Sean Markey, here, publisher of Psychopomp (and The Deadlands and Fantasy Magazine) with a post about the end of things.

But not EVERY thing.

I’ll rip the Bandaid off quickly, and then expand a bit below:

1 – We will no longer be publishing novellas at Psychopomp.

2 – We will no longer publish novelettes on Psychopomp.

3 – Publishing nonfiction on Psychopomp is on hiatus.

4 – Fantasy Magazine is going on hiatus after our December issue.

Okay, that sucked, that was painful.

So let’s talk about WHY this is happening.

why

It’s tough times out there. I don’t have to tell you that.

The biggest reason we’ve arrived at this point is the most obvious one: funding.

With the exception of the first year’s fundraiser, the majority of The Deadlands funding has come out of my own pocket. All of our novella publishing efforts have been paid out-of-pocket. The purchase of Fantasy came in part from last year’s fundraiser, but after someone who stepped up to help us backed out at the last minute, the funds came from me.

Making a long story short:

• we did not sell enough copies of novellas to make it a viable pursuit going forward.
• we did not sell enough subscriptions of Fantasy Magazine to be on track to break even.
• we did not sell enough coins this year to fund The Deadlands.

My financial situation has changed, and I cannot keep paying out-of-pocket for these ventures.

Of course, it’s not ALL about money (it’s the art!) but having money sure does help…

This year, our Coins For The Ferryman fundraiser brought in less than half of what it did last year. And I want to say, for the record: I get it! I am grateful for all of the support we receive–I know I am not entitled to funding, and as I said: it’s tough times out there.

But that includes tough times for me, too.

And I can no longer afford to run a publishing venture at a wild loss.

what does this mean for Psychopomp novellas

We just published our last novella of 2025, K.L. Schroeder’s brilliant No One To Hold the Distant Dead. You should read it! It’s very good.

We will be publishing our last standalone novella next February with Bernie Jean Schiebeling’s House, Body, Bird (also very good, it will be available for preorder very soon!).

Amal Singh’s amazing The Three Apocalypses of Kabir Vasudeva will be published in the July issue of The Deadlands.

Thomas Ha’s novella Scion has found a new publisher and we’re VERY excited to see that published–it’s a story near and dear to our hearts, but I’ll let the author and the publisher announce that on their own terms.

All of the novellas and books we’ve published previously are still available for sale on our site, but I will be returning the rights of those works to their respective authors–I’ll always be a champion of these amazing authors, and will not do anything to hold them back. (Authors: I will be in touch about this via email!)

what does this mean for Fantasy Magazine?

December’s issue 99 will be the last issue we publish before going on hiatus. I do not know what the future of this magazine holds, but it has been an amazing experience being able to publish it (my first real fiction sale a million years ago–it’s special to me!).

I will close the ability to buy this issue via “subscription” on December 1st, and the magazine will be for sale here on Psychopomp.com for anyone who wants to read it.

I want to thank all of the authors who submitted stories for consideration in March’s issue, I wish we could have made it one more issue, but no money is no money, and this is a casualty of that.

You can withdraw the stories you’ve submitted via Moksha if you’d like. I’m working on a way to return those to you without marking them as “rejected,” because, truly, they were not.

Old issues will continue to be for sale, and will continue to be available to read here on Psychopomp.com

what does this mean for The Deadlands

For now? Nothing.

Deadlands will continue to be published quarterly. Diana Dima’s lovely novelette The City In White, originally purchased to run here on Psychopomp will be a part of April’s issue.

As mentioned, Amal’s novella will be in July’s issue.

Right now, our Patreon accounts for about 50% of what it costs to run The Deadlands.

We try to run a fundraiser–not a Kickstarter but a cool, wholly original fundraiser selling death-themed challenge coins to help bridge that gap. Unfortunately, this year’s fundraiser–after the cost of buying the coins, paying for the art, and shipping the coins to buyers (included in the purchase price)–won’t cover a single issue.

Maybe in the future we’ll look to expand again, but I’ve learned a hard lesson about focusing, I guess, and we will not be launching any new projects until such a time as The Deadlands is fully funded.

If we never get there? Well, I’m an optimist. I know we’ll get there.

In the middle of this bad news I do want to thank everyone that has supported us on Patreon, bought a coin, bought a copy of our books, and just generally spread the word and helped other people get HYPE about what we’re up to.

Really grateful about that. Thank you all!!

the future

We had an absolutely fantastic year:

Hugo nominations!

Nebula nominations!

An Ignyte win!

Theodore Sturgeon Award finalist!

Locus Awards finalist!

Shirley Jackson Award finalist!

Wow. Seriously.

We published so much good stuff. Talented authors, and a dedicated staff. Thank you all so so so so much.

Last thing before I go:

The best and most helpful thing you can do right now, if you’re moved to, is to sign up as a patron.

$2/mo gets you 4 ePub issues of The Deadlands per year.

$5/mo gets you 4 print issues (and ePub) of The Deadlands per year.

In 2026, due to rising costs, we will be raising these tiers by a small, but meaningful amount.

If you sign up now and stay subscribed, your cost will not increase.

If you sign up now and stay subscribed, you will help us continue to bring amazing deathy fiction, poetry, and nonfiction to readers everywhere.

Thank you all for your support.

Here is the link to sign up at Patreon.

Another October has arrived, crispy around the edges with a coolness that sinks into your bones. One season folds into another we rarely see, the ground beneath our feet filled with dark stirrings that will erupt come spring and summer. It is time to acquire your 2026 coin for your journey to The Deadlands via Psychopomp!

In 2026, our goals remained unchanged: to bring you fiction, poetry, and nonfiction about the thing no one likes to talk about, death. Your year-long journey through the Deadlands will bring you quarterly issues in digital and print, with work from authors such as Alix E. Harrow, R. B. Lemberg, Kelsea Yu, Vajra Chandrasekera, Maria Haskins, Daniel Oluremi, Josh Rountree, A. C. Wise, Ashok Banker, and more.

Your support allows us to pay our authors a professional rate. It also allows us to pay our staff of nine fellow creatives. We are all writers, artists, editors, working to make our creative community bigger and better and broader than ever.

Publishing has grown increasingly fraught and complicated over the past year, thanks to restrictions on mailing and printing, thanks to tariffs and the rising costs of paper. It costs roughly $42,000 to publish The Deadlands every year. Our patrons make a huge difference, but we remain under-funded and most of the cost to run this incredible zine come out-of-pocket, an unfortunately unsustainable model.

Help us do more in 2026.

The 2026 Fundraiser

Every sale of the coin allows us to keep publishing, paying our staff, writers, artists, and coin makers. In addition to being your entry to the Deadlands, every coin has a unique number on its edge, which gives you entry to occasional giveaways.

In 2026, we will be giving away Deadlands hoodies, limited edition skull mugs, one billion* stickers (*amount possibly exaggerated), skull candles, Deadlands limited edition pins, and more.

In addition to the 2026 coin, we are offering signed books from The Deadlands authors, including Suzan Palumbo, Fran Wilde, Maria Haskins, Lyndsie Manusos, Josh Rountree, Alix E. Harrow, A.C. Wise, and Vajra Chandrasekera.

Kate Lechler is offering a painted animal skull (coming soon!), and we have something special from Premee Mohamed also coming soon.

Pricing & Shipping

Pricing varies, but all items INCLUDE shipping.

Yes, the shipping prices are ridiculous but we are not in charge of those skeletons and their postal prices

We are shipping coins worldwide for this fundraiser. As we launch, Canada Post is on strike. This mailing effort may be further complicated by tariff rules in the US (keep reading below for notes on that). We are a small indie zine, and we will be doing our best, so please bear with us.

If you don’t see your shipping zone represented on the product page, visit our contact page and get in touch, we will make one for you!

Shipping Challenges

Please remember: we do not control shipping costs.

The Trump administration has made a mockery of the US postal system, raising prices and installing controls like no other administration before it. We live in an unprecedented era of countries ceasing shipping to the US entirely. Tariff costs may double our cost for obtaining coins, given the good enamel work comes from, you guessed it, China.

We have seen other fundraisers have their cargo stuck in warehouse or port, because tariffs increased between shipment and arrival. We appreciate your patience as we navigate this new, tremendously hard and stupid system. Packages under $800 are no longer immune from import costs, so this changes literally everything.

Fundraiser ends October 31st!

Here are the items on offer in our 2026 fundraiser:

The 2026 Coin

The centerpiece of our 2026 fundraiser! Obtain your coin, secure your journey with Charon, across all turbulent waters that may come. (Final designs subject to production changes depending on what the enamel needs.)

This beautiful coin was designed by The Deadlands art director inkshark and features colorful fungi having overtaken the skull we unearthed long ago. On the reverse, our beloved Deadlands tree and stars.

Our 2026 coin will only be produced made-to-order, and not available throughout the year. This limited edition offering is only available during our October fundraiser.

The coin is available in three worldwide shipping zones, so be sure to hit the dropdown and select the correct geographic area.

Coin + signed Subterranean Press edition STARLING HOUSE by Alix E. Harrow

Dust jacket and interior illustrations by Rovina Cai.

Starling House is Alix E. Harrow’s contribution to the long tradition of haunted house novels. Our edition includes 9 full-page illustrations, plus endsheets, a chapter head illustration, and dust jacket by Rovina Cai.

The people of Eden, Kentucky, a dying coal town, agree that the decrepit Starling House mansion—with its gothic facade and beast-covered gates—is best avoided. But Opal has never much cared what the people of Eden think. She’s always felt drawn to the place. When she cuts her hand on those gates and its owner, the brooding Arthur Starling, tells her to run and not come back, she doesn’t listen to that either.

Coin + signed RAKESFALL by Vajra Chandrasekera

One of RAKESFALL’s beginnings can be traced to Issue #1 of The Deadlands in a short story.

Some stories take more than one lifetime to tell. There are wrongs that echo through the ages, friendships that outpace the claws of death, loves that leave their mark on civilization, and promises that nothing can break. This is one such story.

Coin + painted bones

Kate Lechler, Deadlands contributor and bone enthusiast, will paint for you ONE SKULL.

This skull will not be human, but sourced from wildlife, found amid reeds, rivers, regrets. Kate loves to hike and explore and collect bones. Who doesn’t, really?

The skull shown is from a prior fundraiser—yours will be different in both shape and colors. BUT, a skull nonetheless. We knew him, Horatio. Or did we??

Coin + signed FROM THESE DARK ABODES by Lyndsie Manusos

St. Edah’s, a house without exit: Lethe and Petunia are mortal prisoners, servants to immortal creatures who unzip from their skin each night and party as skeletons.

Lethe has no memory of how she came to be trapped in this nightmare, only that despite the tenderness she feels for Petunia, she must escape. Together, they traverse the infinite house, searching for passage while finding evidence of their former lives—lives that are not what they believed them to be.

Lethe must decide: join the immortals in their revelry or escape St. Edah’s once and for all.

Coin + signed THE UNKILLABLE FRANK LIGHTNING by Josh Rountree

In this riveting historical horror novel, Frankenstein is vividly reimagined in the Wild West. With equal parts Cormac McCarthy, Mary Shelley, and Stephen Graham Jones, Rountree deftly navigates the terrible aftermath of love and death.

Twenty-five years after she resurrected her husband, Catherine has decided she must make things right. She travels back to Texas with a pair of hired killers ready to destroy Frank. But Frank has remade himself as the Unkillable Frank Lightning, traveling with the Wild West Show.

Coin + Bespoke Writing Prompts from Premee Mohamed

Premee Mohamed, Deadlands contributor and beetle at large, will craft for you WRITING PROMPTS.

These writing prompts will not be human, but sourced from sources we cannot yet divulge. Have they been plucked from a dying black hole? Did Premee find them in Pluto’s rocky core? Perhaps they were startled from their cocoon beneath a dew-damp peony in a seventh-century garden. We cannot say!

Premee will deliver the handwritten prompts in glittery ink—yours and yours alone, for whatever you may want to create.

Coin + signed German editions of WENDY, DARLING and HOOKED by A.C. Wise (1 set available)

Find the second star from the right, and fly straight on ’til morning, all the way to Neverland, a children’s paradise with no rules, no adults, only endless adventure and enchanted forests – all led by the charismatic boy who will never grow old.

Join Wendy on her journey to rescue her son from Neverland, and stay for the truth behind the man who is the devious Captain Hook.

These books are in German, yes!

Coin + signed A CATALOG OF STORMS by Fran Wilde

From sentient storms to walkabout skyscrapers, mythical creatures to mysterious museum guides, the characters and tales of the 14 stories in Fran Wilde’s A Catalog of Storms challenge and subvert expectations. 

Here you’ll find the Nebula and Hugo Awards finalists “A Catalog of Storms” and “Clearly Lettered in a Most Steady Hand,” and multiple Best of the Year anthology selections such as “Shadow Plane” and “The Rain Remembers What the Sky Forgets.”  

The collection represents a decade of genre-spanning, celebrated stories from one of SFF’s most inventive and lyrical voices.

Coin + signed COUNTESS by Suzan Palumbo

A queer, Caribbean, anti-colonial sci-fi novella in which a betrayed captain seeks revenge on the interplanetary empire that subjugated her people for generations.

Virika Sameroo lives in colonized space under the Æcerbot Empire, much like her ancestors before her in the British West Indies. After years of working hard to rise through the ranks of the empire’s merchant marine, she’s finally become first lieutenant on an interstellar cargo vessel.

When her captain dies under suspicious circumstances, Virika is arrested for murder and charged with treason despite her lifelong loyalty to the empire. Her conviction and subsequent imprisonment set her on a path of revenge, determined to take down the evil empire that wronged her, all while the fate of her people hangs in the balance.

NOTE: This item ships from a Canadian author. As we launch, Canada Post is on strike. It is possible this book will take a while to ship, or will be further complicated by tariffs in the US. You assume this risk when you buy this item.

Coin + signed SIX DREAMS ABOUT THE TRAIN by Maria Haskins

Six Dreams About the Train and Other Stories by Swedish-Canadian author Maria Haskins brings together 23 speculative fiction short stories—two of them previously unpublished—that span fantasy, science fiction, and horror, delving into the dark, the strange, the beautiful, and the uncanny points in between.

Many of the stories take place in the deepest parts of the woods, on the shadowy border between reality and fairytale. Others take place on the streets of Vancouver; in a whispering circle of ancient stones on a high tor; and backstage at a rock concert.

NOTE: This item ships from a Canadian author. As we launch, Canada Post is on strike. It is possible this book will take a while to ship, or will be further complicated by tariffs in the US. You assume this risk when you buy this item.

Coin + signed WOLVES & GIRLS by Maria Haskins

From the dark and enchanting mind of Maria Haskins comes 38 weird and wonderful stories featuring werewolves, lost girls, shapeshifters, ghosts, and more.

In Wolves and Girls and Other Dark Gems, you can travel across the stars in an old space freighter, venture across bridges with trolls rumoured to live underneath, join the resistance fighting against a kaiju invasion, and bring comfort to a captured unicorn.

Along the way, Maria Haskins defies expectations and blends genres, always seeking the darkness at the heart of a tale and exposing the dangerous beauty concealed within. This collection introduces readers to a fierce and prolific fantasist with a voice that’s uniquely her own.

This collection teaches us we can’t always tell where the threat truly lies and shows us the humanity within even the darkest monsters. Precise, gloriously dangerous, and always dark, every tale is a jewel to be treasured. Introduction by E. Catherine Tobler.

NOTE: This item ships from a Canadian author. As we launch, Canada Post is on strike. It is possible this book will take a while to ship, or will be further complicated by tariffs in the US. You assume this risk when you buy this item.

Coin + 2025 Psychopomp eBooks

With this tier you not only get a beautiful coin, but you’ll get copies of all three books we published so far this year, as well as a copy of our fourth and final novelette of 2025 when it’s released in November. Happy reading!

One Message Remains, by Premee Mohamad

Starstruck, by Aimee Ogden

Summer in the House of the Departed, Josh Rountree

No One To Hold the Distant Dead, K.L. Schroeder

Coin + Deadlands 2025 eBooks

With this tier you’ll get the aforementioned Ferryman’s Coin and ALSO all four issues of The Deadlands published in 2025 as ebooks delivered straight to your email.

Issue 37

Issue 38

Issue 39

Issue 40 (forthcoming on October 19th!)

Join our Patreon

How can you best help The Deadlands? You can join our Patreon.

Your $5/month helps us consistently buy stories, poems, and essays, and enables us to pay our tireless staff.

Via Patreon, you get Deadlands issues before anyone else, and get treats throughout the year, including giveaways, free ebooks of novelettes, and more. in 2026, we’re giving away skull candles, Deadlands hoodies, stickers, limited edition pins, and more.

Join our Patreon and fund our skeleton crew throughout the entire year.

Sheree says:

I created several anthologies based on the works that I kept returning to, as so many of the pieces…were truly impactful. It is my hope that readers will think about the afterlife—which is to say, our present lives—with eyes more turned to the magical potential and the importance of each moment. This Afterlives collection has some very powerful, gifted voices that explore liminal spaces, the veil between this world and the possible next (next, next?).

Without further ado, please look upon this finely crafted table of contents. The authors of Afterlives 2024: The Year’s Best Death Fiction are:

I. Breathing Beyond the Veil ( Death’s new robes…)

(These opening stories plunge us into surprising and startling transformations, explore the visceral, immediate shifts that redefine existence in new forms beyond what we think of as conventional, everyday life.)

• “How To Get Away with Living” by Chisom Umeh (Sci-Fi, Nigerian, Ethics, Bureaucracy/Hustling Beyond the Grave?/Resurrection)
• “Drinking Dead Brazilians” by Lia Mulcahy (Queer, Magical Realism, Afterlife, Liberation)
• “Eyes Of My Brother” by Robert Luke Wilkins (African/Indigenous Inspired Folk Horror, Body Horror, Grief, Spiritual)

II. Threads of Memory (who are we here and beyond life, the enduring consciousness and challenge of being, existence)

(These stories explore how our consciousness, personal and cultural memory, and ancestral bonds kind of haunt of us, persist, shaping our identities and influencing the living from beyond the spectral veil)

• “Labyrinth” by Beth Goder (Literary Speculative, Psychological Haunting, History, Memory)
• “The Texture of Memory, of Light” by Samara Auman (Dystopian Sci-Fi, Memory, Grief, Social Commentary)
• “A Proper Vessel, A Perfect House” by Ash Huang (Ancestral Dark Fantasy, Cultural, Possession)
• “Not all your bones are yours” by Plangdi Neple (Afrofuturist Folk Horror, Body Horror, Atonement)
• “Rooms of Our Own” by Toshiya Kamei (Digital Afterlife Sci-Fi, Grief, Ethics)
• “The Lark Ascending” by Eleanna Castroianni (AI Sci-Fi, Memory, Consciousness, Legacy)

III. Beyond the Sacred Veil (stories that explore the rituals, ideas around justice, and the great grand design of life/death/afterlife)

(These stories are set in more diverse cultural spaces and offer other understandings of death, explore sacred rituals, engage with the idea of spiritual justice, and/or  explore how choices and actions may live on, requiring restoration or resolutions beyond even the grave.)

• “Unquiet on The Eastern Front” by Wole Talabi (Historical Folk Horror, African, Colonialism)
• “Raising an Ancestor” by Kay Mabasa (Cultural Fantasy, African, Ancestral Connection)
• “When Rain Clouds Gather” by Rutendo Chidzodzo (Magical Realism, African, Justice)
• “Onitsha Main, Ochanja, The Twins, Nkpor, and the Shadows of Shoprite” by Somto Ihezue (Magical Realism, Nigerian, Allegory)
• “The Empty Throne” by Benjamin C. Kinney (Theological Speculative, Jewish-themed, Agency)
• “The Colour of the Ninth Wave” by Katie McIvor (Historical Dark Fantasy, Irish Mythology, Justice)

IV. Celestial Dust & Mortal Wills (stories that confront the infinite, the end…)

(This section of stories confronts some of the broader cosmic implications of death, and/or  poignant encounters with cosmic forces beyond our comprehension.)

• “Mister Yellow” by Christina Bauer (Cosmic Sci-Fi, Ethical, Reality, Destruction)
• “At the End of Everything” by Spencer Nitkey (Existential Sci-Fi, Cosmic Decay, Oblivion)
• “The Ghost Tenders of Chornobyl” by Nika Murphy (Historical Supernatural, Ukrainian, Trauma, Healing)
• “Twice Every Day Returning” by Sonya Taaffe (Lyrical Magical Realism, Queer, Cultural, Grief)

V. The Heart’s Persistent Song (works that focus on purpose, acceptance, and those final, lasting echoes of life)

(These final stories anchor the collection with themes of finding new purpose in the afterlife, achieving a meaningful, emotional acceptance of loss, and/or the enduring, transformative nature of love and unique identity.)

• “Leak” by Maria Hossain (Revenant Horror, Environmental Justice, Social Commentary)
• “A Tapestry of Dreams” by Victor Forna (Magical Realism, African, Healing, Choice)
• “The Eleventh Three-Quarters Hour” by Leslie What (Magical Realism, Grief, Bureaucracy, Haunting)
• “What It Means to Drift” by Rajeev Prasad (Sci-Fi, Identity, Emotion, AI, Grief, Purpose, Self-acceptance)
• “A Late Appearance by Death” by Victoria Brun (Literary Speculative, Compassion, Purpose)
• “Fat Kids” by Alex Jennings (Magical Realism, African Diaspora, Identity, Self-acceptance)

Afterlives 2024: The Year’s Best Death Fiction will be available in October 2025—and we’re already lining up good things for the NEXT volume. We’ve got an editor you’re going to love—but more on that later. Let’s read that TOC again…

Psychopomp Novellas

A Voice Calling, Christopher Barzak

Lovely Creatures, KT Bryski

From These Dark Abodes, Lyndsie Manusos

Psychopomp Novelettes

What Any Dead Thing Wants, Aimee Ogden

Joanna’s Bodies, Eugenia Triantafyllou

We Who Will Not Die, Shingai Kagunda

Psychopomp Short Stories

No Lost (Never Lost), Premee Mohamed

The Deadlands

FICTION

Threnody in Dark Wood, Avra Margariti

The Glass Sarcophagus, Tiffany Morris

Auspicium, Diana Dima

Symphony of the World’s Roots, Damián Neri

Totality, Brandi Sperry

Your Sword, Your Trumpet, Anjali Patel

The Slave Boy, Denzel Xavier Scott

doorbell dot mov, Jennifer R. Donohue

I Love Him Artichoke, Anna-Claire McGrath

The City Unsleeping, Anya Leigh Josephs

The Weather Man, Stephen M.A.

The Clockmaker, Marc Joan

The Ecological Impacts of Resurrection: a Field Study, Corey Farrenkopf

Raising an Ancestor, Kay Mabasa

The Rerebirth of Slick, Stephen Kearse

Rachel Is at a Protest, Esther Alter

End-of-Life, Lauren Ring

Three Things That Happen the Night My Dad Dies, Isabel Cañas

The Empty Ones, Vivian Shaw

On the Existence of Ghosts, As If, James Van Pelt

Catalogue of the Exofaithful Practices on Exoplanet SSR24-∞, Marisca Pichette

The Feast Night of Vengeful Ghosts, Lavie Tidhar

The Last Great Beautiful Leap, Haden Cross

Gravediggers, Nat Nguyen

POETRY

Inferno guts Manila, Mark Cunanan

Earth as Eidolon, Alexander Atreya

Mourning Person, Anuja Mitra

For Kristen, Who Would Have Turned 47 Today, Melissa Frederick

When the Sounds of Fallen Patriots Break into the Wind, I Will Play Dead, Olalekan Daniel Kehinde

the golden armor of science, Dylan Haston

Carbon Cycle, Lindsay King-Miller

Intersections of grief, Diana Dima

Spawn Red Meat Arachnid, Chris Panatier

Inverse Requiem, Abhinav

The High Priestess Falls in Love with Death, Ali Trotta

The Handsome Men, Richard Leis

When the Dead Come In Pieces Will You Remain Unstained, Shana Ross

The Price of Becoming A Villain Is To Quell One’s Kin In A Charade Of Pact With The Gods, Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan

Shattered Souls at Heaven’s Gate, Ayòdéjì Israel

Hiatus, River

NONFICTION

Ask a Necromancer, Amanda Downum

Your Body Conquers Death, Sophia-Maria Nicolopoulos

Etch A Sketch, Stephanie French

The Self-Chosen Burial Rites of a Bunch of Twenty-Somethings, Eleora Ryan

Liturgy of the Hours, Soni Brown

OTHER CATEGORIES

Best Semiprozine – The Deadlands

Best Publisher – Psychopomp

Best Editor – E. Catherine Tobler

Best Artist – Cory Skerry

Music has been something I’ve been passionate about since I was very young. And from well before the launch of Psychopomp the small press, and Psychopomp the cool, gothy blog, I always knew that I’d create Psychopomp the music publisher.

Today I’m excited to announce the realization of that idea, that we’ve signed our first band on at Psychopomp.

Hail Your Highness is a Michigan-based dream rock duo making an original soundtrack (OST) to Aimee Ogden’s upcoming Psychopomp novella Starstruck.

I talked to Hail Your Highness and author Aimee Ogden about the project:

Introducing Hail Your Highness

Describe your sound for people who have never heard your songs before. What’s a good introduction to Hail Your Highness?

We think of Hail Your Highness as bigger than its individual parts, a project with no easy genre. We started out in the hardcore/screamo scene of Michigan back in the mid 2000s where bands like Chiodos and Still Remains were representing the scene, and growing up with that influence is always something HYH has tapped into, and is still built into our foundation. 

Our sound is further influenced by a love of indie pop and a deep passion for K-Pop. We like to think of our sound as constantly evolving, a sentient concept of sound grounded the the music-sphere of a dream-like state. Listen to how songs like “Imagine the Cure,” “Dandelion,” and “Duality” swing from dream pop to grunge to rock-driven trap

What drew you to this project?

The combination of books and music are two of our top tier passions. To be able to combine them into a project creating an OST for the first time felt like a fresh opportunity to do something new that we were ready to step into. After reading Starstruck, the visual and musical storyline instantly came together and developed into a tangible, layered sound that pushed us outside our box and normal musical structures. We’re always looking for unique projects to take on outside of our standard “music industry flow” of release a single, promote it, tour it, onto the next. This project leneded us a hand up in a state of ruminating and figuring out what our next move as a band would be. 

What can we expect from this OST

We dove into our back-catalog of music after reading the story, of songs that have been piling up since pre-Covid and instantly knew several that would work perfect for this story. Being such a soft, almost Ghibli-like adventure fantasy featuring vivid anthropomorphic characters, we were able to take a fresh approach on how we structure songs and tap into multiple genres that we’ve specialized in over the years.

Each song not only showcases a different style of music we love playing, but we also took an approach of giving each character their own theme. As soon as we read about Prish, Alsing, Otra, and Wick we were able to instantly romanticize the beautiful writing and character descriptions that Aimee provided us with as readers.

As musicians, we took to the path of creating a cinematic score, in a way, where we have songs for intros, opening credits, character themes, and ending credits. That helped us create this epic sort of vibe to this adventure of finding companionship in the most unlikely of characters. It’s such a visually written story, it was so easy for us to see the world and feel the emotions of these 4 core characters that Aimee has created. 

What’s the best way for people to follow Hail Your Highness and support the band?

Our most active social media platform is Instagram and we’ve been leaning more into testing out Blue Sky and Threads as well even though you can follow us on literally everything. But the best way to support and stay in contact with us is on our Patreon. We’ve been able to create this beautiful little safe community over the past 8 years where we share everything from demos, new music first, livestreams, and group chats, to handwritten monthly postcards, exclusive merch and even one-on-one mentoring sessions in songwriting from us. It’s free to join with access to exclusive blogs and photo galleries and many different subscription based tiers starting at just $5 for even more content you can’t find anywhere else. We always answer comments and DM’s and just have such a nice time being humans and talking about life while showing people everything that goes on behind the scenes to make what we do as an independent DIY band a reality.

Buying music is huge source of support these days in the digital streaming age, so Bandcamp is a great place to buy our physical media from CD’s, to cassettes that we put out on our own label, to our first vinyl that we were able to team up with our longtime friends at Rotten Princess Records to make happen just last year. You can find many exclusive releases on our Bandcamp as well, along with lots of other merch like shirts, stickers, and anything else we can dream up in the moment.

You can find all the links to support our band here: http://linktr.ee/hyhband

Bio:

On paper alone, Hail Your Highness sound poetic: two sisters from Michigan, who play dreamy emotional music that swirls together aspects of genres ranging from hard rock to shoegaze to trap. But it’s their music, with its unorthodox song structures, dreamy dual vocals, and lava-flow undercurrent of distortion and aggression, that completes the picture. Hail Your Highness (HYH) was officially founded by sisters Jessie and Niki Bobenmoyer back in 2008 as a 4 piece band, but their true awakening to full potential started in 2016 when they dove in head first as a 2 piece dream rock duo. It was a formative year teaming up with sound engineer Brian “Bone” Thorburn of Threshold Studio Productions and Justin Wheeler at Clean Cut Entertainment that helped support the duo that evolved into the underground powerhouse team that is the HYH we know today.

Three Questions With Aimee Ogden

What’s the genesis of this story?

Before it was a novella, this story was a young adult novel told from Wick’s perspective; before that, the origin point was the Beauty Heart Radishes I used to buy at the Dane County Farmers’ Market. I loved the vibrant color hiding on the inside, beneath the dull yellow-green exterior, and when I imagined a world where living things could become ensouled by a falling star, I knew that one of those people would be exactly that kind of radish. The story crystallized around the ending first, before I knew anything else that happened: an accident, a terrible choice.

What are your thoughts on having a band create a soundtrack to something you wrote? 

My first reaction is “oh no, I’m not cool enough for this!” Fortunately, my second reaction is to be relieved, because Hail Your Highness will take excellent care of all the parts that require being cool. This is something I would never have dreamed of putting on my writing bingo card, but I’m thrilled that I get to be part of something so special!

Do you listen to music while you write?

I almost always listen to music while I’m working (and I think I’ve accidentally trained myself to reach for a keyboard when I hear certain songs). Mostly when I’m writing, I prefer instrumental music; when there are lyrics in a language I speak, my verbal input and output start to get tangled up. But I get a lot of mileage out of the soundtrack from the first campaign of The Adventure Zone, Holst’s Planets, and swing/jazz from the 1930’s and 40’s–my favorites are Django Reinhardt and Duke Ellington. I also put together playlists for longer projects, which I like to listen to while I’m taking a walk or cooking or doing something less word-intensive, like outlining. Those end up being a pretty eclectic mix: CAKE, Norma Tanega, Katzenjammer, OK Go, The Amazing Devil, Brittany Howard, Slimane, and The Hard Lessons are a few that figure heavily in the current rotation.

Aimee Ogden is an American werewolf in the Netherlands. Her debut novella, “Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters” was a Nebula Award finalist, and her short fiction has appeared in publications such as Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. She has never met a watermelon radish she didn’t like (although the watermelon radishes might not have been wild about her).

Starstruck

Sometimes a star falls and collides with a living thing that brings it into sapient consciousness. Prish, a radish, is one such being. Her wife, a fox named Alsing is another. Together they live in a cabin and greet newly starstruck people as they come to life. But it’s been some time since the last star fell, and there have been no more starstruck to welcome into being. Prish and Aisling decide to leave the forest for the city and meet some interesting characters on their travels; a starstruck rock (which they thought impossible!), and an abandoned young boy whose parents were scientists trying to harvest the magic of the starstruck for themselves.

Come along on a journey through a strange place, with a found family you’ll want to make your own.

Starstruck, a novella by Aimee Ogden will be published by Psychopomp on June 17th, 2025

Starstruck OST by Hail Your Highness will be available from Psychopomp on June 13, 2025

Sign up to our newsletter for updates about Starstruck, we’ll soon be sharing the cover and the entire first chapter:

You may know that name now, oh yes—he of The Saint of Bright Doors and Rakesfall fame. In fact, Rakesfall had a beginning in The Deadlands Issue #1 with Peristalsis. E. fell in love with it from word one, but didn’t know if it was the direction Sean wanted to ramble in. But lo! Yes, yes it was.

And now here we are, looking at Issue #40 in the near distance, and E. thought “we should do A Thing, because it’s a number ending in zero and humans make big deals over those, but what could we do?” WHY NOT, she thought, ask that first author to return, this time to choose the fiction himself, to shape an issue of the magazine his words helped bring into this world? Why not.

And so we are.

Vajra Chandrasekera will be editing issue #40 of The Deadlands, dear readers. Here’s what he had to say about that:

“Denizens of the Deadlands! I am honoured to return once more to these dread pages. As a guest editor, I look forward to your death-touched fiction. Please make it difficult for me to choose, and forgive the inevitable ruthlessness of the editorial scythe.”

Denziens! Dread pages! Yes. Issue #40 is going to rock. It will publish in October 2025.

Therefore, denziens, prepare yourselves! Fiction submissions for Vajra’s issue will be open from April 1 (no joke) to June 30, 2025. Our regular guidelines and influences will apply, so study them. Apply each and every one to your work.

We encourage writers of underrepresented groups to submit their work. Black, Indigenous, trans, gay, persons of color, persons not of these United States. A global outlook, for an inclusive magazine. Stay tuned to our socials for more (bsky, instagram), and welcome Vajra back to The Deadlands, from which one never truly escapes.

Excited?

So are we!

Sign up to our newsletter if you’re not already on it and we’ll keep you in the loop:

I wanted to write a whole fancy thing about this, but I’m just too excited, so I’ll stick to the straightforward story:

I was super bummed to hear Fantasy was closing. I know many people reading this were as well.

I immediately reached out to John Joseph Adams (publisher of Fantasy at the time it closed) to see if it was a possible to pick up Fantasy Magazine where they left off in October 2023.

Why?

Because I love Fantasy, the magazine.

I also love fantasy the genre.

I love publishing things and figured this could be a fun project. I’d launched a magazine from scratch already (The Deadlands), I thought it’d be a different kind of adventure to continue publishing one that had a big history and was in motion.

John wrote back and said he wasn’t yet ready to sell (and as a publisher, I totally get this).

Consequently, Arley Sorg (co-editor of Fantasy Magazine from 2020 to 2023) reached out to me to see if I’d be interested in creating a magazine with him, as he enjoyed his role at Fantasy.

Me? Sure! I said. I love publishing things!

We chatted for a few months and Arley wanted to bring on a co-editor, that was the model Fantasy had used for the past few years and he liked a lot about it.

“I want to ask Shingai Kagunda if she’d like to be co-editor.”

Shingai? Sure! I said. I love Shingai—we’re publishing a novelette by her later this year.

Long story short, Shingai said yes (“YES!!!“) and we worked on putting together a new magazine.

But Then

But then! In October 2024 I reached out to John pretty randomly and said “how about now.”

He was open to it, and after checking that Arley and Shingai were interested in taking on the co-Editor-in-Chief roles at Fantasy, I quickly worked out a deal to acquire Fantasy Magazine.

So here is Fantasy Magazine, risen from the dead once more (dramatic? Yes, but that’s my whole thing here at Psychopomp, Death!).

Everything You’ll Want To Know

Psychopomp will publish Fantasy Magazine on a quarterly schedule.

We plan to release our first issue June 1st.

You will be able to subscribe to Fantasy Magazine via email for $5 per quarter. When we release a new issue you’ll be sent the ePub. You’ll also receive new stories/poems/nonfiction in your inbox. A year’s sub will be $20, and you can pay it quarterly.

We will publish all of our stories/poems/nonfiction on the website for free, after an exclusive-to-subscribers period.

Digital issues will also be available at Psychopomp’s Grave Goods store (coming soon!), and on WeightlessBooks.com.

What happened to the Fantasy-Magazine.com website?

Right, you may have noticed that if you go to Fantasy-Magazine.com it forwards to Psychopomp.com/fantasy/

(You may have also noticed that TheDeadlands.com also forwards to its own page on Psychopomp.)

Managing more than one website is a huge, resource-intensive commitment. Keeping Psychopomp + The Deadlands working was maxing out my ability to troubleshoot issues and keep everything working. Adding in a whole third website—one we’d need to redesign so it didn’t look like Nightmare and Lightspeed is beyond our budget, so I made the decision to move everything here to the publisher’s site, Psychopomp.

Each magazine will have its own distinct home on Psychopomp—we’ll still publish one-off stories and essays on Psychopomp; meanwhile Fantasy Magazine and The Deadlands will publish content under their respective sections.

It might take a little getting used to, but this change will result in a much stronger overall experience for you, the reader.

All of the links out in the wild will still work, and still get you to the page you’re intending to click on, so it should be a painless transition. However, there will be some bugs to squash here and there, so please pardon our digital dust while we wrap this very big change up.

Currently, the first issue of Fantasy Magazine from Psychopomp is slated to go live on June 1st (but this is subject to change).

For writers:

We plan to have a brief submissions window soon, welcoming short fiction, flash fiction, and poetry.

You can read the submission guidelines here. We will share the submission link via the email list first.

If you’re interested in staying up to date about this, I encourage you to sign up for the Psychopomp email list here:

In addition to staying up to date about all things Fantasy Magazine, you’ll also receive updates about the stellar novellas, novelettes, and short stories we’re publishing at Psychopomp, as well as updates around The Deadlands. We’ll email you at most once per week, and always with cool things to share.

Fantasy Magazine will pay $0.10/word for fiction and $50/poem (same as The Deadlands).

A Final Note About The Reality Of Publishing Things

We need at least 335 subscribers to keep Fantasy Magazine going. We’re starting with zero, but I’ve seen how much the community loved what Fantasy was doing, the stories and poems they published, and I feel very strongly the support will be there.

Here’s how you can help!

Subscribe to Fantasy Magazine here.

There’s a lot of great things coming from Psychopomp in 2025—your support means we get to keep it going into 2026 and beyond!

Finally, please help spread the word about this exciting acquisition on Bluesky, you can find us here:

Fantasy Magazine Bluesky

The Deadlands Bluesky

Psychopomp Bluesky

But it doesn’t have to be the end of all things. We pay the Ferryman to ensure our crossing into a new land, filled with beloveds you have yet to meet. We’re here to do it again!

It’s time to get your 2025 coin for your journey to The Deadlands via Psychopomp. This coin features artwork by inkshark, including a beautiful lantern to light your way onto Charon’s boat and beyond. Your purchase of this coin will enable us to publish more quality fiction at The Deadlands and Psychopomp. If you missed the news this past year, Psychopomp is publishing novellas and now novelettes.

Every sale of the coin allows us to keep publishing, attending conventions, paying our staff, writers, artists, and coin makers.

Every coin has a unique number on its edge, which gives you entry to giveaways throughout the year.

In addition to the coin, we’ll be offering a limited edition pin, and bundles that contain our novellas, our 2024 Deadlands issues, and some add-on options as well.

Hopefully something for everyone!

Here are a few details about the prices and the shipping zones:

Price:

Pricing varies, and INCLUDES shipping.

Yes, the shipping prices are ridiculous but we are not in charge of those skeletons and their postal prices

Shipping Zones:

We are shipping worldwide for this fundraiser.

If you don’t see your shipping zone represented on the product page, visit our contact page and get in touch, we will make one for you

Fundraiser ends November 6th!

Here are the items on offer in our 2024 fundraiser:

Coin

This is the centerpiece of our 2024 fundraiser!

(final design subject to slight production changes)

This beautiful coin was designed by The Deadlands art director inkshark and features a lamp on one side, and the Deadlands tree on the other.

The coin is available in three shipping zones, so be sure to hit the dropdown and select the correct geographic area.

Note: There are a few add-on products you can purchase in addition to the coin at the bottom of this post, including:

• The Deadlands 2024 issues (digital)
• The Deadlands 2025 issues (digital subscription–you’ll receive them via email as they are released)
• The limited edition pin (see below)

We did not want to have 13 options for each tier, so creating add-ons was the most elegant solution ????????

Coin + Limited Edition Skeleton Carousel Pin

This tier includes our beautiful 2025 coin + our limited edition skeleton carousel pin: JUST LOOK AT IT!

(note: the pin is horse-shaped, not circular)

This is a great tier to use for the digital add-ons, if we do say so ourselves…

Coin + Psychopomp Print Novellas

With this tier you not only get a beautiful coin (and pin, if you add it on), but you’ll get print copies of all three novellas we published this year.

Happy reading!

A Voice Calling, by Christopher Barzak

Lovely Creatures, by KT Bryski

From These Dark Abodes, by Lyndsie Manusos

Coin + Deadlands 2024 Print Issues

With this tier you’ll get the aforementioned Ferryman’s Coin and ALSO all four issues of The Deadlands published in 2024

Issue 33

Issue 34

Issue 35

issue 36

The Deadlands 2024 Digital Issues Add-on

Add this on to any order and receive the complete run of The Deadlands issues from 2024

(note: issue 36 comes out October 19th–you will be emailed a copy!

The Deadlands 2025 Digital Subscription

Receive all four issues as they are released in 2025. You’ll be emailed each release day with a new issue.

Issue 37 – January 2025

Issue 38 – April 2025

Issue 39 – July 2025

Issue 40 – October 2025

Psychopomp 2024 Digital Novella Collection Add-on

Add this on to any order and receive all three novellas we published this year.

A Voice Calling, by Christopher Barzak

Lovely Creatures, by KT Bryski

From These Dark Abodes, by Lyndsie Manusos

Skeleton Carousel Pin Only

If you want the pin ONLY (or you want to pair it with a digital-only add-on, here’s where you can do that!

The stories will be free to read on Psychopomp.com, and email subscribers will receive ebook versions (pdf/epub). Psychopomp will publish an omnibus of all the novelettes in print and ebook as well.

Sign up here (free!) to get on the email list and get a copy of these stories—you’ll also get our weekly Letters From The Psychopomp deathy email:

We Who Will Not Die, by Shingai Njeri Kagunda

About the Story:

Nima and Tuni share everything. Theirs is a lovely world, where people were once animals, and carry these traits forward into their human lives. But Nima beieves she was something else—a star that exploded, a nova. The arrival of aliens on their world will change everything the girls know, but not quite everything they believe.

About the Author

Shingai Njeri Kagunda is an Afrosurreal/futurist storyteller from Nairobi, Kenya with a Literary Arts MFA from Brown. Shingai’s work has been featured in the Best American Sci-fi and Fantasy 2020, Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2021, and Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2020. They have fiction, essays, and poetry in, or upcoming in Omenana, FANTASY magazine, FracturedLit, Khoreo, Africa Risen, Baffling Magazine, LIGHTSPEED and Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction, among others. Shingai’s debut novella & This is How to Stay Alive published by Neon Hemlock Press in October 2021 won the Ignyte Award for best novella in 2022. She is the co-editor of Podcastle Magazine and the co-founder of Voodoonauts (an Afrofuturist summer workshop nominated for a community Ignyte Award). Shingai is a creative writing teacher, an eternal student, and a lover of all things soft and Black.

UPDATE: The Buildings Are Hungry and the Plague Can Speak, by Natalia Theodoridou

About the story: 

I have been thinking a lot about games lately (okay, maybe more than lately) and the way they can inflect our realities, which got me thinking about the games we play with each other and with ourselves, what it means to live in a world where work has been gamified, suffering has been gamified, where one can take the idea of escape and turn it into another sort of trap. What would it take for us to disrupt our way of being, and could technology ever really do that within the parameters of capitalist consumption? I don’t have answers, of course; but I sure have a story for us to chew on. 

About the Author:

Natalia Theodoridou has published over a hundred short stories, most of them dark and queer, in magazines such as Strange Horizons, Uncanny, Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Nightmare, and F&SF, among others. He won the 2018 World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction and has been a finalist for the Nebula Award in the Novelette and Game Writing categories. Natalia holds a PhD in Media and Cultural Studies from SOAS, University of London, and is a Clarion West and Tin House Writers’ Workshop graduate. He was born in Greece and has roots in Georgia, Russia, and Turkey. His debut novel, Sour Cherry, is coming in April 2025. Find out more at www.natalia-theodoridou.com. 

Garden of the Bloodpotter, by Erin Brown

About the Story:

The blighted little town of Fauen never meant to attract the attention of a necromancer. But ever since the day the child Hen led the Bloodpotter through the gates, life got better for every citizen. The sorcerer could heal the sick, cleanse the streams, and increase the bounty of the harvest. He could make life so sweet that the Fauens could forget the horrors of the perpetual King’s War, far away and full of bloodshed and rotten magic. At least…until the war arrived in the form of his lost beloved, a brutal and captivating HighSoldier.

About the Author:

Erin Brown is a poet and author of horror, fabulism, and fantasy short fiction. She has been published in FIYAH Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, The Deadlands, Escape Pod, Midnight and Indigo, and other publications, with upcoming work in several periodicals and anthologies throughout 2024-2025. Erin received a Pushcart nomination in 2021, a Truman Capote Literary Trust Scholarship in Creative Writing for Spring 2022, and was shortlisted for Brave New Weird 2022. When not writing, she can usually be found listening to Lo-Fi and sipping date shakes on the bone-shard shores of Salton Sea. Twitter: @babblebrown. BlueSky: @babblewocky.bsky.social. Website www.ebrownwrites.com.

Vajra Chandrasekera did an amazing job as guest curator (and you can pick up his edition here, shipping now!).

For 2024’s stories we’re extremely excited to announce Sheree Renée Thomas will be our guest curator!

Submissions open September 4th for the 2024 edition of Afterlives.

You can find the guidelines and submission info here.

(please read the guidelines!)

About Sheree Renée Thomas

Sheree Renée Thomas is an award-winning fiction writer and poet. She was honored as a Hugo Award and Ignyte Award Finalist twice, and won the Locus Award and is also a three-time World Fantasy Award-winning editor. Her work is inspired by myth and folklore, natural science, Hoodoo, and Mississippi Delta conjure and has earned her fiction fellowships at the Millay Colony of the Arts, Bread Loaf Environmental, with the Cave Canem Foundation, and many others. Her work is widely anthologized and appears in The Big Book of Modern Fantasy. The author of three collections, including Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future, Sleeping Under the Tree of Life, and Shotgun Lullabies, Sheree is a co-editor for Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction, Trouble the Waters: Tales of the Deep Blue, and is the editor of the groundbreaking Dark Matter speculative fiction anthologies that first introduced W.E.B. Du Bois’s work as science fiction and explored 165+ years of Black Speculative Fiction. In 2023 she was honored with the Octavia E. Butler Award. She is the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy of Science Fiction and associate editor of the 49-year old, peer-reviewed literary journal, Obsidian.

Her poems appear most recently in This is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets and The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry. Her collaboration with artist Janelle Monáe on the “Timebox Altar(ed)” novelet appears in The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer (HarperVoyager), a New York Times bestseller. Sheree is a Marvel writer, including the novel, Black Panther: Panther’s Rage (Titan/Penguin Random House), an adaptation of Don McGregor’s legendary graphic novel, and her comic book debut, “The World Is Not Ready” featuring the Black Panther and Storm appears in Marvel Voices: Legends #1 (January 31, 2024). She has new stories in Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda and in Captain America: The Shield Sam Wilson (January 14, 2025). Her essays have appeared in The New York Times and Scientific American. She lives in her hometown, Memphis, Tennessee near a mighty river and a pyramid. Visit shereereneethomas.com

photo source: weird fiction con in Rhode Island