Hey Everyone,

Thanks for opening this month's newsletter. I know we are all buried beneath an endless deluge of little red notifications, so it means a lot to me that you’re giving this your attention. And if you aren’t giving it your attention, that’s fine too. Life is a lot these days, so no shade from me. 

Get excited for Nadia Bulkin’s five short story recs!!!

This month I wanted to share a piece of flash I wrote a few years ago about the most well known (only???) serial killer from Cape Cod. His name was Tony Costa and he lived on the outer Cape and he buried most of his victims beneath a patch of marijuana he was growing in the woods. People have written books about him including Hell Town by Casey Sherman and In His Garden by Leo Damore (which, interestingly enough, is one of the most stolen books from Cape Cod libraries. It’s worth a bit of money over on eBay.)

I’m not usually the kind of guy who writes serial killer fiction, but it’s just past halloween, so maybe it’s fitting…but more than anything, this story makes me think about the state of short story publishing these days. The story is called “In Their Garden” and originally was published in this cool little place called Hellhound Magazine in 2021. They were a flash horror magazine, and flash horror is my jam, so I was pumped about its existence. Not enough flash horror magazines out there. Shortly after they published my story, they disappeared…folded…all weblinks going dead. It was a very short lived publication.

I think when I was younger, I kind of imagined literary magazines as being eternal…which was naive. They’re always run by very overworked and under paid editors who do most of it out of their love for short stories and the community, so I get it. Nothing lives forever. 

So I looked back through some of my publications, and a number of the magazines have disappeared since I had a story with them. Most notably…and sadly…was a magazine called Catapult (you can still access their web archives at least). They were probably the first place to pay me for a story. They were the first place people actually read my work. They were the magazine I made a number of my early writing friends through. Now they just publish books, having chopped their magazine branch off. They published my story Breaking and Entering for Would Be Marine Biologists and Mother’s Wolves (which is also in my collection, Haunted Ecologies). They were one of the first places that really taught me what in depth work with an editor looks like (we did soooooo many rounds with Mother’s Wolves)…and I miss them. They helped my career a ton and I will always be thankful.

The literary/genre communities have lost a ton of magazines over recent years, Tin House, Shimmer, and No Contact come to mind first. But so many magazines are always teetering on the edge of disappearing. Fantasy magazine went on a hiatus for a while, but managed to get enough support to pop back into life (I have a story with them this December!). So many of my favorite genre mags rely on crowd funding to keep their issues coming out. Some can still make it on subscriptions, but only just barely, and I can only think of 1-2 who actually do that. So I guess what I’m saying, at the end of all this, is if you love short stories, try to support them however you can. If you have a little extra money, maybe snag a subscription or join their kickstarter of hop on their Patreon or buy some merch. If money is tight, share stories you’ve loved from them online, linking back to their websites so others can discover them as well. Yell at your neighbor over the fence that divides your property about how excited you are for the next issue of X,Y, and Z magazine. The last one always works really well…trust me.

I hope you enjoy my little serial killer ghost story. I’m always writing about stuff coming back from the dead. Maybe some of these lit mags will too. Who knows…

Based on the Tony Costa Murders (1969)

The garden was nourished by moldering bodies. Phillip grew weed on the eight graves, nutrients from decaying tissue propelling plants skyward. They were leafy, flowers heavy and slick with resin. He killed male plants to ensure cross pollination wouldn’t ruin his harvest. Profits were important. He hated the thought of wasting such good fertilizer and all that effort. 

Philip sold the weed at bars, the same bars where he picked up the women who were now buried beneath his crop. They were loners and drifters and summer washashores as the papers called them in vague write-ups and black-and-white headlines. The disappearances crept sporadically across two years, investigations always dead-ending.

***

People who smoked the weed heard voices, a far off murmuration of crypts and corpses and layers of sand and moss and humus, worms and beetles filling spaces between skin and bone, drugs, hallucinogens and roofies leading to belief in false death and numbness, a burial only a burial in dreams, morphing to burial in real life. There was always a pleaded question, desire suffocated by a mouthful of dirt. Each smoker tried to listen, but they could never make out the women’s last wishes.

Voices and visions, the two went hand in hand.

Half passed out on couches, Philip’s clientele witnessed dark alleys, a man dragging women with names like Joleen and Bette and Claudia to his truck, streetlights dim, the moon a sliver. He pulled them through rain gutters, stirring the muck and detritus of another Cape Cod summer: cigarette butts and fishing line, endless collections of empty vodka nips, tattered clothing and sandals. He was unceremonious and quick, sloppy, but his face never came clear, dark hair, glasses, nothing more definite, no scars or tattoos to set him apart. Just the bodies, the truck, the shovel, the grave, and the blue house in the distance through the trees.

***

Lea’s brother was a cop who wasn’t averse to the occasional toke. Lea bought her weed from a woman by the docks, who bought it from a neighbor who bought it from Philip. The line of faces never came into focus for her, but the plot of land between the scrub pines did, undergrowth sheared low, the humped mounds, the tilled soil, the numerous plants pushing upwards.

“That’s a lot of weed,” Lea said, eyes on the ceiling of her brother’s apartment, visions playing over the popcorn texture.

“That’s a lot of bodies,” her brother replied, eyes wide, newspaper headlines scrawling through his thoughts. 

 They heard the voices, listened closely, picked out landmarks, charted mental maps. Truro was a small town, mostly sand and coastline. There were only so many roads.

*** 

They drove out at night, headlights flickering over cabin fronts, picket fences marking one lot from the next. They found the blue house, could see lights through the woods, bobbing between trees, hovering like scalding eyes in the darkness.

Listening, they searched for shovels falling into soil, the low moan of the injured, the dead and dying.

There was nothing to hear over the wind in the trees.

They left the truck on the soft shoulder and blundered through the forest, skin scraped by holly and wild roses. As they neared, the light faded, drifting back into the scrub, feet accustomed to deer paths quick in retreat. 

They never caught up, losing sight of the lantern in the undergrowth. 

Lea’s brother called in the address when they got back to the apartment, the landline crackling with static.

“Eight. I’m sure there will be eight,” he said into the receiver, murmuring voices promising him of what lay beneath the mounds, how many hands they’d find reaching towards the surface, clawing for open air.

***

Their hearts had been removed, the lead detective said. They never found where they were buried. Not in Philip’s freezer, or beneath floorboards, no attic strewn with human taxidermy. Officers had taken dogs through the woods and dunes, had recovered all other body parts. 

Only the hearts were missing.

When they asked Philip, once he’d been cuffed and guided to a room for questioning,  where he’d put them, he shook his head and said that wasn’t his doing, that it was someone else, his other self, his friend, a neighbor, someone with a taste for ventricles and aorta and tougher tissue.

The detective also noted bites had been taken from the uncovered bodies.

Philip blamed coyotes.

***

The last of the crop was burned early one Friday morning, a thick fog of marajuana smoke settling over the neighborhood, breathing through the trees. It rose in plumes towards a low gray sky. No voices cut through the smoke, no spectres pushed aside the heavy slate curtains to peer at the man below. 

The chorus of eight had fallen silent for the moment, ashy tongues wilted in the dirt.

Lea’s brother ignored orders. He didn’t want to bring the weed back to the station to be disposed of another way. He’d seen each of the women’s faces, knew they had places to go, hearts to find. A quick controlled burn was all it took to cleanse the garden.  

He did his best not to breathe, shirt over his nose. 

A person can only hold their breath so long. 

He didn’t want to take them with him, to impede their journey, but that was no longer his choice to make.

The eight were untethered.

They’d go where they pleased.

I’m so pumped for Nadia Bulkin to be stopping by this week! I’ve been a huge fan of her short stories ever since I read She Said Destroy a number of years back. She’s always doing weird and interesting things with her work, which is what I’m always searching for in fiction. Her new collection, Issues with Authority, is one of my most looked forward to reads of 2025 and hopefully it will be one of yours too. Now enjoy her recs!

Nadia’s Top Five:

“The Specialist’s Hat” by Kelly Link in Stranger Things Happen 

The premise of “The Specialist’s Hat,” my very favorite short story, is a staple of mid-century modern American horror folklore: Two little girls are left in the supervision of a babysitter while their father goes out for the evening; the three trade stories of increasing menace and malevolence. It’s both intimate and mythical in scope, double and triple-stacked with meaning, imbued with threats from the occult to the mundane – and it achieves all this magic with words. A melody plucked out with tweezer-like precision. Repetition like an incantation, or is it just a nursery rhyme? As a writer, this is the story I re-read when in need of a reminder of what a fantastic toolbox we have access to. 

 “In The Penal Colony” by Franz Kafka, originally "In der Strafkolonie" and can be found in his complete works.

Kafka is famous for absurd scenarios accepted as normal, usually narrated by a hapless casualty. I would argue that “In The Penal Colony” is a little different. The key perspective here belongs to a correctional officer who earnestly and fervently believes in the virtues of an execution device that provides transcendence to the condemned (rather akin to Pascal Laugier’s movie Martyrs). The penal colony’s new management considers the machine to be absurd and the officer to be mad, yet this sensibility feels like a veneer: the officer is at least honest about the glorification of suffering and punishment baked into our laws and religions, maybe our very psyches. A foundational story for my worldview. 

 “The Dead” by James Joyce in Dubliners 

There’s a purity and completion in the cold of “The Dead” that I always found comforting. When I first read it, the prose’s beauty kept me engaged in the early travails of a scholarly man arriving with his wife at a family Christmas party. But then I was lulled by the rhythm and hum of human existence on the page – an Irish relative of Luis Rafael Sanchez’s Macho Camacho’s Beat and its hit song “Life Is a Phenomenal Thing” – and consoled, the way I’m consoled by leaving the television on all night when I’m sleeping somewhere new. And then comes the stillness and silence of the ending, and the ubiquity of death, and the reassurance that for all our daily anguishes, we are still so very, very small.  

“A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor in A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories 

O’Connor’s view of humanity is a grim one, and when I first read this story about a dysfunctional family embarking on a road trip from Georgia to Florida, the ending genuinely shocked me. I was conditioned to expect a satirical “manners” story about vaguely unpleasant people; this isn’t that. I won’t pretend to understand what O’Connor intended with this story – she wrote a lot of rebuttals about how it was received, saying critics had missed the role of Catholic grace, and I indeed am no Catholic – but she also thought that violence returned her characters (all of us, I suppose) to reality and I can say that this story did that for me, regardless of whether it was the reality O’Connor intended or not.  

 “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" by Herman Melville in The Piazza Tales 

When I was a kid, I went through a year of what used to be called “psychoneurotic truancy,” now termed school refusal. I papered over that part of myself with obsessive dedication to studies and work, essentially refusing to let myself refuse an order ever again. So I have great empathy for Bartleby, the law clerk who goes from quiet high-achiever to quiet refuser – of work, of movement, of anything that keeps the world around him humming along like a rickety generator. I suspect how you interpret this story depends on the root causes to which you attribute depression; I’d also argue that it ultimately doesn’t matter. Bartleby prefers not to explain, and to that I say: good for him.  

And now a little bit about Nadia’s latest collection of three novella’s, Issues With Authority , from the author herself:

Issues With Authority is ultimately a collection about transformation - about becoming in the Red Dragon sense - into a creature of power and death, a creature worthy of admiration. I named it thus because on the one hand it's about questioning traditional authority - my protagonists are all "problem children" of various flavors - but on the other hand it's also about what happens after these problem children usurp that authority. The book is made up of three novellas, all of them falling in the "horror" category, though with slightly different flavors and monsters. "Cop Car" is political horror, about a psychic little girl who goes from a cult to the CIA to a dark world of her own making. "Your Next Best American Girl" is body horror, about a luckless pageant contestant who goes through the five stages of grief with her disintegrating skin. And "Red Skies in the Morning" is a ghost story, I guess, or rather lots and lots of deadly ghost stories spread through various types of media that the government is trying in vain to control. A little something for everyone. 

Nadia kindly gave me an ARC of “Red Skies in the Morning” at the last NecronomiCon and Dim Shores put my blurb on the back of their small run of that novella. It is one of the best things I’ve read in years, and with her new collection, you get two more stories!!!! You should all be excited about this one.

Here’s that blurb:

"Nadia Bulkin's Red Skies in the Morning is so hauntingly beautiful and wicked weird...you can't miss it! Ghosts possessing the living through cursed movies and polaroids, check! Cults dedicated to the spread and worship of said cursed movies, check! Two sisters bleakly entwined in a collapsing world not so different from our own, check! I spend my life searching for reads like this one. You won't be disappointed!"

And once you’ve checked out her latest, don’t miss her debut collection, She Said Destroy, out from Word Horde Press!

Last month I had a new story come out from Nocturne Magazine called “The Last Knight and the Last Morning.” It’s a sort of homage to the amazing cursed film novel, Experimental Film, by Gemma Files. It’s about a door to a God’s chamber that magically appears on a movie set one day…and wow is the guy who’s producing the movie a jerk…I’m sure that will end well for him. You can find that one here: https://www.nocturnezine.com/issue-5

Upcoming Events:

Resting…October is over, and as a mostly spooky author, now I get to sleep…

What do you have to look forward to next time??? Jeffrey Ford is going to be stopping by to share with us his five short story recommendations and a little about his new collection, Pandemonium Waltz, coming out from Lethe Press in February. I love Jeff’s work and really can’t wait to see which stories he picks. I hope you stop by for that one too. 

Until next time, be well!

-Corey

(and if you’re interesting in pre-ordering The Writhing, Verdant End, my next big release, here is a link: https://www.cursedmorselspress.com/product/the-writhing-verdant-end-paperback-preorder-releases-december-9th-2025-/ZCJ6AWKNC7KDQ62F4KBKYKKL)