories, especially for the femme and POC characters. This is a story about in-betweens--hyphenated reality--the people and forces at the gateways. What starts as a mystery gets weirder chapter by chapter. Occultism, drugs, and queer noir are just the beginning."

​The story begins today over at Eyedolon.

Evan J. Peterson is an author and game writer in Seattle. He’s the creator of Drag Star! (Choice of Games), the world’s first drag performer RPG, as well as The PrEP Diaries: A Safe(r) Sex Memoir (Lethe Press). A Clarion West alum, and his writing has appeared in Weird Tales, Unspeakable Horror 2, Queers Destroy Horror, Nightmare Magazine, Boing Boing, and Best Gay Stories 2015. Evan edited the Lambda Literary Award finalist anthology, Ghosts in Gaslight, Monsters in Steam: Gay City 5. He lives in Seattle with his lazy werewolf, Dorian Greyhound.

Broken Eye Books is an independent press, here to bring you the odd, strange, and offbeat side of speculative fiction. Our stories tend to blend genres, highlighting the weird and blurring its boundaries with horror, sci-fi, and fantasy. Discover our books at brokeneyebooks.com.

Support weird. Support indie.

What if you crossed Archer and Brooklyn 99 with D&D?​

Broken Eye Books is publishing the hilarious debut adventures of Clinton J. Boomer’s fan-favorite fantasy gaming party, Team Murderhobo: Assemble. What happens when the lovable barbarian, perpetually high druid, judgy paladin—absolutely no ninjas—and all the others are thrown together? The punchline to all the RPG jokes ever told...

With Team Murderhobo, Clinton J. Boomer has created a series of short, comedic, in-character gaming scenes, composed of all the traditional stock characters of fantasy gaming, interacting with each other in a day-to-day, workplace-style comedy. Lots of gaming jokes and pop culture references thrown in. Rocks fall, everybody laughs. This lovable crew will steal your heart--and your coin purse, so stay wary. 

"These little slice-of-life comedic moments draw from shows like Archer and Brooklyn 99," says Boomer. "Larger-than-life characters in impossible, action-packed scenarios who still find the time and energy to bitch at each other about totally mundane crap—​extreme personalities forced to work together, bouncing off one another and creating comedy in friction."

New scenes with the characters are tweeted daily by Boomer (@boomer_kid). Read the collected adventures of the series in the forthcoming Team Murderhobo: Assemble under our Stink Eye imprint, with cover art by Jason Bradley Thompson (@mockman).

From Team Murderhobo: Assemble

Wizard: “Ahh. That FIRST sip of coffee.”
Fighter: “YOU REALIZE WE’RE IN COMBAT, NO?!”
Wizard: “YOU are in combat. YOU idiots kept me up all night, ergo no spells. I’m gonna sit here, drink my coffee, and stab anyone who gets close. Look! LOTS of people have already been stabbed. Some of them enemies!”

Praise for Team Murderhobo: Assemble

Clinton J. Boomer, known to his friends as Booms, resides in the quaint, leafy, idyllic paradise of Appleton, Wisconsin, with his wife, two cats, three children, and several moving boxes full of books & magazines. He began writing before the time of his own recollection, predominantly dictating stories to his ever-patient mother about fire monsters and ice monsters throwing children into garbage cans. Boomer is a writer, filmmaker, gamer, and bartender. He began gaming with the 1993 release of Planescape and has not taken a break since. He currently devotes a full 99.9% of his waking hours to thinking about fantasy adventure in general or about ninjas more specifically.

Stink Eye Books is an imprint of Broken Eye Books dedicated to celebrating the influences of popular culture on speculative fiction—in our odd, strange, and offbeat way.

Broken Eye Books is an independent press, here to bring you the odd, strange, and offbeat side of speculative fiction. Our stories tend to blend genres, highlighting the weird and blurring its boundaries with horror, sci-fi, and fantasy.
​
More information can be found at www.brokeneyebooks.com. Inquiries for review copies or for more information should be directed to [email protected].

Catfish Lullaby was announced as a finalist for the Nebula Award! We are so incredibly proud and excited. Voting is now open until the end of March for SFWA active members. I hope you'll consider voting for it for Best Novella. And to celebrate the occasion, all purchases of the paperback of Catfish Lullaby from the BEB store in March will be signed and personalized by the author herself, A.C. Wise. Just write in the comment section during checkout who you'd like her to personalize it to, and she'll wing a copy your way. 
​
The Cop & the Swamp Witch
Small town secrets lead to trouble for everyone as Caleb must confront the demons of his past in this Southern Gothic tale of horror.

Catfish Lullaby is a split story, following Caleb and Cere, part as children, part as adults, as they deal with homegrown bigotry, sorcerous generational evil, and the everpresent, bog-monster specter of Catfish John. All while embracing the love of found family.

Praise for Catfish Lullaby
"Wise’s visceral language conveys an experience of eerie magic that simultaneously lures and repels, placed in close juxtaposition to the mundane monstrousness of prejudice, cancer, and loneliness. This story can be appreciated simply for its ghost story shivers and rich imagery, but its full power comes with the author’s choice to center the misunderstood and marginalized as beloved family to one another, even when the outside world sees them as monstrous." (Publishers Weekly, starred review)

"Catfish Lullaby seamlessly combines Southern folklore with cosmic horror. There's an elegiac undertone to this lullaby that's as deep and mysterious as the bayou where it takes place." (Craig Laurance Gidney, author of A Spectral Hue)

“In her excellent novella, AC Wise revisits a Louisiana family at key moments during the later decades of the recent past—moments connected to what seems to be a local legend, one concerning the conflict between a pair of fantastical figures. Not only do her protagonists discover that what they took for fantasy is fact, they learn that it is more complicated than they could have expected. The result is a compelling narrative that begs to be read in one sitting.” (John Langan, author of Sefira and Other Betrayals)
 
"Folk tales give birth to new mythologies in AC Wise's delightfully enthralling Southern Gothic novella Catfish Lullaby. Flooded with dark sorcery and white-knuckle suspense, Catfish Lullaby demonstrates the many ways saviors and devils can occupy the same body, whether it arises from the depths of the swamp or the dark of the grave." (Mike Allen, World Fantasy Award–nominated author of Unseaming and Aftermath of an Industrial Accident​)

"Over the last few years, A.C. Wise has been consistently creating some of the very best speculative short fiction out there, and now with her glorious novella Catfish Lullaby, she takes her craft to a whole new level. With a potent atmosphere, a formidable antagonist, and well-drawn, unforgettable characters, this book has definitely got it all. An absolute must-read for 2019." (Gwendolyn Kiste, author of The Rust Maidens and Pretty Marys All in a Row)

"What we need is a satisfying, believable story with engaging characters, and that’s what Wise delivers with this weird, suspenseful tale." (Brandon Crilly, for Black Gate)

"[Caleb's] outsider status forces him to confront demons both literal and figurative, and it results in a deeply affecting coming-of-age story." (Carson Winter, for Signal Horizon)

"[A] story that will suck the air from your lungs with its beauty, poignancy, and terror, leaving you on your knees wheezing for more." (The Miskatonic Review)

Broken Eye Books is an independent press, here to bring you the odd, strange, and offbeat side of speculative fiction. Our stories tend to blend genres, highlighting the weird and blurring its boundaries with horror, sci-fi, and fantasy.

Broken Eye Books is publishing the serial novel Hairsbreadth by Craig Laurance Gidney, a contemporary fairy tale in the tradition of Victor LaValle's The Changeling and Helen Oyeyemi's Boy, Snow, Bird.

Seventeen-year-old Zelda has always been isolated, born with deep dark skin and fast-growing hair that seems to have a mind of its own, and moving from place to place with her grandmother. But when the two of them move to the remote eastern shore town of Shimmer, her power grows in strange new ways—she can hear and see the dead, which proves useful to her grandmother’s folk medicine business. Zelda thinks she has a gift at first. But she soon discovers that there is a dark side to her powers.
​
Hairsbreadth is a dark retelling of the fairy tale "Rapunzel," steeped in African-American folklore, and a coming-of-age tale full of Black Girl Magic.
​
The story begins today over at Eyedolon.

It's one of those very special days in any publisher's life when they can breathe life into a new book. Allow me to introduce our latest release, Nowhereville: Weird Is Other People, freshly pressed into life today. We do hope you'll enjoy the read. Reviewers certainly have been:

"Taken together, these stories create an uncanny, unpredictable hall of mirrors. These wonderfully strange takes on modern living are sure to resonate with fans of speculative fiction." (STARRED review from Publishers Weekly, and a PW Book of the Week)

"Readers will be enchanted by this collection and eagerly anticipate what the next entry will bring. The stories here are disconcerting, ambiguous, and sometimes confusing—but always intriguing and genre-bending, digging into the ways we connect to those around us." (Booklist)

"What's more, they complement one another in a way that's rare even for collections by single authors, much less an anthology delivering 19 disparate voices. Indeed, the effect of this collection is not so much that of a set of loosely comparable episodes but of a kaleidoscope: variegated and multifaceted yet all of a piece. Remarkably powerful urban tales, each one brilliantly in harmony with the others." (STARRED review from Kirkus)

AND it was just included in USA Today's "5 Books Not to Miss" list.

You can find Nowhereville online at Amazon | B&N | Kobo and right here at Broken Eye Books (which also exclusively offers the hardcover edition).

And of course, you can support your favorite indie bookstore (and us at the same time)--or ask them to order it for you if they don't already carry it.

Broken Eye Books is an independent press, here to bring you the odd, strange, and offbeat side of speculative fiction. Our stories tend to blend genres, highlighting the weird and blurring its boundaries with horror, sci-fi, and fantasy.

More information can be found at www.brokeneyebooks.com. 

New speculative fiction anthology, Nowhereville: Weird Is Other People, explores the weird fictions, from the horrific to the ecstatic, that are inherent in city life and in the ways we love and hate and express, in the ways we interact and cope and deal with one another. Releases December 17, 2019, from Broken Eye Books. (Available now for pre-order.)

These are stories of the city, of people interacting with the complexities that are other people. These 19 short stories explore a landscape that is not quite fantasy and not quite science fiction, tales blurring the lines between genres. These are the strange stories of the strange decisions we make and the strange ways the city affects us.

And there's an amazing cast of authors:

Nuzo Onoh | Maura McHugh | P. Djèlí Clark | Evan J. Peterson | S.P. Miskowski | Craig Laurance Gidney | Lynda E. Rucker | Tariro Ndoro | D.A. Xiaolin Spires | Mike Allen | Jeffrey Thomas | Erica L. Satifka | Kathe Koja | Leah Bobet | Ramsey Campbell | Wole Talabi | Stephen Graham Jones | R.B. Lemberg | Cody Goodfellow

gather together enough people and strange things happen. that’s just fact. it’s inevitable really. just try keeping them apart. impossible. they just keep clamoring and fiddling and getting into everything and strangeing up the place. can’t say why. you just learn to accept it. even to thrill at it. the ups, the downs, the everchanging nature of it all. it’s unpredictable. it’s exhausting. and it’s fascinating.

Broken Eye Books is an independent press, here to bring you the odd, strange, and offbeat side of speculative fiction. Our stories tend to blend genres, highlighting the weird and blurring its boundaries with horror, sci-fi, and fantasy.

More information can be found at www.brokeneyebooks.com. Inquiries for review copies or for more information should be directed to [email protected].

Catfish Lullaby releases today! 

Small town secrets lead to trouble for everyone as Caleb must confront the demons of his past in this Southern Gothic queer cosmic horror.

This is a split story following Caleb and Cere, part as children, part as adults, as they deal with homegrown bigotry, sorcerous generational evil, and the everpresent, bog-monster specter of Catfish John. All while embracing the love of found family.

Written by AC Wise and cover by Sishir Bommakanti with Scott Gable on design. Early reviews have been amazing! Hope you love it!

Lewis is a Town of Secrets
The Royce family has been a plague on the small, Southern town of Lewis for generations. Caleb has heard rumors about the family his whole life, just like he's heard the rumors about a monstrous creature known as Catfish John living in the swamp. 

When the Royce house burns down, Caleb's father—Lewis's sheriff—takes in the sole survivor, a young girl named Cere. Caleb quickly learns the truth about Archie Royce and the terrible fate he had planned for his daughter. After a woman is brutally murdered, Cere begins to suspect that not all of her family perished in the fire, and she and Caleb set out to stop her father's dark vision from coming to pass. 

Years later, Caleb is the sheriff of Lewis, and the monsters of his childhood return. Now Caleb must fight to protect those he loves from Archie Royce's legacy, and his best hope may be a legend he's almost managed to convince himself never existed—Catfish John.

Reviews
"Wise’s visceral language conveys an experience of eerie magic that simultaneously lures and repels, placed in close juxtaposition to the mundane monstrousness of prejudice, cancer, and loneliness. This story can be appreciated simply for its ghost story shivers and rich imagery, but its full power comes with the author’s choice to center the misunderstood and marginalized as beloved family to one another, even when the outside world sees them as monstrous." (Publishers Weekly, starred review)

"Catfish Lullaby seamlessly combines Southern folklore with cosmic horror. There's an elegiac undertone to this lullaby that's as deep and mysterious as the bayou where it takes place." (Craig Laurance Gidney, author of A Spectral Hue)

“In her excellent novella, AC Wise revisits a Louisiana family at key moments during the later decades of the recent past—moments connected to what seems to be a local legend, one concerning the conflict between a pair of fantastical figures. Not only do her protagonists discover that what they took for fantasy is fact, they learn that it is more complicated than they could have expected. The result is a compelling narrative that begs to be read in one sitting.” (John Langan, author of Sefira and Other Betrayals)

"Folk tales give birth to new mythologies in AC Wise's delightfully enthralling Southern Gothic novella Catfish Lullaby. Flooded with dark sorcery and white-knuckle suspense, Catfish Lullaby demonstrates the many ways saviors and devils can occupy the same body, whether it arises from the depths of the swamp or the dark of the grave." (Mike Allen, World Fantasy Award–nominated author of Unseaming and Aftermath of an Industrial Accident​)

"Over the last few years, A.C. Wise has been consistently creating some of the very best speculative short fiction out there, and now with her glorious novella Catfish Lullaby, she takes her craft to a whole new level. With a potent atmosphere, a formidable antagonist, and well-drawn, unforgettable characters, this book has definitely got it all. An absolute must-read for 2019." (Gwendolyn Kiste, author of The Rust Maidens and Pretty Marys All in a Row)

From the Author
"Even though Catfish Lullaby has its share of monsters, darkness, and characters fighting to save the world," A.C. says, "at its heart, it's a story about family. Caleb lost several people in his life early on, and he's terrified of losing the rest of the people he loves. As an adult, the very concept of family frightens him, even as he craves that closeness and connection. For Cere, her journey is about overcoming the family she was born into and protecting the family she chooses.

"In-between family and fighting monsters, Catfish Lullaby is also a novella about the power of stories—how legends are born, how they are passed down through the generations, and how they can shape a person's worldview for good or for ill."

___
Broken Eye Books is an independent press, here to bring you the odd, strange, and offbeat side of speculative fiction. Our stories tend to blend genres, highlighting the weird and blurring its boundaries with horror, sci-fi, and fantasy.
​
Support weird. Support indie.