“With her latest, Kaplan taps into the found-footage genre with a tale of missing rock singers, disgusting fungi, and gruesome body horror.”
Brynn Werner, singer for metal band Queen Carrion, disappeared while staying at a cabin in Oregon’s Umpqua National Forest. On the one year anniversary of her disappearance, her bandmates head to cabin seeking closure. As the band grieves, tensions boil over while deciding their new singer, as well as who could be responsible for Brynn’s disappearance.
But things are not as they seem at Trail Creek Cabin. The weird entries in the guestbook tell of a pale form shifting through the trees, while figures in gas masks lurk in the woods. Not to mention the strange fungus growing around the wall of a tunnel in cabin’s basement.
And they hear Brynn’s voice, echoing through the forest. The pale form emerging from the trees looks just like her. Is this her ghost, or …
Brynn knew there was something bad about the woods.
The dead collect in low places.
Why we’re excited about this book:
Jo Kaplan’s back with her first long form fiction in nearly four years. When not playing cello for the Symphony of the Verdugos and indie Spanish rock band Guerra/paz, Kaplan taps into our fears with novels such as It Will Just Be Us and When the Night Bells Ring, as well as short fiction gracing the pages of such publications as Nightmare Magazine, Vastarien, Nightscript, Fireside Quarterly, Hand of Doom: A Literary Tribute to Black Sabbath, and GabaGhoul: A Mafia Horror Anthology, among others. With her latest, Kaplan taps into the found-footage genre with a tale of missing rock singers, disgusting fungi , and gruesome body horror. Clay McLeod Chapman (Wake Up and Open Your Eyes) says: “The Midnight Muse is a found footage fruiting body of a haunted novel, a heavy metal mycelium monstrosity—imagine Iron Maiden replacing its lead singer with the Blair Witch—that echoes through your skull long after reading it.”, and Zachary Ashford (Polyphemus) says: “Fetid, cosmic, and distinctly human, The Midnight Muse is a corpsepaint-daubed reimagining of the urge to create art as an infection. It asks what happens when those compelled by its charge are consumed by its creeping compulsion. A must-read.”
