Nicole Cushing

A Sick Gray Laugh

Transgressive and bleakly funny, terrifying but surprisingly humane, The Half-Freaks showcases Nicole Cushing's ever-evolving take on the Weird.

The Half-Freaks

Like everyone else in the world, you've wanted to do things people say you shouldn't do. How many times in your life have you wanted to slap someone? Really, literally strike them? You can't even begin to count the times. Hundreds. Thousands. You're not exaggerating. You're not engaging in... whatchamacallit? Hyperbole? You're not engaging in hyperbole. Maybe the impulse flashed through your brain for only a moment, like lightning, when someone tried to skip ahead of you in line at the cafeteria. Hell, at more than one point in your life you've wanted to kill someone; really, literally kill someone. That's not just an expression. Not hyperbole. Then it was gone and replaced by the civilized thought: You can't do that. Not out in public. But you've had the thought...

Mr. Suicide

The Sadist's Bible

Mothwoman

When the soul has been thoroughly poisoned, the body must abandon it. Everything feels unreal afterwards, but plastic heads shed no tears. Bram Stoker Award(R) winning author Nicole Cushing offers an excursion into the Weird, a quiet novella of a madwoman in a mad town, as an Episcopal priest grapples with the meaning of faith, reality, and if there is anything real to either of them, at the end of it all. "An intense and uncompromising literary voice." - Rue Morgue "I've never read anything quite like The Plastic Priest, and I'm delighted I have. A witty and incisive portrait of a priest beset by doubts, it mutates into a comedy of uncanny paranoia before exploding into weirdness that's as disturbing as it's liberating. Nicole Cushing's tale is a stimulating challenge, and her spare precise prose is a constant pleasure." - Ramsey Campbell Nicole Cushing is a Bram Stoker Award(R) winning novelist and a two-time nominee for the Shirley Jackson Award. Various reviewers have described her work as "cerebral", "brutal", "transgressive", "wickedly funny", "taboo", "groundbreaking" and "mind-bending". Her second novel, A Sick Gray Laugh (2019) was named to LitReactor's Best Horror Novels of the Last Decade list and the Locus Recommended Reading List. Her third novel, Mothwoman was released in late 2022. Nicole lives in Indiana.

The Plastic Priest

In Nicole Cushing's first full-length collection, The Mirrors, one finds the reflections of a nightmare world brimming with horror, despair, and brazen absurdity. Within these pages are tales of identities lost and found ... relationships lost and found ... sanity lost and found. Included in this collection: The Truth, as Told by a Bottle of Liquid Morphine The Cat in the Cage The Orchard of Hanging Trees The Fourteenth A Catechism for Aspiring Amnesiacs White Flag The Company Town The Choir of Beasts All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Piggy Class The Last Kid Scared by Lugosi I Am Moonflower The Meaning The Suffering Clown Eulogy to be Given by Whoever's Still Sober Youth to Be Proud Of Subcontractors The Peculiar Salesgirl Non Evidens The Squatters The Mirrors.

The Mirrors

Sadism, nihilism, poverty, wealth, screams, whimpers, sanity and madness collide in Nowhere, Indiana. For Thomas Krieg, Nowhere is a miles-long, pitch-black underground maze in which he's imprisoned dozens of boys for the past ten years -- all in the name of art. For two brothers, Nowhere is the only place they clearly remember living. A world unto itself, in which they must stay alert to stay alive. A world from which the only escape is death. But for an English occultist known only as Mr. No One, Nowhere is much more...and much less: the perfect place in which to perform a ritual to unleash the grandest of eldritch deities, the God of Nothingness, the Great Dark Mouth. Shirley Jackson Award Nominee for Novella (Finalist) (2013) "The confidence and expertise so blatantly evident in Nicole Cushing's writing is astonishing." - Thomas Ligotti

Nicole Cushing

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