Hello, my friends! It has certainly been a minute. A lot has happened since I last popped in, including winning the Bram Stoker Award for Love is a Crematorium and Other Tales, finally getting the all-clear on not one, not two, not three or four, but FIVE cancer scares (what a tough few months!), and buying a new, bigger house here in town. We close right after Christmas! There is a lot to catch up on, and I hope you forgive my radio-silence, but the break was nourishing and necessary. Now I want to invite you to a special event we have going on tonight!
The Sinister Societies Anthology Launch Party!
Tonight we’ll be having a launch party with the six Sinister Societies authors, hosted by John Skipp! John Tom Deady, Sarah Read, Errick Nunnally, Cindy O’Quinn, Michael Burke, and me as we do a short five-minute reading and a live Q&A. It will be a lot of fun!
It’s online, so you merely have to click the Zoom link to drop in. The party starts at 9:00 pm Easter, 6:00 Pacific. (That’s in three hours.) Here’s the link. Hope to see you! links.ruadanbooks.com/S6LAUNCH
As for my story, it’s titled The Witches of Paradise and it ties in to the worlds of Darling (to be re-released from Ruadán Books in 2026 with 30% more content!) and its sister book Paradise (Ruadán, 2027). It’s a beautiful, dark, magical surrealism story that is classic Mercedes, and it’s my very favorite thing I’ve written in a long while. Please come and check it out!
We all have secrets. That’s one truth. Another is that secrets are tricky to keep: They want to be shared. In the company of these secrets, societies emerge. They fester and spread. From the esoteric to the pragmatic, history is built on these societies made as much of myth and rumor as blood and bone.
Some societies are real organizations with documented histories. The Freemasons. The Molly Maguires.
Some are patchwork figments of speculation, conspiracy theory, and perhaps even the delicious specter of world domination. The Illuminati.
And some take other forms: from cults to covens to covert operations, secrets can bind us to the society of others or split us apart with sinister intent.
In Sinister Societies, six acclaimed horror writers explore these darker implications:
A foster kid finally feels as though she’s a part of something much bigger than the hellish life she was living, when a new home brings her old life into fractious focus.
A secret agent—a dancer, singer, assassin—investigates a series of mysterious murders in Europe that point to an invisible killer with inhuman characteristics.
In a dark, dreamy town, a line of otherworldly women is tasked with keeping the carnivorous landscape at bay.
An accidental murder in a Cleveland, Ohio alleyway during the height of Prohibition—and the discovery of a mysterious book—sparks a series of events that threaten to engulf the entire world.
In a late-1800s mining town, the Molly Maguires arrive to help workers fight for better working conditions—but even they can’t save the ones sent to work in Tunnel 17.
The Rat King controls the underground, and the Coin King controls the overstreets, but when a pickpocket proves that power can be stolen, chaos reigns.
Join Mercedes M. Yardley, Tom Deady, Sarah Read, Errick Nunnally, Cindy O’Quinn, and Michael Burke as they uncover the darkness that infests the hidden corners of the mind and the soul.
With a foreword by John Skipp. Edited by Linda Hartley.
I really hope to see you there!