Loren Rhoads's Blog, page 12

All the Morbid that’s Fit to Print

I wrote a ton of stuff earlier in the year and it’s all being published now. By now, I mean yesterday and today.

First up, I am really proud of the story that appeared Friday on The Fabulist. This is another tale about my succubus Lorelei and her days working in the music industry in Los Angeles. You can read it for free here: https://fabulistmagazine.com/devil-in-her-heart/

My essay about real-life vampires I have known went up at the Horror Writers Associations’ Halloween Haunts blog: https://horror.org/halloween-haunts-blood-drinking-freaks-by-loren-rhoads/

 

“Cemetery Postcards,” an essay about my collection of 900 or so vintage cemetery postcards, appears in issue #6 of The Deadlands. I’m really proud of it, too. Check it out here: http://thedeadlands.com/.

An essay I wrote about the techniques behind the stories in This Morbid Life went up on the Words Matter blog: https://wordsmattersurfsidescwablog.wordpress.com/2021/10/18/creating-the-character-i/

For the Shepherd List, I pulled together a list of some death-positive memoirs that make good companions to This Morbid Life. You can check it out here: https://shepherd.com/best-books/death-positive-memoirs

Finally: my flash story “Zoonosis” will appear in the 99 Tiny Terrors anthology, edited by Jennifer Brozek. The kickstarter to fund fancy editions of the book goes live today, October 19, and runs until Halloween. Here’s the link, if you’d like to snag a copy: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1133704229/99-tiny-terrors-an-anthology.

 

October Storytime

How is your October coming along? This year is pretty quiet for me, since I backed out of all my in-person events and most cemetery tours are still on hold. This may be the year for carving a whole series of jack-o-lanterns and basking in the glow of my Halloween Village graveyard.

This FRIDAY, October 15, I’m joining R.L. Merrill and Emerian Rich on Clubhouse to chat about What Are You Reading, the Horror edition! It’s my first time on Clubhouse, so I’m curious what will happen.

A postcard from my collection

I read “The Drowning City” — about the creature that stalks Venice after dark — from Best New Horror #27 for The Story Hour last week. You can check out the replay here. I’m in the second half-hour, but settle in and enjoy the whole thing:  https://fb.watch/8A7EKuvdZr/

Ken Volante invited me back to his Something (rather than nothing) podcast, where we had a great death-positive conversation.

I read “Ghost-Inspired Fiction” from This Morbid Life for Fright Girl Autumn. You can check out all the readings at the link or watch just my bit here:

Hungry? I presented one of my favorite autumn recipes from This Morbid Life at Readers Entertainment magazine.

My friend Emerian published my essay, “Telling the Truth as a Radical Act,” about how zines led me to This Morbid Life.

Fanbase Press interviewed me about the art that inspired This Morbid Life.

One of my favorite reviews of This Morbid Life appeared on Black Flowers: “a wonderful collection of essays that lead with a curious mind and an openness that we are often asked to avoid. Loren’s writing is touching, amusing and strange. It isn’t just an attempt to be morbid for morbid sake – each essay is an intelligent romp through the human experience – it is weird as it is beautiful.”

Finally, I got a fun review of Reedsy, too. My favorite part: “A collection of essays told in perfectly proportioned chapters that show the — if not always morbid — raw, startlingly real, and uncomfortable side of life.”

Click to learn more.

Top 5 weird facts about me

This was a post I wrote for the This Morbid Life blog tour that didn’t end up getting used. I thought you might find it amusing. All of these stories are told in full in This Morbid Life.

Top 5 weird facts about Loren Rhoads and her morbid life:

5) I used to publish a magazine called Morbid Curiosity, which collected confessional essays from around the world. Editing those tales taught me that sometimes humor is the only way to survive the darkness. Needless to say, I have a very weird sense of humor.

4) I was shopping in a grocery store during the 1989 Earthquake. The wine bottles were rocking together and exploding, shooting glass into the aisle in front of me. I hadn’t lived in San Francisco very long and didn’t have the sense to be afraid. If you have to survive a killer earthquake, that’s the best way.

3) Once I celebrated my birthday in a pitch-black restaurant where all the servers were visually impaired. It was one of the best meals of my life.

2) I dressed up as my best friend for Halloween. I stole a shirt from his closet and had my husband drawn Jeff’s tattoos on me. Then I answered the door at his Halloween party. The weird thing is, I wasn’t the only person dressed as Jeff at that party. I was the only female Jeff, though.

1) I’ve held a human heart in my hand — and the story (like all the others here) is in my book! The short version: I spent two days alone with a gross anatomy lecturer examining three teaching cadavers. It was an amazing experience.

If you’re a book reviewer:

Please get in touch. This Morbid Life is up on Netgalley until the end of September. It’s also on Bookfunnel. I would like to hook you up with a copy. You can comment below or reach me through the comment form above.

This week’s book tour links:

Tui Snider had me back on her Offbeat & Overlooked podcast. We had such a great conversation!

Emerian Rich hosted my origin story on her Emz Box blog: https://emzbox.wordpress.com/2021/09/15/telling-the-truth-as-a-radical-act-by-loren-rhoads/

Supernatural Central featured two excerpts from This Morbid Life:
https://supernaturalcentral.blogspot.com/2021/09/blog-post.html

The Book Junkie Reads hosted a guest post about the cemetery I grew up with and my openness to ghosts:
https://thebookjunkiereadspromos.blogspot.com/2021/09/spotlight-wguest-post-nonfiction-this.html

The last stop of my official blog tour goes up today at Gail’s Gory Details. It’s your lat chance to enter the Rafflecopter to win a paperback copy of This Morbid Life:
https://gailsgorydetails.blogspot.com/

I’m waiting on a few more blog posts to go up after that, along with a handful of interviews. I’ve also recorded a couple more podcasts, but I don’t have the airdates of those yet. It’s been a whirlwind of events.

Last week I had a brainstorm about what my next project will be, so it’s time to clear the decks and start to plan for Nanowrimo. It’s almost time to hammer out another book that I’ve wanted to finish for a really long time.

Get your own copy of This Morbid Life:

Order a signed paperback from Borderlands Books in person or online.

In ebook or paperback from Amazon.

As a signed paperback from my bookstore.

This Morbid Life on Parade

The book tour for This Morbid Life continues!

This week, I am really excited to return to Tui Snider’s Offbeat & Overlooked podcast on Thursday at 2 PM Pacific. You can tune in to watch us live or catch the replay on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wd9nnnS-0M

Last week, I was a guest on A. S. Stewart’s Between the Pages Book Chat, which was really fun! You can watch the replay here: https://www.facebook.com/afstewartauthor/posts/279841287283540

I’ve recorded two more podcasts, but I don’t have the airdates for them yet. Stay tuned.

My guest posts are continuing to go up:

Horror Addicts published one of the essays that went into This Morbid Life, so I wrote a piece to revisit it: https://horroraddicts.wordpress.com/2021/08/30/claustrophobia-revisited-by-loren-rhoads/

Readers Entertainment featured one of my favorite autumn recipes, inspired by one of the adventures in This Morbid Life: https://readersentertainment.com/2021/09/12/my-favorite-dess…-by-loren-rhoads/

Westveil Publishing featured an excerpt from my first cadaver lab experience and a Rafflecopter giveaway: https://www.westveilpublishing.com/?p=11135

Serena Synn interviewed me and ran a taste of one of the ghost stories in This Morbid Life: https://serenasynn.blogspot.com/2021/08/interview-with-loren-rhoads-author-of.html

Reviews on Amazon are stellar: https://amzn.to/3zjSi8N

The book tour wraps up next Monday.

Deathly Fog

When Jacob and his brothers discover the ability to capture fog from the marsh behind their house, they bring it back with them. The fun game turns to danger as they realize perhaps something else accompanied them home. Is it too late to escape the Deathly Fog?

Available now on Amazon Kindle

https://www.amazon.com/Horror-Bites-Deathly-Adam-Breckenridge-ebook/dp/B09BP5L3Z8

 *****EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT BELOW*****

Deathly Fog

by Adam Breckenridge

Because the marsh at the edge of our property was forbidden to us, my brothers and I would take any chance we could get to slip away from under our mother’s nose and go stand at its edge. She had told us it was dangerous because so many things died there and we knew it was true, despite how many plants and bugs we found there. Even with all that life, the marsh was still where things went to die. My older brother, Jacob, used to tell us that there were bodies buried everywhere in the muck, going back hundreds of years.

“From back when it was Indians killing other Indians,” he said. “Centuries of murder down there. If you pulled the bodies up they’d look just like they’d been killed yesterday.”

We poked around a lot trying to find a human body. We never did, but we found just about every kind of animal that we knew lived on our property. Squirrels, rabbits, frogs, snakes, and birds, all mummified in a terrible imitation of life.

And then there was the fog, always so thick you could never see more than a few feet in front of you. It didn’t matter when you went. No matter how sunny the day was, as soon as you passed into the marsh, the world became murky and dark. That’s why we only ever stood on its edge. We were pretty sure if you went in, the fog would eat you whole. It could certainly move in ways that seemed unnatural for fog. Sometimes I was convinced it had teeth, but we were always safe as long as the air to our backs was clear.

When we weren’t there looking for dead bodies, we’d try to catch the fog in our hands instead. That’s how thick it was. You could actually cup it in your hands and hold it there. It was like holding a ghost. You could feel all that death from the marsh in it chilling your skin. It became a game for us to see who could hold their fistful of fog the longest, and then the game became running toward the house while trying to enclose it, which further evolved into a determination to try to get into the house while still cupping the fog in your hands. We never made it anywhere near the house. The fog was too slippery for the task, dribbling out between our fingers as we ran.

But then Jacob figured out a way to blow on the fog that would make it spin into a globe. He’d stay down there at the marsh’s edge for hours, practicing rolling the fog in his hands with his breath, trying to keep it going for as long as he could. It always bored the hell out of me and our younger brother, Mattie. Neither one of us could do it. We just didn’t have the breath for it, but we never wanted to leave him alone while he practiced because that’s how bodies go missing in the marsh. You never knew what was hiding in the fog just out of view. So, we’d stay and watch, keeping an eye on the fog for him in case one of those dead Indians rose from his grave and came after us with his tomahawk.

“Okay, I’m ready,” Jacob said one day after practicing for awhile. He scooped a fresh batch of fog in his hands and then started running for the house, keeping it spinning with each exhalation like it was the world in his grasp.

We ran after him, not getting too close in case we tripped him up. I could see bits of the fog slipping away, but he was keeping a lot of it in his hands, blowing and running at the same time.

Mattie rushed ahead to open the front door for him and then he was through, still a few wisps clutched in his hands. In the atrium, he stopped blowing and we watched the fog dissipate above us.

It should have been a cause for celebration—we had finally pulled off the impossible task—but a somber mood struck us. The marsh was a place of death, not fit for any house, let alone our house, and we had brought some of its morbid air into it. The decay had diffused and we could never get it back. My brothers and I breathed gingerly for a long while afterwards, feeling the stink of death in our lungs everywhere we went in the house.

The fog sat long in our minds so that even as we aged and shed our childish beliefs, the specter of death never stopped hanging over the house. Our house was a place of life, not just with our family coming in and out of it and all the pets and plants we had, but also the spiders, rats, and mold in the basement. Even the furniture, which was old and made of wood, had a certain life to them. There wasn’t a corner of the house that didn’t have something breathing in it, but since we unleashed the fog, the house was just as much a place of death as the marsh was.

Jacob was more adamant than any of us in trying to dismiss the weight of our superstition, but I could tell it bothered him as much as it did the rest of us. Read more of Deathly Fog.

**************************************

Adam Brekenridge is a traveling professor for the US military who goes around the world teaching US soldiers stationed overseas. He has eighteen short story publications and most recently his work has appeared in Visions Magazine, Mystery Weekly, and Clockwork, Curses and Coal from Worldweaver Press.
He’s currently based in Seoul.

**************************************

Horror Bites Series

Volume 1: Alice’s Scars by Adam L. Bealby

When he met Alice, he wasn’t prepared to go down the rabbit hole. His love for her pushes him into the uncomfortable realization she might be mad. He wants to keep her safe, but what if that’s not what Alice wants?

Volume 2: Campfire Tales

Dear Reader,

You’ve been invited to a very special night of Campfire Tales, hosted by HorrorAddicts.net. Meet us at Old Bear Creek, just past Dead Man’s Curve. Dress warm. We’ll be waiting.

Four scary tales told by Next Great Horror Writer finalists and woven together by a trek through the woods you’ll never forget.

Volume 3: #NGHW Editor’s Pick

HorrorAddicts.net is proud to present our top 14 contestants in the Next Great Horror Writer Contest. The stories, scripts, and poems are the result of the hard work and dedication these fine writers put forth to win a book contract. We hope you enjoy the writing as much as we did.

Volume 4: #NGHW Winner

Requiem in Frost by Jonathan Fortin

BLACK METAL LIVES! When Ingrid and her mother move into a home in the deep frostbitten woods of Norway, they are haunted by extreme metal musician, Skansi Oppegård. Hoping to exorcise Skansi’s ghost, she talks her mom into being part of a metal band. Oppegård’s last musical creation awakens forces beyond Ingrid’s understanding and causes Skansi’s murderer to resurface. In the battle between a madman and zombies, metal may be the only weapon she has.

The Week in This Morbid Life news

The first week of the This Morbid Life blog tour is over! It’s been pretty amazing so far.

First off, the book has gotten some great reviews, including:

“Rhoads is the adventurous woman who’s done all the outrageous and brave things people like me wanted to do but were too scared. And she’s lived to tell about them. Five life-affirming stars!” Priscilla Bettis on Bookbub

“Candid, raw, unfiltered…Loren’s essays about life, death, dying, and living are utterly fascinating – completely engrossing. I picked up the book to read one or two chapters and before I knew it I had completed 3/4 of the book. I just couldn’t put it down.” — Roxanne Rhoads, Roxanne’s Realm 

“I almost wished that I was sitting in a coffee shop with the author and she was telling me these anecdotes, experiences and vignettes herself over a flat white. This is such a great book to dip into like a huge box of chocolates. It brought back memories of the ‘80’s and ‘90’s especially the ‘Modern Primitives’ book which gets a namecheck. I can’t recommend ‘This Morbid Life’ enough as I enjoyed it so much.” Carole Tyrell on Goodreads

The pieces I’ve written for other people’s blogs have started to go live:

I wrote about one particular “Unexpected Influence” that kept cropping up throughout This Morbid Life for MarthaJAllard.com.

I remembered the first time I watched a total lunar eclipse for Tillism.com in an essay called “I Fell in Love with the Moon.”

I Fell in Love with the Moon

A Bewitching Guide to Halloween posted my video introducing some of my favorite stories in This Morbid Life.

Jennifer Brozek’s Tell Me featured my guest post about how I grew into being morbid.

Fang-tastic Books featured an excerpt from my “Anatomy Lesson” essay.

The Home for Wayward Spirits published my guest post about Near Escapes, a local tour company that took me to visit a local crematorium.

The Paranormalists featured my “Tips for Hunting Ghosts.”

And finally, the Creatively Green Write-at-Home Mom interviewed me about This Morbid Life and its followup book, coming next year.

The blog tour continues for 3 more weeks! The schedule is in last week’s blog post.

This Morbid Life unleashed

Today is the day! My 15th book, a collection of death-positive essays posing as a memoir, is for sale. You can check the book out for yourself at Amazon: https://amzn.to/3AHBedT

The first reader review called This Morbid Life “a comfy old blanket that you just want to curl up with for days,” which I thought was a wonderful complement to the first Instagram review giving it 5 coffins. (Thank you, Kathy!)

The Goodreads giveaway ends tonight, so if you’d like a chance to win an ebook copy of the book, you need to act quickly: https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/329876-this-morbid-life

The first of the promotional essays went up on Friday. It’s about the unexpected influence that crept into several of the essays in This Morbid Life. You’ll never guess what it is.

Tomorrow begins the blog tour to celebrate the book’s release. I’ll be stopping by:

August 23 A Bewitching Guide to Halloween (Video post!)
https://www.abewitchingguidetohalloween.com/

August 24 Lisa’s World of Books
http://www.lisasworldofbooks.net/

August 25 Fang-tastic Books
http://fang-tasticbooks.blogspot.com

August 26 Paranormalists (Guest Post)
https://paranormalists.blogspot.com/

August 27 Roxanne’s Realm
http://www.roxannerhoads.com/

August 30 The Creatively Green Write at Home Mom (Interview)
http://creativelygreen.blogspot.com/

August 30 I Smell Sheep (Guest Blog)
http://www.ismellsheep.com/

August 31 Serena Synn (Interview)
https://serenasynn.blogspot.com/

September 1 Roxanne Rhoads FB
https://www.facebook.com/RoxanneRhoadsAuthor/

September 2 Booklikes
http://roxannerhoads.booklikes.com/

September 3 Bewitching Book Tours
https://bewitchingbooktours.tumblr.com/

September 6 Jazzy Book Reviews
http://bookreviewsbyjasmine.blogspot.com/

September 7 Sapphyria’s Books
https://saphsbooks.blogspot.com/

September 8 JB’s Bookworms with Brandy Mulder
https://jbbookworms.blogspot.com

September 9 Westveil Publishing
https://www.westveilpublishing.com

September 10 Fang-tastic Books FB
https://www.facebook.com/FangtasticBooks/

September 13 Momma Says: To Read or Not to Read
http://mommasaystoreadornottoread.blogspot.com/

September 14 Roxanne Rhoads Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/roxannerhoads/

September 15 Midnight Musings with Bertena
Www.midnightmusingswithbertena.blogspot.com

September 16 Supernatural Central
http://supernaturalcentral.blogspot.com

September 17 The Book Junkie Reads (Guest Post)
https://thebookjunkiereadspromos.blogspot.com/

September 20 Gail’s Gory Details
https://gailsgorydetails.blogspot.com/

The History of This Morbid Life

In less than a week, my 15th book — This Morbid Life — will be out from Automatism Press. It’s had quite a journey to publication, so seeing it in print finally is extra sweet.

Early in 2008, I submitted a proposal for a “best of” book that would collect some of my favorite essays from the confessional magazine I’d edited for 10 years. Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues attracted the second agent I sent it to, a young woman who’d just been promoted to full-time agent. She sold the book at auction to Scribner. It was only the second book she sold.

We had long conversations about my career. She wanted to represent both my fiction and nonfiction. I was excited to have my foot in the door of New York publishing.

Over the next several years, I pitched seven books to her. Among them were Wish You Were Here, the first two space opera books, Lost Angels, the first Alondra novel, and two books of essays. When she wasn’t able to place any of them, it was devastating for me to realize that the agency that had originally staked its claim on edgy, exciting books had moved into selling celebrity cookbooks. We weren’t compatible any longer.

I started to sell my books without an agent’s help. Lost Angels was published in 2012 by Black Bed Sheet Books. Wish You Were Here was published by Western Legends in 2013.

A small ebook publisher approached me early in 2013. I sent them the initial manuscript for This Morbid Life. The acquiring editor really liked it. We signed a contract in May. I started to get excited about the possibilities ahead of my punk-rock, death-positive memoir…

And then nothing happened. The book never got scheduled for production or even placed on the publisher’s list of upcoming books. By August of 2014, the editor admitted there were still no plans to publish it any time soon. Maybe I should have been more patient, but I withdrew the book from the publisher. Before I could figure out what to do next, my space opera novels sold (as a trilogy) to Night Shade Books. The next year was consumed with writing, publishing, and promoting those books.

It’s been a whirlwind ever since. Black Dog & Leventhal approached me to write 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die. I updated Wish You Were Here and published a second edition. I finished Angelus Rose, the sequel to Lost Angels, which came out last year, just before San Francisco was shut down in March.

Faced with having to entertain myself last year, I assembled Unsafe Words. I found another agent, then had two cemetery book proposals fall through last year. Emerian and I created the Spooky Writer’s Planner.

If nothing else, the isolation during the pandemic has given me a lot of time to think. It feels weird to have all these husks of books behind me: the Alondra novels, four or five unfinished cemetery projects, several books of essays. I don’t know if I would have chosen This Morbid Life as the next book to focus on, but once I bought Lynne Hansen’s cover last fall, I knew I had to put together a book to do it justice.

This iteration of This Morbid Life is one-third bigger than the last version. Both books started with the same essay — taking prom pictures in the cemeteries of Flint, Michigan — but the earlier book ended with taking my infant daughter to see the Body Worlds exhibit in 2004. This version includes morbid adventures up through Fire Season last year.

This Morbid Life got its first review already. The Bookeyman said, “I was blown away by the vulnerability and just how Loren laid everything out with no holding back. I loved this so much. What a fantastic life and what a beautiful love letter to her friends. I’m absolutely astonished. Everyone needs to read this ASAP.”

And then he gave the book 5 coffins. I cannot imagine higher praise.

You can check the book out for yourself at Amazon: https://amzn.to/3AHBedT

The Goodreads giveaway is running for a few more days, if you’d like a chance to win an ebook copy of the book: https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/329876-this-morbid-life

This Morbid Life is coming soon!

We’re two weeks away from the release of This Morbid Life, my death-positive memoir celebrating life, death, and all the lovely morbid things in-between. The ebook is now available for pre-order on Amazon.

You can pre-order the paperbacks (signed if you like) from my bookshop.

Other venues will follow soon, including Bookshop.org, IndieBound, Smashwords, and Borderlands Books.

In the meantime, you can enter to win a copy of the Kindle edition on Goodreads. You need a Goodreads account to enter and you’ll be asked to add the book to your To-Read Shelf. Check it out here:

.goodreadsGiveawayWidget { color: #555; font-family: georgia, serif; font-weight: normal; text-align: left; font-size: 14px;<br /> font-style: normal; background: white; }<br /> .goodreadsGiveawayWidget p { margin: 0 0 .5em !important; padding: 0; }<br /> .goodreadsGiveawayWidgetEnterLink {<br /> display: inline-block;<br /> color: #181818;<br /> background-color: #F6F6EE;<br /> border: 1px solid #9D8A78;<br /> border-radius: 3px;<br /> font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;<br /> font-weight: bold;<br /> text-decoration: none;<br /> outline: none;<br /> font-size: 13px;<br /> padding: 8px 12px;<br /> }<br /> .goodreadsGiveawayWidgetEnterLink:hover {<br /> color: #181818;<br /> background-color: #F7F2ED;<br /> border: 1px solid #AFAFAF;<br /> text-decoration: none;<br /> }<br /> Goodreads Book Giveaway This Morbid Lifeby Loren Rhoads

Giveaway ends August 22, 2021.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

The Cover of This Morbid Life

I met Lynne Hansen at one of the World Horror Conventions so long ago now that I can’t tell you which one.  I got to know her at the World Horror in Atlanta, when we spent one evening talking about being women in the horror field, our hopes and dreams and future projects. It was one of the most inspiring conversations of my life.

Somewhere along the way, Lynne started to design book covers. Last year, when I decided to put together a short story collection, I paged through Lynne’s available covers. There were some things I really loved, but noting was quite right. For the first time in my life, I commissioned a book cover — and I was thrilled by what she designed for me.

In addition to all her commissioned covers, Lynne also designs a monthly calendar which she gives away to her newsletter subscribers. Those images are available to be turned into book covers. You can subscribe to her newsletter here and check them out for yourself:  https://view.flodesk.com/pages/5efe1de66d32be002643c1b5

Last October, Lynne also (because clearly this woman needs to keep busy!) challenged herself to make a book cover a day. All of them were for sale at a discount off her regular rates, first come, first serve.

One day, she put up a mock cover that I just had to have.  My hands were shaking as I sent her an email, hoping no one else had beaten me to it. I’ve never sent a payment so quickly in my life.

Then I had to come up with a book worthy of the book cover. I’ve been working on it all year. It’s a collection of confessional essays I’ve written for zines, including Morbid Curiosity magazine, online magazines from Gothic.Net to Scoutie Girl, print magazines like Unzipped, and the Sex Toy Tales book.

The 45 essays range from taking prom pictures in a cemetery to spending a couple of days in a cadaver lab, from nursing a friend who was dying of AIDS to raising a kid who isn’t afraid of anything. I am so excited to unleash this book on the world — and I am so grateful to Lynne for inspiring me to pull the book together.

This Morbid Life comes out August 22. It will be available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indie Bound, Bookstore.org, and Smashwords. You’ll be able to get it in paperback and the ebook format of your choice. I’ll post the links as soon as I have them.

“Witty, touching, beautifully written, and haunting — in every sense of the word — This Morbid Life is an absolute must-read for anyone looking for an unusually bright and revealing journey into the darkest of corners.  Highly recommended!” — M.Christian, author of Welcome To Weirdsville