Other recent reviews of Corpsepaint include the following:

“David Peak captures the apocalyptic tension gripping the world today, one that is also expressed on several levels by the microcosm he has chosen to focus on: black metal.” —Invisible Oranges

“…a novel which throbs in astonishing levels of darkness right until its brutal and shocking apocalyptic ending, which fits uncomfortably within the broken world of today. A truly outstanding novel.” —HorrorTalk

“To anyone who enjoys bleak, innovative tales of impending anti-cosmic evil, this is a pretty sure bet.” —Aaron Besson

Have you read Corpsepaint yet? We’d love to hear what you think: Post a review, share a link, make a recommendation. Help us spread the weird!

It’s been years since the groundbreaking debut of black metal band Angelus Mortis, and that first album, Henosis, has become a classic of the genre, a harrowing primal scream of rage and anger. With the next two albums, Fields of Punishment and Telos, Angelus Mortis cemented a reputation for uncompromising, aggressive music, impressing critics and fans alike. But the road to success is littered with temptation, and over the next decade, Angelus Mortis’s leader, Max, better known as Strigoi, became infamous for bad associations and worse behavior, burning through side-men and alienating fans.

Today, at the request of their record label, Max and new drummer Roland are traveling to Ukraine to record a comeback album with the famously reclusive cult act Wisdom of Silenus. What they discover when they get there will go far deeper than the aesthetics of the genre, and the music they create–antihuman, antilife–ultimately becomes a weapon unto itself.

Equally inspired by the fractured, nightmarish novels of John Hawkes, the blackened dreamscapes of cosmic-pessimist philosophy, and the music of second-wave black metal bands, author David Peak’s Corpsepaint is an exploration of creative people summoning destructive powers while struggling to express what it means to be human.

Here’s some of the praise David Peak’s Corpsepaint has received so far:

“Corpsepaint is an imaginative, doom-laden foray into the contested domain coupling black metal’s disabused hostility to liberal-capitalist ideology with an ethereal and perforce transgressive henosis of hate.”
—Edia Connole, co-author of Floating Tomb: Black Metal Theory

“Novels about rock bands are usually just that: novels about rock bands: depictions, imitations. Peak’s Corpsepaint is much more than that. It captures the dark spirit, howling aesthetic and nihilistic philosophy of black metal and makes it the motor of the fiction. A grim and unforgiving book that steps deeply into the darkness and invites you to follow.”
—Brian Evenson, author of A Collapse of Horses

“Beautifully, wonderfully, tragically dismal! Thought provoking horror that reaches deep inside you, rips out your still-beating heart, then asks you to consider what it means.”
—Amber Fallon, author of The Warblers

“Sliding into darkness and doom like a tourbus on black ice, Corpsepaint starts harder and darker than most poser potboilers finish, with a true metalhead’s understanding that the real demons of nihilistic aggression and self-destruction are more diabolical than anything Tipper Gore thought she heard playing Stained Class backwards. When the amoral engine of metal madness reveals its true philosophy and purpose, the grimy walls falls away and the intimate green-room misery becomes a coldly glorious symphony of cosmic horror. Get in the pit with this one. You won’t want to come out… and it won’t let you.”
—Cody Goodfellow, Wonderland Award-winning author of All-Monster Action and Sleazeland

“A work of true cosmic horror set in the death-tinged world of the black metal scene. Peak drags the reader below ground to confront forces seeking to spread a powerful, ancient darkness. Corpsepaint is a bleak, terrifying ride.“
—Michael Griffin, author of The Human Alchemy

“This book is brutal in the way only stoner metalheads can say the word. But it’s also brutal in the way only real lived human suffering is. Total, unending and strangely life affirming if you can manage to walk away from its wreckage in any way intact. Corpsepaint bludgeons the senses with an eerie alchemy of occult dread, jackbooted human malevolence and surprisingly affecting sorrow. The spell cast here by Peak perfectly conjures up a sensation of being lost on a winter night in the woods and knowing that something ancient and inhuman watches your every step, marking you as trespasser and seeing you for what you know you truly are: alone.”
—Tony McMillen, author of An Augmented Fourth

“Gripping and mythic, bleak in a way that makes nihilism look cozy; if there’s a darker metal than black, this book is it.”
—Christine Morgan, author of The Raven’s Table

“Corpsepaint is a bleak descent into the romance of drugs, decay, the occult, and black metal. This one will stay with you like the voice of a choir singing from the surface of long dead distant planets.”
—Christopher Slatsky, author of Alectryomancer and Other Weird Tales

Order your copy of Corpsepaint today!

Fantasy Literature‘s Marion Deeds says, “Tony McMillen’s An Augmented Fourth (2017) is heavy metal rock and roll horror at its wailing-guitar best. Set in 1980, the point of transition from heavy metal to punk, An Augmented Fourth blends inter-dimensional eldritch horror, David-Cronenberg-movie grotesquerie, and psychedelia in a thrash-metal twenty-minute-guitar-solo of a story.”

LitReactor‘s Gabino Iglesias says, “This is a wildly entertaining novel that is both a hilarious deconstruction and a tender love letter to rock and roll. McMillen has a knack for dialogue and that helps the action and the story move forward at breackneck speed. […] If you think you’d dig watching a psychedelia-infused version of The Thing while blasting awesome tunes and having a great acid trip, then you need to pick this one up.”

“It would take a real virtuoso to properly blend The Thing, The Mist, Black Sabbath, and Bowie into one rollicking, comical cosmic horror tribute to early metal and the dark beyond. Lucky for us, Tony McMillen has the chops to make this mutant beast fly on blessed black wings. An Augmented Fourth is a strange, sludgy, progged-out blast!” –Jeremy Robert Johnson, author of Skullcrack City and Entropy in Bloom

Ask for An Augmented Fourth wherever better books are sold.

And while you’re waiting to hook your copy of The Fisherman on your line, check out this brand new interview with John Langan, conducted by Word Horde’s own Sean M. Thompson:

In upstate New York, in the woods around Woodstock, Dutchman’s Creek flows out of the Ashokan Reservoir. Steep-banked, fast-moving, it offers the promise of fine fishing, and of something more, a possibility too fantastic to be true. When Abe and Dan, two widowers who have found solace in each other’s company and a shared passion for fishing, hear rumors of the Creek, and what might be found there, the remedy to both their losses, they dismiss it as just another fish story. Soon, though, the men find themselves drawn into a tale as deep and old as the Reservoir. It’s a tale of dark pacts, of long-buried secrets, and of a mysterious figure known as Der Fisher: the Fisherman. It will bring Abe and Dan face to face with all that they have lost, and with the price they must pay to regain it.

“John Langan’s The Fisherman is literary horror at its sharpest and most imaginative. It’s at turns a quiet and powerfully melancholy story about loss and grief; the impossibility of going on in same manner as you had before. It’s also a rollicking, kick-ass, white-knuckle charge into the winding, wild, raging river of redemption. Illusory, frightening, and deeply moving, The Fisherman is a modern horror epic. And it’s simply a must read.” –Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and Disappearance at Devil’s Rock

“The Fisherman is an epic, yet intimate, horror novel. Langan channels M. R. James, Robert E. Howard, and Norman Maclean. What you get is A River Runs through It…Straight to hell.” –Laird Barron, author of X’s for Eyes

Feeling lucky? Take a chance at winning a copy of The Fisherman in our Goodreads Summer Solstice Giveaway, running now through July 4, 2016.

Here’s the teaser:

In upstate New York, in the woods around Woodstock, Dutchman’s Creek flows out of the Ashokan Reservoir. Steep-banked, fast-moving, it offers the promise of fine fishing, and of something more, a possibility too fantastic to be true. When Abe and Dan, two widowers who have found solace in each other’s company and a shared passion for fishing, hear rumors of the Creek, and what might be found there, the remedy to both their losses, they dismiss it as just another fish story. Soon, though, the men find themselves drawn into a tale as deep and old as the Reservoir. It’s a tale of dark pacts, of long-buried secrets, and of a mysterious figure known as Der Fisher: the Fisherman. It will bring Abe and Dan face to face with all that they have lost, and with the price they must pay to regain it.

And here are just a couple of the blurbs The Fisherman has picked up so far:

“John Langan’s The Fisherman is literary horror at its sharpest and most imaginative. It’s at turns a quiet and powerfully melancholy story about loss and grief; the impossibility of going on in same manner as you had before. It’s also a rollicking, kick-ass, white-knuckle charge into the winding, wild, raging river of redemption. Illusory, frightening, and deeply moving, The Fisherman is a modern horror epic. And it’s simply a must read.”
–Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and Disappearance at Devil’s Rock.

“For some fishing is a therapeutic, a way to clear one’s head, to chase away the noise of a busy world and focus on one single thing. On good days it can heal the worst pains, even help develop a sense of solace. John Langan’s The Fisherman isn’t about the good day fishing, it isn’t even about a bad day fishing, its about the day that you shouldn’t have even left the house, let alone waded chest deep into a swollen stream of churning water. Langan tells you that up front, warns you this isn’t going to be that story, but you ignore the signs, lured in by the faint smell of masculine adventure, hooked by tragedy and the chance of redemption, and reeled in by a nesting tale of ever growing horrors. By the time you realize what has happened it’s already too late, you’re caught in an unavoidable net of terror that can end in only one way. It doesn’t matter how strong you are or how prepared, John Langan has you hook, line and sinker, and he doesn’t let go until the very last page.”
–Pete Rawlik, author of Reanimatrix

“The Fisherman is an epic, yet intimate, horror novel. Langan channels M. R. James, Robert E. Howard, and Norman Maclean. What you get is A River Runs through It…Straight to hell.”
–Laird Barron, author of X’s for Eyes

Preorder your copy of The Fisherman today!

In his house at R’lyeh, Cthulhu waits dreaming…

What are the dreams that monsters dream? When will the stars grow right? Where are the sunken temples in which the dreamers dwell? How will it all change when they come home?

Within these pages lie the answers, and more, in all-new stories by many of the brightest lights in dark fiction. Gathered together by Ross E. Lockhart, the editor who brought you The Book of Cthulhu, The Children of Old Leech, and Giallo Fantastique, Cthulhu Fhtagn! features nineteen weird tales inspired by H. P. Lovecraft.

Edited by Ross E. Lockhart
Cover Art by Adolfo Navarro
Cover Design by MMP

Table of Contents

Introduction: In His House at R’lyeh… – Ross E. Lockhart
The Lightning Splitter – Walter Greatshell
Dead Canyons – Ann K. Schwader
Delirium Sings at the Maelstrom Window – Michael Griffin
Into Ye Smoke-Wreath’d World of Dream – W. H. Pugmire
The Lurker In the Shadows – Nathan Carson
The Insectivore – Orrin Grey
The Body Shop – Richard Lee Byers
On a Kansas Plain – Michael J. Martinez
The Prince of Lyghes – Anya Martin
The Curious Death of Sir Arthur Turnbridge – G. D. Falksen
Aerkheim’s Horror – Christine Morgan
Return of the Prodigy – T.E. Grau
The Curse of the Old Ones – Molly Tanzer and Jesse Bullington
Love Will Save You – Cameron Pierce
Assemblage Point – Scott R. Jones
The Return of Sarnath – Gord Sellar
The Long Dark – Wendy N. Wagner
Green Revolution – Cody Goodfellow
Don’t Make Me Assume My Ultimate Form – Laird Barron

Pie by Petaluma Pie Company.

Ask for Cthulhu Fhtagn! wherever books are sold.

—

He didn’t want her to know how physically taxing he’d found the long drive to the woods, how tedious the prospect of unpacking seemed, or how repugnantly primitive he found their accommodations to be upon their arrival. The holiday had the potential to be far too special an occasion for him to sour it by sulking.

The cabin had been in her family for decades, though the moment he spied it—an oblong box slumped between leprous-looking birch trees—he wondered why she didn’t regard the cabin as a skeleton from her family’s closet instead of a prideful heirloom.

After an anxious struggle to fit the copper key inside the ancient lock, the door gave, allowing the pair of them to be assaulted by the stench of long-trapped air. The dark had evidently grown so accustomed to the cabin’s interior that it stubbornly refused to part for the sunbeams that the man and woman ushered in.

Shutters were peeled back, windows were pried ajar. She stripped the ancient white sheets from the beds and took them outside and hung them from the birch limbs so that the breezes might push out their mustiness.

They cleaned and unpacked and traded off-colour wisecracks. The supper they cooked together was hearty and its aroma managed to mask a bit of the cabin’s cloying staleness.

After eating he delighted her by finding the detached footboard that had once braced the lower bunk bed she’d slept on as a girl. It had been wound in a shower drape of translucent plastic and stored behind her grandmother’s dormant sewing desk.

Her grandfather had carved (with visible skill and obvious love) an inscription into the footboard:

Here lies Donna Hammill
Each and every summer
Dreaming…

—

The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron may be ordered directly from Word Horde or wherever better books are sold. Ask for The Children of Old Leech and other Word Horde titles at your favorite bookseller.

There are Things – terrifying Things – whispered of in darkened forests beyond the safe comfort of firelight: The Black Guide, the Broken Ouroboros, the Pageant, Belphegor, Old Leech…

These Things have always been here.

They predate you. They will outlast you.

This book pays tribute to those Things.

For We are the Children of Old Leech… and we love you.

Featuring all new stories by many of the brightest lights in dark fiction:

Allyson Bird
Michael Cisco
Gemma Files
Richard Gavin
J. T. Glover & Jesse Bullington
Cody Goodfellow
T.E. Grau
Orrin Grey
Michael Griffin
Stephen Graham Jones
John Langan
Daniel Mills
Scott Nicolay & Jesse James Douthit-Nicolay
Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.
Molly Tanzer
Jeffrey Thomas
Paul Tremblay

Edited by Ross E. Lockhart and Justin Steele
Cover Design by Matthew Revert

Pub date: July 15, 2014

Pre-order today!