Book Blitz and Giveaway - Lullabies for Suffering: Tales of Addiction Horror by Various Authors

Title: Lullabies for Suffering: Tales of Addiction Horror
Authors: Various
Publisher: Wicked Run Press
Publication Date: January 10th 2020
Print Length: 255 pages
Genres: Horror

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“A plunge into the agony and the ecstasy, the inescapable nightmare of addiction.” ~ALMA KATSU, author of The Deep and The Hunger

Addiction starts like a sweet lullaby sung by a trusted loved one. It washes away the pains of the day and wraps you in the warmness of the womb where nothing hurts and every dream is possible. Yet soon enough, this warm state of bliss becomes a cold shiver, the ecstasy and dreams become nightmares, yet we can’t stop listening to the lullaby. We crave to hear the siren song as it rips us apart.

Six stories: three novellas, three novelettes, written by a powerful list of talent, all featuring the insidious nature of addiction–damaged humans craving for highs and wholeness but finding something more tragic and horrific on the other side.

FEATURING:

Caroline Kepnes, author of You and Hidden Bodies

Kealan Patrick Burke, author of Sour Candy and Kin

Mercedes M. Yardley, author of Pretty Little Dead Girls 

John FD Taff, author of The Fearing

Mark Matthews, author of Milk-Blood

Gabino Iglesias, author of Coyote Songs

“Each story uses different techniques and tropes from the genre resulting in a volume that is chilling and thought provoking.” ~Library Journal (Starred Review)

Goodreads * Amazon

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EXCERPT:

SOMETIMES THEY SEE ME
by
Kealan Patrick Burke

I MET CALVIN ON THE SINGING BRIDGE outside Rosewood Park on the night of December 24th. I’d gone there to kill myself, and though he never admitted it, so had he. It was there in his eyes, the same flat look of grim resignation I’m sure I carried in mine. Everyone goes there to die. It’s become a cliché, but such things don’t matter when the end of your life is concerned.

He’d been throwing scraps of paper down into the frozen water. The scene looked familiar to me, but it would take a while before I could recall where I had seen it before. In that moment, I was more intrigued by his posture and the aura radiating from his emaciated body.

“I can wait,” were my first words to him, and his response bound us together until the end of the whole mess.

“For how long?”

The night was full of funny things, the first of them being that when I rounded the spider web of frozen trees and saw his dark figure hunched over the railing in the haze of cold moonlight, I felt a brief twinge of panic. Woman alone; strange man on a bridge. That I worried he might be a killer only tickled me later as we lay in bed together reminiscing on how f*cked up it all was. If he’d turned out to be a homicidal maniac, it would have put a serious damper on my plan to kill myself. But that’s the interesting thing about suicide. It’s a personal thing, perhaps the most personal thing of all, the very last measure of control. Thus, having someone else do it doesn’t count. Instinct will revolt if the executioner isn’t you.

Rather than cast our bodies into the freezing current, we walked and talked, and retreated to his place among the unsteady tenement buildings in a part of town nobody thinks of as anything but a backdrop to the occasional nameless murder on the nightly news. There, on the second floor, by the cozy light of a host of guttering candles, we drank cheap vodka, laughed and wept and entered each other both spiritually and physically until sleep left us entwined in his stained and stinking sheets.

With his true nature written in sweat all over my skin, my dreams did not, for the first time in years, try to drown me in anxiety. I did not see the wallpaper, and I did not see the blood. I saw only magic.

I knew him.

And so our brief love story began.

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