CUT TO CARE:
A COLLECTION OF LITTLE HURTS
by Aaron Dries, featuring an introduction by Mick GARRIS available here!
Shopping Cart
Your Cart is Empty
Quantity:
Subtotal
Taxes
Shipping
Total
"These stories are as disturbing as they are emotionally authentic and devastating. Humanistic horror. Beautiful. Grotesque. And all too real."
— Paul Tremblay, author of The Cabin at the End of the World and The Pallbearers Club.
An agency that sends social workers into the homes of grieving families to impersonate dead loved ones... The kind old woman who saved a teenager's life but now finds herself haunted by the weight of a cheated suicide... And the daughter of a candlestick maker as she tries to survive a painful existence after her father's execution for making human chandeliers from drunken cowboys...
These stories and more -- ranging from supernatural to the frighteningly domestic, Splatterpunk to the weird and cosmic -- stain the pages of CUT TO CARE: A COLLECTION OF LITTLE HURTS by Aaron Dries. They serve as a timely reminder of the cost of caring too much. Or not caring enough. Of how we mask cruelties behind kindness. And of our willingness to rip ourselves apart in the hope of satisfying a world that doesn't always care for you back.
Featuring an exclusive introduction by Mick Garris, creator of Showtime's MASTERS OF HORROR and director of Stephen King's THE STAND, this unforgettable collection truly cuts deep. Available from IFWG Publishing.
"Dries dissects themes of mental health, memory, and momentary mistakes in this heart-wrenching collection excised from everyday life.”
— Lee Murray, USA Today Bestselling author, Shirley Jackson, and Bram Stoker Award® winner
"Dries writes with the confidence of someone who doesn't just know our universal truths, but our mostly deeply hidden secrets. This collection left me shaken."
— Paul Michael Anderson, author of Bones Are Made To Be Broken and Everything Will Be All Right In the End: Apocalypse Songs.
"Dries takes personal fears and moulds them into universal truths. And the truths he writes of most powerfully are those associated with the terror of simply being alive."
— Gary McMahon, British-Fantasy-Award-nominated author of Rough Cut and All Your Gods Are Dead
Blog
Blog
Blog
It was the night before ebook release ...
|
|
It was the night before ebook release and all through the house … not a creature was stirring—
Oh, hold it. Something was stirring. Something in the dark. The kind of something that only starts to lurk about once you’re asleep in your bed. It crawls up your staircase towards your room, its joints popping as It moves. You can’t see It because your eyes are closed, but Its form is blocking out the moonlight and casting a dim shadow under your door … which is opening. Wider and wider.
—Sorry, I got carried away.
You only get to be a debut author on the eve of his first ebook release once, so damn-it, I’m running with the theme here.
House of Sighs has been a long time coming. I wrote it over two years ago now while traveling abroad. It was pounded out in frenzied sessions on semi-working hostel computers at all hours of the night, on borrowed netbooks, in libraries, by hand in laundromats. When the time came to format the manuscript for Samhain (with the advanced readers copies needing to get out the door A.S.A.P.) my editor, Don, mentioned to me: “Aaron, there’s some seriously weird text elements in your Word document, like thousands—indents, symbols, characters that I’ve never seen before. Our IT department is scratching their heads. Some of it’s in Chinese.”
Hmmm.
I tell you, it was a long night stripping my entire manuscript down to the 300 page paragraph, italics-less, completely un-formatted form it took for me to rebuild it up from again. But it was worth it. Unequivocally worth it.
Those moments when I was pounding my head against the wall because I didn’t know whether or not to let a character live or die? Worth it. The intense mental anguish a single sentence can put you through? Worth it.
I don’t know what kind of future is in store for my wee book. It may slip into oblivion; people may hate it. Who can tell, really? One dude’s Bible is another dude’s toilet roll—it’s all a crapshoot. Yet at the end of the day, I’d be an idiot—and I probably wouldn’t deserve to be here, on the eve of eves—if I didn’t at least hope that House of Sighs has a shelf life. Just a little. I’m not looking for a falcon of success here … I’d happily settle for a little blood-splattered courier pigeon, just so long as somebody is there to receive its message.
Time will tell. I'll see you on the other side.
Oh, and watch out for that creature on the stairs. It’s hungry.
Categories: None