Donna Lynch's new poetry collection pays homage to her muses and explores their dark beauty. Whether victims or victors, scarred or unblemished, she casts light on all their qualities; their shameful purity and their endearingly vile ways. With a scavenger's eye for treasure she reveals tantalizing possibilities glimpsed briefly. And for a short time the muse peers back at us both from familiar faces and strange ones: captivating, terrible and awe-inspiring.

This is a signed chapbook limited to only 250 copies. Each copy contains a sampler CDR of songs by Lynch's band Ego Likeness (Dancing Ferret Discs), as well as some bonus spoken word material. It also features illustrations from artist Steven Archer.

Now available for pre-order!

Order the expanded hardcover of 100 Jolts together with Audiovile and get a discount.

August 25th, 2:30 pm
signing by Jeremy Shipp for Vacation
Barnes & Noble Booksellers
Citrus Plaza Shopping Center
Redlands, CA

September 28-30
Context 20 SF/F/H Convention
Midwest Hotel & Conference Center
Columbus, OH
Michael Arnzen will be Horror Guest of Honor

September 28-30
Baltimore Book Festival
Mount Vernon Place
600 Block North Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21201
RDSP Dealer's Table
John Edward Lawson
Ronald Damien Malfi

Horrorfind is one of our favorite events of the year and we hope to see you there! We'll have a table in the dealer's room all weekend and we'll be hosting a release party for Audiovile and Ladies & Other Vicious Creatures party Saturday night.

Don't miss out on meeting: John Edward Lawson, Matthew Warner, D. Harlan Wilson, Michael A. Arnzen & Donna Lynch

A new hub for all bizarro happenings has just been launched—BizarroCentral.com. It's got great info on authors, events, new releases and even a brand new, hilarious story from D. Harlan Wilson titled Toreador which begins, "His profession: toreador. His bane: toreadoring doesn’t pay the bills. His task: deliver a Siamese algae eater (Crossocheilus siamensis) to a connoisseur of aquatic converters."

You mean aside from that curious incident of demonic possession that commanded me to pick up a microphone, press record... Well...it was really a happy confluence of a couple of things. I was getting a few queries from readers about whether any of my work was available in audio book form. I always love doing fiction readings as a sort of performance, and I thought it would be good to try to capture that for people who can't make it to horror conventions and so forth.

Around the same time, I was asked by the producer of the movie based on my work, called Exquisite Corpse, if I wanted to send him something for the "extras" part of the DVD. I thought recording a recitation of a few pieces would be a natural thing to do, so I gave it whirl. But once I started, hamming up the voices like I always do at a fiction reading, I found that the words alone just wasn't enough, so I started adding sound effects... and the next thing I knew, I was pulling a bunch of old musical instruments out of the closet (years ago, I played bass guitar in a few garage bands and my wife had a dusty old keyboard; there were lots of little noisemakers I found in the closet...) and I used them to fill out the sound in creepy and artful ways.

Some of the tracks do seem to take on a life of their own, over and above the original written pieces. Were you surprised by the way any of them turned out?

ALL of them were surprises! None of them sound the same way on the CD as they sound in my head when I read them in print. Since I was feeling my way around in a medium that was relatively new to me, I was discovering all sorts of things buried in the stories that I didn't know was there: there's music underneath the language, and vice-versa. Having a back beat makes you "time" the way you read things differently. I often found myself improving, revising some of the words or pulling out lines from the stories and repeating them like a chorus throughout the story. It's wild! And sometimes I imposed a new mood or color onto the story by approaching it from an unexpected musical genre. Like, if you've read "Obictionary" you probably see that it's sort of a sing-songy children's piece based on the way it uses the alphabet -- but maybe you don't think of it as a hip-hop song. And once you hear it that way, and you find yourself tapping your toes or making gangsta rapper poses along with it as you drive-by a shopping mall, well, it might just creep you and your friends and unsuspecting pedestrians out in some very unexpected ways.

Do you see any similarities between the composing process and the writing process?

I always write with the idea that I might read the story aloud some day at a public performance and I often can be seen mumbling to myself when I'm typing at the keyboard. My makeshift background in poetry has always allowed me to explore the musical side of writing, as well. So I'm sure I drew on my writing strategies as I fumbled around trying to figure out how to shape a "song" around a story. But this focused recording experience has really opened my ears to the subtle ways that music and sound undergird stories and I've become even more flexible and excited about the implied voice and pace of my writing. Things like song structure, sound juxtaposition, and just BEAT have given me more conscious ways of thinking about what it is I'm doing when I'm composing a story, and I'd like to think it's leading to improvements in my style, if not just more experiments with form, and, ultimately, a lot of fun.

Audiovile is supposed to be creepy and dark and bizarro all the way... but it's also just plain fun. And as I return to focus more on my next writing project, I've found that I can't stop having fun with what otherwise might be called "work." I hope listeners and readers will have fun with it, too. If folks reading this haven't heard the free samples from Audiovile yet, I invite them over to the party at http://www.myspace.com/arnzen And there's an Audiovile promotion contest going on for subscribers to The Goreletter this month that might be fun for people, too (heck, they could even win a free deck of Play Dead playing cards!). It's free to sign up at http://www.gorelets.com