Jo Kaplan – författare

When a metal band’s lead singer vanishes in the woods, the mushrooms in the forest might know more than they’re letting on in this mycelium-metal horror novel from Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author Jo Kaplan.

The dead collect in low places. That’s what Brynn Werner, lead singer of metal band Queen Carrion, wrote in her notebook before she vanished while staying at a cabin in Oregon’s Umpqua National Forest.

A year later, on the anniversary of her disappearance, the rest of her bandmates visit the cabin to remember her and find a way to move on. But tensions arise over who should be their new singer and who is responsible for Brynn’s disappearance—tensions that boil over as they realize not all is as it seems at Trail Creek Cabin.

Strange entries in the guestbook write about visions of a pale form that moves through the trees, figures wearing gas masks lurk in the distance, and there’s a strange fungus growing from the wall of a tunnel in the cabin’s basement. Then they hear Brynn’s voice echo impossibly through the forest—and the pale form that emerges from the trees is her perfect likeness. Is it her ghost…or something else?

Brynn knew there was a secret in these woods. It’s why she chased her muse here to finish her masterpiece. The Midnight Muse is an alluring and grotesque dissection of self and fungus. Kaplan delivers an ominous spiral of psychological torment as the members of Queen Carrion slip into a more natural skin.

Don''t awaken what sleeps in the dark.

In a future ravaged by fire and drought, two climate refugees ride their motorcycles across the wasteland of the western US, and stumble upon an old silver mine. Descending into the cool darkness of the caved-in tunnels in desperate search of water, the two women find Lavinia Cain’s diary, a settler in search of prosperity who brought her family to Nevada in the late 1860s.

But Lavinia and the settlers of the Western town discovered something monstrous that dwells in the depths of the mine, something that does not want greedy prospectors disturbing the earth. Whispers of curses and phantom figures haunt the diary, and now, over 150 years later, trapped and injured in the abandoned mine, the women discover they’re not alone . . . with no easy way out.

The monsters are still here—and they’re thirsty.