My new book comes out on March 26th! FLESH AND BONE is a queer gothic horror-romance set in 1889 Western Canada, from a queer Canadian author.

It's a short, gory story taking place in the span of a single night as two cowboys—best friends, and something more complicated—are hunted across the Prairies by the physical manifestation of one man's shame and self-loathing. It's a tense, harrowing little story (still a romance though, I promise), and I can't wait until it finds its perfect readers who will love it and enjoy all its dread and viscera (and romance, I really do promise).

I have a preorder goal of $200, which is maybe too ambitious to do in only 8 days for such a weird western horror novella? Prove me wrong, queer gothic enthusiasts!

(Please note: it is quite short at 13,500 words. This is a read-in-one-sitting horror story.)

Content warnings: graphic descriptions of gore and violence, loss of limb, self-harm and self-mutilation including cannibalism, suicide ideation, animal harm to livestock, homophobia including slurs.

Read the opening excerpt below!

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“No way a coyote could take down a steer like this,” Marshall finally said.

It was near midnight. Summer daylight kept long hours in the Prairies, but not long enough. Above, the stars burned cold and distant. To the west, the Rocky Mountains took jagged bites out of the sky. And below—

Everett was trying not to look.

“There’d have been a commotion if a grizzly came up through the herd,” Marshall said, frustrated. “We’d have heard it.”

“A cougar?” Everett offered doubtfully, keeping his face tipped skyward.

The steer was the fifth animal they’d lost in a month. Moving two hundred head of cattle, they expected to lose a couple as they drove west from Saskatchewan into the Porcupine Hills—illness, lameness—but nothing so drastic.

Something was following them.

It didn’t sound like any coyote Everett had ever heard, and it didn’t eat as much as he figured a bigger predator would. He didn’t know what kind of animal that left. Something rabid, maybe. But something rabid wouldn’t have survived so long. Neither he nor Marshall had caught a good look at the thing, no matter how late they kept watch. Everett had seen its eyes once, flat circles reflecting the campfire in the dark, but in the second it took him to haul his rifle up and aim, they blinked away.

He couldn’t shake the feeling that they were still on him, even in the daytime. A tiny itch in between his shoulder blades, digging at him like a thorn under the saddle blanket.

That had been a week ago.

The steer was a mess. Even with its throat torn open and its guts pooling into the dust, it had been alive when they found it. Eyes rolling in their sockets to show the whites, breath coming hard and fast in panicked wheezes. Deep gouges marred its sides, and the lake of blood under it was black and sticky in the darkness. Marshall had put a bullet through its skull to end its misery. How long it had lain there, disembowelled and bleeding out, they couldn’t tell. A few minutes, or half an hour. Longer. The stars had seen what happened, but they weren’t saying. Marshall had been the one to look it over afterwards, trying to figure out what could be responsible. Everett had turned away to be sick.

“Ain’t a hungry animal doing this,” Marshall said, full of conviction. “Show me any animal in its right mind that makes a kill and doesn’t take more’n a bite or two. The flies ate more of the poor bastard than whatever killed him.”

“Whatever it is, it’s been after us since the July moon.” Everett didn’t look at Marshall to mark his reaction. “I’ll take first watch.” He hadn’t been sleeping lately anyhow.