The Merry Dredgers by Jeremy C. Shipp

 

Release date: April 25, 2023

Subgenre: Dark Fantasy, Horror

 

About The Merry Dredgers:

 

Seraphina Ramon will stop at nothing to find out the truth about why her sister Eff is in a coma after a very suspicious "accident." Even if it means infiltrating the last place Seraphina knows Eff was alive: a once-abandoned amusement park now populated by a community of cultists. Follow Seraphina through the mouth of the Goblin: To the right, a wolf-themed roller coaster rests on the blackened earth, curled up like a dead snake. To the left, an animatronic Humpty Dumpty falls off a concrete castle and shatters on the ground, only to reform itself moments later. Up ahead, cultists giggle as they meditate in a hall of mirrors. This is the last place in the world Seraphina wants to be, but the best way to investigate this bizarre cult, is to join them.

 

Excerpt:

 

When I first started working as a princess, I felt a little self-conscious peeking through a gap in the fence into a client’s yard. Nowadays, it comes as second nature. Through a knothole, I see a French bulldog in a polka-dot bowtie, squirming on his back and sunning his round, speckled belly. I also see a rustic-looking shed with a massive window. In the window, I see the severed heads of bobcats and boars and black bears. I wonder for a moment if the hunter who owns this shed only kills animals that start with the letter b. No, there’s a sheep’s head right there. Ah, but is it a bighorn sheep?

My attention shifts away from the shed because a little girl appears with glittery stickers covering her arms like tattoo sleeves. She tickles the armpits of the French bulldog for a while, and then she lies down beside him on the well-manicured lawn. A boy with a buzzcut appears and drops a balloon onto the girl’s stomach.

The taxidermy shed gives me Norman Bates vibes, but at least there are actual children at this children’s party. That isn’t always the case. Now and again, guys will book you for a bachelor party, or worse. I haven’t experienced this myself, but I visit the princess forums and I read the stories.

Now that I’m feeling somewhat safe, I make my way to the front of the house where I make my grand entrance. Sometimes a parent will speak with me one-on-one before leading me to the heart of the party, but most of the time I’m greeted at the door by a horde of wide-eyed, yipping children. This time around, three girls spill out of the front entrance before I can even ring the doorbell.

Children soon surround me on the front porch, and I sing the Greeting Song. Or croak is more accurate, as this is my seventh party this week and I’m losing my voice. To those children who come close enough, I gently tap them on the head with my magic wand.

After I finish singing, a young mother shakes my hand and leaves behind a smear of frosting on my glove. She tells me her name, although her voice is too soft for me to hear it, and she leads me into the house to the birthday girl, who also politely shakes my hand. While I sing the girl the Birthday Princess Song, she stares down at an astronaut doll bent in strange angles on the hardwood floor. Even when I present her with a magic wand of her very own, she takes it without looking at me and doesn’t say a word. I don’t mind.

I sing a couple more songs and teach the children to do the fairy tale shuffle.

Eventually, the birthday girl musters up enough courage to approach me and say, “Do you want to see my dog?”

“Oh yes,” I say, in the sickly-sweet manner that feels almost normal to me at this point. “I do so love animals.”

There aren’t any songs in the princess guidebook that are meant for pets, but I made one up about a year ago. Through song, I tell the French bulldog that his heart is full of gold and that his nose is very cold. I won’t be winning any Grammys for my lyrics, I know, but the kids gobble this ditty up. 

 

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About Jeremy C. Shipp:

 

Jeremy C. Shipp is the Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of The Atrocities, Bedfellow, and Cursed. Their shorter tales have appeared in over 60 publications, including Cemetery Dance, Dark Moon Digest and Apex Magazine. Jeremy lives in Southern California in a moderately haunted Farmhouse. Their twitter handle is @JeremyCShipp.

 

Interview with Jeremy C. Shipp, author of The Merry Dredgers

Today it gives the Speculative Fiction Showcase great pleasure to interview Jeremy C. Shipp, whose novel The Merry Dredgers is published on April 25.

The Merry Dredgers is an unusual title. Who are the Merry Dredgers and what can you tell us about them?

Depending on who you’re asking, the Merry Dredgers are either an insidious cult with sinister motivations, or they’re a mind and body retreat devoted to spiritual growth and the cultivation of authentic joy. Are the Dredgers loveable weirdos? Are they indoctrinated villains? I’m curious to hear what readers will think about them.

Your protagonist, Seraphina Ramon, is desperate to find out how her sister Eff ended up in a coma. What can you tell us about Seraphina and Eff?

When thinking of Eff, you might picture her wandering a forest under the light of a full moon, puffing a sage-flavored vape pen, whispering greetings to the trees. She might sit on a boulder and spend an hour contemplating the meaning of her dream from last night about a headless witch and a giant talking lightbulb. 

When thinking of Seraphina, you might picture her eating a veggie burger in her decaying lemon of a car, listening to a true crime podcast about a serial killer who carves scrimshaw into his victim’s bones. Seraphina will most likely start the podcast over again after twenty minutes, because she hasn’t been paying attention. She’s spent her time reworking her household budget in her head, trying to figure out how she’s going to afford to take her cat to the vet. Eff and Seraphina are very different people in many ways, and they love each other all the more for it.

To uncover the mystery of what happened to Eff, Seraphina has to infiltrate a cult that has occupied an abandoned amusement park. How does she set about it?

According to Seraphina, the best way to learn the secrets of a cult is to join the organization undercover. Personally, I don’t think this is the best idea in the world, but Seraphina never listens to me. She’s stubborn that way.

An abandoned amusement park is a nightmarish place. What awaits Seraphina?

Goblintropolis is an enchanting fever dream of an amusement park filled with psychedelic dark rides and bizarre attractions. Follow Seraphina into the park entrance, and you’ll spot a wolf-themed roller coaster to your right, resting on the blackened earth, curled up like a dead snake. To your left, an animatronic Humpty Dumpty falls off a concrete castle and shatters on the ground, only to reform itself moments later. Up ahead, cultists giggle as they meditate in the hall of mirrors. This is only the beginning of what you and Seraphina will discover in the park.

How far is this novel a departure from your previous full-length works, Bedfellow and The Atrocities?

While The Atrocities is my love letter to the gothic genre, and Bedfellow is a family-centered, psychological tale, The Merry Dredgers is a horror novel where I play around with certain mystery and noir tropes. The narrative voice in my newest book is fun and lyrical and sarcastic. 

You have published copious amounts of short fiction. How do your short stories relate to your longer works and where can readers find them?

The main difference between my short fiction and my longer works is that I write my short stories while sitting cross-legged in the hollow of an ancient oak, draped in moss, with wildflowers in my hair. Meanwhile, I write my novels while sitting on a mound of goblin bones in a cavern, with bioluminescent beetles lighting my parchment. 

In some ways, writing a short story is more difficult than writing a novel. I have much fewer words to plumb the depths of my short story characters and their worlds. You can find my shorter tales in various anthologies and magazines, such as Cemetery Dance, Dark Moon Digest and Apex Magazine. I also have a few short story collections available, like Sheep and Wolves, and In the Fishbowl, We Bleed. 

You live in Southern California in a moderately haunted farmhouse. What does it mean to be moderately haunted?

In a moderately haunted farmhouse, the mannequins only descend from the attic and wheeze cosmic secrets on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. In the middle of the night, I often catch possessed dolls gnawing on the fridge, but since the house is merely somewhat haunted, the dolls lack the preternatural power necessary to devour a whole appliance. During the winter months, gnarled, ectoplasmic stalactites grow from the ceilings and drip the memories of ghosts into our heads. The other months are stalactite-free. It’s all rather manageable.  I can’t complain. 

What made you decide to write dark fantasy?

I suppose I write what I write because I’ve always enjoyed tales of the bizarre and the ominous and the whimsical. As a kid, when playing pretend with my brothers, we would create worlds populated by ghosts and monsters and other strange creatures. I grew up watching movies like Return to Oz and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and The Dark Crystal. Dark, fantastical tales are the ones that live and grow inside me.

Do you enjoy horror and fantasy works or range more widely?

Despite the fact that I gravitate toward the horrific and the fantastic, I’ll read anything if the story is absorbing, if the prose dazzles me in some way. I read romance-forward classics, plays, literary novels, middle grade books, ancient epics. Right now, I’m on a quest to read a book from every country. I just finished Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt, and I started The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedaya. My next read will be The Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-eun. 

Where do you start when you begin to write - with an image or a scene? Or something different altogether.

The seed varies from tale to tale. Sometimes I’ll start with a setting or a creature or a theme. Sometimes I’ll write a list of things that delight me or horrify me, and a story will burgeon forth from there. When writing The Atrocities, I began with a few goals. I wanted to create a macabre yet alluring house that felt more like a living character than a setting. I also wanted to incorporate certain gothic tropes and turn them on their heads.  

Horror and Dark Fantasy have come back from the dead in a big way. Why are these genres and their slipstream more popular than ever?

I’m not sure. It could be that reality is the dream of a colossal, cosmic worm, and the worm is experiencing more nightmares than usual lately. It could be that experiencing fictional horrors is a form of catharsis and existential relief. 

What are your thoughts about the crop of recent folk horror movies like Midsommar and Enys Men?

I think the appeal of folk horror is layered and complex. These films embrace a lushness of color and art and beauty in a refreshing way. When it comes to films like Midsommar or The Wicker Man or Lokis or The Dark Secret of Harvest Home, part of the appeal is the folk art, the architecture, the costumes, the quilts, the music, the festivals.

On another level, I think people connect with folk horror because, in the real world, we frequently experience the horrors of mob mentality. In America, for example, the spread of QAnon conspiracy theories is basically a cult horror movie come to life. Your main character slowly realizes that a massive number of people around them believe in lizard people and demons. The QAnon community wants to wreak havoc on the non-believers. I think watching folk horror films is one way to help process and think about those aspects of our reality.

Is America the home of horror and what does that mean?

The US definitely produces a lot of phenomenal horror films, books, TV series, games, comics, etc. At the same time, beautiful works of horror are being created all over the world, and I’m sure in other galaxies. Every year, I experience new horror books and films from far and wide, and I feel extremely lucky to have those opportunities. 

How does fictional horror relate to the horror of contemporary reality?

Horror can be cathartic. Horror can be subversive. It can help us understand the human experience. It can help us shine a light on beliefs and norms and systems that cause people pain. It can help us find strength. It can expand our consciousness.

Preorder The Merry Dredgers now!

About Jeremy C. Shipp:

Jeremy C. Shipp is the Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of The Atrocities, Bedfellow, and Cursed. Their shorter tales have appeared in over 60 publications, including Cemetery Dance, Dark Moon Digest and Apex Magazine. Jeremy lives in Southern California in a moderately haunted Farmhouse. Their twitter handle is @JeremyCShipp.

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The Bridge by J.S. Breukelaar

 

Release date: June 22, 2021

Subgenre: Dark Fantasy, Horror

 

About The Bridge:

 

Meera and her twin sister Kai are Mades—part human and part not—bred in the Blood Temple cult, which only the teenage Meera will survive. Racked with grief and guilt, she lives in hiding with her mysterious rescuer, Narn—part witch and part not—who has lost a sister too, a connection that follows them to Meera’s enrollment years later in a college Redress Program. There she is recruited by Regulars for a starring role in a notorious reading series and is soon the darling of the lit set, finally whole, finally free of the idea that she should have died so Kai could have lived. Maybe Meera can be re-made after all, her life redressed. But the Regulars are not all they seem and there is a price to pay for belonging to something that you don’t understand. Time is closing in on all Meera holds dear—she stands afraid, not just for but of herself, on the bridge between worlds—fearful of what waits on the other side and of the cost of knowing what she truly is.

 

Excerpt:

 

CHAPTER 1

TOWER

 

I was raised by three sisters—one a witch, one an assassin and the third just batshit crazy. By the time I left our home deep in the Starveling Hills, I’d met the middle one, Tiff, once, but I never told the others. She’d run off or something, and they didn’t talk about her much, and maybe it was for that reason that she was my favorite—her ghostly absence having as big an impact on my growing-up as the others’ larger-than-life presence. When I finally came to live in the Hills, carrying my own dead twin in my arms, Tiff was already gone, leaving behind nothing but bad blood and a trunk filled with old clothes from across the ages. Among them were a pair of Roman sandals that fell apart in my hands, some rusted crinolines, a moldy cat-o’-nine-tails, some concert T-shirts and even a notebook from her days at the Blood Temple with the Father—bound in the skin of one of her victims, for all I knew. The pages were scribbled in with illegible symbols which set something humming inside me, convinced me from day one that “Aunty” Tiff wanted me, and only me, to find her.

I was good at finding lost things, Kai always said, and they were good at finding me.

In time Narn, the eldest sister, sent me away to Wellsburg college, ten thousand miles away and on the other side of the planet. To the ends of the earth, may as well have been.

 

I had arrived at the campus just before the start of the semester and was soon sick with one of my frequent chest infections. I lay awake in the Tower Village dorm room, feverish and snotty, too ill to go to the first week of classes, forgetting why I was here. The damp pillowcase chafed my cheek. The weary thwack of a campus security pod overhead tangled in the jerky drum of my heart, and I tried to push thoughts of the Father’s birds away, couldn’t help wondering how far I had really come from all that—Narn and her crazy sisters and my sister Kai, buried under a bloodwood tree, high in the Starveling Hills. I tried not to think. I tried not to ask myself if it would ever be far enough.

My pajamas, blue plaid with pink elephants, were damp with sweat. They insistently nudged between my legs. I shifted on the mattress, trying not to think of the downy young shearers who drank at the pub in the nearest town to our hut—a twenty-kilometer drive in Narn’s truck, but worth every pothole. I was nineteen and Kai would be too—my better half as Narn called her, not joking. Narn never joked. Maybe that’s why Kai had been her favorite from the beginning—law of opposites or something. My sister always joked, even when she lay in the Blood Temple infirmary covered with sores and the Father already sharpening his scalpels for the unmaking.

Even then.

The door opened with a click. I squeezed my eyes shut, hoping my roommates, Lara and Trudy, would leave me alone. Their laughter subsided when they saw me still in bed, but they continued their conversation in whispers—something about an urban myth of a ghost of a fur hunter from the 1800s who crawled out from under the bridge after being pushed to his death by a witch.

“Yes, but don’t most old colleges in the Slant come with some kind of scary story?” Trudy was saying. “In orientation they told us . . .”

I couldn’t resist. Partly because in the mostly bedridden week that I’d been at Tower Village, I’d barely spoken or been spoken to, but also because long before I’d even gotten here, Narn had versed me in the history of witches’ rights. “He jumped!” I croaked. “Probably. They had to blame somebody. Why not witches?”

“Know-it-all,” Lara said beneath her breath.

No, Kai was the know-it-all. Always had been. My cheeks burned with fever, but there was no stopping me now. Kai always said how just a sniff of threat was enough to make me see red.

“Witches got the blame for the fur trade drying up in Upper Slant,” I continued. “People said they poisoned the game—even after the Apology it wasn’t safe for them here.”

The air in the dorm room was stale. My nose was blocked with congestion so I drew it in as best I could through my mouth, watching Trudy dart through the shadows like a bottom feeder through lakeweed, for a moment the meds and the fever telling me that it was Kai. That my twin was not dead after all and I was home in the Starvelings and the Father had not found us as she always said he would. But then Lara flicked on the light and I blinked into the reality of what I’d lost.

Lara moved to check her roots in the mirror for telltale regrowth. Like all Mades, her hair was course and dull, but she’d applied conditioning treatments and lightened it to a chestnut brown, had it cut into a curly bob that suited her. “It stinks in here,” she said.

“Anyway, what do you care about myths?” I propped myself up on a wobbly elbow. “We have enough problems with reality.”

Lara and Trudy were made on the Blood Temple’s mainland property but the Father’s synthetic reproductive protocol was the same there as it was in Rogues Bay, where I was from. Their teeth looked ultraviolet in the blue-stippled light from the bridge outside our window. Their forms were limned in a milky afterglow which seemed to slow their movements one minute, speed them up the next, silvery jetsam shredding in their wake. Or maybe it was just the meds.

“The counselor in pain clinic said we shouldn’t fixate on the past, Meera,” Trudy shivered mechanically, “if we want to belong to the future.”

I wanted nothing less.

“Well, we can’t fixate on the past,” I said. “It’s not how we’re, um, made.”

It was something my sister would do—hiding good intentions behind a dark pun, an offhand joke—but I sucked at reading the room, something Kai never let me forget. Instead of admiring my cleverness, Trudy’s eyes brimmed and she reddened in the shame of our shared congenital amnesia.

“Myth or not,” Lara turned defensively from the mirror, fastening a chain around her wrist from which dangled a rose-gold feather, “they’ve put a curfew out now that semester’s started. The bridge is off-limits after ten.”

“Why?” I asked.

“To keep us where we belong,” Trudy sniffled. “Especially after dark.”

They moved about, preparing for the night. Later they would come home smelling of beer, faces bleached in the light of their program-issued phones, and fall immediately asleep dreaming, I imagined, of a new tomorrow.

What I really felt like was a drink, but before I could ask them to wait while I dressed, Lara reminded me that today, Thursday, was the last day to sign up for our second-choice electives. And that we needed these for credit point requirements to complete our transfer program in the specified time of eighteen months.

“The sooner we complete the program,” she said, “the sooner we can get out of here.”

“I almost forgot.”

“You did forget,” Lara eyed my pile of snotty tissues. “And you need to get up now, Meera, or you never will.”

I hacked phlegm into another tissue. My nostrils were chaffed and there was blood in my snot. Unlike most of the Redress Award recipients, including my roommates, who had followed the award recommendations and arrived during the summer, my body had not had time to build up the required immunities. Nor had my brain gone through the regulation mnemonic and behavioral reconditioning. The dormitory pulsed black and blue in the light from the illuminated bridge. It wasn’t much different from how my eyes would open into the half-light of the little room I shared with my dead sister in the Starvelings, before closing once more on the shifting optics of a digital dream.

Unfamiliar constellations pricked the alien September sky. I looked through the window high up in my Tower and thought how I wanted to be here—didn’t I? Yet a part of my consciousness did not. Some part of me—my mind—remained in South Rim where, beneath Crux and the Jewel Box, blossoms would be blowing across my twin sister’s grave beside the bloodwoods. Where Mag would be cleaning their gun and Narn would be peeling potatoes while she stirred a cauldron of beans on the stove—she was a terrible cook of everything but sweets and libations, and even from here, I could taste the burnt scum from the bottom of the pot, smell the lemon myrtle in her velvety pudding and the stinking hellebore in her soup.

But my heart could not.

The walls spasmed in another flash of electric blue. I closed one eye. Through the window of the high dorm, saw a shadow haltingly separate from a row of unintegrated shapes on the bridge and unfurl what looked like fleshy wings before drawing them once again into itself and settling hunched in the cold blue light. When I opened my eye, it was gone.

The medication I’d stolen from the bathroom made my head fuzzy. In my footlocker I kept some of Narn’s A. sarmentosa tea for pain, but I couldn’t recall the sorcery required to activate it. The words were written down somewhere—Kai had seen to that—but ink in the hands of the dead tends to ravage the paper it’s written on.

The Regulars called us survivors—although none of us saw ourselves that way: we called ourselves Mades. The Father made us by inserting a soluble microscopic implant laced with his Forever Code into a human female zygote in vitro, birthed from a surrogate we would never know. I was raised along with thousands of others in the Blood Temple, which flourished in remote Southern Rim camps for just shy of three decades, although the first years were much less productive than was hoped. According to our Father, Mades, by virtue of our . . . virtue, would be the bridge to lead man back into the Paradise from which he’d been so unjustly expelled. It made perfect sense at the time. We understood the Father. He made us feel his pain as if it was our own.

It was our own.

My roommates went out, leaving me alone with nothing except a reminder of my own amputated singularity. Lara was right. I needed to get out of here and the sooner the better. I crawled from the bed to Trudy’s bunk and helped myself to two pills from one of her many bright jars purchased from the pharmacy. If they knew I was stealing their meds, they didn’t say. They brought me things sometimes—cough drops and once, some soup. My throat was on fire, and my nose so congested that I’d dreamed last night of drowning, of hanging, of a hand across my face.

I heard a snuffling under the bed, that cheap-carpet drag, and slowly lifted the sheet, my breath coming quick. I was maybe expecting the spotlit eyes of a lost flying fox, like once back in the Blood Temple—dragging itself by its broken wings, it had looked more insect than mammal—but there was nothing. Each night since arriving in Upper Slant, I’d had the same dream, or different versions of it. Kai and me playing on the lichen-striped outcrop even though I am already too old for games and Kai is already dead. She taunts me through lips black with rot, teeth hanging by ropy gums in her still beautiful face. In my dream the shadow when it first appears is both distant and too close, a shadow without a shadow, erect as a monument, the ravens circling overhead with their iridescent wings and their sad-baby cries, Kai rank and rotting beneath a sky too high and never high enough. “He’ll always find us,” she gurgles. “We’ll never be free.”

In my dreams it was Kai the guilty survivor instead of me.

  

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About J.S. Breukelaar:

J.S. Breukelaar is the author of Collision: Stories, a 2019 Shirley Jackson Award finalist, and winner of the 2019 Aurealis and Ditmar Awards. Previous novels include Aletheia and American Monster. Her short fiction has appeared in the Dark Magazine, Tiny Nightmares, Black Static, Gamut, Unnerving, Lightspeed, Lamplight, Juked, in Year’s Best Horror and Fantasy 2019 and elsewhere. She currently lives in Sydney, Australia, where she teaches writing and literature, and is at work on a new collection of short stories and a novella. You can find her at thelivingsuitcase.com and on Twitter and elsewhere @jsbreukelaar.

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