Hey everybody, M. here,

Just wanted to share the news that you can now pre-order a copy of Nyctalocos: A Collection of Night Terrors. As I mentioned the other day, the anthology is scheduled to come out in August and will contain my story Sherman Dismantled And Afloat. Visit the Chthonic Matter website to see the just-announced full table of contents and put in your pre-order so you get a copy right when it hits the shelves!

And while you are there, consider picking up a 2026 subscription to Chthonic Matter Quarterly for a year’s worth of innovative and thought-provoking weird horror, and so you do not miss my story What’s Behind The Walls, which is scheduled to appear in the Summer 2026 issue of the magazine (and which is a thematic followup to my story Sticky, which appeared in the Winter 2024 issue).

Should have another big announcement coming around the end of the month, stay tuned!
-M.

Hey everybody, M. here,

First I’m happy to share the news that my new horror story, Sherman Dismantled And Afloat, will be appearing in Nyctalocos: A Collection of Night Terrors from Chthonic Matter Press, which is scheduled to hit the shelves in August.

And just in case you forgot, or have stumbled onto my work for the first time just now and did not know in the first place, my story What’s Behind The Walls is scheduled to appear in the Summer 2026 issue of Chthonic Matter Quarterly. That story is sort of a thematic followup to my story Sticky from the Winter 2024 issue, so if you want to prepare your mind for the madness coming this summer, pick up a copy and dig in if you dare!

You can also subscribe to Chthonic Matter Quarterly for a full year of some of the most terrifying and thought-provoking new horror fiction getting published today.

Burial Books science fiction anthology title And cover art revealed
I received some additional good news on Friday: Burial Books officially revealed the title and the cover art for their upcoming science fiction anthology. It is going to be called Strange Tales  of Space And Time, and it’s got this cool, fun cover by Betty Rocksteady.

As I first announced last year, this anthology will contain my science fiction-comedy story, Kayfabe. This will be my second appearance in an anthology from Burial Books, the first being with my tale of memetic and demonic forces, #FireOfLove, which can be found in Weird Tales to Haunt Your Reptilian Brain, released last year and still available for your enjoyment.

Strange Tales of Space And Time is scheduled to appear in August, and it will be available for pre-order in May. A full reveal of the table of contents should be coming in the near future.

Get some FREE sword & sorcery in the new DMR Books digital sampler
I announced this in my previous blog on Friday and went a bit more in-depth, but since people love free stuff so much I thought it was worth mentioning once again: the new digital sampler anthology from DMR Books, titled The Battle Rages On, is now available to download FOR FREE.

Among the eight excellent tales therein, you will find a reprint of my story The Tears of Blood, which originally appeared in 2023’s Die By The Sword anthology (and introduces the world which reader will revisit in my book Kingdoms Trembling this June).

More news on the way, take care everyone!
-M.

Hey everybody, M. here,

Yesterday DMR Books released its new FREE digital sampler anthology titled The Battle Rages On, a followup to the popular sampler released in 2019, The Infernal Bargain and Other Stories. The ebook features a stunning cover by Brian LeBlanc and contains eight stories (six from contemporary authors and two from classic titans of years past) that showcase what DMR is all about. I’m happy to say that my story The Tears of Blood appears among them!

The story originally appeared in the first volume of Die By The Sword from DMR Books, and is also the first one that I set in the world that readers will revisit in my collection, Kingdoms Trembling, which is slated to be published in June by DMR Books. So if you want a feel for what you can look forward to this summer, download The Battle Rages On and charge headfirst into the weird world of action and adventure!

And you also get seven other stories that will get you familiar with the unparalleled force in sword & sorcery and dark fantasy that is DMR Books, including a previously unpublished story by Ethan Sabatella. So check it out!

Much more news on the way!
-M.

Hey everybody, M. here,

It’s release day (or “Harvey Day” as the wonderful people over at Harvey Duckman Presents call book release day) for the Knot On Tree, Fire On Stone anthology! I’m thrilled to have my short cosmic horror story The Magician appear in this book alongside 14 other tales of dark pagan myth, magic, and mayhem.

My story takes place in the Julio-Claudian era of the Roman Empire (a favorite historical time period of mine ever since I first watched the 13-part BBC miniseries I, Claudius when I was 15). It is about Julianus, the one and only magician in the Roman province of Hispania. Celebrated and adored, he finds himself suddenly and inexplicably exiled when the prevailing mood throughout the empire shifts. Fending for himself out in the hinterlands of Pannonia, he comes into contact with forces of decay even more profound than the ones that drove him away; or perhaps a different shade of the same forces.

Maybe one of these days I’ll get a chance to talk about why I decided to write a period piece as I think that real-life tale is sort of an interesting one in and of itself. But for now, I’ll just encourage you to check out the story and the rest of the great tales in this volume. You can buy the book here in your preferred format.

Plenty more news to come, stay tuned. Take care everyone!
-M.

Hey everybody, M. here,

The other day DMR Books announced its release schedule for 2026 and made the news public, so I can officially share that my first sword & sorcery collection, Kingdoms Trembling, will be published by DMR Books in June. It contains all previously unpublished stories that take place in the same world as my stories The Tears of Blood and The Eye Within The Eye, which appeared in Die By The Sword and Die By The Sword Vol. II respectively.

I’ll have plenty more to say about the contents (and the cover, for that matter) as the year gets going, believe me! In the meantime, if you want to get yourself prepared for summer, grab a copy of Die By The Sword and/or Die By The Sword Vol. II and dig in!

-M.

Hey everybody, M. here,

Happy New Year! This year I am breaking from tradition and attempting to actually get my New Year’s blog post up on the first day of the year. Without further ado, here is a quick recap of what happened over the last 365 days publishing-wise, followed by a run-through of what I’ve got lined up for 2026 so far.

Stories that came out in 2025

2025 ended up being a very productive year, maybe my most productive one since I started getting published, but not a particularly high-volume one for anthology appearances. Such things can happen when acceptance dates and release dates line up in a particular way.

Over the summer, I appeared in Weird Tales to Haunt Your Reptilian Brain, the un-themed multi-author horror anthology from Burial Books with my story #FireofLove. Then at the end of October, I was in Inkd Publishing‘s Cthulhu Mythos anthology Cthulhu Dreams with my story A Special Way of Doing Things. This was my first time appearing in an anthology from either of these indie presses, and I was really impressed at how both of the books ended up looking (and the work of the other authors found therein!).

#FireofLove is half social media-era tech tale told in snippets of online video, half noirish revenge plot, with a demonic twist that ties together the two narrative threads. I could go into the details a little more here, but when the story came out, Burial gave me the opportunity to talk a little more deeply about where the story came from and what I was going for with it, in an article that you can read on the Burial Books website.

A Special Way of Doing Things is also now that I think of it, completely by coincidence, a story told from two perspectives; one of a woman who has just been hired on to work in IT at Miskatonic County, and of the author of a digital diary she stumbles on to written by a temp decades earlier.

While this dive into the Cthulhu Mythos deals with the denizens of Innsmouth, the semi-epistolary style of this reality-bender was more inspired by my favorite H.P. Lovecraft story, The Whisperer In Darkness. I think it’s a pretty idiosyncratic take on the Mythos that nevertheless plays with those classic Lovecraftian themes of madness and the loss of certainty about one’s own sanity, which I find to be the most authentically scary stuff in Lovecraft (and one of the most authentically disturbing things in general).

Sound interesting? You can pick up a copy of Weird Tales to Haunt Your Reptilian Brain here, and Cthulhu Dreams here.

Now on to some, but not all, of the stuff I’ve got lined up for 2026.

What’s On The Way in 2026

I’ve got a couple of things in the works that I’m not quite cleared to announce yet, so I’m going to restrict myself to what I can. First, as I just announced on Facebook, my short cosmic horror period piece The Magician will be appearing this month in the Knot On Tree, Fire On Stone: Curse On Axe and Bloody Thrones anthology of dark age pagan fiction from UK-based publisher Harvey Duckman Presents… The story is set in the Julio-Claudian period of the Roman Empire, which has long been one of my favorite historical eras.

Then, in the summer, I’ve got two more stories on the way.

My horror story What’s Behind The Walls is slated to appear in the Summer 2026 issue of Chthonic Matter Quarterly, and is a thematic followup to my story Sticky which ran in the Winter 2024 issue.

My science-fiction comedy Kayfabe will be appearing in the sci-fi anthology coming up from Burial Books. It is a story much different from the on in Burial’s horror anthology, though it also deals in some sense with the madness of crowds. If you know the word in the title, you’ve already gotten a teaser into what it’s about, but that’s as far as I’m going with spoilers.

Other Miscellany

Other than the stuff I’m waiting for the go-ahead to talk about, I have a project I’ve been working on here and there which I was hoping to be farther along with by now but might still get into place this year. How’s that for cryptic?

Relatedly, I’ve sort of been considering a social media/web presence revamp. I’m torn on it, because I believe that maintaining a web presence that you, as an author, own and can point people to as a public-facing destination is important (dystopian issues and paradoxes surrounding what constitutes ownership online that have sprung up in the past few years aside). At the same time, expecting to draw much organic, non-bot traffic to this blog, let alone use it to generate a great deal of interest, might be an artifact of a kind of thinking stuck in the late-’90s. And since I’m far from being a WordPress developer, there are some annoying facets of upkeep that occasionally worry me.

We’ll see. If I end up actually getting myself onto an additional, more useful social media outlet than what’s left of Facebook, I’ll let everyone know here (and on Facebook).

Anyway, I’m trying to start out the year strong, so time to get back to reading! Much more news to come over the next couple of months. Take care everyone!
-M.

Hey everybody, M. here,

I was getting ready to write my year-end wrap-up post without making any of those big announcements I’d mentioned in my post earlier this month, but much to my excitement I got an email yesterday that crossed some t’s and dotted some i’s, so I can officially announce that my short story The Magician will be appearing in the upcoming anthology from UK-based publisher Harvey Duckman Presents! The anthology will be called Knot On Tree, Fire On Stone: Curse On Axe and Bloody Thrones. It is a collection of tales set in (or around) the Dark Ages and steeped in ancient pagan mythos. My story is a tale of cosmic horror set a bit before the Dark Ages, during the Roman Empire’s Julio-Claudian era, but it gets you ready for the fall.

I’d say more but I don’t want to veer into spoiler territory; but fear not, you will not have long to wait to see what this one is all about! The anthology is slated to come out in January, in fact you can already pre-order the Kindle version if you’re an e-book person (print should be on the way shortly thereafter).

Much, much more to come, on this story and a few other things I am still waiting to share the news on. Take care everyone!
-M.

Hey everybody, M. here,

It’s been a couple of weeks since I got my contributor copy of Cthulhu Dreams in the mail and while I got some pictures up over on Facebook pretty quickly, I realized I neglected to share them here. I was running into some problems uploading images that I’ve now gotten basically figured out, so you can take a look at some pictures of this absolutely beautiful volume right here next to these words and down there below.

Again, totally thrilled to be in this anthology from Inkd Publishing and if you’re looking for some new Cthulhu Mythos horror to add to your reading list for 2026 from a lineup of exciting and innovative authors, this is the one to pick up! (Available in print or e-book). This one contains my short story A Special Way of Doing Things, a decades-spanning, perception-warping, partially epistolary tale of local government and IT management done the Miskatonic County way.

I’ve said before that this story is both one of my most idiosyncratic and one of my most traditional explorations of the Lovecraft Mythos, so if you want to see what that means, grab one of these in your format of choice (and you can take a look at that preview of the first page of the story right there to get a hint of what you’re getting yourself into).

Besides the annoying changes in how I upload images over here vexing and haunting me, one of the reasons I’ve been sitting on posting these images here on my author blog is because I was hoping I could time things such that I could possibly post some additional news alongside the pictures. I’ve got three or four updates at this point that I am absolutely itching if not outright on the verge of exploding to share, but I might not be able to speak about a couple of them before the end of the year.

At the very least I should have a year-end wrap-up coming soon, possibly with some teasers of stuff to come and more news on the upcoming stories I’ve already announced over the past couple of months.

Time to get back to work, take care everyone!
-M.

Hey everybody, M. here,

I’m happy to share that the Cthulhu Dreams anthology from Inkd Publishing is now available for purchase in print and digital.

This one contains my story about a rediscovered digital diary and the eldritch secrets that may be revealed within, A Special Way of Doing Things. It’s been a while since I’ve made a foray into the Lovecraft Mythos, and I think this perception-bending tale of local government done the Miskatonic County way might represent both my most idiosyncratic and my most traditional take on it, so grab a copy in print or digital and find out what I mean!

Should have some more updates to come in the relatively near future, don’t forget to follow me on Facebook if you’re on there and dig my stuff. Take care everyone!

-M.

Hey everybody, M. here,

Got a few developments over the past few weeks I wanted to share! First of all, the Kickstarter for Cthulhu Dreams is going great, it’s funded and moving into stretch goal territory with about a day and a half left to go.

As part of the social media promotion for the Kickstarter, Inkd Publishing has been putting together these cool looking images announcing the story for each author and today mine hit Facebook. I wanted to share it here as well because I’m really excited about the look of this one, especially with that image of yours truly, which I think makes me look like a walking work of German Expressionist cinema (a thought that in turn has made me want to re-watch one of my all-time favorite horror movies, Carl Theodor Dreyer‘s Vampyr, this coming spooky season).

Inkd’s Facebook post also has a nice blurb about the story, so have a look at it if you want the first look at what you’re getting into with my latest Lovecraftian tale. I’ll probably have more teasers in the coming weeks, as I believe the anthology is set to go on sale in October.

I’ve got another cool picture as well that you might have seen if you’re following me on Facebook. Last month (or two months ago? Time is flying by!) when Weird Tales to Haunt Your Reptilian Brain came out, I snapped up a paperback copy as soon as I could which you might have already seen.

A few weeks later, I received the exciting news that contributors would be getting a HARDCOVER copy of the anthology from Burial Books, which I received in the mail a few days ago. I thought the cover art was stunning to begin with, but I think something about the artwork really lends itself to the hardcover format. You can see it pictured right there next to some of my favorites in the genre, and you can buy one of them of your own if you want your shelf to look at least that cool if not cooler (and want some excellent new horror to read!).

And oh yeah, speaking of hardcovers, in the statistically unlikely circumstance that you happen to be reading this while the Kickstarter is still rocking, you can back it for a hardcover copy of Cthulhu Dreams that will NOT be available after the Kickstarter ends.

Time for me to get back to work, take care everyone!
-M.