Momma’s Home! CONQUEROR WOMB Now Available for Purchase!

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Martian Migraine Press and editors Justine Geoffrey and Scott R Jones present Conqueror Womb: Lusty Tales of Shub-Niggurath. 18 pulpy tales of fertility and fear, hot sex and chilling sacrifice! Stories that squelch, tales that both titillate and terrify, from some of the best writers working in Lovecraftian horror and mind-bending erotica today: Wilum H. Pugmire, Molly Tanzer, Don Webb, Christine Morgan, Kenton Hall, Brian M. Sammons, Jacqueline Sweet, Copper Sloane Levy, Annabeth Leong, and Christopher Slatsky, along with fresh new voices!

From nighted glades where frenzied orgiasts work unholy magic to slick urban dungeons of unbridled pleasure; from fertility clinics to fevered dance clubs; from the misty depths of the past to the unthinkable future, join us as we offer praise and abundance! Iä! Shub-Niggurath!

NOW AVAILABLE for purchase direct from MMP or through Amazon
$5.99
(ebook only – details below)

WEBSITE EXCLUSIVE CONTENT! Order Conqueror Womb directly from MMP using the links below and receive a bonus ebook: DARK/YOUNG (a Conqueror Womb companion) featuring two spicy new stories from Justine Geoffrey and Jess Gulbranson! NOTE: Kindle users will need to forward their Amazon e-receipt to the MMP Bookstore to receive their bonus content. EPUB and PDF purchases (through Paypal) will have their bonus content sent to them with their copy of Conqueror Womb within 24 hours of purchase.

To purchase CONQUEROR WOMB in Kindle/.mobi format, click HERE
To purchase this book in EPUB format, click HERE.
To purchase this book in PDF format, click HERE.

 

Advance Praise for ‘When The Stars Are Right’ from ‘Book of Cthulhu’ Editor Ross E. Lockhart

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“In the decades since H. P. Lovecraft’s untimely death, countless objects, films, novels, stories, and poems have expanded upon The Old Man of Providence’s oeuvre and its associated pantheon of alien god-things. Among those secondary creations, alongside such nameless horrors as plush Cthulhus and stranger things, have been numerous false Necronomicons, promising arcane wisdom and occult power, but too-often turning out to be a gamut of unpronounceable gobbledygook and a handful of incomprehensible rituals borrowing heavily from Buckland, Crowley, and Spare.

No longer. Canadian author, editor, and poet Scott R Jones eschews such fannish faux-cult nonsense by approaching Old Grandpa Theobald’s life’s work and literary legacy as a true spiritual seeker, and, as a result, uncovers real spiritual truths. This is no Simon Necronomicon, no coy cash-in; instead, the book you hold in your hands is a sort of Cosmic Horror How to Win Friends and Influence Cultists, filled with potentially life-changing wisdom, provocative observation, and beautiful madness. When the Stars Are Right is the first real self-help book for the weird fiction crowd.”

— Ross E. Lockhart, editor of The Book of Cthulhu

Scott R Jones When The Stars Are Right: Towards An Authentic R’lyehian Spirituality from Martian Migraine Press in both print and electronic editions. Click on the cover for details on how you can get an electronic Advance Review Copy of this game-changing guide to Keepin’ It R’lyeh in the 21st Century.

COMING
MARCH 2014
#keepinitrlyeh

 

 

 

 

Bending, Curving, Humming Cosmic: Bryan Thao Worra’s Sublime DEMONSTRA

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If there’s a problem with genre fiction at all (and particularly the horror genre, and even more particularly Lovecraftian genre fiction – OK, multiple problems, I know, I know), it’s that its writers have an unfortunate tendency to bog down in the minutia of the form and format, resulting in stories which merely rehash the already fragrant pulped material of previous years. And so we end up with protags going for a drink down at Tcho-Tcho’s Bar & Grill, or yet another shuddersome “Check it! The Yellow Sign!” and so on. I highlight Lovecraftian tropes here (because that’s my eldritch bailey-wick) but this same issue can and does appear anywhere in genre material: we all know what to expect from zombies, vampires, Little Green Men, and the like, and most toilers in the genre vineyards see little reason to break from those tried-and-true molds.

That’s prose, and such laziness can in most cases be forgiven. There’s only ever one Story, after all, or at most a dozen, so more repetition than reinterpretation/rehabilitation can be expected, even tolerated.

Unlike mere story, though, each poem is (or should be) unique, and when the above happens in poetry, and particularly poetry in the speculative fiction arena, the results are disastrous: lame re-treadings of sci-fi or horror tropes, humourous barely-a-poem asides loaded with references for the in-crowd, and no examination of wider themes relating to the poet’s world or indeed, the world outside that world. This is why (with the exception of Ann K. Schwader) I’ve steered clear of reading “horror poetry”: it is largely a shallow dip into a mostly empty interior geek-space, the space of the specific subject of the poem (zombies, extra-dimensional beast-gods, whatever) and it has nothing to say to me. With a poem like that, once read there’s just no good reason to re-read, and that, for me, is what characterizes a decent piece of poetry, the urge to return and begin again. So why start?

Well, on several recommendations I bought and started Bryan Thao Worra’s DEMONSTRA. I read it straight through in one sitting, and have since read it several times more, in whole or in part. DEMONSTRA is clever, insightful, compassionate, often funny, sublime. Worra brings a very human eye to the world he sees, and that world is filled with, yes, Lovecraftian critters and deities, rampaging kai-ju, giant robots, and the occasional zombie, but also the cultural warping of the Lao diaspora, the god-forms and spirit beings of Laotian belief systems, wrestling sages, surreal road trips, and the meathook realities of wars public, secret, and internal.

Only two pieces into DEMONSTRA, there is a poem about the Deep Ones. Now, there are only so many places a poet can go with Lovecraft’s batrachian breeders from below, right? Worra doesn’t go to any of those places and the result is a poem of peculiar melancholy and spiritual intensity. A line:

Bending, curving, humming cosmic.
Awake and alien.

That is as good a definition as any of what great poetry actually is: the written word used as a hyperspatial bridge to another, radically different point of view, an eyes-wide-open felt experience of ourselves as not-ourselves, which yet comes round again, bending, curving, to speak to our centre: great poetry is a humming transmutation device for the soul. And that is what Worra’s writing in DEMONSTRA does, piece after piece.

Some highlights were Zombuddha (a striking comparison of the traditional Western zombie with the rough lineaments of enlightenment that made me laugh out loud with the pleasure of recognition “Yes! Of course!”); the rich re-telling of Call of Cthulhu from a Lao perspective in The Terror in Teak; the epic road poem The Dream Highway of Ms. Manivongsa (“Fifty years from now, no one will see any difference / Between J.R. and J.F.K., or who shot them. / Now, flee.”); and Full Metal Hanoumane, which includes a geeky reference to Planet of the Apes, true, something that in lesser hands would make a clanging mess of the poem, but here transforms it into a clear bell tolling in the purple depths of space.

Worra has mastered his subjects, instead of the other way around. He has, over four previous books and multiple publications, also mastered his poetry, and I suspect he has mastered his self, his own “writer’s ego”, to a degree that allows him to enter his interior world, return with jewels that reflect that world and ours, and then place those jewels in perfectly appropriate settings that only add to their lustre. I highly recommend this book: it is a bright spot in the overwrought gloom of standard speculative/horror poetry and well worth acquainting yourself with. The appendices: of Lao spirit-entities, and Cthulhu Mythos deity-names translated into Lao; as well as the lovely artwork of Vongduane Manivong that grace the pages, are an added bonus.

DEMONSTRA is published by Innsmouth Free Press, a Canadian micro-publisher of weird and truly wonderful work. You can order DEMONSTRA from them directly here. Bryan Thao Worra can be found here and followed on Twitter @thaoworra

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