Strange & Fantastic #24
Some updates, Ivy Grimes' new novel, and Mushrooms for Mirabelle Part 5
Winter is almost behind us! I don’t know about you, but I am so ready for some sunshine. This winter has been rough, and for whatever reason, it felt like it’s just dragged on forever. (Thanks a lot, Punxutawney Phil!)
Black Coral
Speaking of a rough winter, I realized I haven’t updated you all about my novel, Black Coral, in a long while. I’m still working on it! I really seem to struggle with writing during the winter months, so progress on Draft 2 has been very slow, but progress has been made nonetheless. With the days getting longer and the sun shining brighter—and me being able to get outside and go for walks without freezing to death!—I feel myself getting more and more creatively energized. I’ve had to do a lot of rewriting from scratch for the first half of the novel, but I’m happy to say that’s almost completely done now: I’ve got one more early chapter to finish, and then I can get to the second half of the book, which will be much more straightforward in terms of revising what’s already there. (Revision is much, MUCH easier—and enjoyable—for me than drafting!) Overall, and despite the struggle it’s been to write, I’m feeling very good about Black Coral, and I can’t wait to share it with you all at some point down the line.
Scares That Care AuthorCon V
In just a little over a week from now (March 28-30), I’ll be down in Williamsburg, VA for Scares That Care AuthorCon V! I can’t wait to hang out with a TON of other authors and readers. I was at AuthorCon a couple years ago as an attendee, and it was an absolute blast. This will be the first year I’m participating as an author, and I couldn’t be more excited about it. I’ll be sharing a table with my friend and fellow author Zach Lamb, so if you’re at the event, please come by and say Hi! I’ll have copies of City of Spores and Goodly Creatures available for purchase and signing, as well as free City of Spores bookmarks and “Mushroom Noir” stickers. Tickets to AuthorCon are available here.
City of Spores
Speaking of City of Spores, I can’t believe it’s been a little over a year since my weird “mushroom noir” novella was released into the world! Happy belated birthday, little guy!
Thanks SO MUCH to everyone who has picked up a copy and left a review. It’s meant so much more to me than I can put into words, so from the bottom of my heart, Thank you.
And while I can’t say too much just yet, I’ve got some exciting news about City of Spores that I’ll be sharing with you all very soon, so stay tuned!
The Ghosts of Blaubart Mansion
by Ivy Grimes
Those of you who read the newsletter and/or follow me on social media know that I’m a HUGE fan of Ivy Grimes. She’s one of my favorite writers, and I’ll read anything and everything she writes. So when Ivy mentioned she was looking for ARC readers for her debut novel, The Ghosts of Blaubart Mansion, I jumped at the chance. And let me tell you—you are not going to want to miss this incredible book! Here’s what I wrote for my Goodreads review:
I’ve loved everything Ivy Grimes has put out, and The Ghosts of Blaubart Mansion is no exception! In fact, it’s my favorite thing she’s done to date—it’s funny, creepy, and unabashedly weird, a perfect distillation of Grimes’ one-of-a-kind mix of the surreal and the absurd, all wrapped up in the guise of a modern Southern fairy tale. I can’t wait to revisit it!
Ivy herself has described The Ghosts of Blaubart Mansion as a “comic fabulist Southern Gothic” inspired by the classic fairy tales “Bluebeard” and “Snow-White and Rose Red". So if you’re looking for something new to read, please do yourself a favor and pre-order The Ghosts of Blaubart Mansion! It releases April 21, 2025 through Cemetery Gates Media. Pre-order here.
Monthly Serial: Mushrooms for Mirabelle
[Read Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4]
(Part 5)
Mirabelle said the black mushrooms—I couldn’t help but think of them as corpse fingers—didn’t smell all that different from the other mushrooms we could find growing in our yard, or the dankest places of the house. She said they smelled earthy and musty, almost sour. It was only after Granny had chopped the mushrooms up and mixed them with herbs and boiled them in her pot to create the sticky, black elixir Mirabelle carried home in a glass vial that they smelled downright putrid, Mirabelle said.
I was only half-listening to her as we walked home from Granny’s with the elixir; I was still worrying over what Granny had said: “Now listen, child. Your daddy and Henry may seem to get worse before they gets better. Could seem like the elixir is killing them, but you gotta trust me, Mirabelle. This the only way for them to heal.”
“Yes’m,” Mirabelle had said.
Then Granny had mumbled over the black goop as she poured it from pot to vial. I couldn’t make out the words, but that bad feeling got worse in my haint-belly. For the first time in Granny’s presence, I spoke, and asked her what she’d said, but she’d only smiled and handed the elixir to Mirabelle.
“Just…praying a blessing, dearie.”
I followed Mirabelle up the steps of our house. The sun had gone down, and the overgrown grass was alive with the clicking, humming buzzsaw songs of insects. Seeing the house like that right then, in the near dark, unlit, abandoned, half-consumed by weeds, it sure looked evil. As evil as what had befallen my family.
You ain’t gotta do this if you don’t wanna, I said, as Mirabelle opened the front door and shut it behind us.
She went to the small oil lamp we kept on the kitchen table, took a match from the matchbox next to the lamp, and lit it. The room shone orange-gold. Daddy moaned loudly upstairs in his room, and we could hear the steady thud-thump-thud of Henry pounding his head against the wall as he rocked perpetually back and forth.
“I wanna,” Mirabelle said.
She climbed the stairs to Daddy and Henry’s room and pushed open the door. Daddy was on his stomach on the floor beside his cot, clawing at the planks, drool dribbling out his mouth.
“Daddy!” Mirabelle cried. She hurried to his side and placed Granny’s elixir on his nightstand before wrestling Daddy back into his bed. He’d soiled himself and his sheets.
When she’d washed him and got him dressed in another pair of clothes and got him tucked in fresher sheets, Mirabelle went to Henry. She pulled him to his feet and guided him back to his bed, where she cleaned and bandaged the back of his swollen, bleeding head with bunches of dirty cloth.
Floating there, watching her, unable to help her help Daddy and Henry, well, I felt as useless as a broken headlamp in a mineshaft.
Mirabelle grabbed the vial from Daddy’s nightstand, then wiped her nose with her arm.
“Ain’t you see?” she said. “This the only way. I can’t… I just… I can’t, Judson. Not no more.”
Whatever you say, Belle, I said. I’m with you. Right here with you.
Mirabelle walked over to Henry and unstopped the vial. She took a deep breath, then lifted Henry toward her and made him drink.
When Henry had swallowed half of the elixir like Granny had said, Mirabelle moved to Daddy’s bed and made him finish the rest.
***
I don’t sleep. Not since I’ve been a haint. I just kind of sit there, floating, hovering, whatever you want to call it, doing nothing, thinking nothing, until there’s something to do or think about. Usually, that happens when Mirabelle wakes up in the morning.
But that night—the night Fyffe went up in flames—I was rousted from my thoughtless haint half-life by the creak of floorboards above us. The sound didn’t wake Mirabelle. She just kept snoring contentedly on her mattress, curled up in her ratty-tatty blanket.
At first, I didn’t think nothing of it. Daddy often groaned and moaned throughout the night, so much so you kind of got used to it. And Henry oftentimes would wake up and get out of bed and go back to rocking in the corner under the window, at least until he got tired again and crawled back in bed or passed out on the floor.
But then, more creaks kept on coming, like the wood was groaning beneath a heavy, shuffling weight. I kept hearing strange noises, too. Wet, gurgling noises that didn’t sound like anything I’d ever heard before.
I moved toward the ceiling, deciding to poke my head through the floorboards into Daddy and Henry’s room to see what was making such a racket. But as I passed through the wood, I heard a mighty loud crash and the shattering of glass, then a heavy thud and scritch-scratch scuffle outside the house.
I pulled myself fully up into the room. Henry’s bed was empty, the window broken, jagged shards of moonlight still dangling from the frame and glistening on his bed.
Then I was rushing out the window, soaring after my brother as he loped and skittered toward town like a spider running upright on two legs.
Henry! I called after him.
He couldn’t hear me, of course; old habits, I reckon.
I should’ve known something was wrong from the start, but it wasn’t until I caught up with him that I was sure it was wrong. That he was very, very wrong.
Henry?
His eyes, the color of his skin, they weren’t right. He was a blossom of bruises and dried blood. The way he moved, like there was something inside him, steering him, it was bad-strange. He shifted in the moonlight and I saw them—fungal growths rippling through his skin from head to toe. A stalk was speared through the top of his head and jutting out his chin, ending in a shiny black cap I swear was moving, like hundreds of things inside it were raring to break free.
He gargled and chittered in a throaty, wet voice, and stumbled toward Main Street.
When Henry rounded onto Main, he burst through the front door of the first house on the corner, splintering the wood like it wasn’t nothing to him, even as it gouged his flesh. His blood dribbled in steady tattoo on the floor. Whoever lived there was up and screaming now, and a man came rushing down the stairs, his wife and several children behind him.
With a loud, gurgling cry, Henry rushed forward.
No! I said.
I lunged at Henry, throwing my arms around him and his many growths, but I didn’t do anything but tickle the air; my arms went right through him.
Henry convulsed like he was full of snakes, and then silvery strands of living gossamer were shooting out from his skin and coiling around the man, forcing the man’s mouth and eyes and nostrils open.
Henry, please, stop! I cried, throwing my arms through him again and again to pull him back.
Then Henry bent his head and the black cap at the end of the stalk burst open as a fountain of black spores erupted from it.
TO BE CONTINUED…
Signing Off
Well, that’s it for March 2025, folks.
As always, thanks so much for reading, and stay strange.
—Austin
If you enjoyed this newsletter, please subscribe—you’ll get a free eBook of my short story, “Magus,” available EXCLUSIVELY for subscribers!
I’d also love it if you considered checking out my weird fantasy noir novella, City of Spores, or my illustrated sci-fi thriller chapbook, Goodly Creatures.
Thank you so much for the shout-out!! It's very kind!