Yesterday I began a mini series, within a series, within a series. Wait...what? Becky that is very confusing. Okay, so let me explain.
You are currently reading the 31 Days of Horror series and today's post is part of the "Why I Love Horror" series within that series. However, it is also part of three days featuring authors who play their trade in the self publishing sphere, authors who are putting out solid books, titles readers love, but with little to no marketing push behind them.
All three of these authors are also members of the Horror Writers Association and they have offered up a book for one of you. All titles offered are finished copies that you should add to your library's collections immediately. The rest of you, should consider ordering a copy for yourselves.
Please see the most recent giveaway for rules. Those rules apply here as well. I will pull 3 separate winners over the weekend. The second name pulled will get today's title.
Now you can see what I mean about this being "a mini series, within a series, within a series." So let's begin.
I met Michael Phillips because he is in my Chicagoland chapter of the HWA. He is also one of the chapter's volunteers, running our website. During one of our meetings, he mentioned launching is own micro press. My ears perked up. Then he talked about what he would be publishing through it and I emailed him immediately after the meeting asking for the press' first title to review. I got the book read and into Booklist Online because it was amazing.
I invited Michael here to talk about not only his love of Horror, but why he started a micro press. Below is his story. And if my review didn't make you want to buy the book, his essay will. And do as Michael does. pay it forward by ordering his books.
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Why I Started From Beyond Press
by Michael Phillips
by Michael Phillips
Inspired by the poster and by Kealan’s reading, I asked the two of them if they’d be interested in doing an illustrated book. The result was “Distinguishing Features,” a chapbook with a new story by Kealan and illustrations by Corinne. I printed 200 copies and had author and artist sign them, and we talked about doing a release party at Bucket O’Blood in May of 2020. The pandemic intervened, but the book sold out in a couple months anyway. I asked Kealan for recommendations for the next book, and he introduced me to Cynthia Pelayo, who said yes. She wrote the heartbreaking story “Snow White’s Shattered Coffin,” and I found suburban comic artist Vheto Gutierrez Vazquez to do the cover and illustrations. Again, 200 copies, signed and numbered. Those are sold out too. I have wide-ranging interests, so for the next book I asked my friend, the jazz musician and podcaster Lloyd Brodnax King, if I could make a book of his long-running Twitter project “Stoopin,” in which he tweeted pithy observations of his rapidly gentrifying south side Chicago block. That book came out in 2022.
That summer, I decided to turn my small chapbook enterprise into From Beyond Press. I got advice from Cina Pelayo and from Joe Mynhardt at Crystal Lake Publishing about how to run a publishing company, and how to do it in an ethical manner. And in a battered copy of Things with Claws, a 1961 collection of stories about killer animals and monsters (it also contained Daphne du Maurier’s “The Birds”), I found John B.L. Goodwin’s 1946 story “The Cocoon,” which is one of the creepiest things I’ve ever read.
I decided that my first “real” book would be an anthology of horror stories about bugs, using Cina’s story (which she graciously allowed me to reprint) and Goodwin’s story as the starting point. I tracked down Goodwin’s heirs and secured permission, I filed as an LLC, I turned my bookstore logo into a publishing company logo, I built a website, and I launched a Kickstarter and a call for submissions for what became This World Belongs to Us: An Anthology of Horror Stories about Bugs.
It struck a nerve: I asked a bunch of award-winning authors if they’d write stories, assuming maybe one or two would be interested, but almost all of them said yes—Laurel Hightower, Paula D. Ashe, V. Castro, Kealan Patrick Burke, Felix I.D. Dimaro. I raised $2500 to help pay for the book, I received more than 500 submissions (thank god for slush readers!), and I’ve sold more than 200 copies, in addition to the ones sent out as Kickstarter rewards. Not bad for the first book from a publishing company that nobody had ever heard of. The next anthology is Escalators to Hell: Shopping Mall Horrors, which is due out next spring. It’s co-edited by Jennifer Jeanne McArdle, an award-winning writer who was incredibly helpful as a slush reader for the bug book. I couldn’t have done it without her, so now I’m paying her to help.
I don’t think of From Beyond Press as a horror publisher. I love horror, but I don’t only love horror. I read widely—right now I’m reading Native American author Louise Erdrich and Indian author Khushwant Singh—and I want to publish widely. I’ve lived on the south side of Chicago for 20 years, and I want the press to reflect that, like it’s reflected in my other projects. I used to run a small nonprofit film series called South Side Projections that showed movies around the south side. We showed a lot of work by and for the African American community, and I made a lot of connections. My spouse, art historian Rebecca Zorach, also works closely with the Black community in Chicago. While she was researching the Black Arts Movement in Chicago, she learned that Frank London Brown, who chronicled Chicago’s Black community in the 1950s through journalism and the groundbreaking novel Trumbull Park before his tragic early death, had written some short fiction for the Chicago Defender.
I am a historian by training, and in my film work I often used my research skills to find things: rights to elusive historical films, contact info for filmmakers who seemed to have vanished. I found one director through her ex-husband’s bankruptcy filing, and another through a letter to the editor he wrote to the New York Times in the 1990s. So I found 133 of Frank London Brown’s stories—bite-size, poignant, vibrant vignettes about Black life in Chicago in the late 1950s—and I found his family and offered to split the proceeds from the book with them, even though the stories were in the public domain. They deserve to see some money from their father’s work. And so This Is Life: Rediscovered Short Fiction by Frank London Brown came out this summer. It’s in 25 branches of the Chicago Public Library, and it’s being taught in classes at the University of Chicago and Northwestern this fall. I wanted to emphasize that the stories still speak to us after 60 years, so I asked Nile Lansana, a young Black poet, to respond to them in verse. I asked my friend Sandra Jackson-Opoku, an award-winning novelist, to write an introduction, and it turns out that she had lived down the street from Brown when she was a little girl.
I have a couple other archival projects in the works. In October, I’m launching a new series of reprints of work by women who wrote for the pulp horror and sci-fi magazines of the 1920s-1950s. The first one is by Greye La Spina, who was more successful than H.P. Lovecraft back in the day, but she’s mostly forgotten now—because, I argue in my introduction, she was a woman, for a time a working single mother, at other times a caretaker for her sick husband, so her writing career often took a backseat to her roles as mother and wife. It’s certainly not because the stories aren’t good—they’re incredible, and they’re so different from what we’ve been taught to expect from that period. And I’m working with the daughter of Ida Chittum, whose retellings of scary Ozark folktales in books like Tales of Terror and The Thing Without a Name gave a generation of kids nightmares back in the 1970s. We’re going to reprint her work, including some never-before-published stories.
I understand that I’m operating from a position of privilege. I was able to start the press while working half-time because my spouse has a great job. I’m able to promise professional pay rates because if sales don’t materialize, I can afford to pay out of pocket. I’m trying to use that privilege to benefit others. I’ve made it clear that I want to publish diverse anthologies, and I’m proud to say that only a few of the stories in the bug book and the forthcoming mall book are by straight white men. The mall book, especially, is queer as fuck, and I’m very proud of that. I’m going to publish work by Black authors, by Latino authors, by forgotten female authors. It might take a while, since I’m doing most of it by myself, but I’ll get there.
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