We are only two months away from the launch of my debut collection, Cyanide Constellations and Other Stories! The collection can currently be pre-ordered through Dark Matter Ink here!

I’m so excited to get this book out there in the world. I thought I would do a little promo today with the above mood board and a brief look into the table of contents!

“The Viridescent Dark” opens up the collection and it’s a story I originally had published in The First Five Minutes of the Apocalypse, edited by the wonderful Brandon Applegate. I loved writing this story. It’s a somber piece about looking up to the once familiar moon and seeing it covered in a destructive algae bloom. I also named a cat Walt Whisker in this one, which seems important to note.

“As Humans Burn Beneath Us” made its first appearance in Field Notes from A Nightmare: An Anthology of Ecological Horror — such a fantastic anthology edited by Alex Ebenstein. It continues with the theme of Nature vs. Humans, but is told entirely from the point of view of clouds as they drift away during Earth’s final days.

“The Bones He Planted” was part of Seasons of Severance and is a very heavy grief story that focuses a lot on nature and our bodies returning to nature, though maybe in an unconventional way. I love stories where people morph into weird things, so creating an alien tree inspired by the Bullhorn Acacia and its symbiotic relationship with aggressive ants was a delightful way to experiment with grief, love, and the circle of life.

“A Haunting of Lawn Ornaments” is one of the brand new stories to this collection and I wrote it to help break up how bleak the collection is. I love pouring my whole being into the gloom when it comes to writing, but having a more lighthearted piece with a twisted sense of humor was a fun challenge for me to write. Within, find garden gnomes and other lawn ornaments possessed by evil spirits as they take some vengeance out on an HOA neighborhood. All those strict ordinances aren’t going to help these folks…

“The Revenge of Rappaccini’s Daughter” is my favorite in the collection and the one I’ve been talking about the most because it was just so fun to take one of my most beloved stories in the public domain and play around with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s characters. It’s easy to assume Hawthorne would hate what I’ve done to this story, but at the same time, he might not. Despite very much being a product of his time (though I hate that phrase) and holding up many traditional roles as a man in the 1800s, Hawthorne also seemed eager to disassociate himself from his great-great-grandfather, a vicious judge during the Salem Witch Trials. There were other cruel relatives of Hawthorne’s (who spelled their last name without the “w”) who Hawthorne never seemed to take pride in being related to. Additionally, Hawthorne often wrote of tragedies befalling women in rather sympathetic and thoughtful ways, so I can’t help that think maybe he would be on board with my version of Beatrice Rappaccini finally getting a little vengeance of her own. Also, stay tuned on my blog because I will later be interviewing the fabulous Tanya Pell about her upcoming novel Her Wicked Roots, a queer retelling of “Rappaccini’s Daughter” — I seriously can’t wait to read that book!

“Cyanide Constellations” made its first appearance alongside the earlier mentioned “The Bones He Planted” (both in Seasons of Severance). This is a weird, poetic little piece that combines nature and cosmic horror in a way that really spoke to my heart. It allowed me to play with point of view, go wild with my tendency to infuse poetic prose into my pieces, and create something sorrowful but hopefully beautiful. I chose this one as the title piece because I think it strongly captures the vibes of poison, nature, complex relationships, and exploring the unknown that this collection focuses on.

“With Radium on Her Lips” is a horrormance story that was first published in Dark Dispatch Issue # 2: Deadly Love. Inspired by the dreadful accounts of what happened to the infamous Radium Girls, this sapphic story focuses on a witch who lost her lover to the poison of the watch factory. Oddly, I think this story has one of the happier endings of the ones in this collection.

“Avian Eyes” focuses on birds because of course I had to have a bird story in here! If you came to our birds in horror panel at StokerCon (which was such a delightful panel), I mentioned I had a story about birds migrating to the moon and it is this piece! I had come across this article in Audubon Magazine that mentioned how in the 1600s, English minister Charles Morton theorized birds migrated to the moon for the winter. It was such a fabulous theory for some fowl inspiration.

“Moonflowers” previously appeared in The Horror Collection: Yellow Edition. It tackles the sorrow of a widow who must deal with her late husband’s obsessive brother, twisted secrets, and a haunting of her own making.

“Acidic Atonement on Sulfur Planet” was written for The Wicked Library podcast and is a longer piece that explores how even if we did find another habitable planet that could provide resources, we’d likely end up exploiting the poor and downtrodden as laborers. The main character in this one is complex, flawed, and entirely human. This piece goes deeper into cosmic horror than I normally write, but I have a soft spot for this story.

“Gardening by Moon: A How-To Guide” is inspired by the Farmers’ Almanac planting calendars. It was fun to play around with format a little in this piece and have a flash story between two longer stories. What are we planting? Well, you’ll have to read that one to find out…

“After the Twilight Fades” was originally published in Apex Magazine, Issue 136, which was seriously a highlight of my career because I’m a huge Apex fan. I’m grateful to have the story reprinted here in my very first collection. This story was inspired by a freelance client of mine who had old journals about hypnotism he wanted typed up since the pages were fading. The journals were written by my client’s late friend, who was a notorious hypnotist in Pittsburgh decades ago. It was neat to draw inspiration about hypnotism from such a unique source.