Courtney Lovecraft’s Book of the Dead.

I’ve been so deep in book promo land that I almost forgot: I have a new short story out!!

This one is horror, and like a lot of horror it comes from a particularly dark place deep inside me. Specifically: my rage at the way the world is treating trans and nonbinary folks and drag queens and anyone else who transgresses along the edge of gender.

It’s called Courtney Lovecraft’s Book of the Dead, and published in Nightmare Magazine. You can read the story for free online…

Courtney Lovecraft will be the first one to tell you—she’s an old-school, old-ass drag queen, and she does old-school drag. Her makeup is caked-on, dramatic and impeccable—the evil queen from a Disney cartoon made flesh. Her performances are offensive. She lip syncs torch songs. She’s not on TikTok, and she’s never done a clapback video. She’s never sent in an audition reel for a reality television drag competition.

and then check out this interview with me about it!

Watching the way the world has been going to hell lately, and the way that drag queens and trans folks have been used as wedge issues and boogeymen to scare people into voting against their own self-interest, I realized that Courtney Lovecraft had to be someone who came from that lineage of fierce radical freedom-fighter artists… In an interview, the iconic drag queen Sasha Colby said something like—drag for her was a tool to empower people who had been disempowered. And that sparked the essence of Courtney’s character and her journey.

This one spent a long time percolating. Seventeen years, to be precise – from the time the title first came to me to the time I was ready to start actually writing it. Seventeen years of inchoate rage condensing into something (slightly) more choate.

I hope you think it’s worth the wait. I know I do.