By Dee Holloway 
Welcome to Dead Leaves, an occasional table stacked high with recent horror tomes! Today’s focus is an early look at the most recent volume of Split Scream, a series of novelette pairings from indie horror titan Tenebrous Press. Join the Librarian as we venture “Off the Map,” beyond the pale, toward the interior and beyond. WARNING: some spoilers below.
First things first: I love the Split Scream series. I’ve read two volumes prior to #7 and will be getting the others at some point because they just hit right. For those new to the concept, each Split Scream pairs two novelettes- short fiction that sits between 10,000 and 20,000 words- often sharing a central theme, such as the academic-flavored haunts of #4.
The series has been a stellar spotlight on indie horror’s boldest voices, with entries from Scott J. Moses, Holly Lyn Walrath, J.A.W. McCarthy, and more. This continues with “Off the Map,” featuring the writing duo of John K. Peck & L. Mahler alongside Íde Hennessey. Tenebrous Press bills the novelette series as akin to a double feature, calling to slasher night at the drive-in, but for me, it’s also reminiscent of split EPs. In the best cases, a split EP’s two bands bring out the best in each other… or the weirdest. A split isn’t a collaboration with two artists working toward one story. It’s a mirror, an inversion, a conversation. “Evergreen” and “Sequoia Point” would be enjoyable without each other, but taken together, they’re more affecting than the sum of the parts.
It’s easy enough to imagine a place we might describe as “off the map.” As depicted in this volume, the Pacific Northwest fulfills that in spades. But these stories’ narrators might be described so: not off the grid regarding technology, but pursuing terrain beyond the borders of normal human experience.
Deirdre and Meg are both travelers in grief, the former returning to her hometown after her mother’s death and the latter returning to a secluded vacation spot which her deceased husband loved. As human emotions go, grief’s power–and seductiveness–lies in its ability to transfigure. As the two women move through the stages of grief, mourning for lost loved ones and their own lost lives, they’re offered the chance to change in extreme and overt ways.
“Evergreen” inverts the truism that you can’t return home. Its denouement suggests that home has been waiting for Deirdre and that home is something communicable. Through the cursed evergreens thronging Falls Valley, nature has intruded into civilization. The last shred of civilization becomes a weapon when Deirdre carries her town’s darkness into the wild.
“Sequoia Point” presents a California far from the glitz and traffic of Los Angeles, yet its few characters embody certain CA archetypes: the hippie-witch, the idiosyncratic painter, the Hacky-Sack guy. Where “Evergreen” maintains a dreamlike, elegiac tone, “Sequoia Point” is often hilarious, its serious theme and provocative twists highlighted by beach bitch decor and kombucha accidents.
Falls Valley in “Evergreen” and the eponymous Sequoia Point are quintessential small towns with dark underbellies. Sure, in the current moment, it’s perhaps impossible to approach Pacific Northwestern settings and eldritch hamlets without an inevitable comparison to Twin Peaks. The title “Evergreen” and its in-text designation as a “bad-luck place” call to the Black Lodge energy lurking in Ghostwood Forest; it’s got a little diner too, though the Sugar Pine is no RR. There’s not even an uncanny veneer of cheerful Americana in Falls Valley, only economic depression, your crush who grew up to be a cop, and a rash of missing persons.
Sequoia Point is famous for good surf and infamous for its inaccessibility… and it’s become attractive to portal-seekers. The glimpses of another world Meg catches–a world where witch bottles provoke very real effects, and monstrous beings travel through a rift in reality–are given form in that most appalling of forms: the doppelganger. Lynch loved him a twinning, and “Sequoia Point” plays that straight, asking such scintillating questions as “would you kill your clone” and, more poignantly, “how do you rescue yourself?” Both stories also share a fatal interest in the perversion of community, that Twin Peaks hallmark. Meg recalls the chain emails of her youth when it becomes clear how the witch bottle she’s been gifted works. Deirdre is confronted with a choice many of us have to make in the real world: leave home at all costs, stay home and either pretend you don’t see the violence- or learn to wield it.
Another success from the Split Scream team, “Off the Map” invites readers into towns and lives a little too close to our own for comfort and then kills the GPS. Thanks to Tenebrous for an advance copy, and congratulations to John K. Peck, L. Mahler, Íde Hennessey, editor Alex Ebenstein, and artists Echo Echo and Evangeline Gallagher on a double feature worth tuning in for.
The full Split Scream series thus far is available for ebook and print purchase in the Tenebrous shop. Happy reading, ghouls!
