The Official Site Of Author Brian Hodge

It’s a cluster of releases lately, with four projects squirting out in less than a month’s span. This one is a novelette in the latest in the series of mini-anthologies jointly produced by Cemetery Dance Publications and Random House. E-books now, big hardcover omnibus edition later.

It answers the burning question: What happens when a hard electro band from Mexico City gets kidnapped by a cartel enforcer from MS-13 with a whole other agenda involving Santa Muerte and the land’s legacy of bloodlust, from pre-Colombian human sacrifice to the Matamoros cult murders to the cartel wars?

It’s the most vicious thing I’ve done in ages. Most of it got written last year while I was laid up after a severe knee injury, so, knowing that, you can tell I really wanted to take it out on someone.

I’ll just let some early reader reviews on Amazon take it from here.

• “West of Matamoros, North of Hell” chilled me to the bone. It took me 2 days to finish because I kept getting freaked out. I remember when this happened, “the real part,” and it’s still a chilling story. Also, Brian Hodge always manages to scare me silly.

• Always a favorite of mine, Brian Hodge goes very dark in this not to be missed story about ink and music.

• Without a doubt the most terrifying story in the collection for me. I am well aware of the problems of drug cartels within the boundaries of our southern neighbor, and have seen videos of their savagery. This story seriously hits a nerve.

Here’s a project where everybody brought their A-game. I wrote a novella set in the mountains of West Virginia. At the heart of it is a cache of old paintings by an untrained artist who tried to his bitter end to depict the undepictable.

Then the folks at Cemetery Dance Publications and I thought, hey, wouldn’t it be great to illustrate it with folk art-style color plates? Enter artist Kim Parkhurst, who knocked it out of the park. And now it’s up for preorder, in advance of the release in a few weeks.

Folk horror? It’s that. Cosmic horror? That too. But beyond subgenre labels, what is it? For me, it’s always about the characters most of all. There’s a world-weary gallery owner. And a pair of idealistic junior college students desperate to find a way to stay where they want to live even though their Appalachian region has no future for them.

Then there’s an unnamed chorus of elderly busybodies who provide an ongoing and sometimes contradictory kaleidoscope of windows into the distant past, and the man none of them could understand.

The landscape of mountains and hollows is a character too. And then maybe there’s also the largest living thing on earth in there somewhere.

Yeah, that’s about it. If it sounds like your kind of thing, have at it.

First copy off the press, still with that new book smell.

In an instantly successful Kickstarter campaign, the world of last year’s Tales of the Lost Citadel anthology is being ported over to a roleplaying game. And other stuff. Which is where I come in…

The project hit its base funding in the first 24 hours, and has since made almost every stretch goal — including the soundtrack I’ll be composing and recording for — with just the last couple goals left…

Including a novel spinning off from “The Sport of Crows.” Which was a novelette wherein I put on my Robert E. Howard pants to unleash a perfect storm of mayhem, bigotry, and honor in a Tolkeinesque world on the brink of total ruin. Sure would be fun to go back in.

So go forth and explore yonder Kickstarter page, and see if anything here catches your fancy enough to back the project.

I never expected it to shake out quite this way.

For a few years, just to have something to shoot for, it’s been an unspoken stretch goal to see three separate stories make it into various year’s best editions. Which seemed as though that would take three different anthologies.

First, it was Paula Guran with her pick of “Mommy’s Little Man” for The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2017. That’s one.

Next it was Ellen Datlow seeing fit to drop “It’s All the Same Road in the End” into The Best Horror of the Year Volume 9. That’s two.

And then, a couple weeks later, came Ellen’s gobsmacking followup that she would also be concluding the book with “On These Blackened Shores of Time.” One author represented by two stories in the same volume…? That almost never happens.

But there it is. Three is three.

Coming in June and July. Maybe I’ll even be off the fainting couch by then.

After months of a vow of silence, I can at last make utterances about this without getting flogged.

Last fall, I had a dream gig. For the first volume in editor Stephen Jones’ next “mosaic novel” project, a slice of cosmic noir called The Lovecraft Squad, I had the pleasure of retelling “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” from the viewpoint of the pre-FBI agent key to breaking the case open. I’ve never devised a character quite like him, and evidently he went over so well he’s become a recurring figure throughout the book.

Which should be due out this October.

Because I try to look for the silver linings, how this came out is one of the good things that emerged from jacking my knee last year. That put me behind on everything, so I didn’t start the piece until last October, while Doli and I were seaside in Oregon. A lot of sensory impressions from the coast that found their way in might never have otherwise occurred to me. Plus, that’s where I discovered the wolf-eel, courtesy of the sign at the Rogue Brewery’s bayfront tap house in Newport.

Took one look at that beautiful blue-green face and said, not unlike Tom Hardy in Taboo, “I have a use for you…”