Thomas Kemp, the Libertine, turned cruelty, torture, and humiliation into works of art.
It was said that he had given his soul to something inhuman to be part of artistic immortality. It was said that his very ashes were used to make a set of charcoals still imbued with his spirit. When Shannon Hernandez, a traumatized and repressed art student, is tasked to draw with them by her lecherous professor, she feels a change in herself and something menacing calling out to her. She is offered a chance to create work that breaks boundaries and hearts alike but comes bound with a connection to a legacy of immortal terrors.
“Written with the haunting lyricism of early Clive Barker and with the poetic prowess of Kathe Koja, Garrett Cook’s Charcoal is an elegantly beguiling tone poem of trauma and suffering. To miss out on this masterpiece would be to miss out on watching a master craftsman at work. An utterly bewitching read.”
–Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke
“Charcoal nails the pain that every artist knows – the agony of creation and the despair of grasping for recognition — and lays it bare on the page, naked and shrieking, like nothing before.”
–Bitter Karella, Hugo Award Nominated creator of The Midnight Society Twitter
Raised on the North Shore of Massachusetts in a house half the town called haunted, Garrett Cook grew up obsessed with everything curious, monstrous, and perverse as well as struggles with body image, gender roles, and intense trauma. He has since moved on to Portland, Oregon, where there are fewer ghosts but still a great deal of perversity. His work has appeared alongside Joe Lansdale in Best Bizarro Fiction of the Decade, Michael Moorcock in Kizuna, Jack Ketchum in DOA III, and James Joyce in I Transgress. He is the winner of the Wonderland award for Time Pimp and an Honorable Mention in Best Horror of the Year 7 for his story Beast with Two Backs. His work has been translated into Spanish, Japanese, and Russian.
Grab your copy from CLASH books, or on Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon.
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