A Brazen Package

To celebrate our fantastically supportive #Brazenreaders and the launch of #bebrazen this month, Brazen Folk Horror is doing a surprise giveaway! …

A Brazen Package

#BeBrazen at Events

Team Brazen Folk Horror smoothly divide and conquers! Ruthann represents us at American events, and Natasha will swan about Scotland. For starters! …

#BeBrazen at Events

The Delevan Diaries

Desperate for book II? Preorder the eBook here. To secure your co-signed softcover or hardcover now, email us at brazenfolkhorror@gmail.com with your…

The Delevan Diaries

City Kill House

As a child, I used to beg my parents not to drive by it. “Please, can we take another road to get there?” I’d plead.

I’d have a visceral reaction on approaching this place. My insides would fill up with a sickening feeling like the air was choked with poison. My skin would prickle. Terror. Revulsion. Anger. Pain. Screaming. I could feel them scream. And how no one cared to stop it. What a world we live in. We turn so many blind eyes; it’s a wonder we see anything at all.

I hated being anywhere near this part of town because of the abattoir. On the edge of the east of Glasgow city centre — less than a mile away. It even had its own cattle ramp for the animals arriving by train at night.

The abattoir and meat market was in operation from 1911 to 2001. I can’t go through this area without thinking of the slaughter.

Since its closure, part of the site was used as a city car auctioneer, but that has long since moved too. Some of the facades remain intact and front a modern apartment development, which was part of the area’s regeneration. Behind those, overgrowth tries to reclaim the bones of remaining structures. New developers will move in soon.

It may look a certain way on the surface… I can still hear them.

The inscription on the calf sculpture reads:

Animals came from over the horizon

They belonged there & here likewise

They were mortal & immortal

Each lion was lion & each ox was ox.

The Cast of Delevan House #12

Mauve is introduced in Delevan House in the chapter ‘Ripples’, during Caoimhe Liùsaidh Delevan’s birth. Mauve, along with Fraoch, are the only two of…

The Cast of Delevan House #12

Art Inspires Art: Incesticide

I was asked recently about the cover for Incesticide: Collected Horror, so I’m sharing a wee bit about it here.

Music is a massive part of my life, inspiring me when I work. It helps me find grounding when the the Earth has fallen from my feet, and I can’t find anything else to tether onto. Art is a wonderful way of distracting us from pain or helping us face and conquer the demons taking up space. The title was chosen in homage to Nirvana — I am a huge grunge fan, and it is one of my comfort-food genres, so it felt natural to fall into that.

The artwork followed the title. What’s more grunge, punk and indie than doing it all myself? I love to paint too. I guess the creative streak is profoundly ingrained in my wheelhouse, even when I suppressed those urges in years gone by. I took this idea and continued my homage to the title. I didn’t overthink it and just went with the flow, inspired by and creating my spin on Kurt Cobain’s cover art for Nirvana’s Incesticide.

Dandelions (dandelion wishes) are my favourite flower. The invasive weed wields healing properties. Her seed is carried in the sweep of a breeze, and she’ll resist suppression, taking deep root wherever seeds land. She’ll bloom through cracks in the concrete — nature dominating and cleaning the disaster of man. I replaced Kurt’s poppies with dandelion seed heads. Though this element is scarcely visible on the Incesticide: Collected Horror book cover, as the figures took central focus on the wraps.

Those two forms: I switched the small figure to the opposite arm and painted them with only a loose nod to Cobain’s originals. I fleshed out my forms but maintained a skeletal accent to the larger figure. For the small child figure, I wanted to recreate that mannequin/doll base but with a dance that quietly echoed the larger one. I think they quickly transformed into ‘mother’ and ‘child’ when painting them, more so when I stepped back and saw a ghost of my daughter’s face in that child form. My ‘koala baby’. With that, it made sense that’s where my paintbrush went. That revelation then paints more sense onto the wide-eyed, dishevelled ‘mother’. The art for Incesticide became personal. Perhaps a bit of a mirror to PND. A little horror of life that has nothing to do with the collection’s contents.

As well as the Ts and Hoodies on my Etsy, prints of the Incesticide artwork are available if you find me skulking in the shadows with my books and other entwined wares at some cool events this year.

The Gothic Market

#BeBrazen Saturday

Last week we shared some insight into one of our most loved characters, The Threnody. The character who haunted Ruthann’s dreams, demanding to be …

#BeBrazen Saturday

The Cast of Delevan House #10

The Green Stones It’s always interesting when we can assign a personality or humanize the importance of inanimate objects in a story. There are …

The Cast of Delevan House #10