Our Authors

J.R. Blanes lives in Chicago with his wife and neurotic dog. His short fiction has been published in several magazines and podcasts such as Tales to Terrify, The No Sleep Podcast, Thirteen, and Creepy, among others. In between bouts of writing and dog wrestling, he plays bass guitar and records music. Coffee is his nightmare fuel of choice. 

Mercedes M. Yardley is a whimsical dark fantasist. She is the author of numerous works including Love is a Crematorium and Other Tales, Darling, the Stabby Award-winning Apocalyptic Montessa and Nuclear Lulu: A Tale of Atomic Love, Pretty Little Dead Girls, Detritus in Love,and Nameless. She won the Bram Stoker Award for her stories Little Dead Red and “Fracture.” Mercedes lives and works in Las Vegas. You can find her at mercedesmyardley.com. 

Climber, tattoo collector, and peanut-butter connoisseur, Xan van Rooyen is an autistic, non-binary storyteller from South Africa, currently living in Finland where the heavy metal is soothing and the cold, dark forests inspiring. Xan has a Master’s degree in music, and–when not teaching–enjoys conjuring strange worlds and creating quirky characters. You can find Xan’s stories in the likes of Three-Lobed Burning Eye, Daily Science Fiction, and Galaxy’s Edge among others. They have also written several novels including upcoming YA cyberpunk novel Second Soul, and adult aetherpunk novel Silver Helix. Xan is also part of the Sauútiverse, an African writer’s collective with their multi-award nominated anthology Mothersound out now from Android Press. Feel free to say hi on socials. Find all links here: https://linktr.ee/xanvanrooyen

“Jeff Somers observes these amiable sociopaths with a funky wit …” — Bruce Allen, The New York Times

Jeff Somers (www.jeffreysomers.com) began writing by court order as an attempt to steer his creative impulses away from engineering genetic grotesqueries. From 1995 to 2014, he published The Inner Swine, a personal zine expressing his often alarmingly dumb opinions on everything under the sun, and several pieces were chosen for inclusion in The Zine Yearbook. He has published ten novels, including the Avery Cates series of dystopian sci-fi novels (avery-cates.com) published by Orbit Books, the dark urban fantasy The Ustari Cycle (wearenotgoodpeople.com) published by Gallery Books, and the standalone novels Lifers (Creative Arts Book Company), Chum (Tyrus Books), and Five Funerals (forthcoming from Ruadán Books). He’s also published more than sixty short stories, including “Ringing the Changes,” which was selected for inclusion in Best American Mystery Stories 2006 and “The Little Birds,” published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine in 2023. He writes about books for BookBub, the craft of writing for Writer’s Digest (which published his book Writing Without Rules), and everything else for Lifehacker. He lives in Hoboken with his wife, The Duchess, and their cats. He considers pants to always be optional. As a verified attention whore, he can be found lurking on Bluesky (jeffsomers.bsky.social), Threads, (@jeffsomersauthor), and occasionally on X (jeffreysomers), Facebook (jeffreydxsomers), and Instagram (jeffsomersauthor), where he posts more photos of whiskey bottles and cats than is probably healthy.

“Hefty and insistently entertaining … the story races along with an appealing balance of grimness and likability.” — Kirkus Reviews

“Soaked in blood and steeped in deadly power and desperation.” — Publishers Weekly