C.M. Rosens's Blog, page 26

#PitLight ~ 10/12/22

I’m taking part in PitLight today, where you can like, retweet and comment/quote tweet people’s pitches and aesthetics. I’ve scheduled my 4 tweets (the maximum per person) and I’ll be pinning them to my profile through the day.

I’m using THE DAY WE ATE GRANDAD, so enjoy the tweets! I’ve had a go at movie posters for the pitch, and I’m also linking the book’s Goodreads page, and the buy links to the other stories to catch up on the story so far.

My sale is still on via Ko-Fi, too! You can download the files and gift them to others if you want!

Sale link: <https://ko-fi.com/s/811fa7d3b0>

Goodreads link: <https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60161402-the-day-we-ate-grandad>

The poster is above, the actual cover is by Rebecca F. Kenney and on the left! It’s now with an editor going through a round of developmental edits this month, and I hope that it will be released early 2023.

Wes is not coping with the mass bereavement and not sure how to feel about the murders of his family by his own sister, even if he knows they deserved to die. He is detoxing from the hallucinogenic drug that helped him remember things forwards as well as backwards in time, and now he has opened his mind to the possibilities of the future.

When Wes has three visions of the future, one where things are normal, overlaid with two versions of the end of the world, he tries to direct the course of fate – but in doing so, has he guaranteed the apocalypse he is trying to stop?

AMERICAN GODS X WHYBORNE & GRIFFIN – an eldritch family drama for fans of THE MAGNUS ARCHIVES, H. P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, and Susannah Clarke.

Catch up with the story so far: https://buy.bookfunnel.com/tpg2gwx0c3 – the illustrated eBook duo set of THE CROWS and THIRTEENTH.

THE CROWS is also available in audiobook, paperback and hardback.

THIRTEENTH is also available in paperback.

Both novels are serialised, unabridged, on my podcast Eldritch Girl.

The Day We Ate Grandad: Coming Soon

Add to Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60161402-the-day-we-ate-grandad

Blurb ~ Coming 2023

Three possible futures. Two versions of the apocalypse. One chance to save the world.

Wes Porter, a severely depressed insanity-inducing playboy, is detoxing from hallucinogens that have unlocked his ability to see versions of potential futures – and he’s just foreseen two ways the world could end. Normally, Wes would leave the hero bullshit to somebody else, but he can’t abdicate responsibility this time… not when both those apocalypses might be his fault.

With some prompting from a mythological bard-prophet who may or may not be real, and a lot of assistance from his monster-eating baby sister who desperately wants to move out of his apartment, and their soothsayer cousin who has his own demons to fight, Wes attempts to save [his] world… but have his poor decisions doomed them all?

THE DAY WE ATE GRANDAD is the third book in the Pagham-on-Sea series. It is a dysfunctional family cosmic horror novel for fans of WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS, THE MAGNUS ARCHIVES, and THE CALL OF CTHULHU, with themes of bereavement and grief, generational trauma, and a dash of Roman/Welsh mythology.

~

You’ll be able to listen to this free, as a weekly serial, on the Eldritch Girl podcast S03

Cover design: Rebecca F. Kenney

Interior Illustrations: Tom Brown

Add to Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60161402-the-day-we-ate-grandad

Catch up with all my work so far – all these eBooks for only £6: https://ko-fi.com/s/811fa7d3b0

Note that THE RELUCTANT HUSBAND is still only available in the anthology THE UNCANNY AND THE DEAD.

It will be released in my own collection of historical horror fiction, all set in Pagham-on-Sea, coming Summer 2023. Title TBC.

December Sale! Book Bundle £6+

All my published work so far (with the exception of THE RELUCTANT HUSBAND, so far only available in the UNCANNY AND THE DEAD anthology) for £6.

You can pay more if you like, that’s optional!

All my Ko-Fi shop eBooks are Pay As You Feel, with a minimum price of way below RRP.

Download the files as ePub / pdf and gift them to people (or keep them for yourself!)

Eldritch/Cosmic Horror Films

This was a longer Tumblr post but I think it works on my blog too!

ANNIHILATION (2018) was so good, I loved the Shimmer and the concept and the vibe, so interesting – a much better Colour Out Of Space film than COLOUR OUT OF SPACE (Nick Cage). But the body horror did get to me in COOS, I was eating my lunch while watching.

Error.

THE THING is obvs great, and IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS and PRINCE OF DARKNESS. Love the John Carpenter trilogy. I can’t decide which of the 3 I like best.

Some others that I keep thinking about:

JUG FACE – you never see the monster but it lives in a pit, cw for graphic miscarriage and incest among other things

THE CALL GIRL OF CTHULHU – I did laugh, I’m easily pleased

THE RITUAL – I wasn’t sure about the Sami-coded cult (was it?? That felt …off to me) but I loved the creature design and the atmosphere

SATOR – slowburn and more demonic entity, I wasn’t sure about this film or if I liked it, but I keep thinking about it.

THE HALLOW – Irish eco-horror, so much parasitic fungi body horror and the fae creature design was great. Yes, I’m counting the fae as eldritch, that’s where the word comes from! Not humans, not angels or fallen angels, but a secret third thing…

THE LURKING FEAR – 90s creature feature based on a HP Lovecraft short story, similar themes of heredity and concealed monstrosity as The Shadow Over Innsmouth, but this is about underground things.

HP LOVECRAFT’S THE DARK SLEEP – not great, actually pretty bad, but again the concept is something I keep thinking about.

THE DUNWICH HORROR (1970) – I haven’t seen the 90s one, but I didn’t mind the 1970 one. You can always trust the 70s to sex things up for no reason, and I quite liked it.

THE VOID – I do like this, it’s got a lot of things going on in a besieged hospital

SACRIFICE – Norwegian cult and pregnancy horror, heredity and gods in the fjords etc, gave me big Ramsey Campbell The Inhabitant of the Lake vibes

I quite liked the Full Moon mini series THE RESONATOR even though ep 5 is missing and I’m not the biggest fan of The Reanimator as a story as I hate zombies and brain stuff. I have seen THE REANIMATOR though and it was fine.

UNDERWATER – loved this one, it starts off very The Shadow over Innsmouth and then segues into The Call of Cthulhu. Plus Kristen Stewart was good in it, I thought! I enjoyed it a lot.

HELLRAISER – I’m counting the whole franchise and the new film in this. All of it.

THE MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN – Yeah, I do think this counts, so little is explained (good) and it’s a cultish conspiracy in NYC. Vinnie Jones has the best role. I liked the short story too!

STRANGER THINGS – yeah, I’d say this counts? Kinda?

NOBODY SLEEPS IN THE WOODS TONIGHT 1+2 – The sequel took me places I didn’t want to go, but this is a solid Polish body horror concept. It’s body horror and mutations caused by a meteor thing. I wouldn’t rewatch them, I don’t think, but it kept me on my toes.

MONSTERS (2010) – survival romcom? It was cute and I liked the alien thingys. I don’t know if it really counts, it’s dispassionate aliens invading accidentally creating an ‘infected zone’, which was similar to ANNIHILATION. I haven’t seen the sequel yet.

APOSTLE – I might include this as there’s some unexplained stuff going on with this island, and the whole ‘prisoner of the landscape’ thing that appears in Welsh Gothic fiction as a trope. In this case, if you’ve seen it, you’ll know what I’m referring to.

THE CABIN IN THE WOODS – loved this the second time around. Saw it in the cinema and due to circumstances wasn’t into it. Saw it again and realised it was more my thing than I remembered.

BLACK SPOT – This is a French series, folk horror, eldritch weird stuff in the forest, eco-horror, slowburn. Worth it, I thought.

REQUIEM – I think this does count, also a series, Welsh Gothic themes abound, it’s classed as supernatural but it’s much, much weirder than ghosts. Plus a lot of the Welsh Gothic themes – prisoner of the landscape (which also contains the haunted history and secrets relevant to the present), cultural disinheritance, music as language, etc, all pull through to create that folk horror/eldritch horror atmosphere. It also has weird cult playing with forces beyond their control.

SOCIETY – No idea where else to put this, but even though it’s a cosy 80s teen body horror shocker, the themes are reminiscent of THE MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN (same basic concept in fact in terms of conspiracy and cult and so on) but with added overt class discourse. I do love this film.

LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM – based on the Bram Stoker story but has Lovecraftian overtones, and then goes full on Hammer Horror THE REPTILE which doesn’t belong in this list. LAIR is – not good. Hugh Grant and Peter Capaldi carry the film and are so young, and it’s not their best work ever. I made it 1min 30secs in twice and turned it off, but third time lucky. Now I can say I’ve seen it to the end. There was no prize.

THE STRANGENESS – abandoned gold mine and mysterious, people-eating slime creature that dwells within. Kind of “In The Mountains of Madness” but … not.

THE WRONG HOUSE – This is weird, timey-wimey but not, inexplicable nightmare that’s a lot more than a haunted or sentient house. It’s the horror of being stuck somewhere that won’t let you leave, and there are no rules, no explanations, and no way to figure it out.

DON’T BLINK – an extinction event that also goes completely unexplained, very weird, very unsettling concept. Life forms of all kinds just… stop existing when you stop looking at them.

THE CIRCLE (2017) – a stone circle on a remote Scottish island, a monster thousands of years old, a mystery that a group of archaeologist students try and solve (it doesn’t end well).

I haven’t seen a load of obvious ones, but would like some recs on which are worth watching? Anything with the above vibes (including the comedies) welcome!

#FinishUrBookFall Update: Completed!

Finally finished the rewrite of THE DAY WE ATE GRANDAD and I can’t wait for it to go off to an editor for developmental edits then get the copyedits done!

I’m going to be doing some posts about it (and the trilogy as a whole) on Tumblr, TikTok and Instagram, so AMA on those platforms or in the comments and I’ll make a short video!

In the meantime, I’m working on the Ko-Fi posts and the snail mail packages for Eldritch Family tier members, but due to postal strikes not sure when November/December ones will arrive! :(((( Hopefully soon.

I’m also building some ideas for Book 4 of the Pagham-on-Sea series, which I feel will be a Throne-based ecohorror. If you don’t know what the Throne is, read THIRTEENTH… It doesn’t appear on-page in TDWAG as Katy is actively avoiding it, so that needs to be rectified. I also feel that Ricky needs a collection of stories as an accompaniment, so that needs to be maybe its own thing. I have way too much Ricky material to go in a novel where anybody else ALSO has an arc, so he does need his own set of novellas really.

THE SUSSEX FRETSAW MASSACRE is one of these, out now! Look out for more.

eBook Stores: https://books2read.com/u/bQjXKD
Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0BKV2B4XW
Amazon US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BKV2B4XW
Discounted to £1.99 in my Ko-Fi Shop: https://ko-fi.com/s/ca4d3de407

While we await the end of times…

Some great apocalyptic fiction coming soon or out now… including mine! THE DAY WE ATE GRANDAD is coming soon, I’m 87.4K into the post-beta rewrite and nearly at the part where Wes slicks his hair back with someone else’s blood at a party. Fun times await.

Author Theresa Jacobs

The Day We Ate Grandad, is a dysfunctional family horror novel for fans of The Magnus Archives, We Have Always Lived In The Castle, and The Call of Cthuluh.

Unspoken is a short, but well-paced and compelling exploration of the themes of unrequited love and the insanity that accompanies it in the midst of a world sliding into madness. A story of love, regret, and the end of the world expressed with a poetic voice and postmodern sensibilities; it could be described as being a combination between George A. Romero’s The Crazies and an amalgam of The Notebook and Love In the Time of Cholera.

Innocence Ends. Six friends meet together in an isolated mountain town in Northern Idaho to commemorate the fifth anniversary of a close friend’s suicide. A week of hiking, spending time in nature, and bittersweet reunion soon takes a sinister turn as the…

View original post 535 more words

Lessons from the whole Twitter Thing…

So, Twitter is having a rough time as a platform right now, and lots of people are leaving following Elon Musk’s takeover. I’m still there at the moment, but diversifying and looking at places to build a platform away from it. It’s my biggest platform out of all my social media presences at the moment and I’d like that to change!

I think this just hammers home the precarity for authors – especially indie ones – when they rely on social media sites to promote their work and build a base and just generally express themselves. It’s probably a good idea to have multiple places to be, and a static landing page to use as a jumping off point for all your stuff.

In this post, I talk about my own social media and the platforms I’ve chosen to focus on for various reasons. Click on the headings below to jump to the relevant section of the post.

Pinterest
Instagram
TikTok
Twitter
Cohost

I’m thinking about how to manage all these platforms in ways that work with my ADHD, especially my time-blindness. (Time-blindness affects me in the following ways: I don’t know how long it’s been since I opened an app, or posted something, and I can’t keep up with posting schedules because I have memory issues and I can’t form habits. Once I stop doing something, the “habit” is broken, and I’ll never get it back. This is true for cleaning my teeth: every day is a conscious effort to remember. Imagine how it is with something that’s lower down on my priority scale.)

So I’m thinking about cross-posting and what I’m using these platforms for, and how to work smarter not harder.

First, I’ve got Canva Pro, which I love for making graphics and Insta Reel/TikTok video ads of my books. You can record direct to Canva (audio and video), and use their video clips, audio and images, add transitions and text, and download the video as a complete mp4 file for posting anywhere you like.

Canva Pro also has an automated scheduler, and can link to your social media accounts, when you link them up to it via the Share button on the top right of the screen. It posts immediately or on a day/time of your choice. You can also add captions and tags to your post like you can with any other scheduling app.

Pinterest

I’m starting to create and upload my own pins on Pinterest to the “My fiction” board as an experiment. It’s not going well (good to know!) So I need to figure out where I’m going wrong and try again!

I’ve always used Pinterest as a personal account to pin my own ideas, not create pins for others to share/pin to their boards. I’m now cross-posting my book ads from Instagram and TikTok to Pinterest, hoping that users who pin ideas for their reading lists will see them and share them. I’m not sure how this works, or the best ways to use Pinterest for this.

This is the app with the majority of users and I’m not using it to it’s maximum effect in marketing. I’ve got a Business Account, but I have just been using it more like a “personal” account, and not really marketing my stuff this way. I want to learn to use this better, automating posting schedules so that my audience (majority for me is UK based on my stats for the Instagram ads I ran as experiments) get to see my stuff, but I also have a small fan base in Australia and I’m selling a lot in Europe and North America (USA and Canada) as well. So I need to sit down and work out the times to post things when my demographic is online. Unfortunately, my “demographic” = Lovecraft fans, BBC Ghosts fans, WWDITS fans, Weird Fiction readers, Gothic Horror readers, so that’s not so helpful with age and gender markers that marketing tips keep asking me about re: ad targeting.

I think my main audience is currently between 21-45, so I need to work out how to use this to work out the SEO stuff?? Also my engagement stats are skewed more to women than other genders, but additionally a lot of word-of-mouth sales have been in the LGBTQ+ community especially with asexual horror fans. (Thanks, Ricky).

For the deadly serious, there are paid-for courses online you can take to learn about this. Otherwise, there’s an article by Karin Olafson on Hootsuite which is pretty good basics and very helpful, Kevan Lee’s article on Buffer about what they tried and what worked, and there are lots of YouTube videos about this too.

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/cmrosens/

I will create pins for blog posts I’ve made, and see how that boosts traffic to the WordPress site, and also post the book ads and see if I can make these pins better. You can already see that some of these pins I’ve posted are not the 2:3 ratio for mobile, and that means these pins aren’t going to be very good on the mobile app. They’ll be too small or be weirdly cropped, so I might just delete these and try again.

If the ratio is fine and they look ok, I’ll be editing the descriptions and titles of the pins and the boards I’ve made to include better keywords and 3-5 relevant hashtags, so that they start to show up in more searches.

In Canva Pro, you can resize your graphics, so that you can see how it will look! I’m going to use Pinterest templates in Canva Pro.

Instagram

You can find me on Instagram, where I’m building up a bigger following. It’s my second largest platform after Twitter and I’ve been slowly building it for a while now, but I’ve stalled on follower count! My engagement has also completely tanked and I’m not sure why. Well – I do know why. This is happening to lots of people not just me! Instagram is now at the monetisation/profit-focused stage and no longer handing out exposure to all users but rather it’s favouring specific things and a select number of users who are proven to be successful at these things… so original content is king, and you need to keep the audience’s attention for longer, so that Instagram can show them more ads. People who stop and watch can turn into customers.

So I need to up my game with content!

I’m cross-posting TikToks to Reels and Instagram doesn’t seem to like that. It likes original reel content posted regularly. I’m not doing that. I’m also using a lot of tags, but I’m not attracting likes and comments that would boost the post (thanks, Insta algorithm).

Find me here: https://www.instagram.com/cm.rosens/

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by C. M. Rosens (@cm.rosens)

An example of an post that Instagram doesn’t really like: I have 1.3K followers but only 10 likes on this post

Now that Instagram is part of Meta (same as Facebook), the pros are that Insta crossposts to Facebook and I don’t need to use Facebook much any more as my content is basically my Insta stories and WordPress posts. This isn’t helping engagement on Facebook, but I just don’t have the energy. Also, on Facebook, I get better traction in groups, not on the main timeline posts. But being active in Facebook groups is not something I have the mental bandwidth for on top of my everyday life. Also, I just don’t like Groups, and I find it hard to meaningfully engage and click with people in them, especially in groups with very vocal prominent members or ones that are just ad boards. This isn’t a fault of the Groups or the members, it’s just me, and I’m not here to make my own life harder or my anxiety worse, so it’s just something I avoid as Not For Me.

If you really like the energy of the Groups you’re in and have a community built up there, that’s different, and maybe Facebook is a primary place for your marketing. I just can’t juggle all that at the moment and so that’s why for me focusing on platforms I can personally be more passive in terms of talking to people (like Pinterest and Insta etc) is my best bet. I have Twitter to talk to people & shitpost, because that hits the sweet spot for me in terms of firing stuff into the void or just into my Circle, and actively engaging when I want to but in short bursts, not longform comments.

Anyway, I need to re-evaluate how I’m using Instagram and shake this up a bit, so that I can start to build my platform again on there. This will mean I may have to comment more and engage in hashtags more actively for a while, which takes so much energy, but this might help! I need to factor in how much time this takes me and work out a schedule which I can sort of stick to if I have automated reminders.

However, creating content for Insta means I have pins to post, and vice versa. It does mean I can work around the algorithm maybe and use the reels for TikTok if I post at different times? I’ll experiment with this a bit. I’ll also try and post more things in Facebook Groups and my feed, just to see what happens with engagement if I do. That way I can share the same piece of content/ad multiple times across multiple platforms and have a look at my engagement stats to see the impact it’s having.

Hootsuite has an article on Instagram strategies by Michelle Martin. Shopify’s blog also has a Beginner’s Guide to Instagram by Ana Gotter, with an embedded YouTube video.

TikTok

I’m brand new to TikTok, as that’s apparently the best platform for authors, but I think this is more for certain genres than others that get favoured on BookTok? I haven’t managed to break into HorrorTok yet! Also I don’t write YA or Fantasy or Romance, and these 3 seem to have the biggest share of views. This is all really new to me, and I notice again that my videos where I talk to the camera are the ones that get more traction than my lovely ads made in Canva – EXCEPT for ones that are tagged #Fantasy and use trending sounds.

(My Fantasy aesthetic was for something I’m not even writing, ironically, it’s an embryonic idea I have that I wanted to see if there was an audience for).

I think I can cross-post these videos to Instagram too, but again, as it’s not original content it tanks when I do. So I do need to mix it up and post the same videos on different days or weeks and see how that works. I can also post all my videos as pins on Pinterest and link back to my website or carrd so that my content leads back to my books and that might help me drive sales as well as views?

I need to stick to the 20% promotion rule too – creating 80% of my content for engagement only and 20% as adverts for my books. It’s currently the other way round.

Hootsuite’s blog has an article by Alyssa Hirose on using TikTok in your marketing strategy, as does Kindlepreneur – an article by Jason Hamilton on tips and tricks for authors specifically.

I really need to look into this more, as this is a brand new platform for me. I’m going to check out a few videos like this:

Twitter

This is where I’ve got my biggest platform, but even that has plateaued now with the algorithm changes and followers leaving due to the latest takeover. I’m going to rethink how I use Twitter – it’s got my Revue newsletter embedded into it, and I hope that I can keep this if I migrate elsewhere.

I also want to think about how I engage with people on that platform and what I actually want that account for. I’m currently using it more personally but also doing book promotion – I think this is where I’m closest to getting the 80/20 rule right.

If I’m going to be taking the ‘social’ out of the equation and not engaging so much on that platform with current affairs and so on, then I’ll need to think more about how to work with the algorithm since it currently nixes links and images and videos. Especially as I’m not planning on paying for Twitter Blue, and that is where video posting is being pushed most. Also, with Elon Musk firing staff and potentially axing a load of server space to save money, Twitter won’t be able to handle all that media anyway.

I’m going to check out a few articles about how to effectively use Twitter for marketing, as I’m not really engaging with the stats and insights as I could be right now.

SproutSocial has an article on Twitter Marketing that looks useful. I really struggle with the interface of TweetDeck and I can’t use that very well, something about it makes my brain go brrrr. Besides, being able to fire off random thoughts as they come to me suits my ADHD really well. I’ll be very sad to leave the platform, and I have no immediate plans to do so, just to change up how I use it for the benefit of my sales.

I can definitely still use it to cross-post stuff and alert people to new content on other sites, and all that kind of stuff, so that everything’s joined up and primarily drives traffic to my website and carrd. Let’s see if it works!

Ultimately, Twitter might not be the best place for me to do this – it’s all about finding your niche.

CoHost

This brings me finally to the newest social media site I’m trying out: CoHost.org, which has some really sensible community guidelines and seems to be similar to Pillowfort in the way it handles 18+ accounts (I think??) and has a chronological timeline like the Twitter of old. It’s small and growing, so would be a good place to try out and see how I can build a presence there.

Gizmodo has an article on the 5 Best Twitter Alternatives, and CoHost appears on here, but CoHost is NOT Twitter and not meant to be used in a similar way. So I won’t be advertising or marketing on CoHost, I’ll be posting snippets and maybe cross-posting my older WordPress blog posts there to see what sticks and what people want to see there, and if that drives traffic to my other social media platforms, my carrd, this website, and so on. Hopefully this will get me more exposure and I’ll start seeing that translate into sales further down the line.

Again: CoHost is NOT Twitter. It’s a blogging site, but where you can post all kinds of stuff without an algorithm prioritising certain content over others – the timeline is chronological. Harassment is implicitly and explicitly discouraged, it’s very hard to go viral (not impossible, but that’s not really the point of it) and like counts on posts are hidden by design so people can evaluate a post for themselves and not be influenced by how “popular” that post is.

Cohost, on the other hand, has a nicer (for me) interface and you can post longer stuff or shorter stuff, or images etc, and it just pops up in your feed. You can “retweet” (whatever the CoHost equivalent term is) and like and save posts, and comment, and the interface for that reminds me of a cross between Twitter and Facebook before Facebook got overly complicated and unusable for me as well.

Here’s a good article by Alexis Ong for The Verge about CoHost and what you can do with it, and I’m going to look into it more and decide how best to use it. I’m thinking currently to use this in conjunction with my Ko-Fi to post my flash fic that is free for all, and see if I can drive traffic to Ko-Fi for supporter only content this way? I don’t know if this will work, but maybe I’ll get some more interest in my writing that way!

I’m going to start by posting stuff that’s on Ko-Fi at the moment, and see how it goes over.

I don’t think Mastadon is for me, I can’t quite get my head around Tumblr and Pillowfort’s interfaces, I really don’t like them. So I think CoHost is the last (for now) new place I’ll land on, and I’ll focus on these platforms until I find my niche.

SpookyMonth Showcase ~ THE SUSSEX FRETSAW MASSACRE

A brand new Halloween release for 2022! Well – not exactly brand new, as a version of it has been up on Ko-Fi for supporters only in 9 parts for some time. Ko-Fi members get this one for free via my Ko-Fi shop, and it’s discounted on there at £1.99, but it’s on general release for everyone else at £2.99.

This one is set during the pandemic of 2020, when lockdown rules were lifted temporarily only to be slammed back down again around Christmas. It’s not that accurate, but it uses LFTs and issues with hire car fleets as plot points.

Ricky Porter the eldritch haruspex, in a classic twist on the Etruscan tradition of liver reading, needs some young people to sacrifice in order to read his own future in their entrails, which he can only do under a Blue Moon. The omens say five are due to die before midnight, but his beloved home is not happy about him going out to hunt them down. Fortunately, as fate would have it, there’s a knock on the door…

eBook StoresAmazonBuy & Download at a discount direct from my ko-Fi

Influences and Comps

STAG (mini-series 2016)THE RITUAL by Adam NevillMADE IN CHELSEA (TV series)READY OR NOT (2019)TUCKER AND DALE VS EVIL (2010)GET DUKED! (2019)TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE franchise – especially the original where the chainsaw is used only once on a still-living person and yet the title is what it is

Tropes:

Car breaks down at night on a country road, but there’s a Creepy Old House!Obnoxious upper middle/upper class people vs working class people People getting picked off in a house of horrors (but with a slight twist)You can’t fight fateHorror-comedy with dark situational humourHapless protagonist has a corruption arcMaking friends with the killers who have no reason to kill youKillers win

Please show this fun anti-slasher some love and leave a review if you can!

eBook StoresAmazonBuy & Download at a discount direct from my ko-Fi

SpookyMonth Showcase ~ THIRTEENTH

This novel leans into the humour more, so if you enjoyed the dark sitcom feel of THE CROWS but you want more one-liners and more of the family themselves, this novel introduces Wes Porter as a main character. Expect some eldritch playboy lifestyle drama, front row seats to a live snuff show, one-liners as defence mechanisms, estranged family to grudging, bickering team, and dealing with generational trauma incredibly badly.

THE CROWS was Ricky’s story: this one is really Katy Porter’s, who appeared in Chapter 4 The Grande Dame with one line of dialogue. Katy is an angry teen coming to terms with being the Chosen One, weaponised by her beloved grandmother, and feared/abused by the rest of the family. What Katy is “chosen” to be is the family failsafe; the thirteenth child of a thirteenth child will metamorphose into an unstoppable eldritch god-creature that hunts down family members and devours them whole, working through a List in their head. Except Katy doesn’t know how to control who goes on the List, or who comes off, and she certainly doesn’t know how to manage her powers. “Luckily”, Ricky is there to help with that, and her oldest brother Wesley, the insanity-inducing playboy torn between his family duties and his preferred lifestyle of leisure.

Cue absolute screaming chaos as Katy tries to outrun her destiny with the family wanting her dead, Wes being unable to make up his mind whose side he’s on, and Ricky stepping in to ‘mentor’ her and ensure the destiny she never wanted or asked for is fulfilled…

It’s possible to read this one first with THE CROWS as a prequel, but technically this is Book 2!

Ebook & Paperback Versions

The paperback is available from Amazon only

Ebook from my Ko-FiEbook duo box set

Influences and Comps (some overlap with THE CROWS)

WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS (series)WHYBORNE AND GRIFFIN series, Jordan L. HawkTHE DUNWICH HORROR, H. P. LovecraftDAGON, H. P. LovecraftNYARLATHOTEP, H. P. LovecraftIN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS (1994)BUFFALO ’66 (1998)ADDAMS FAMILY and ADDAMS FAMILY VALUESBEETLEJUICETHE OMEN (1976)FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS (1998)THE HOUNDS OF TINDALOS, Frank Belknap LongTHE FORSYTE SAGA, (TV series 2002-2003)COLD COMFORT FARM, Stella GibbonsSILAS MARNER, George ElliotFLOWERS IN THE ATTIC, V. C. AndrewsGRIMM (TV series)SUPERNATURAL (TV series)SLASHER S04: FLESH AND BLOOD

Tropes

dysfunctional family tries to survive threat to their existencethe family secret is a relative everyone pretends doesn’t exist as much as possible“Chosen One” (to be transformed into eldritch god)angry teen abducted then mentored by grumpy killer (no romance, more Arya and The Hound of GoT tv series type dynamics)drug-addled playboy fucks up and (kinda) grows up twisted history with kissing cousins ~ part of Gothic-vibe inbred family of monstershorrors that induce madnesshorrors from the great beyond with Plans and Schemes younger generation rebelling against the destiny decided for themTHIRTEENTH – from £3.99

This was so much fun! It’s got all the hassle of being part of a large extended family – awful cousins, annoying siblings, bossy uncles – except they’ve got tentacles/fangs/slime and think nothing of a little light murder. And cannibalism (but it’s for practical reasons, so that’s okay). The three main characters bicker hilariously through all manner of weirdness, and the odd attempted murder, and there’s oodles of ickiness and monsters. Horror aside, Katy, Wes and Ricky are all great characters, each with their own worries and pressures, and somehow they make a decent team, even if their relationships with each other are complicated. That’s probably the strongest aspect of this book; families are complex, and the shared histories and unforgotten slights are really strong here, but they don’t get in the way of the story, and actually bind the characters together. Loved it.

~ 5 star Goodreads Review

C.M. Rosens is in a league of her own, something I say with both love and enthusiasm. In The Crows, she grabbed every gothic horror trope she could find, put them through the blender, and somehow made me hate Carrie’s painfully mundane ex-boyfriend more than the literally-a-murderous-cannibal neighbour. In Thirteenth, she takes the idea of the Chosen One by the horns and then covers it in eldritch tentacles and teenage rage. It was an absolute joy to read.

Our protagonist is Katy Porter (she’s a cousin of Ricky Porter, a main character in The Crows who eats people and tells the future, yet I still want to just wrap him in blankets and check he’s okay). She’s the family’s chosen one. The problem with this is that, when your family are the descendants of a nameless dimension-bending tentacled eldritch god who kill and/or curse each other over things as petty as flower shows, you’re not going to be chosen for anything good. So like any sensible seventeen-year-old labouring under an ominous prophecy, Katy decides to run away.

This does not go to plan.

And so, Katy Porter finds herself stuck living with Ricky, considered creepy even by her family’s standards, and Fairwood House, which <spoilers for THE CROWS>. Her elder brother Wes is also involved, although he is in turns terrified and incoherent (in no small part due to one of the uncles blackmailing him into testing drugs). This story is, in many ways, a story about family expectations: it’s just that in this family, three generations back some sisters decided that summoning an eldritch god and having its babies was an excellent plan. Katy would really like to be focusing on college and not the fact that her dad is a serial killer and she has some kind of horrible destiny, Ricky would like to make friends but doesn’t know how, Carrie/Fairwood is a little tired of trying to explain ethics to Ricky, and Wes would like it if anyone could remember his face and also could his family members stop threatening to eat his partners please? And somehow between the four of them they need to figure out if there’s any way for Katy to be in control of her powers, rather than controlled by them.

It’s a brilliant story. Somehow, in the midst of some very gory transformation sequences and a lot of murder, it is incredibly emotionally touching. There’s an unexpected gentleness at times: the characters are trying to be friends, however clumsily (Ricky and Carrie/Fairwood is one of my favourite examples of this). C.M. Rosens also has a delightful sense of humour that had me cackling in public. As in The Crows, the mundane is mixed in with the magical with stunning results, and the characters are complicated and messy and weirdly loveable. Pagham-On-Sea continues to have strangely accurate small town vibes, and the ending was so satisfying that I nearly screamed (I was, yet again, reading this in public so I tried to restrain myself).

Rating: read this, don’t ask whose heart is up the chimney.

~ Review by Meredith Debonnaire, on https://meredithdebonnaire.wordpress.com/2021/10/18/book-review-thirteenth-by-c-m-rosens/

Ebook & Paperback Versions

The paperback is available from Amazon only

Ebook from my Ko-FiEbook duo box set

SpookyMonth Showcase ~ THE CROWS

You knew it was coming… my first novel is available in eBook (alone and with THIRTEENTH, its sequel), audiobook, paperback and an anniversary edition hardback that has a prequel short story in the back, “Gerald”.

Ebook, Hardback, Paperback & Audiobook Versions

The hardback and paperback are from Amazon only

Ebook from my Ko-FiEbook duo box setThe Crows

I sat down and bashed out a version of this in 2013 – it was an exercise in whether I could write a cozy murder mystery with a romantic subplot, set in a fantasy version of reality like Neil Gaiman’s NEVERWHERE. I love the sentient house trope, and I wanted an English version of Stephen King’s ROSE RED, and the Haunted Mansion in Disneyland Paris (my favourite ride).

In the original version, the house’s avatar was the love interest and Guy Bishop was the other corner of the love triangle. Phil was just a cheater and never appeared on-page. People in the History Society were dropping like flies while the core secret (who performed the ritual murder of a child in 1958, and why) was being protected.

There was no Ricky and no family, but there was Beverley Wend and I had an idea that she had thousands of grandchildren or spawned lots of monsters, and I expanded on this concept in later stories I wrote in 2015-2018 based on this world.

When I decided to rewrite the first shelved version (which was straight to Wattpad and up there for a while), I picked up on bits from all the expanded ‘verse stuff to create Bramble Cottage and Ricky Porter, and this shifted the emphasis of the plot.

Influences and Comps:

MIDSOMER MURDERS (TV series based on the books by Caroline Graham)MISS MARPLE series, Agatha Christie (particularly the romantic B-plots in her mysteries where the practical, clever girl gets the more-or-less competent guy who really needs a practical woman in his life, bonus points if he’s a bachelor policeman working on the case)BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (TV series)NEVERWHERE, Neil GaimanTHE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE, Neil GaimanThe 2010 economic crash and poverty traumaMental health issues I worked through and the major mental health crisis I had 2006-2008, a lot of which got put into Ricky Porter and exaggerated to its furthest logical points to create his personalityCOLD COMFORT FARM, Stella Gibbons THE TURN OF THE SCREW, Henry JamesJANE EYRE, Charlotte BronteSILAS MARNER, George ElliotPHANTOM OF THE OPERA, Gaston Leroux (also musical adaptations and film)English folklore, Welsh mythology and bardic cultureROSE RED, Stephen KingSleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Beauty and the Beast – Ricky is the Rapunzel figure, the house and its avatar is more the Beast/Sleeping Beauty, and Carrie is the prince figure waking things up, making things happen, and inadvertently making people’s lives simultaneously better and worse as a result.WEIRD STONE OF BRISINGAMEN, Alan GarnerTHE OWL SERVICE, Alan GarnerTHE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, Shirley JacksonClassic Hammer Horror films featuring houses – like The Manor, Elstree, (The Devil Rides Out), and Oakley Court, Windsor, which I considered for our wedding/honeymoon, but is now where I’m planning on having my 40th birthday. Tredegar House, Newport and Llancaiach Fawr, Nelson, where I spent a lot of time as a child.The Phantom Manor ride at Disneyland Paris, which I became obsessed with when my grandparents took me thereTHE ADDAMS FAMILY and ADDAMS FAMILY VALUES (films) and the 1960s ADDAMS FAMILY seriesVENOM (2018)A lot of conversations at the gym where I worked around disordered eating, restrictive diets, training and how a lot of guys have undiagnosed, unnoticed issues around their image and eating disorders because they ‘look good’ – more for Ricky’s image, self-image and backstory development

[Weirdly, I didn’t actually read THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE until after I’d written THE CROWS, but it must have filtered into my consciousness through popular media representations and parodies.]

The Crows – from £3.99

Rosens’ body horror is sublime, and scenes are repulsive and gorgeous all at once. There’s a transcendence of physical and sexual boundaries that is exhilarating rather than flatly grotesque, and I found myself yearning for the mutability of such a world.

Rosens’ prose is also as funny as it is macabre. The humour grounds the weirdness, and vice versa. 

~ Horrified Magazine Review – Full Review Here

I adore this book! It’s a marvellous contemporary horror story which bustles with lively, horrific characters doing terrible, fascinating things yet still manages to have the horror of lonelier books in the genre and several of the scenes were incredibly chilling.

The curiosity, anger and fear of the heroine makes her feels incredibly real – she’s not just a passive character through whom the story is observed. The plotting and pace draw the reader on and on and on, it’s an incredibly addictive read! I managed to read it and the Thirteenth in a very short time. The character interactions are also quite hilarious.

The dichotomy between the modernness of the town and normal life outside and that which goes on at the Crows, which involves old magic and bloodlines rife with inbreeding and family feuds, is incredibly done.

All in all, if you like characters with character, horrific occurrences and excellent writing, I cannot suggest this book (and its companions) enough!

~ 5 star Goodreads Review

I was blown away by this book, I just couldn’t put it down. There were so many twists and turns I didn’t see coming, I needed more. Carrie Rickards finds herself head over heels in love with a total wreck of a house (Fairwood, but the locals called it The Crows), not realising that her life would change drastically forever! The Crows is cursed, and Carrie needs to find out why. Well written and gripping from the start, this book will keep you wanting more. I’m very excited for the sequel. Buy UK and US

~ Red Cape Publishing’s Review

This is a fantastically surprising work of gothic horror. I loved it. Every single time I thought I had an idea of what the plot was doing the plot twisted around and bit me, gleefully. So for example, at the beginning we have Carrie Rickards, who has recently left a (terrible) relationship and somewhat impulsively/compulsively bought a crumbling ruin of a house (known as the Crows) and spent all her money doing it up. And so as a reader I thought “oh yeah, gothic horror, single woman in a spooky house it’s gonna do That Thing where it’s all Atmospheric and maybe there is a plausibly deniable ghost”. And then we get the POV of her neighbour, who knows that Carrie will die in 33 days because he read it in the entrails of the girl he just killed. And for the first of many times, I went “OH WHAT?!” It was GREAT!

So we have Carrie, a compelling main character who I instantly enjoyed, and her neighbour Ricky, who was… a lot less disturbing than he should have been for a cannibalistic bloke living in the woods with a truly messed up family. And a very strange town, Pagham-On-Sea. And an author who really knows how to twist a plot around a reader. One of the things I really adored was the way that mundanity crept into everything: the Crows is definitely strange, in a supernatural and disturbed way, but Carrie is less worried about that than she is about trying to get a job to pay the bills. There’s a dead werewolf in the living room and she’s finding out increasingly odd things about the town she’s moved to, and her neighbour is really really weird, but also her job is a zero hours contract and her ex is harassing her and well, frankly those last two are more upsetting. C.M. Rosens kept startling me with surprising breaks from the sort of story patterns I’m used to while sneaking important foreshadowing in the back, or sneaking it in so blatantly that I just… forgot about it? Ten pages from the end I was still going “EEEEEEEEE Hoooww is this going to eenndddd?” and my lovelies, I was not disappointed!

The Crows is a book that has all the ingredients for a classic gothic horror: a stubborn and compelling protagonist, some ghosts, an excellently old house (is it alive?), a desperately creepy neighbour, a setting that was so alive it might eat you, and years and years of small-town family history and feuding. But it takes all those ingredients and just… completely goes to town with them in the most wildly enjoyable way possible, and definitely leans into the horror… It’s also illustrated by the wonderful Tom Brown, which is certainly a joy. And I just tried to search for an example of the inner illustrations and have found that C.M. Rosens has a whole lot of extra Pagham-On-Sea content on her blog so um, I shall be going to read all of that now.

Rating: read this. Don’t plant what you don’t want to grow…

~ Meredith Debonnaire’s review on https://meredithdebonnaire.wordpress.com/2020/05/26/book-review-the-crows-by-c-m-rosens/

Ebook, Hardback, Paperback & Audiobook Versions

The hardback and paperback are from Amazon only

Ebook from my Ko-FiEbook duo box set