From Bram Stoker Award-winning author Nicole Cushing comes A Sick Gray Laugh, a novel about madness, depression, history, Utopian cults, literature, sports, and all the ways we struggle to stay sane in an insane world. Look for A Sick Gray Laugh at better independent booksellers everywhere, and most online retailers. Copies with signed bookplates are available direct from Word Horde.
Award-winning author Noelle Cashman is no stranger to depression and anxiety. In fact, her entire authorial brand, showcased in such titles as The Girl with the Gun in Her Mouth, Leather Noose, and The Breath Curse, has been built on the hopeless phantasmagoric visions she experiences when in the grip of paranoid psychosis. But Noelle has had enough, and, author brand be damned, has found help for her illness in the form of an oblong yellow pill, taken twice daily.
Since starting on this medication, Noelle’s symptoms have gone into remission. She’s taken up jogging. She’s joined a softball team. For the first time in Noelle’s life, she feels hope. She’s even started work on a nonfiction book, a history of her small southern Indiana town.
But then Noelle starts to notice the overwhelming Grayness that dominates her neighborhood, slathered over everything like a thick coat of snot, threatening to assimilate all.
From Bram Stoker Award-winning author Nicole Cushing comes A Sick Gray Laugh, a novel about madness, depression, history, Utopian cults, literature, sports, and all the ways we struggle to stay sane in an insane world.
Cover Art by Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen
Cover Art and Design by Matthew Revert
Pub Date: August 27, 2019
Format: Trade Paperback
ISBN-13: 978-1-939905-52-9
Format: eBook
ISBN-13: 978-1-939905-53-6
Reviews
“A wholly erratic and unstable narrator drives this kooky, outlandish tale. […] Cushing constructs a convincing portrayal of someone rationalizing away their lunacy […] but Cushing keeps it lively with clever parody.” —Publishers Weekly
“Cushing has once again delivered an original story that’s hard to define, yet manages to bring the chills in a way all its own and seldom seen in genre novels. Don’t miss this.” —Nick Cato for The Horror Fiction Review
“…it is my opinion that A Sick Gray Laugh is Cushing’s masterpiece. […] this is the best horror novel I’ve read all year, and I strongly suggest you check this out as soon as you can..” —Richard Gerlach for Signal Horizon
“Noelle Cashman—I mean Nicole Cushing—has delivered a shocking and satirical survey of the failed American experiment and its many horrifying discontents. A Sick Gray Laugh’s warts-and-all metanarrative is reminiscent of such recent genre touchstones as Caitlin R. Kiernan’s The Red Tree and Gemma Files’s Experimental Film, but told in a brutal and uncompromising style that is all Cushing’s own.” —Robert Levy, author of The Glittering World