Charcoal

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 role 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 and 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.

"Written with thehaunting lyricism of early Clive Barker and with the poetic prowess of KatheKoja, Garrett Cook’s Charcoal is an elegantly beguiling tone poem of trauma andsuffering. To miss out on this masterpiece would be to miss out on watching amaster craftsman at work. An utterly bewitching read."–Eric LaRocca, authorof Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke“With echoes of Rimbaud andBaudelaire, Garrett Cook’s poetic, lyrical Charcoal exploreswith a licentious butcher’s cruel insight the bloody thread thatconnects  the darkness in man, the darkness in the medium by which artis created, and the darkness in art itself.”–MatthewM Bartlett, author of Gateways toAbomination"Garrett Cook's proseis meticulous and beautiful."– Lori Bowen,director of I am Monster"A whirlpool of consciousness, smoothly drawing you in and then sweeping you alongin ever-faster tightening spirals to plunge into a dark, mind-blowingvortex."– Christine Morgan, author ofLakehouse Infernal"Charcoalnails the pain that every artist knows – the agony of creation and the despairof grasping for recognition -- and lays it bare on the page, naked andshrieking, like nothing before."--BitterKarella, Hugo Award Nominated creator of The Midnight Society Twitter"Charcoalexpertly weaves different levels of reality, going from past to present tocanvas to dream"–Joe Koch, author ofThe Wingspan of Severed Hands“Charcoalis full of brilliant darkness and on-point observations about people, traumaand the ways we interact with problematic art. Gothic, nightmarish, and feelsvery much like falling into a historic painting of hell.”– Madeleine Swann, author of TheSharp End of the Rainbow