Lovecraft eZine’s Pete Rawlik gave a solid review of MALINAE!
“There are relatively few books in which the elderly function as protagonists, and Schlossberg not only makes you care for the pair of them, but also makes their plight and actions in the face of a personal apocalypse feel perfectly appropriate and natural.
“[A]n incredible book about growing old with the one you love…well-crafted and fine enough to be placed in my collection of cosmic horror…”
READ FULL REVIEW at Lovecraft eZine
Email Josh[at]JoshsWorstNightmare[dot]com for your autographed copy of the MALINAE paperback for $9.99 + shipping ($3 in the U.S.)!
Candace Nola from Uncomfortably Dark emailed me several excellent interview questions about my horror writing and I had to go and ruin everything.
Don’t believe me? Here are a few quotes from the interview.
UNCOMFORTABLY DARK: What made you want to become a writer and when did you first begin writing professionally?
JOSH: I had no choice in the matter. The demons that incubated and hatched in my head demanded an outlet, and I was powerless to resist. I’m no more a professional writer than a hostage is a professional captive.
UNCOMFORTABLY DARK: What most inspires your ideas for your stories, real-life, bits of dreams or something else?
JOSH: A chemical imbalance, I’m assuming.
UNCOMFORTABLY DARK: What legacy would you like to leave behind?
JOSH: A general sense of unease.
Dawn Shea with D&T Publishing had me on her podcast, D&T After Dark, to talk about MALINAE, biological horror, and how I don’t screw around with ghosts.
Cover for MALINAE, my novella by D&T Publishing. Art by Don Noble.
In a virtual launch event on Friday, April 9 at 6 p.m. (MT), D & T Publishing unleashes MALINAE, the debut novella by biological horror author, Josh Schlossberg.
RSVP via Eventbrite for Zoom link.
Ward Ayers, physically disabled and confined to his Jersey Shore home, can only watch in dismay as his beloved wife Malina slips further and further into dementia. Until he uncovers the dark force behind Malina’s decline and must plumb the depths of sacrifice and selfishness to reclaim his wife and preserve humanity’s future.
The 1-hour event will feature:
–Josh Schlossberg reading a brief excerpt from MALINAE and sharing the real-life inspiration for his fictional work’s exploration of Alzheimer’s disease.
–D & T Publishing editor, Dawn Ellis Shea, relating her experiences working as a nurse with dementia patients.
–Huntington Potter, Ph.D., Director of University of Colorado Alzheimer’s and Cognition Center, offering hope in the form of the latest scientific progress towards a cure.
The event will conclude with Q&A.
MALINAE will be available as an e-book from Godless.com on April 9, and as print and e-book through Amazon on April 23.
For more information, please visit JoshsWorstNightmare.com or DandTpublishing.com.
All my life, people have been trying to shut me up.
It started in grade school, when speaking my mind got me sent out into the hall. This kept up through junior high, where I’d commit the sin of “talking back” to teachers, earning me a double-digit tally of detentions.
I mostly stayed out of trouble through high school and college by funneling my unauthorized thoughts into writing, without ever bothering to try to publish any of it.
In my twenties, when I took a job as an environmental organizer, the state would muzzle my legal protests with detainments and arrests. On one occasion, I was passing out brochures on a public sidewalk when a SWAT team member and former Blackwater operative threw me to the pavement, kneed me in the neck, and confiscated my camera before carting me off to jail.
Upon discovering the political power of the written word, my activist career from that point on involved me being censored and blacklisted by government agencies and corporate-funded NGOs for daring to critique their failures.
After retiring from activism in favor of journalism, despite writing for dozens of publications and winning multiple awards, I eventually learned that editors would reject any pitch that didn’t conform to their own rigid ideologies.
Venturing into the horror fiction world, I was able to sneak several of my short stories into some forward-thinking publications and subversive anthologies, but not a single publishing house would touch my far more “controversial” longer fiction.
But 2020 changed everything. That’s when I sent my novella, MALINAE, to D&T Publishing’s Dawn Ellis Shea. Not only didn’t Dawn blanch at what I had to say, she offered me a contract for the book (coming out in April).
Praise the dark gods for people like Dawn; the opposite of censors, they’re the amplifiers raising up the voices of artists the establishment doesn’t want you to hear.
Darkest Regards,
Josh Schlossberg
The Grip of It
by Jac Jemc
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (2017)
FAIR WARNING: THIS IS
NOT YOUR TYPICAL HAUNTED
HOUSE NOVEL. GOOD LUCK!
Josh's Worst Nightmare 