And now readers have a new reason to be afraid. One hundred new reasons!
From the grotesque to the hilarious these bits of micro-fiction will keep you entertained long after you put the book down.
]]>Johnny soon discovers there's a game going on at the shelter. A game where before you play the cards you have to make them. A game where the payout is survival and folding means death. A game where the question becomes: are you playing the cards or are they playing you?
Using 52 chapters Arnzen's novel-of-cards is stacked with mischief and thrills. Like the most accomplished blackjack dealer Arnzen will keep you guessing at his hand. Are you ready to play?
]]>As did the genre. Gorelets are "horror" poems: a mode of writing which explores the "dark side" and muses over morbid themes like death, murder, disease, mutation, chaos, mutilation, the uncanny and all things outré. This is the genre I work in, mostly because I believe it is the most experimental popular genre. In it, one expects the unexpected, which requires the writer to break with convention at every turn.
Tapping into the popularity of the fiction genre, horror also brings a new audience to poetry. That was part of my goal: to get more readers in the digital age to take notice of poetry. When I began this project I realized that e-books (texts intended to be read on PDAs) were everywhere, but none of them were poetry. And poetry just seemed to "fit" the screen better than long, eternally scrolling documents written for print rather than pixels.
Here you are given the opposite: electronic text that has been transported back to the printed page. Gorelets were like applets — tiny computer applications — only darker than the usual fare. I think these pieces will stand up just as well in this slim volume as they did on a screen the size of gauze bandage.
Read and bleed. They'll be quick jabs, but I hope nothing will clot the cut.
— Michael Arnzen, Halloween 2003
]]>In PARATABLOIDS, Bram Stoker Award-winning horror writer Michael A. Arnzen captures that truth in 22 poems that steal actual headlines from the tabloids and tell the truth in a way that only Arnzen can. These poems all relish the outre, the insane, and the grotesque, telling the untold--and often quite touching--stories that lie right under the surface of the headlines.
"This is poetry like you've never heard it before!"
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