Listen:
We spend our whole lives trying to keep our bodies intact. However, the earth is always waiting to make us into something else.
The author of Folklore and Flesh, W. J. Martinez, wrote in his preface that he has always been drawn to the places where the veil thins. In these places, folklore seeps into the soil and the human body becomes a canvas for transformation, decay, and rebirth. He wrote these stories because of the quiet dread that lingers in our ancestral memory.
And he is right. We are all terrified of our own frail, meat-and-bone bodies. But the real horror in this book isn’t just the physical decay. In truth, the real horror is that the characters in these stories almost always invite the monsters in. Usually, this happens because they are too sad to remain human.
Take The Whispering Bone Orchard. There is a grove where a shaman plants human femurs like tulip bulbs, so the trees can whisper the unfinished stories of the dead. A grieving mother goes there looking for her son. She listens for the specific tink of the small silver bell he kept on his waterskin. What she gets instead is a violent birth into flora. Her spine prickles, bark unfurls across her skin, and she becomes a tree that weeps sticky red sap. This tree becomes a wooden conduit for generations of sorrow.
Or look at Digital Fangs. An internet influencer named Ava Delgado buys a tooth-whitening serum called Dentifex, which promises an incandescent smile forged in ancient rites. Instead, she grows a self-replicating colony of bone-ash fangs right inside her own skull. And instead of stopping, she unhinges her jaw on a livestream. This happens because her digital followers demand she feed the hive.
Then there is poor Santiago the beekeeper. His wife leaves him because she is choking on their nowhere life. Santiago is so lonely he steps into his fields and casts off his veil. As a result, he dissolves completely into a swarm of wings, trading his human shell for the eternity of the hive.
Whether the monster is an ancient demon, a digital beauty filter, or just profound grief, the human body always falls apart.
These stories are stitched together with blood and breath and bone. And right now, you can read them for absolutely nothing.
These stories are stitched together with blood and breath and bone.
Folklore and Flesh is now part of the October Contagion – ebook $1.99 direct from the press, signed artifact $12.65 shipped. The June free run is over, but the infection is still spreading.
Go download it.
So it goes.
Thank you for visiting with me. For more Poetry or Literature related content, visit my blog at The Ritual.
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