Welcome to Undertaker Books, where our core values are integrity, professionalism, honesty, and transparency.
At Undertaker Books, our mission is to provide publishing services to indie authors worldwide, spotlighting new and unique voices within the realm of horror fiction. We strive to offer a seamless publishing journey from submission to publication while providing valuable feedback every step of the way.
We believe in collaboration between authors, publishers, editors, and designers to bring diverse voices to the forefront of the horror genre. Our passion lies in creating a long-lasting partnership with authors by focusing on the “less is more” concept: quality releases, not the quantity of them.
Undertaker Books is not limited to any specific theme or subgenre. Instead, we are dedicated to innovative storytelling and embracing the myriad voices that contribute to horror literature.
To our readers, we hope to bring you stories you’ll take to your grave.
Undertaker Books is a small press on the rise, and its Founder and Publisher Rebecca Cuthbert has everything to do with that. I thought there was no better way to kick off this exciting week of feminist horror than to invite Cuthbert to tell you the story of how Undertaker Books came to be, and of course to share her own "Why I Love Horror" story as well.
Cuthbert has organized six of her authors to contribute to this week long feature. You will get to meet each of them and read their contributions to "Why I Love Horror" over the course of this week.
Cuthbert is also offering a giveaway this week-- Undertaker Books prize packs for 3 winners! Click here for the rules and details on how to enter (from a previous giveaway post). Get your entries in by 5pm Central this Friday (10/9) to be entered for the week's giveaway.
One final note, Cuthbert herself has her own story collection with Undertaker Books that you absolutely should check out-- The Hauntings Back Home.
Now let's read why Cuthbert loves horror.
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Why I Love Horror
By Rebecca Cuthbert
No one comes to the horror genre without trunks full of whys and hows. The whys are usually sad. The hows are often traumatic. Beneath their weight, we stagger, and sometimes fall.
But horror understands—both the struggle and the need to keep going. It shares the load, carrying it with us, or points to a place we can set it down, if only for a moment, to rest before trudging on.
I can trace my first topple back to age nine. My mother died unexpectedly, a freak heart attack that I learned (decades later) had nothing to do with genetics. We were out on a day trip. We left that morning with my mom. We came home that night half-orphans, and nothing would ever be the same.
Small town, early 90s. Even though my mother had been a church-school teacher, a Girl Scout leader, a Little League fixture—as soon as she died, a pall of suspicion was cast over her widower and kids. Mean gossip. Predictions including, and I quote, that my sister and I “would end up pregnant and smoking Marlboro reds before [we] graduated high school.” (I may be a weirdo, but I’ve never been pregnant. I don’t smoke, and neither does my sister, who grew up to be a lawyer AND a judge. Those gossips can suck it.)
It wasn’t just the nasty adults, though. Kids didn’t know how to act around me and my siblings, and for a while, it was hard to connect with friends. I always felt different, left out and lonely, even when no one was being purposefully cruel. (Though there was that, too—one little boy on the bus told me “Haha, I got a mom and you don’t.” Thirty-odd years later, those words still cut me.)
There was lots of dissociation, though I didn’t have a word for it until well into adulthood. Frankly, there’s not none now.
Back then, I found myself reaching, more and more, for ghost stories. Tales in which the dead are never truly gone. It doesn’t take a therapist to figure out why.
And the older I got, the more the patriarchy encroached—from “You’re too pretty not to smile!” to sexual harassment and worse. I don’t need to explain. Every woman knows.
Each one of those offenses, another weight to carry. I stooped lower and lower, until I could have licked the ground just by sticking out my tongue.
And so I turned to feminist horror for refuge. In that space, carved out mostly for and by women and femme creators, I was heard, and I was comforted. Instead of offering temporary storage for my rage, feminist horror invited me to throw it onto a communal bonfire. To dance around the flames with my sisters. To throw my head back and howl and scream and sob, free of judgment. What weary woman wouldn’t want to stay there?
Other subgenres doled out relief, too. Grief horror handed me an empty five-gallon jug for my tears. Gothic horror guided me to an empty corridor, shoved a candle into my hand and told me to run as fast and long as I wanted, putting distance between me and my fears. Eco horror saw me choking on the helplessness I felt at the earth dying all around me, led me to a basin and held my hair back while I vomited until the heaving stopped. Folk horror brought me to a clearing in the forest, knocked me to my knees and told me to release my anxieties over a confused faith in prayer. A being older than any one religion would listen, then laugh.
Horror does not make us light or whole or perfect. Horror accepts we’ll never be any of those things.
So when D.L. Winchester and Cyan LeBlanc approached me early in 2024 and said they were starting a horror and dark fiction press and needed an editor-in-chief, what they were really offering me was a chance to contribute to relief efforts. To help bring into the world the kinds of books that had, for years, given me both reprieve from pain and permission to hurt.
We’ve published over 40 titles since opening our doors. The very first book we put out is a novella called INK VINE, written by Elizabeth Broadbent. It features Emmy, a young woman crushed by generational poverty, trapped in a small southern town that would rather see her die than escape. She works as a waitress in a strip club, and every man there feels entitled to her time, her attention, and her body.
I worked as a waitress, too, for many years. As I read Broadbent’s story, it was like I was still holding a tray, still smiling in the face of sexual harassment, still hoping it didn’t hurt my tip that I’d dodged some customer’s wandering hands.
And now, when I read the final scene of INK VINE, it’s like a deep, cleansing breath. A release of the stress those memories bring me.
Then there’s Charlotte Platt’s TREASURED GUEST, in which a Scottish hotel called The Basker and its ghostly staff members choose the wrong traveler to imprison in their uncanny luxury suite—a veteran named Stephanie who will fight bloody tooth and ragged nail to get home to her girlfriend. Plied with every amenity but her freedom, Stephanie battles not just her hellish captors but hopelessness, self-harm, and an entity with glowing golden eyes hiding deep within a stygian pit. The Basker’s concierge keeps insisting Stephanie is their most treasured guest, but all she wants to do is check out.
I will never say no to a good ghost story, but what really hooked me with TREASURED GUEST was its violence. Not ladylike to say, I know, and that’s just it—gender roles mean nothing when a person is fighting monsters. Stephanie must do what, on some level, at certain times, I’ve wanted to do: grab a fire poker and swing. I don’t want to give too much away, but Platt’s story is just excellent, full of familiar tropes applied unexpectedly, with twists and turns that mimic the labyrinthine chambers of The Hotel Basker itself.
More recently, we published Leticia Urieta’s THE REMEDY IS THE DISEASE, a story collection full of Latina characters facing the daily horrors of living with disabilities in a world that refuses to acknowledge their existence, much less their value. The injustices, the shoulder-shrugging apathy of bureaucracy and those who claim to be public servants will boil the reader’s blood, and open their eyes to what is happening, every day, to their friends and neighbors managing chronic conditions. When Urieta gives her protagonists agency—to get revenge, to make connections, to determine their own courses of treatment—she gives them the dignity and respect they have always, inherently, deserved.
I do not see myself—a privileged white woman with easily managed medical conditions—in this collection. That’s its point. That’s its magic. It’s not about me. THE REMEDY IS THE DISEASE does the monumental job literature has always done: shows us others’ lives, encourages compassion, points out inequality and asks us to do something about it. And the collection does it all with gorgeous prose and compelling plotlines.
I could praise Undertaker Books titles all day—one of editing’s joys is getting to know a book from the inside out, and we have dozens to brag about. But the point is this. With Undertaker, the guys and I are doing our best to create a haven for the lonely, the outcast, the grieving, the angry, the desperate souls who turn to the horror genre, again and again, not because it’s the only community that will have us, but because there’s nowhere else, really, we want to be.
Join us. Rest. Lay your burdens down, if only for a moment, before trudging on…
Beautiful!
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