books – PSYCHOPOMP.COM

Issue 42 – The Deadlands

E. Catherine Tobler — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 14:13:26 +0000

A floating point of view, guiding. Something rests upon the hill—something we shall call a dog, but it is not a dog. Do you see his form in the tree, lingering? They told you your mother waits in the white city for you—but maybe they meant sister, brother, something we shall call family, but is not family. Unless it is. The flicker of a digital face, remembered.

Table Of Contents

No Mother to Replace, Nosawema (poetry)
In This Corner of the World, A.E. Weisgerber (fiction)
The Dog, Phoenix Mendoza (fiction)
After Messiaen: A Quartet for the End of Time, R.B. Lemberg (poetry)
Lurid Parts, Maya Ysabel Ng (fiction)
What the Trees Took Back, Marvin Garbeh Davis, Sr. (fiction)
The City in White, Diana Dima (novelette)
We’re Running out of Numbers for all this Counting, Kelsey Dean (poetry)

Cover: Do Forests Dream of Plasmodial Creep by Dory Whynot

House, Body, Bird

E. Catherine Tobler — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 16:48:15 +0000

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.

Content Warnings: Abuse, animal death, blood and gore, homophobia, violence

Price: $ 13.99 Print / $ 8.99 ebook

Publisher/Imprint: Psychopomp

Format: print/ebook

Pub date: February 24th, 2026

Page count: 150

ISBN: 979-8-89116-021-7

Genre: Fantasy

Distribution arrangements: Psychopomp
Contact: press@psychopomp.com
Cover design by: Christine M. Scott clevercrow.com
Cover illustration by: John G. Reinhart

HOUSE, BODY, BIRD turns up the creepy dollhouse dial to 11, and then goes to some unexpected places. I read it during a house repair and I haven’t quite recovered yet. Truly a fabulous debut title! Thoughtful, engaging, both cheerfully gory and cheerfully queer — this novella gives us a glimpse into the future of horror, and I’m here for it. —Bogi Takács, Hugo and Lambda award winning author, editor and critic

House, Body, Bird is a fascinating fractal of hauntings and houses. Schiebeling gives us a claustrophobic generational cycle of women made small by the needs of the family; but also the welcome reminder that even the heaviest weights can be rolled aside when we trust the hands holding the lever. —Aimee Ogden

House, Body, Bird is a gorgeous Gothic jewel of a book, and one which understands keenly that a house can be haunted by more than just ghosts. Its blistering insights into the quiet horrors of a poisonous family are at least as upsetting as the darkness that lurks behind the House’s immaculate façade. You will follow Birdie down into the basement, and you’ll love it. —Waverly SM, author, editor and 2019 Lambda Literary fellow

When Birdie grudgingly returns to help her parents in the house she grew up in—a dollhouse museum where even her own room was an exhibit—it’s not a homecoming. It’s a trap. As Birdie struggles to escape that toxic place and its suffocating memories, this slim volume asks big questions: How do you build a home within a house, a family, your own body? Disorienting and frightening, but ultimately heartening, House, Body, Bird is a book like nothing I’ve ever read before. Highly recommended.
—Laura Blackwell, Shirley Jackson Award-winning author

House, Body, Bird manages to explore some uncommon but familiar horror, and creates something utterly new: beautifully written, emotionally complex, and completely unpredictable. In a thousand years, I could not have guessed how this was going to develop and end. —Kij Johnson, award-winning author of The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe

Issue 40 – The Deadlands

E. Catherine Tobler — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 21:22:23 +0000

There is no magic without the procedure. A golden faceplate aimed at a hole in the sky through which we are buried and baptized in a breath. Our skin bruised and stitched, our bones acquainted. Ghosts have always been there, we just haven’t noticed them, what with the turtles as green as heaven, and the roosters rousing us from dreams. There is no magic without the procedure.

Table Of Contents

Fiction Guest Editor: Vajra Chandrasekera

The Last Minute Before the Rooster Crows, by Malena Salazar Maciá (fiction)
Amanita Season, Belle Biscotti (poetry)
Hamaka, Leave Me Alone, by Testimony Odey (fiction)
I had a dream and in the dream I knew I was dreaming so I believed I could change things, Shana Ross (poetry)
The Destruction of All That is Good and Holy, Otherwise Known as Green Beans, by Erin Ulm (fiction)
The Ritual, by Matthew Wollin (nonfic)
The Ghost of Cerrera Orbital Station Makes Herself Known, by Laila Amado (fiction)
The Pretendian, by Jason Pearce (fiction)
Bay nakht afn altn mark: A rehearsal, by R.B. Lemberg (poetry)
Punks Don’t Die, by Kat Sedia (fiction)
Not a Bird, Ellen Romano (poetry)
Liminalities of the Second Contraction, by Scott Payne (fiction)

Cover: Golden Maze by Carly A-F

Issue 41 – The Deadlands

E. Catherine Tobler — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 17:00:22 +0000

We start this letter again. An empire of death. A bark in the night, after the sharp snap of something unknown. Would you look back? There’s nothing out there, but what if there is? A child comes apart so easily. Would you look back? What if what you saw didn’t evaporate but became something else, something other. A corpse may be a shadow, may be a father. An empire of death. We start this letter again.

Table Of Contents
Fiction Guest Editor: Vajra Chandrasekera

bark!, Charlotte Suttee (poetry)
The Skull of Francisco Xalbec, Alan M. Fisher (fiction)
The Self-Made Women’s Circle, Marisca Pichette (fiction)
in which Orpheus is a Hmong daughter, Phoua Lee (poetry)
On the Anthology Entitled “Frames of Colour and Un-Colour,” Dmitri Akers (fiction)
Bible Verses for the Dying and the Heathen, Robin Wheeler (nonfiction)
Mushaboom, Jeremy Morris (fiction)
Babe, gray lindsey (poetry)
A Woman Is Screaming, Joe Koch (fiction)
Ask a Necromancer: C’est ici de l’empire de la Mort, Amanda Downum (nonfiction)
Sole, Aliya Whiteley (fiction)
You Build Your House on Your Father’s Corpse, Sadoeuphemist (fiction)
The Breeze & The Black Door, Mack W. Mani (poetry)

Cover: Silver Island, by Carly A-F

Afterlives: The Year’s Best Death Stories, 2024

E. Catherine Tobler — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 15:25:11 +0000

Full Table of Contents

Introduction, by Sheree Renée Thomas
“How To Get Away with Living” by Chisom Umeh
“Drinking Dead Brazilians” by Lia Mulcahy
“Eyes Of My Brother” by Robert Luke Wilkins
“Labyrinth” by Beth Goder
“The Texture of Memory, of Light” by Samara Auman
“A Proper Vessel, A Perfect House” by Ash Huang
“Not all your bones are yours” by Plangdi Neple
“Rooms of Our Own” by Toshiya Kamei
“The Lark Ascending” by Eleanna Castroianni
“Unquiet on The Eastern Front” by Wole Talabi
“Raising an Ancestor” by Kay Mabasa
“When Rain Clouds Gather” by Rutendo Chidzodzo
“Onitsha Main, Ochanja, The Twins, Nkpor, and the Shadows of Shoprite” by Somto Ihezue
“The Empty Throne” by Benjamin C. Kinney
“The Colour of the Ninth Wave” by Katie McIvor
“Mister Yellow” by Christina Bauer
“At the End of Everything” by Spencer Nitkey
“The Ghost Tenders of Chornobyl” by Nika Murphy
“Twice Every Day Returning” by Sonya Taaffe
“Leak” by Maria Hossain
“A Tapestry of Dreams” by Victor Forna
“The Eleventh Three-Quarters Hour” by Leslie What
“What It Means to Drift” by Rajeev Prasad
“A Late Appearance by Death” by Victoria Brun
“Fat Kids” by Alex Jennings

Fantasy Magazine – Issue 99

E. Catherine Tobler — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 19:18:48 +0000

Issue 99 Table of Contents

Unlikely Friends on a Quest: A Conversation with Kemi Ashing-Giwa, by Arley Sorg (interview)
More Than A Blank Parenthesis Equals God’s Forgetfulness, by Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan (poetry)
Collective Action: A Conversation with Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older, by Arley Sorg (interview)
The Matriarchs, by Malena Salazar Maciá (flash)
A Cup of Forgetting, by Eleanor Glewwe (short story)
Grove of Jealous Lovers, by Alex Jennings (poetry)
When You Hit The Poison Ivy Thicket, You’ve Gone Too Far, by Cory Farrenkopf (flash)
Marked for Destruction: A Conversation with Moniquill Blackgoose, by Arley Sorg (interview)
Ichthyosis, by M. L. Krishnan (short story)

Cover art: Asterisa, Weaver of Constellations, by Babs Webb

No One To Hold the Distant Dead

Sean Markey — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 14:41:27 +0000

Inga Nyström chose to leave Earth and help the colony of Nordenmark escape a looming ecological disaster. But by the time she arrives, the catastrophic degradation of the planet’s terraformed environment has already passed the point of no return, and she finds its people defeated, sleepwalking through a slow-moving death.

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.

Praise for No One To Hold the Distant Dead

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

A lovely and melancholy exploration of loss, grief, and care for the dead. K.L. Schroeder has created something truly unique in this novella, confronting not just individual death, but looking a society mourning the immanent death of an entire planet.

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

No One To Hold the Distant Dead is a searing, intensely evocative novella. KL Schroeder paints a gentle, otherworldly apocalypse, both ecological and personal, which by turns delights with its stunning prose and devastates with its incisive detail. This is a timely and fascinating novella that is richly populated with fascinating characters surviving in an all-too-real future. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

— David W. Goodman, author

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

No One To Hold the Distant Dead is a brutally beautiful story, deftly navigating ecological grief, the loss of self, and finding hope in the strangest forms. The dying world of Nordenmark will haunt me. It is as if Schroeder wrote this specifically to break my heart.

— Lorraine Wilson, author of We Are All Ghosts In The Forest

In No One to Hold the Distant Dead, Schroeder explores the intersections of nature and technology in a world facing ecological collapse, with thought-provoking beauty, intriguing concepts, and smooth and engaging prose. A taut, intelligent, moving, and compelling tale, this is eco and science fiction at its best.”

— Lyndsey Croal, author of Dark Crescent and Limelight and Other Stories

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

No One to Hold the Distant Dead offers a heartfelt meditation on grief and a reminder of the value of interspecies connections.

— Sarena Ulibarri, author of Steel Tree

Full title: No One To Hold the Distant Dead
Author name: K.L. Schroeder
Price: $13.99 Print $8.99 ebook
Publisher/Imprint: Psychopomp
Format: print / ebook
Pub date: Nov 11, 2025
Page count: 108
ISBN: 979-8-89116-020-0 (print)
Genre: Science Fiction
Distribution arrangements: Psychopomp.com // Ingram
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Fantasy Magazine – Issue 98

Sean Markey — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 20:37:48 +0000

Issue 98 Table of Contents

All of Our Mothers are Dead, Eleanor Ball (poetry)

The Memory Breach, Christian Emecheta (flash)

The Dragon and the Bog, Sunwoo Jeong (fiction)

Fear is a Dagger, Mateo Perez Lara (poetry)

Knife Plus, Tracie McBride (flash)

They Return, Eleanna Castroianni (fiction)

Cover art: Wound, by Zi Xu

Signed From These Dark Abodes and 2026 Coin

Sean Markey — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 20:34:50 +0000

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.

Signed Rakesfall and 2026 Coin

Sean Markey — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 16:30:28 +0000

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.