Shingai Njeri Kagunda: Hello Rebecca, it is such a delight to be engaging with you and your creative process in this way. I have had the privilege of reading your upcoming collection of short stories, River of Bones and Other Stories, and I would love to know what putting together this collection of short stories has shifted inside of you?

Rebecca Roanhorse: I don’t know that it’s shifting anything inside me, but it definitely feels like the end of a particular era in my writing life. It’s been gratifying to be able to look back at the last almost decade and see my short fiction collected in one place. Some of these stories only exist in e-books or on websites, so it’s cool to seem them in print.

SNK: “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience^TM” may be one of your most well-known shorter works, appearing as the first story in this collection. That said, it is incredible to see how the tone of the collection reads as so wide-ranging. At what point in the process of writing a story do you realize you have decided on a voice or tone that feels right for that particular story?

RR: Usually from the beginning. Short stories tend to come to me fully formed, unlike novels which are a process and often require extensive revision. Shorts are really my chance to explore an idea or a voice or even an event in the popular consciousness without a lot of overhead and commitment. I usually know who and what they are from the beginning.

SNK: In a previous Clarkesworld Magazine interview with Arley Sorg you spoke to character being one of the most important elements of story for you. Is there an aha moment when you realize you have written a well-rounded complex character? Does that aha moment feel different when moving between short stories and novels?

RR: In novels, characters need depth and a relevant arc—they need to grow and fail and arrive somewhere different from where they began. Shorts, for me, need that much less. They need to exist in their moment and function to tell the story I’m trying to tell. I’m always concerned with character, but not as concerned in shorts.

SNK: Vengeance as an idea comes up in such interesting ways throughout this collection, whether it be about avenging settler colonial theft of life, or taking life in order to satisfy the one you love (Shout out to the deer woman). In our present reality, there is often a narrative that names the people who are resisting apathy, the aggressors or the disturbers of peace; how do you navigate writing violence from the perspective of the oppressed?

RR: I don’t really write violence for spectacle, although I’m also not wholly against it. I am a big fan of the John Wick franchise and I’ve written a Predator comic. But I do try to ground my violence in purpose, and I try to be very aware of who commits the violence and against whom violence is committed. It is another element of story craft that is important to balance. It’s also worthwhile to note that not all violence is physical—there is emotional and social violence that can be just as devastating and effective.

SNK: In that vein, you write Black and Native characters who are morally complex. You have talked in the past about your work being interested in complicating the moral binary of good and bad. How do you think your background in religious studies and theology seep into this particular curiosity?

RR: Ha! What an interesting question. I am sure my studies have had an impact in a myriad of ways, but I don’t think I can pinpoint a particular influence. I also make room in fiction for things I wouldn’t tolerate in real life. Perhaps ironically, good and evil feel much clearer cut in real life than I like in my fiction. I think a lot of my desire to write morally complex Black and Native characters stems from my desire to push back against stereotypes like the Magical Negro and the Nobel Savage. I want my characters to span the gamut of human experience and emotion, something often denied them. If that makes them morally gray, so be it.

SNK: In the last Psychopomp interview you did (welcome back) with my co-editor Arley, you phrased very beautifully how a book’s publication, “can only capture a moment in time for the author—who they were and what concerned them when they wrote it—and then we move on to what’s next.” What are the different iterations of yourself you see strewn across the timeline of these short stories and their publications?

RR: I think characters who struggle with identity and belonging are hallmarks of my early work. The theme reflects my own struggles and the larger zeitgeist of an era of identity politics. As I write my ninth novel, I am much less concerned with identity for example, at least in the way it defines us as marginalized. Now, we’re in an era of growing fascism and institutional collapse, and, not unrelated, I have an 18-year-old heading out into our messy, complex, and dangerous world. I also need to figure out what’s next for me, now that my day-to-day role as a mother is receding. I’m simply not the same person I was a decade ago, and my writing will reflect that.

SNK: You seamlessly transition between lengths and subgenres in your writing. What practices ground your process when you are moving between stories that have vastly different structural arenas?

RR: I don’t know about seamlessly. There are some lengths I really struggle at, although short story tends to come fairly easily. I don’t outline my short stories, but I do outline anything over 20k. So writing each of those separate forms is a very different process. With short stories I try not to overthink the work, whereas with novellas and novels, I tend to obsess over the structure and characters and plot, probably to a fault. What keeps me grounded in both is knowing what I am trying to say and doing my best to get there.

SNK: Originally this interview was going to be published in our Fantasy issue 100 that centered around themes of migration and transition. What are some of the strengths of writing about, to, and through liminal spaces?

RR: I am a creature of liminal spaces. This is my natural environment. I am sure there are both strengths and weaknesses to abiding here, but I also think this is where artists best create—in the ambiguity and flux of change and thresholds. Artists should never be too sure of themselves or who they are lest it hinders their ability to metamorphose.

SNK: Writing from the margins, I think, makes us more wary of the consequences of getting ourselves wrong. One of the things I love about your work is that you do not shy away from the experiment, and speculative fiction feels like the perfect arena for experimentation. As Octavia Butler said, “there are no walls.” That said, you craft your characters with so much care that their wounds, desires, loves and hatreds feel easily accessible to the readers. How do you write through/against the expectations that come up around any burden of representation tied to queerness, and cultural identity?

RR: I think you kind of have to say “fuck it” and write what you want to write. The human experience is messy and unsure and, in the end, lethal. Writing scared is no way to write. Writing worried about what other people think is no way to write. If that’s what consumes you, maybe don’t bother writing. The problem arises when one person is held up as an authority of a particular experience, and sometimes, most times, being designated as such is out of the author’s hands. It is something done to them, not something they have done. So it is inherently flawed, and we all know those who lift you up are quick to tear you down. So don’t worry about it. Be true to yourself and your experiences, write with integrity and do your best. Your function as an artist is not to placate or even represent, necessarily. Your role is to create, and creation requires transgression.

SNK: The year has just begun, but I am curious; what does writing, and publishing feel like for you at the start of 2026?

RR: Fraught. Difficult. Necessary. We are definitely in a time of change and pushback against marginalized authors. Many young writers won’t make it out of the starting gate as publishing pulls away from championing and marketing them. It’s a travesty. But it’s also a reminder that being a writer and getting published are two different things. Write because it feeds your soul, write because your stories matter. Commercial and professional success is the icing on the cake but cannot be the raison d’etre. Capitalism will always let you down.

SNK: What possibilities do you think dark fantasy, horror, and speculative fiction at large offer when faced with large scale systemic and societal inequities?

RR: What do they offer to the reader? Validation that your horrors are not imagined, escape from the confines of conformity, hope that stories can save you, or at least offer a respite. Plus, genre is fun.

SNK: My final question comes with so much gratitude for what you make possible by sharing your imagination with us. Thank you, Rebecca. What would you like readers who are coming into River of Bones to carry with them as they read the collection?

RR: I think the theme of the collection, as I say in the Introduction, is that “identity is fluid, desire kills, and survival makes one a monster.” Do with that what you will. These stories were mine emotionally, but they are in your hands now, Reader. Enjoy!

Rebecca Roanhorse is a New York Times bestselling and Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Award-winning speculative fiction writer. Her short story collection, River of Bones and Other Stories is out March 6, 2026, and her novel set in the Star Wars Andor universe, Edge of the Abyss, is out September 2026. She lives in Northern New Mexico with her husband, daughter, and pup. She drinks a lot of black coffee. Find more on Instagram at @RebeccaRoanhorse and on BlueSky at @rebeccaroanhorse.bsky.social

But what a way to go out—a haunted house that is not remotely familiar to you. You have not walked these haunted halls. You don’t know what’s in that basement, I promise you don’t.

I first encountered Bernie Jean Schiebeling’s writing when they submitted to The Deadlands. We published “The Counting Ghosts,” in Issue #19 of The Deadlands. They have gone on to publish in Analog, The Drabblecast, Small Wonders, and more.

We’re absolutely delighted to share the cover of House, Body, Bird with you—but first, let’s talk to our author and get the VIBE of this place.

Birdie Goodbain, last of the House’s daughters, thought only the dolls were watching…

Raised in her family’s dollhouse museum, Birdie grew up surrounded by models of perfect daughters that she could never be, haunted by a father who refused to accept her and a mother who wouldn’t protect her. Birdie fled and didn’t look back.

A home, a girlfriend, a job—a summons to the House she left behind.

After ten years, Birdie returns to her mother’s welcoming arms, but something has changed in the centuries-old family home. Strange dogs hide in the foundations, her bedroom door locks on its own, her father won’t leave the basement—and something new and terrible lurks behind her mother’s eyes. She knows that she should leave, but eyes far older than the dolls’ have been watching her. 

The House allowed Birdie to escape once. It refuses to let her shame the family again.

BJS sat down with me, ECT, and here’s what we discussed…

House, Body, Bird, is a surreal journey into a dollhouse life in more than one way. Becoming small in front of your parents, or being made small by your parents; there is a lot to unpack here, in terms of sexuality, gender, family expectations and obligations, and more. Was all of this in the forefront as you wrote, or how much developed as you got into the story itself?

I was absolutely thinking about gender roles and familial obligations while I was writing. From early on, I knew Birdie’s bedroom should be filled with mid-century nuclear families living in suburbia, and I knew that all the dolls were glued in place. Dollhouses can be powerful creative toys for kids’ stories (my playtimes had a lot of kidnappings, demonic possessions, and secret romances, which is how we ended up with this book), but if children aren’t allowed to explore ideas through their own play, then the dollhouses might as well just be educational dioramas prescribing what the world should look like. Moms go in the kitchen, Dads go in the big armchair, and Kids go outside where they can’t bother anyone. Dolls become tools for social reproduction, even more so than they already are.

One thing that developed as I wrote was the attic filled with Barbie’s Dreamhouses, which became a refuge for Birdie as a child. The dolls there aren’t glued down specifically because Birdie’s father doesn’t care about them as much: in his view, Barbies are commercial, modern, and cheap, but also socially relevant to the tourist rabble, and therefore they have an out-of-the-way exhibit in the dollhouse museum. However, what her father denigrates, Birdie finds liberating. She creates a counter-cultural space within her family’s house, and while it isn’t the same as true freedom—she’s stuck in the attic, the literary prison for madwomen who can look at the horizon but never reach it—the Dreamhouses give her a place to be herself and therefore survive until she can escape.

Rigid ideas of gender, sexuality, and family create the impression of a scouring, inescapable light. But bright lights cast dark shadows, and houses have so many shadows to hide in—especially if you’re small.

“Houses and children are very alike—constructed…” Do Birdie’s parents have difficulty with her because they made her, but ultimately didn’t control her?

Short answer: Yes.

Longer answer: It’s not just that they couldn’t control Birdie. It’s also that recognizing and, crucially, accepting their lack of control over Birdie—accepting that Birdie deserves autonomy—would mean having to reckon with their own life histories. Birdie’s parents have both led lives of constant, unhappy compromise. Her father suffered physical and emotional abuse from his own parents, which he never got any kind of closure about, and her mother struggled with an authoritarian marriage that isolated her and eroded her goals, dreams, and even hobbies. If they realize that Birdie’s choices are legitimate, then they’d also have to question what different choices they could have made for themselves. What sort of people, parents or otherwise, could they have been if they tried to command their own happiness instead of someone else’s?

This story takes the haunted house trope and turns it on its head; Birdie’s father tells her “we build on what came before us.” Is every piece of land haunted, and thus every home haunted, be they dollhouse or otherwise?

I’m setting aside the question of whether or not paranormal entities exist, because the world is huge and strange and I’ve seen so little of it. Here’s my experience with hauntings: places become haunted from the stories we tell about them. That story can be as simple as, “this room has a weird vibe” or as complicated as the whole of American history.

At one point in House, Body, Bird, Birdie bumps against a model of the kitchen at Thomas Jefferson’s plantation, where enslaved chefs—including James Hemings, older brother to Sally Hemings—cooked meals for one of America’s most famous founding fathers. That detail is meant to remind the audience of all the stories erased or sanitized by neat encapsulations of history. Even if mainstream narratives don’t acknowledge them as much, they persist in archival materials, archaeological artifacts, and/or oral histories (and this isn’t even getting into all the hard work done to study, preserve, and publicize these stories in fiction and nonfiction spaces), much like ghosts persist just out of sight, asserting their continued existence, disturbing day-to-day operations. A ghost is a creature with unfinished business, and historical injustices are full of unfinished business; think of all the modern American ghost stories about Native American burial grounds. One reason hauntings disturb us is because they remind us that we’re connected to a wider spiral of history and everyone who once lived in it. To everyone who is still living, still carrying these stories, still seeking justice. And it’s good to be disturbed this way. We have responsibilities to the past and the future.

Hauntings also don’t have to be negative. A line in HBB that I’m proud of is, “Suffering is not the only ghost.” Love and joy leave their own traces, and telling stories about that warmth changes the mood of a place as well.

In conclusion, not every home is haunted. But with your help, they could be!

If you could build a dollhouse that was the home of a fictional character, whose would it be?

My first instinct is to name a character with a very cozy home, like Bilbo Baggins’ Bag-End or the Moomins’ Moominhouse, but I think then I’d spend a lot of time staring wistfully at them instead of writing. We also already have a clear idea of what these homes look like, so there wouldn’t be much invention involved. It would probably be more fun to create a dollhouse for a character whose home we never see so that we can speculate on the floor plan, furnishings, decor, etc. A “dollhouse as fan fiction” situation. And in that case, I’d choose Columbo. What color scheme did he and his wife pick out? How plush is the dog bed for Dog? And is he actually telling the truth about misplacing his pens? (No. They’re well-organized in this coffee mug.)

What did you discover during the writing that you had not planned for?

The biggest plot change that I made to the story was Birdie’s confession to Lila about her situation (i.e., honey, my parents shrunk me, and not in the fun family movie way). In the first draft, Birdie told Lila that she was in trouble and needed Lila to come get her—and that was it. I thought keeping Birdie’s transformation a secret from Lila would be more suspenseful and dramatic, but it didn’t sit right with me once I’d finished the scene. Birdie, who tried her best to keep Lila out of danger, was now deliberately withholding information that could protect Lila? Not to mention, Birdie’s character development involves her learning to open up to Lila, so failing to do so at such a pivotal moment would have been a real missed opportunity on my part. I think this is a version of Ursula Le Guin’s thoughts about artists mistakenly seeing pain as interesting and intellectual, while happiness is mundane and stupid. We may think that secrets and mystery make a relationship exciting, but really the everyday work of communication, of allowing ourselves to be known, is what creates a fun, loving, and worthwhile partnership (and talking to my partner is actually how I was able to figure out that the scene needed to be fixed in the first place!). I’m happy I got the chance to articulate that through Birdie and Lila.

Also, figuring out the architecture of the house to make the final action sequence work was a real bear. I looked at a lot of Victorian house floor plans, which were way too sensible for what I’d gotten myself into. I ended up drawing my own layout on an index card with a lot of scribbled-out sections and arrows tracking the movements of different characters. It’s still a little wonky, but the house itself is meant to be a series of ill-advised renovation projects, so it works.

Would you ever want to be made small to live in a dollhouse?

I live with an adorable house cat named Mochi who has highly-developed hunting instincts—so, no. I’ve seen what she does to her favorite stuffed raccoon. I would not survive. 

Reader, will you survive? We hope you do, because after the cover (here it comes), you get the all mighty preorder button. We hope you’ll grab an ebook or print copy of our final-for-the-moment print novella. Supporting small press is more vital every day in this oppressive world of ours.

Our cover for House, Body, Bird comes from the talented John G. Reinhart, whose art has graced From These Dark Abodes, One Message Remains, and Starstruck as well. The text design is by Christine M. Scott, with input from inkshark. It takes a village to build a haunted house.

The truly astonishing news is: you can add this book to YOUR shelf. You can possess and be possessed by House, Body, Bird. You can do it right now.

Thank you for loving the books we have published at Psychopomp. Thank you for supporting this final print edition! Will we ever return to the land of really cool print books? We sure do hope so. If you’d like to help that happen, buy this book! Support our quarterly fiction zine, The Deadlands! Every little bit helps—no matter how little you are, you can do the thing. House, Body, Bird proves it to be true!

You may have read about Psychopomp’s recent reorg, but we are still doing Afterlives 2025: The Year’s Best Death Stories!

Instead of having open subs for authors, we are asking editors to send the deathly stories they published. If you are a writer who had story about death published in 2025, please be in touch with your editor and ask them to send it to us! (Editors: we are looking for doc/docx files, thank you.) We have sent submission info to editors, but may not have reached every single editor, it’s true.

Stories should be 1k to 17,500 words in length (shorts to novelettes). Stories should be about death, not slasher horror. Hopefully you know the vibe by now.

For our 2025 edition, Maria Haskins will be picking the final table of contents. Maria Haskins is a Swedish-Canadian writer and reviewer of speculative fiction. She is a non-fiction editor at Ruadán Books, and a fiction editor at Many Worlds. Maria reviews short fiction for Locus Magazine. Her essays and reviews are also available to read at Pyschopomp, Strange Horizons, and Maria’s Reading.

We will be open from February 1 to February 28, 2026.

Magazines

The Deadlands is eligible for the Locus Award for Best Magazine, British Fantasy Award for Best Magazine/Periodical, and the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine.

Fantasy Magazine is eligible for the Locus Award for Best Magazine, British Fantasy Award for Best Magazine/Periodical, and the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine.

Editors

The Deadlands editors are eligible for the Best Editor Short Form Hugo Award, and the Best Editor category in the Locus Awards.

Deadlands fiction: E. Catherine Tobler, Vajra Chandrasekera (guest, #40), Laura Blackwell (copy editing), Annika Barranti Klein (copy editing), Josephine Stewart (proofreading)
Deadlands poetry: Nicasio Andres Reed
Deadlands nonfiction: David Gilmore

Fantasy Magazine editors Shingai Njeri Kagunda and Arley Sorg may be considered for Best Editor Short Form Hugo Award, Best Editor for the Locus Awards, and the Special Award for World Fantasy.

Short stories (under 7500 words)

Everyone Keeps Saying Probably, Premee Mohamed
Extreme Sports Club for Octogenarians, Kate Lechler
his love’s ashes on his tongue, Monte Lin
The Path She Sings, Vanessa Fogg
Saint Gremmy, Robert Nazar Arjoyan
The Scythe and Other Simple Mechanisms, T.E.Z. Moore
Highway 1, Past Hope, Maria Haskins
Soul Shepherds, Joshua Lim
Whalesong, Guan Un
The Twelve Deaths of You, C. J. Subko
Penny For Them, Die Booth
The Wanderer, C. T. Muchemwa
Fractionated Doses Don’t Quench the Thirst of Those Who Knew the Whole, Le Werner
For Those Who Stay Buried, Amanda Cecelia Lang
Everlasting, Daniel Oluremi
Deliquescence, Kelsea Yu 
Plus One, Olufunmilayo Makinde
Miles To Go Before I Sleep, Beth Goder
Little Trinkets, A. J. Sharpe
One More Episode, Ashok Banker
The Last Minute Before the Rooster Crows, Malena Salazar Maciá
Hamaka, Leave Me Alone, Testimony Odey
The Destruction of All That is Good and Holy, Otherwise Known as Green Beans, Erin Ulm
The Ghost of Cerrera Orbital Station Makes Herself Known, Laila Amado
The Pretendian, Jason Pearce
Punks Don’t Die, Kat Sedia
Liminalities of the Second Contraction, Scott Payne
Corporate Policy, Eden Royce
Knife Plus, Tracie McBride
The Matriarchs, Malena Salazar Maciá
Silence Starved and Swallowed by Sydney Paige Guerrero
When You Hit The Poison Ivy Thicket, You’ve Gone Too Far, by Corey Farrenkopf
The Memory Breach, Christian Emecheta
That Time Uncle George Caused the Apocalypse, Vanessa Kyn
The Interrogation of So-ssang, Seoung Kim
The Dragon and the Bog, Sunwoo Jeong
They Return, Eleanna Castroianni
A Cup of Forgetting, Eleanor Glewwe
Ichthyosis, M. L. Krishnan

Novelettes (7500-17500 words)

UPDATE: The Buildings Are Hungry and the Plague Can Speak, Natalia Theodoridou
Garden of the Bloodpotter, Erin Brown
Forsaking All Others, Premee Mohamed (found in the collection One Message Remains)
The Weight of What is Hollow, Premee Mohamed (found in the collection One Message Remains)

Novellas (17500-40000 words)

One Message Remains, Premee Mohamed (found in the collection One Message Remains)
Starstruck, by Aimee Ogden
Summer In the House Of the Departed, by Josh Rountree
No One To Hold the Distant Dead, by K. L. Schroeder

Collections

One Message Remains, by Premee Mohamed (this collection includes two novelettes and one novella)

Nonfiction

Nonfiction essays are generally eligible for the Best Related Work Hugo Award, and authors are generally eligible for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award.

Five Treasured Tropes of SFF K-Dramas, Cressida Blake Roe
John, Penelope K. Parker
Blind Date With a Corpse, RJ Aurand
The Ritual, by Matthew Wollin
Ask a Necromancer: Autopsy of a Horror Film, Amanda Downum
Ask a Necromancer: Fun with Formaldehyde, Amanda Downum

Poems

Longer poems are eligible for the Rhysling Award. Poems under 10 lines are eligible for the Dwarf Stars Award. 2026 will also include a Hugo Award for Best Poem!

The river, Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi
Suffer the Blessing, Aaron Knuckey
The Language of Fireflies, Angela Liu
Things for which I have not ascertained your consent, RB Lemberg
Treatise of the Lyric on the State of Things, Justin Cruzana
After the Storm, Ishita Basu Mallik
Flesh Ghosts, Andrew Kozma
Interrogation of Saint Winifred, Caroline Shea
The Clothier of the Sunless, Arda Mori
Query Telling on Other Elder, Michael Hessel-Mial
Séance, Elizabeth Wing
quietude II, Adamu Yahuza Abdullahi
Amanita Season, Belle Biscotti
I had a dream and in the dream I knew I was dreaming so I believed I could change things, Shana Ross
Bay nakht afn altn mark: A rehearsal, R.B. Lemberg
Not a Bird, Ellen Romano
Seascape w\Ṣàngó & Ọya’s Incarnations, Mu’izz Ọpẹ́yẹmí Àjàyí
How the road extracts an elegy, Aishat Yahkub
All of Our Mothers are Dead, Eleanor Ball
Fear is a Dagger, Mateo Perez Lara
More Than A Blank Parenthesis Equals God’s Forgetfulness, Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan
Grove of Jealous Lovers, Alex Jennings

Artwork

Artists are eligible for the Best Fan Artist Hugo Award and the British Fantasy Award for Best Artist. Art may be eligible for the BSFA Award for Best Artwork.

Our artists:
Summer In the House Of the Departed: inkshark
One Message Remains and Starstruck: John G. Reinhart
Deadlands #40: Carly A-F
No One to Hold the Distant Dead: MMIX (Rust + L)

Thank you for your support in 2025. In 2026, we are getting back to our Deadlands roots and trying to build a better foundation for all we hope to do in the coming years. Have a blessed awards season (we have always lived in awards season…).

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:

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Haunted locations like the Overlook in The Shining, the very middling remake of House on Haunted Hill, or ahuge mansion like The Others, all provide different types of haunted horror. The following list won’t include any of the films previously listed, nor any of the Paranormal Activity films or The Conjuring.  Mainly to add some variation, and nearly everyone knows of those films by now.  Instead, you’re getting a little bundle of haunted location horror films that might not be on your radar.

Let’s roll up to your haunted location of choice and likely not go inside, we’ll just marvel at the infrastructure before we head on out. Sounds like a good idea, right? Keep reading on and see what you find.

House (1977)

The ‘70s was quite the time for delightfully weird horror films, and this one is a great international horror example as well. House (or Hausu) follows a young girl and her friends who go to visit her aunt, only for supernatural occurrences to occur during their stay. It’s not nearly as serious in tone as it sounds. And it’s actually a comedy horror film, so it’s meant to elicit a few laughs.

Hauntings don’t always need to be downright terrifying or even just stereotypically scary. This one has a few bizarre and unsettling moments that might cause people to be scared as a result. But House is so experimental and playful in its stylistic approach that it sets itself apart from other haunted house films. It’s a Japanese horror film that folks should absolutely watch if they are interested in international haunted location films.

Grave Encounters (2011)

Haunted psychiatric facilities are relatively typical, but this one has a cult following for a reason. Grave Encounters follows a crew of paranormal investigators who aim to film a hit episode in an asylum, only for it to be the last one they ever create. The characters range in terms of how tolerable they are, but it’s still a terrifying situation to watch them willingly enter. And not to mention how once they enter, it’s impossible for them to get out.

The film doesn’t have a huge budget, but horror films about hauntings don’t always need budgets like The Conjuring films, especially with found-footage horror films like Grave Encounters, as we’re meant to believe what’s happening is very real. It’s the perfect haunted location film to throw on during a random evening. And the ending will make you feel extremely hopeless (just don’t watch the sequel, it’s a mess).

Hell House (2015)

At this point, the Hell House LLC franchise has a relatively strong fanbase, and it all starts with the original. Hell House LLC follows what happened to a crew of haunted house creators and the individuals who died during their opening night of “Hell House”. The scares are incredibly effective in this film, and the crew feels like a tight-knit group. And what happens to them is pretty tragic.

There’s a lot of lore in the other films that help explain the events of this one. But for the most part, Hell House LLC is a fun solo watch if you’re not interested in bingeing the series. Overall, it’s one of those films that if you watch it without the lights on, you’ll be in for an unsettling night. It’s worthy of the hype it receives from other folks, especially if you love found footage set anywhere but a house or an asylum.

Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum (2018)

When the supernatural things start happening, you will be genuinely scared of the sequences that occur. Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum follows a horror YouTubers who make the horrible decision to travel to the Gonjiam Psychiatric facility to gain views and virality. It’s a solid entry in influencer horror, found footage, and international horror as it’s a South Korean horror film.

The scares don’t happen right away like one might expect. But if you stick with Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum and be patient, you’ll be pleasantly surprised. There’s one particular scene that’ll make you glad you’re not in the character’s position. And if you’re interested, Wi Ha-joon (Squid Game) is the lead in this, and his performance really lends to the film. 

Strange Frequencies: Taiwan Killer Hospital (2024)

The inspiration from Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum is strong in this one. Strange Frequencies: Taiwan Killer Hospital follows a bunch of influencers who decide to film a paranormal reality series in a haunted and abandoned hospital. Of course, everything goes wrong and the characters don’t realize how bad of a situation they’re in. It’s quite a lot like Gonjiam because of the direct inspiration; it’s said to be based on it. Therefore, it’ll either work for you or it won’t.

There are some decent moments in this film, and it’s not a bad watch at all. Does it reinvent the wheel at all? No, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth at least checking out if you love haunted asylum films, found footage, or you want to support a Filipino horror film.

What’s more, the technology that brought Inga to this distant colony—beaming her consciousness out of her original body and into a synthetic one—has misfired. There are haunting gaps in her memory, pieces of herself lost to the void. As extinction takes species after species, Inga and the people of Nordenmark must find a way to survive, and a reason to live, in the spaces death leaves behind.

K.L. Schroeder is a speculative fiction writer and microbiologist forged by the cold dark winters of Canada and Sweden. Their fiction can be found in the horror anthology Northern Nights, and climate fiction anthology And Lately, the Sun.

K.L. joined editor Nicasio Reed for a few quick questions about their upcoming novella, No One to Hold the Distant Dead.

A lot of science fiction about terraforming is especially interested in how that process begins—what a place looked like before, and how it’s changed into something different. What was your thought process in looking instead at, instead, the ending and failureof a terraforming process?

Well, I wanted to look at how we go on when it seems like our world is lost, and for me that meant that death and ending had to infuse everything in the story, including the setting.

The form it took was influenced a lot from the time I worked in veterinary microbiology and anatomy research, which are disciplines quite close with death compared to other science spaces. They lent themselves to the discussion of what we do when faced with an end. And they are also wildly fascinating places. There really was a very big preserved tapeworm in a jar with ‘YUM’ written on it.

I think it’s fair to say that everyone who reads Distant Dead falls a little in love with Hecate the lizard. But really, every animal we run into has a huge emotional punch for the reader and the characters. How did you choose which animals would be representative of Nordenmark’s ecosystem?

I pictured Nordenmark as having sort of a boreal forest vibe similar to what I’ve lived around in Sweden and Canada, so it’s populated with wildlife that you might find in those places on Earth. I’m not an ecologist, so there’s imagination involved here, but I chose keystone species like beavers and otters because they have very strong stabilizing relationships with their environments. Which could be helpful in a forest terraforming situation.

There’s maybe only the viviparous lizard that lives in the boreal forest, but the black velvet leopard gecko is so adorable and goth that surely centuries of adaptation would allow the Nordenmark damask lizard to diverge and live in the forest too :).

While this is a science fiction story, set on a distant planet, it feels so much like a climate fiction book in its ecological concerns and even in the small glimpses we get of what’s happened back on Earth. Are there authors or works of climate fiction that you’ve been influenced by?

Oh man, there are so many. Probably the first SF-climate fiction I was influenced by was An Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed that I came across on CBC Books back when it first came out. I love Lorraine Wilson’s This is Our Undoing and We are all Ghosts in the Forest, Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea, and of course the solarpunk canon all the way back to Joan Slonczewski’s A Door into Ocean and Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. I’m panicking now because there’s so many more I haven’t mentioned.

Francesco Verso gave a panel here a few years back where he said something to the effect of “Cyberpunk is the modus operandi, the world we live in. It has lost its power to critique the system. In exploring solutions, including people, and focusing on humanity, survival and community, solarpunk is best positioned to do this now,” and that really resonated with me. Don’t get me wrong, I love cyberpunk (not showing the picture of teenaged me wearing those circuitboard contact lenses), but stories like Nausicaä and all the others have left marks on my heart and brain that have been important particularly in the last years with gestures at everything. It’s an honour if you can see their influence in this story.

There are threads throughout the story about the connection between death and memory. What happens to grief when the memory of what’s lost fades or disappears, and if it’s worth preserving a facsimile of what’s been lost. Was this always something you wanted to explore, or did these themes emerge during the writing?

Both, I think. The seed of the story was thinking about what death folklores might look like for people who have left Earth—and of course goths in space—and then everything related to death or grief and memory and making sense of how it changes kind of developed during the writing. Which also involved things like haunting the death deity Wikipedia pages (Meng Po Soup!) and learning about Swedish funeral traditions (there really used to be candy!) and reading how people revisit memories in the digital age (looking at old houses on Google Maps like in Josh’s cover reveal!).

What did you learn from writing these characters that you didn’t expect?

It was easy to write characters being empathetic, but much more difficult to write them reaching a consensus when it came to remembrance. Even if death and loss are certain for humans, I found there are many different ways to think about it.

Do you think you’d be willing to get beamed across space into a new body?

Hell yes, that would be extremely cool. I mean, it would be difficult to explain it to my cats, but if I had fewer attachments on Earth I’d go in a heartbeat. Which is possibly an unsurprising answer from a knowledge-hungry scientist and immigrant who has launched themselves across the globe.

Lush, lyrical, and heartbreaking, No One to Hold the Distant Dead is fascinating science fiction as well as a moving elegy mourning lost selves, lost loves, and lost species. This story of a cosmic traveler grappling furiously with pain and sorrow offers us a grim sort of hope in the midst of despair.

— Ivy Grimes, author of Glass Stories

K.L. Schroeder strikes the perfect balance between hope and grief, exploring loss on both a personal and planetary scale. Beautifully written, gentle, and thought-provoking—overall, a stunning debut.

— A.C. Wise, author of Ballad of the Bone Road

Schroeder weaves together a visceral and timely tale of environmental collapse that pulls no punches about what’s coming. Heartfelt and infuriating at times, No One To Hold The Distant Dead leaves us with a realistic, but hopeful version of the future, one hovering somewhere between victory and defeat.

— A.D. Sui, author of The Dragonfly Gambit

“Beautiful and heartbreaking. It’s sadly rare to find an author like Schroeder who approaches the non-human with such compassion and respect. A must read.”

— Ever Dundas, author of Goblin and HellSans

Readers, we are pleased to present MMIX’s (Rust MacCarthy & L Faunt) artwork for the cover of No One to Hold the Distant Dead by K.L. Schroeder (design by Christine M. Scott).

This November, join Inga on a journey out of her planet and body, across the stars to a world where everything is possible, but Death yet lingers.

Today’s detour takes us into AFTERLIVES: The Year’s Best Death Fiction cover reveal. But…that sounds pretty Realm of the Dead, you are thinking. And you aren’t wrong, but look—not everything about death is grim. Sometimes, the Realm has beautiful things to show us. The end of suffering, the paths our ancestors took, the fragment of them that still lives within us.

And this is new! You haven’t seen this before, so here we are.

Curator Sheree Renée Thomas made you a beautiful table of contents, so we aimed to put as beautiful a cover on the book—and with her guidance, we think we achieved it. Nephthys, Egyptian goddess of the dead, has come to oversee this collection of fiction, rendered in hues of violet and ebony by Jeszika Le Vye.

Gaze upon her!

Stunning.

Let’s take another look at that TOC, too:

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)

The best news? Join our Patreon at any paid level, and get the AFTERLIVES: The Year’s Best Death Fiction 2024 ebook free. The book will be delivered to all patrons in November December.

Is the mind behind reality your own consciousness, that hermit sea trapped behind the rocky shore of your skull? Or is this mind not even your own? Is the puppet master a dull godhead birthing all things that live and die without ever knowing their true parentage? Is it some madman’s dream? Certainly would make sense these days. Such a mind, in all its massive responsibility, can only be insane. Sutter Cane declares he is this mind and he is indeed mad. And you will be, too, once you get stuck In The Mouth…

The thin membrane that peels off the plot, like shedding skin, is a late twentieth century neo-noir, which calls to mind Dan O’Bannon’s The Resurrected. John Trent is offered as a protagonist who is above it all. He sees most of human behavior as lies beguiling a scummy truth. As he investigates the mystery of the missing horror author, Trent regards himself as perfectly detached. Self-satisfied with his alienation, he denies himself any interconnectedness. Trent’s native New Yorkerness is an interesting detail; he feels at home in the heaving superorganism of the urban environment, surrounded by people he ultimately finds repulsive and untrustworthy. This sets him up for a gnosis only Weird Horror can offer.

The book’s first act shines in the disgustingly mundane: the filthy asylum and its shoddy management, streetside civilians startled from their apathy by an axe-murderer, Trent’s time-loop on the subway, first with people then with things. Cane paints the world as a monstrous carnival long before the teratological freaks flash their malformed fangs. He also does a great job populating this world. The day players engage Trent with enough credibility in their lives outside of the interactions. Cane generates a whole world this way; there’s a lot of color to the third-person omniscience. Little jokes pepper the atmosphere, alleviating the tension, then scatter like frightened fish when the terror takes off.

The descriptions are very grounded. The beasts are vivid with leering grins, crackly bones, and of course lots and lots of tentacles. The action sequences are well paced; you always know where the characters reside within the motion. Once reality starts melting, the reader must trust Cane to guide us through the fetid liquid. And he proves a most loquacious Virgil. In another stunning choice, Cane actually provides first person narration as himself. It feels like Cane has pulled up a chair at the table where I was reading alone. And I alone can see him. Yet he sees all of us. He sees you.

Trent’s reply came, low and bitter. “God’s not supposed to be a hack horror writer.”
Cane smiled. “I love that line, a bit of self-depreciation on my part.”

The book mocks itself, trafficking in lurid mutations while having Trent criticize them as cheap fakery, not just within the narrative but in the meta-dialogue about horror schlock at large. This mass entertainment, which you the reader currently consume, is warping your delicate sensibility, and you won’t care when you are finally swallowed whole.

The concrete horror reaches its apex halfway through the plot then recedes, like a dark tide, leaving the reader in the fishy stink of reality. It is once Trent is allowed to escape Hobb’s End that a deeper horror is unearthed. He wanders back into his familiar world, the hazy shadow of his experience dogging his every step. Trent’s conflict is not fisticuffs with mutated townsfolk, but with the violation of his waking mind as he attempts to resolve his impossible experience within a cozy framework of reason. That’s when the book’s true tension winds up, in the lockstep of John’s teetering doom.

The finest moment of cosmic horror is reserved for the climax of the Old Ones’ becoming. Cane never uses their names, but that’s certainly what they are. There’s even a deviously sneaky “Arkham” reference slipped in near the end; see if you’ve the eyes to clock it. I won’t give away the ending, but it’s simply stunning. Feels like the book has pulled the reader round and round a swirling drain, and at the end we vanish from sight never to emerge again. The Final Word elevates the book to the height of Weird Meta-Horror. You will have to see it for yourself.

The horror follows you. The thing about reality is you can compartmentalize it. I see with these eyes in the car, those eyes at the office, and a third pair at home. I see friends, family, neighbors, tense & terse interactions each performed by a discordant variation of my mind. Like melodies emerging at their designated rhythm, my patterns were preset, comfortable, normal. Now they are not.

I’ve been getting headaches since I finished reading. I only feel better at night. The moonlight sharpens my vision. In the pale glow, skin becomes waxy and smooth, as if the whole world were populated by candle-folk. It would be dazzling to watch them burn and melt. My gums are bruised. I’m spitting out teeth. I can see the fangs coming in at random.

Now all the waxy skin looks tasty, like flesh covered in maggots. Want to use the fangs. Carrion feast for the senses. I can feel the mind behind reality, its thoughts popping like bubbles in curdled milk. Prodding me. It is not mine. It’s moving my tubes, blowing cold air through the pipes in my organs, remaking me into an instrument for him.

Dizzy. Nausea. Dreams in the daytime. I remember when I still had dreams of my own. I’m having trouble picturing my father’s face. It must have existed, since I exist. I have to have a father. His blue eyes, cold in the dying sunlight. His narrow face and wild steel-gray hair. My father. The mind behind me. What was his name? Kane? Cane?

I stare at my face in the mirror and know that something is off. I didn’t always have blue eyes; I know that FOR SURE. My eyes are brown, so why does a stranger in the mirror stare back with those icy azure irises? The nausea, the dreams, the growing pains. Long fangs sinking into tender waxy flesh…

The worst part is that the book didn’t cause this; it brought my attention to it. It was always here. I was always becoming, I just didn’t have eyes to see. I was another cave fish skulking about in the pond scum like the rest of you. And now new eyes have sprouted from the benign flesh of my smooth forehead. Sutter Cane isn’t even solving anything. He’s just lifting a finger and pointing at the rip in the sky. My new eyes follow, and I can finally see what is pouring through.

A writer is a person whose book is true to them. That’s what makes a powerful read. Sutter Cane is deceptively simple. You think he’s just taking another ride around the cul-de-sac of genre, letting you gawk at papier-mâché monsters, but no. The trick the author pulls is devious. The circus ends, but you find yourself still strapped to your seat. The show never ends, but you’re finally aware of it. You wake up as one of Thomas Ligotti’s clown puppets. And there’s Sutter Cane behind you, tugging the strings like a cruel child.

It’s all so baroque, but don’t you love a good old-fashioned spookfest? The claws. The tentacles. The colours shedding off like snakeskin in the waxing moonlight. I’m a cosmic giggle of sardonic delight wrenched from his throat. I’m spit in the wind from his mouth. Can you see me? I can see you. So can he. It’s a fun book. I encourage you to read it.

The mouth opens this Halloween.