On my website, I’ve now posted a new horror story, “The Testament of the Puppeteer”, a grotesque revenge comedy (though without many laughs). It’s available both as a webpage and as a downloadable ePub file for eReaders.
In the winter of 2021, I posted a previously-unpublished story on the site for the first time, “A Suicide Gun”. The next winter, I shared another previously-unpublished story, “At the Edge of the Forest”. Both were stories I didn’t know what to do with, but wanted to be available to an audience. They were a bit too long and too uncategorizable for editors of magazines and journals to be interested in them, but I thought they had merit, and figured even if they didn’t, at least they didn’t cost anybody anything other than a little bit of time and attention. I would have shared a new story last winter, but my collection The Last Vanishing Man was due for spring release, I didn’t want to steal anything from it, and I didn’t have anything else I thought worth sharing. So we skipped last year.
Unlike the two earlier stories, “Testament of the Puppeteer” is categorizable — this is a horror story, pure and simple. It’s what I conceived it as, and what it turned out to be. It’s on the crueler side of the horror spectrum, too, a bit like Poe’s “Hop-Frog”, one of my favorites ever since I first encountered it in elementary school.
So why not try to publish it with a reputable market instead of releasing it into the wild myself? Mostly because of its length — at 8,000 words, it’s a tough story to sell. Most horror markets want no more than 5,000 or 6,000 words. Also, it’s not supernatural, which cuts out some of the markets that do look at longer work. It’s absurd and nuts and grotesque and implausible, but there’s nothing actually supernatural or fantastic in it. Thus, the markets are few, and honestly I’d rather just release it as part of my winter tradition rather than send it out and wait months and months for response on the very slim chance that somebody might want to publish it.
If you’re not squeamish, I hope you’ll check it out. (If you are squeamish, you should probably keep away from most of my stories, but this one in particular!) If you enjoy it, I will be glad. If you do not … well, hey, it was free…
