Contemporary Authors

• Ink Samhain (Cincinnati, OH), 2012
• Sing Me Your Scars ( anthology) Apex (Lexington, KY), 2015
• Paper Tigers Dark House Press (Chicago, IL), 2016

1. Paper tigers LCCN 2015957759 Type of material Book Personal name Walters, Damien Angelica. Main title Paper tigers / Damien Angelica Walters. Published/Produced Chicago, IL : Dark House Press, 2016. Projected pub date 1602 Description pages cm ISBN 9781940430577 1940430577

• Cry Your Way Home - 2017 Apex, Lexingotn, KY
• Sing Me Your Scars - 2015 Apex Book Company, Lexington, KY
• Ink - 2012 Samhain, Cincinnati, OH

• author's site - https://damienangelicawalters.com/

  Damien Angelica Walters is the author of Cry Your Way Home, Paper Tigers, and Sing Me Your Scars, winner of This is Horror’s Short Story Collection of the Year. Her short fiction has been nominated twice for a Bram Stoker Award, reprinted in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror and The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, and published in various anthologies and magazines, including the Shirley Jackson Award Finalists Autumn Cthulhu and The Madness of Dr. Caligari, World Fantasy Award Finalist Cassilda’s Song, Nightmare Magazine, Black Static, and Apex Magazine. Until the magazine’s closing in 2013, she was an Associate Editor of the Hugo Award-winning Electric Velocipede. She lives in Maryland with her husband and two rescued pit bulls and is represented by Heather Flaherty of The Bent Agency.

  Sing Me Your Scars

  Sometimes a thread pulled through the flesh is all that holds you together. Sometimes the blade of a knife or the point of a nail is the only way you know you’re real. When pain becomes art and a quarter is buried deep within in you, all you want is to be seen, to have value, to be loved. But love can be fragile, folded into an origami elephant while you disappear, carried on the musical notes that build a bridge, or woven into an illusion so real, so perfect that you can fool yourself for a little while. Paper crumples, bridges fall, and illusions come to an end. Then you must pick up the pieces, stitch yourself back together, and shed your fear, because that is when you find out what you are truly made of and lift your voice, that is when you Sing Me Your Scars.

  In her first collection of short fiction, Damien Angelica Walters weaves her lyrical voice through suffering and sorrow, teasing out the truth and discovering hope.
  Named Short Story Collection of the Year in the 2015 This is Horror Awards
  Title story nominated for a 2015 Bram Stoker Award

  Paper Tigers

  In this haunting and hypnotizing novel, a young woman loses everything—half of her body, her fiancé, and possibly her unborn child—to a terrible apartment fire. While recovering from the trauma, she discovers a photo album inhabited by a predatory ghost who promises to make her whole again, all while slowly consuming her from the inside out.

  Cry Your Way Home

  Sometimes things are not what they appear to be. DNA doesn’t define us, gravity doesn’t hold us, a home doesn’t mean we belong. From circus tents to space stations, Damien Angelica Walters creates stories that are both achingly familiar and chillingly surreal. Within her second short story collection, she questions who the real monsters are, rips families apart and stiches them back together, and turns a cell phone into the sharpest of weapons.

  Forthcoming

  “The Whipping Girls” (reprint) – Apex Magazine
  “A Lie You Give, and Thus I Take” (reprint) – Sharp & Sugar Tooth: Women Up To No Good
  “What Finds Its Way Back” – Ashes and Entropy
  “The Sundowners” – Suspended in Dusk 2
  “Siūlais ir Kraujo ir Kaulų (Of Thread and Blood and Bone)” – Sisterhood
  “Sewn into Pieces, Stitched into Place” – Leaves of a Necronomicon
  Published
  2017

  “Everything Hurts, Until it Doesn’t” – Tales from the Lake: Volume 4
  “Filigree, Minotaur, Cyanide, Bloom” – Adam’s Ladder
  “1570 kHz” – Shadows Over Main Street 2
  “All the Windows and All the Doors” – Chopping Block Party
  “A Perfect Replica” – Darker Companions: Celebrating 50 Years of Ramsey Campbell
  “This Unquiet Space” – Looming Low
  “What They Lost in the Storm” – Gamut Magazine
  “Here, Only Sorrow” – Black Static
  “Kai Monstrai Ateik (When the Monsters Come)” – Through a Mythos Darkly
  “On Grief and the Language of Flowers: Selected Arrangements” – Mythic Delirium
  “In the Deepest, Darkest Holes” – For Mortal Things Unsung
  2016

  “Blood and Stone, Ever Binding” – The Lost Citadel
  “Take a Walk in the Night, My Love” – The Madness of Dr. Caligari
  • Reprinted in Cry Your Way Home (2018)
  • On Ellen Datlow’s list of Honorable Mentions for Best Horror of the Year 9
  “Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice” – Eternal Frankenstein
  • Reprinted in Cry Your Way Home (2018)
  • On Ellen Datlow’s list of Honorable Mentions for Best Horror of the Year 9
  “Little Girl Blue, Come Cry Your Way Home” – Lost Signals
  • Reprinted in Cry Your Way Home (2018)
  “On the Other Side of the Door, Everything Changes” – Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories
  • Reprinted in Cry Your Way Home (2018)
  “In the Water, Underneath” – Genius Loci
  “After the End” – Daily Science Fiction
  • On Tangent Online’s 2016 Recommended Reading List
  “Umbilicus” – The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction
  • Reprinted in Cry Your Way Home (2018)
  “Deep Within the Marrow, Hidden in My Smile” – Black Static
  • Reprinted in Cry Your Way Home (2018)
  • On Ellen Datlow’s list of Honorable Mentions for Best Horror of the Year 9
  “In the Spaces Where You Once Lived” – Autumn Cthulhu
  • Reprinted in Cry Your Way Home (2018)
  • On Ellen Datlow’s list of Honorable Mentions for Best Horror of the Year 9
  “The Whipping Girls” – Chiral Mad 3
  “A Pathway for the Broken” – Tomorrow’s Cthulhu
  • On Ellen Datlow’s list of Honorable Mentions for Best Horror of the Year 9
  “What You Do Not Understand” – Exalted
  “The Hands That Hold, the Lies That Bind” – Cemetery Dance
  • Reprinted in Cry Your Way Home (2018)
  2015

  “Black Stars on Canvas, a Reproduction in Acrylic” – Cassilda’s Song
  “Her Beginning is Her End is Her Beginning” – a novelette co-written with E. Catherine Tobler – Cassilda’s Song
  “The Judas Child” – Nightmare Magazine
  • Reprinted in Cry Your Way Home (2018)
  • Audio version narrated by Stefan Rudnicki
  • Featured in Dread Central
  “Tooth, Tongue, and Claw” – Nightscript
  • Reprinted in Cry Your Way Home (2018)
  • On Ellen Datlow’s list of Honorable Mentions for Best Horror of the Year 8
  “These Things, They Linger Still” – Dark Discoveries
  “Not My Circus, Not My Monkeys: The Elephant’s Tale” – Apex Magazine
  • Reprinted in Cry Your Way Home (2018)
  “Though It Be Darkness There” – Flesh Like Smoke
  “When We Taste of Death” – Exigencies
  • Reprinted in The Dark Magazine (2017)
  “S is for Soliloquy” – B is for Broken
  • Reprinted in Cry Your Way Home (2018)
  “Falling Under, Through the Dark” – Black Static
  • Reprinted in Cry Your Way Home (2018)
  • Audio version produced by Pseudopod (2016)
  • On Ellen Datlow’s list of Honorable Mentions for Best Horror of the Year 8
  “All That We Carry, All That We Hold” – Fantastic Stories of the Imagination
  “The Sons of the Father” – LampLight
  • Reprinted in LampLight Volume 3 Omnibus (2016)
  “Sing Me Your Scars” – Sing Me Your Scars
  • Translated into Spanish by David Tejera for Dark Fantasíes: Antología de Fantasía Oscura (2017)
  • Nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction
  • Reprinted in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2016 (2016)
  • On Ellen Datlow’s list of Honorable Mentions for Best Horror of the Year 8
  • Audio version produced by Tales to Terrify (2016)
  • Reprinted in Apex Magazine
  • On Tangent Online’s 2015 Recommended Reading List
  “All the Pieces We Leave Behind” – Sing Me Your Scars
  “Sugar, Sin, and Nonsuch Henry” – Sing Me Your Scars
  “The Taste of Tears in a Raindrop” – Sing Me Your Scars
  “Immolation: A Love Story” – Sing Me Your Scars
  “Iron and Wood, Nail and Bone” – Sing Me Your Scars
  “And All the World Says Hush” – Sing Me Your Scars
  “Paper Thin Roses of Maybe” – Sing Me Your Scars
  • Reprinted in Trapped Within (2017)
  “Requiem, for Solo Cello” – Apex Magazine
  “All the Pretty Cages” – Not Our Kind
  • Reprinted in LampLight (2017)
  2014

  “A Lie You Give, and Thus I Take” – Lightspeed Magazine
  • Reprinted in Cry Your Way Home (2018)
  • On Ellen Datlow’s list of Recommended Stories for Best Horror of the Year 7
  “Such Faces We Wear, Such Masks We Hide” – Streets of Shadows
  “The Floating Girls: A Documentary” – Jamais Vu
  • Reprinted in Cry Your Way Home (2018)
  • Reprinted in Flame Tree Publishing’s Supernatural Horror (2017)
  • Reprinted by Great Jones Street app (2017)
  • Nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction
  • Audio version produced by Tales to Terrify (2015)
  • Reprinted in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2015 (2015)
  • Translated into Chinese by Geng Hui for ZUI Found (2015)
  • On Tangent Online’s 2014 Recommended Reading List
  “U is for Umbrella” – A is for Apocalypse
  • Audio version produced by StarShipSofa (2015)
  • On Ellen Datlow’s list of Recommended Stories for Best Horror of the Year 7
  “This is the Way I Die” – Nightmare Magazine
  • Reprinted in Cry Your Way Home (2018)
  • On Ellen Datlow’s list of Recommended Stories for Best Horror of the Year 7
  “Green is for Silence, Blue is for Voice, Red is for Whole, Black is for Choice” – Daily Science Fiction
  • Audio version produced by StarShipSofa (2015)
  “Broken Beneath the Paperweight of Your Ghosts” – Shock Totem 8.5
  • On Ellen Datlow’s list of Recommended Stories for Best Horror of the Year 7
  (listed as by Damien Walters Grintalis)
  “The Serial Killer’s Astronaut Daughter” – Strange Horizons
  • Audio version narrated by Anaea Lay
  • Reprinted in Cry Your Way Home (2018)
  2013

  “Grey in the Gauge of His Storm” – Apex Magazine
  • Reprinted in Sing Me Your Scars (2015)
  • On Tangent Online’s 2013 Recommended Reading List
  “When the Lady Speaks” – What Fates Impose
  • Reprinted in Gamut Magazine (2016)
  • Audio version produced by PodCastle (2014)
  “Girl, With Coin” – Shimmer 17
  • Reprinted in Sing Me Your Scars (2015)
  • Reprinted in Choose Wisely (2015)
  “Inside Hides the Monster” – Glitter & Mayhem
  “When Dark Things Sleep” – Undead & Unbound
  “Shall I Whisper to You of Moonlight, of Sorrow, of Pieces of Us?” – Shock Totem
  • Translated into Italian by Elena Furlan for Nuovi Incubi (2015)
  • Reprinted in Sing Me Your Scars (2015)
  • Reprinted in Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume One (2014)
  “Melancholia in Bloom” – Daily Science Fiction
  • Reprinted in Sing Me Your Scars (2015)
  “Always, They Whisper” – Lightspeed Magazine
  • Reprinted in Sing Me Your Scars (2015)
  • On Gardner Dozois’ list of Honorable Mentions for The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection
  “Paskutinis Iliuzija (The Last Illusion)” – Interzone 245
  • Reprinted in Apex Magazine (2016)
  • Reprinted in Sing Me Your Scars (2015)
  • On Ellen Datlow’s list of Honorable Mentions for Best Horror of the Year 6
  • On Gardner Dozois’ list of Honorable Mentions for The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection
  “Dysphonia in D Minor” – Strange Horizons
  • Audio version narrated by Anaea Lay
  • Reprinted in Sing Me Your Scars (2015)
  2012

  “When She is Empty” – Daily Science Fiction
  “Glass Boxes and Clockwork Gods” – Electric Velocipede
  • Reprinted in Sing Me Your Scars (2015)
  • Reprinted in The Best of Electric Velocipede (2014)
  • On Ellen Datlow’s list of Honorable Mentions for Best Horror of the Year 5
  “They Make of You a Monster” – Beneath Ceaseless Skies
  • Audio Version
  • Reprinted in The Lineup (2015)
  • Reprinted in Sing Me Your Scars (2015)
  • On Tangent Online’s 2012 Recommended Reading List
  “A Handful of Glass, a Sky without Stars” – Daily Science Fiction
  “And Down Will Come Baby, Madmen and All” – Buzzy Mag
  “Scarred” – Fireside Magazine
  • Reprinted in Sing Me Your Scars (2015)
  • Reprinted in The Many Tortures of Anthony Cardno: A Charity Anthology (2014)
  • Audio version produced by Pseudopod (2014)
  • On Tangent Online’s 2012 Recommended Reading List
  “To Be Undone of Such Small Things” – Daily Science Fiction
  “In Her Arms of Dresden Pale” – Daily Science Fiction
  2011

  “Like Origami in Water” – Daily Science Fiction
  • Reprinted in Sing Me Your Scars (2015)
  • On Ellen Datlow’s list of Honorable Mentions for Best Horror of the Year 4
  “Running Empty in a Land of Decay” – Niteblade Issue 15
  • Reprinted in Sing Me Your Scars (2015)

• Apex Magazine - https://www.apex-magazine.com/interview-with-damien-angelica-walters/

  Interview with Damien Angelica Walters

  by Andrea Johnson on Mar 3, 2015 in Nonfiction | 0 comments
  Tags: andrea johnson, apex magazine, damien angelica walters, interview, interview with damien angelica walters, issue 70

  A prolific writer of speculative short fiction, Damien Angelica Walters’ work has appeared in magazines such as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Lightspeed, Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons, Electric Velocipede, Nightmare Magazine, and Daily Science Fiction, and in anthologies such as Glitter and Mayhem, What Fates Impose, and Year’s Best Weird Fiction. While publishing upwards of ten short stories every year, she makes time for editing as well, having been an editor for the Hugo Award winning Electric Velocipede.

  Her debut short fiction collection Sing Me Your Scars is forthcoming from Apex Publications and is currently available for pre-order. Her new novel Paper Tigers will be released in late 2015 from Dark House Press.

  In this issue of Apex Magazine, we are thrilled to present the titular story from her forthcoming collection “Sing Me Your Scars.” This fresh and unforgettable take on Frankenstein gives us a monster who is not a monster, a woman who tries to live her life in the most rational way possible. With prose as focused as a theater spotlight, the reader is given an intimate view of Kimberly’s predicament, and of how she decides who and what to bind her destiny to. Damien was kind enough to answer a few of my questions about the story, her new short story collection, and about other aspects of her professional writing career.

  APEX MAGAZINE: Kimberly is imprisoned with these other women. Do they see each other as friends? allies? What lessons do you imagine she’s learned the along the way regarding “welcoming” the new women to the “club”?

  DAMIEN ANGELICA WALTERS: I think they see each other as unwilling partners in a macabre dance, and that no welcome will ever be a welcome one. They all take part in trying to make the new woman as comfortable as possible, because their peace of mind depends on her acceptance of the situation.

  AM: The man who gave her life and is keeping her alive—is he saving her, or killing her? Why do you think he did what he did with her and the other women?

  DAW: His purpose is definitely a selfish one: he’s creating his perfect woman with all the attributes he deems necessary. As far as why? Because he can. Like Mary Shelley’s doctor, he’s the true monster. He views women as objects, not as individuals, and as such, he feels no guilt and no hesitation. He wants, so he takes.

  AM: Kimberly takes a stand, and finds herself facing a crossroads at the end of the story. What’s next for her? Do you think she’ll ever find peace or acceptance?

  DAW: At the end, she’s found the acceptance that matters most: her own. I’d like to think she finds some sort of peace in the world at large, and that she finds a place among people who will think of her not as a monster, but as someone to whom monstrous acts were done. In truth, though, what I think doesn’t matter too much at this point; once the story is done, it belongs to the readers and they might have a very different concept of what comes after.

  AM: Where did the idea for this story come from?

  DAW: I’m not sure it came from any one thing in particular. The opening line popped into my head and once I finished the intro section, I knew where the rest of the story would lead. It’s definitely an homage to Mary Shelley and her creation, but I also wanted to make it very much my own story. I couldn’t stop but think how horrific it would be for all the monster’s parts and pieces to have their own consciousness, and I coupled that with the twisted concept of the perfect woman.

  Questions about writing in general

  AM: Your short fiction often features knife-sharp opening lines that demand the reader stop what they are doing and read the rest of this story *right now*. Is the first line usually the first line you write? Or does the opening scene develop later once you’ve got the story drafted?

  DAW: Yes, the first line usually pops in my head, and if I’m lucky, the rest of the story spills out or at least an opening section that tells me where the story wants to go. But I also have dozens of first lines and opening paragraphs written down that I haven’t spun into full stories yet.

  AM: Congratulations on Sing Me Your Scars, your new collection of short fiction (available from Apex Publications). Do you have a favorite piece in the collection? How did you decide what stories should be included?

  DAW: The favorite story question is a hard one to answer because so many of them mean different things to me. “Like Origami in Water” was my first professional rate sale, and they say you never forget your first; “Girl, With Coin” has its roots in my relationship with my mother, and both “Melancholia in Bloom” and “Glass Boxes and Clockwork Gods” were influenced by my grandmother’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease.

  Deciding what stories to include was a nightmare. The first draft of the collection had several additional stories, but as I read through the collection as a whole, I realized that some didn’t fit the tone and themes as well as others. So I cut here and there and hopefully the end result is a cohesive one.

  AM: Later this year, your novel Paper Tigers will be released. What can you tell us about the novel? Is it true that there is a connection between the title and one of your tattoos?

  DAW: Paper Tigers is a ghost story, but it’s as much about the things that haunt us personally as it is about external ghosts.

  It’s true about the tattoo—I have one on my forearm that reads “A paper tiger to swallow me whole.” What the phrase means to me, within the context of writing and reading, is that words can grab you and refuse to let go, much like a tiger would if it had a chance. What it means within the context of the novel is…a little different.

  AM: Tell us a little about your writing process. Is it different for short stories than for novels? Between writing short stories and writing portions of a novel, which do you find easier? Which is more enjoyable?

  DAW: I don’t have one set process. Sometime I sit in front of a blank Word document; other times I sit with a notebook and pen. Sometimes the stories flow like rain; other times they’re more like molasses in January. I try to let them come as they will because trying to force them out creates a ton of frustration. Deadlines are a great incentive to make them flow, though.

  Both novels and short fiction come with their own set of difficulties, but I enjoy writing short fiction more. While it’s nice to spend a long time with a character or a group of characters, the short form is a bit more freeing. I don’t have to commit to one genre, and I can experiment with form and voice and tense and points of view.

  AM: Where do you get your ideas? and with so much short fiction published each year, how do you keep all of those ideas from getting tangled up with each other?

  DAW: I buy my ideas in bulk online. Much easier that way.

  Seriously, though, they come from everything I’ve done, everywhere I’ve been, and all that I’ve seen, mixed with a hefty helping of what if? The human imagination is a powerful thing, and that’s the best answer I can give.

  Keeping the ideas straight is fairly easy. I typically work on one first draft at a time. If another idea rears its head, I’ll jot down a sentence or two in my notebook and let it sit until later. I’ve found that at times, themes will cross story lines. What was a minor mention in one becomes the backbone for another, or I’ll tackle a similar theme from a different angle. Sometimes that ends up a good thing, but it can also be limiting. Of late, I’ve been trying very hard to write stories outside my comfort zone, and thus far, it’s working well. I’ve recently sold Lovecraftian and King in Yellow-inspired stories, neither of which I was sure I could successfully write. Writing is a neverending cycle; there’s always more to learn, always new things to try and new ways to create.

• Pseudopod - http://pseudopod.org/people/damien-angelica-walters/

  Damien Angelica Walters’ work has appeared or is forthcoming in various anthologies and magazines, including The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2015, Year’s Best Weird Fiction: Volume One, Cassilda’s Song, The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction, Nightmare Magazine, Black Static, and Apex Magazine. She was a finalist for a Bram Stoker Award for “The Floating Girls: A Documentary,” originally published in Jamais Vu. Sing Me Your Scars, a collection of short fiction, was released in 2015 from Apex Publications. The titular story “Sing Me Your Scars” was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction. Paper Tigers, a novel, was released in 2016 from Dark House Press.

• Lightspeed - http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-damien-angelica-walters/

  Author Spotlight: Damien Angelica Walters

  by Liz Argall

  Published in Dec. 2014 (Issue 55) | 659 words | Related Story: A Lie You Give, and Thus I Take

  This story is packed with symbolism. What’s your favorite bit of symbolism in the piece? Was there any particular symbolism that emerged during the writing process that surprised you?

  I have two favorite bits. The first is the cyanide burn the main character feels after she’s fed marzipan, a small inkling that something is wrong but one that quickly gets buried in the sugar rush.

  The second came from my beta reader. In the original version, I used slices of ratatouille for heartache, but my reader suggested using carpaccio, which was such a perfect choice I kicked myself for not thinking of it first. (Thank you, Scott!)

  The only things that surprised me were all the other story references that occur throughout. It makes a strange sort of sense because it’s fiction about a fiction, but I initially thought the story was nothing more than a strange retelling of Hansel and Gretel, minus the familial relation and the witch, of course. I added one or two of those references after the first draft was complete, but most joined the party on their own.

  What do you think her breadcrumbs were?

  I think they were pieces of herself, her strength and independence. It’s far too easy for someone to lose that along the way, no matter how resolute they are. There are always wolves hiding in the woods.

  Once she crawls back to her story, what would you like her first real meal in a long time to be?

  I think she deserves spinach salad with blue cheese and bacon, filet mignon, roasted Brussels sprouts, a chunk of good crusty bread, and a glass of Merlot, or maybe the whole bottle. I suspect she won’t be eating dessert for a long, long time.

  How did this story come about? And what was your process for writing this story?

  I was thinking about the nature of liars, how they often get away with it by spoon-feeding people stories a little at a time, and the lengths they’ll go to to preserve that fiction as truth. Some of the best liars use sweet words as a lure; they tell people what they want to hear and believe, and they do it in such a way that their sincerity is never doubted. (At least not until it begins to fall apart, as all lies eventually do.)

  That led to thinking about Hansel and Gretel and the witch’s candy house—the ultimate lure. The two concepts ended up in a tango and I let them dance, allowing other stories to cut in from time to time.

  Has writing this story changed your relationship with sweet food?

  I have a huge sweet tooth and I don’t think anything could change that, but even so, I couldn’t bring myself to eat anything sugary while I was working on the story.

  Writing unconventional stories can be challenging to edit on occasion. What was the editing process like for this story?

  I started to make it more conventional in structure by adding proper dialogue tags and removing the parenthetical statements, but it altered the flow and the voice to the story’s detriment. So I put it back the way it was originally written, accepting that while it might make the story a hard sell, I was being true to the story and the way I wanted to tell it.

  Do you have any other projects you’d like to tell us about?

  Sing Me Your Scars, a short fiction collection, will be released in early 2015 from Apex Publications; Paper Tigers, a novel, will be released later that same year from Dark House Press; and more short fiction is forthcoming in a variety of anthologies and magazines.

• Nightmare - http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-damien-angelica-walters/

  Author Spotlight: Damien Angelica Walters

  by Jude Griffin

  Published in May. 2014 (Issue 20) | 1055 words | Related Story: This is the Way I Die

  What was the seed for “This is the Way I Die”?

  I was going through a rather tumultuous period in my life, and I’d made the decision to focus on myself and not on things that were beyond my control. Not long after that, the opening section of this story blindsided me one day while I was working on something else. I wrote it down, set it aside, and a few days later, the rest came out in a rush. The story is very firmly fiction, but I think it’s impossible for writers not to bring something of themselves to the table.

  The story moves between the literal and metaphorical: new eyes provide the ability to see color, but a new heart would erase the memories of love. Can you talk about how you approached the challenges of this juxtaposition?

  Honestly, I didn’t see it as juxtaposition but as another stretch of the metaphorical flavor of the piece entire. When Lola Mae learns to see and feel things in a new way, without hurt and pain, she realizes she doesn’t need a new heart, doesn’t have to lose every bit of herself, in order to be whole.

  Does the name “Lola Mae” have any significance?

  I’ve written quite a few stories with unnamed protagonists, and I honestly thought this was going to be one of them. Then the issue of her name came up within the context of the story, so I knew I couldn’t leave her nameless, but I also knew I couldn’t just give her any name. I wanted something that whispered, but didn’t scream, sadness. Lola is the diminutive form of the name Dolores, which is Spanish for sorrows, and Mae is a Hebrew name meaning bitter. When I added the last name Blue, I loved the cadence, and more importantly, the name felt right for the character.

  How did your vision for this story change along the way?

  After I wrote the opening section, I thought the story was going to be about a woman transformed into a monster, and I nicknamed it my Godzilla girl story. When I added the line “I’m drowning when I come to you,” I realized it was about a different sort of transformation, that what Lola Mae wanted, and needed, was not necessarily to be a monster, but to be strong enough to fight against the damage left behind by the other monsters she’s known.

  Lola appears to emulate the cruel behavior of others that has hurt her so deeply: she takes so much and then just turns away—or has she too given something back?

  I knew in my heart that Lola Mae didn’t have a choice. In order to survive, she had to leave, because in leaving, she slayed the last monster inside her—fear.

  The story was never meant to be a happy ever after for Lola and her artist/creator. I think perhaps what she gave him was a sense of selfless purpose. He listened to her, he was there for her, and he helped her chip away all the broken pieces to unveil the woman she was meant to be.

  The story of Pygmalion and Galatea echoes through “This is the Way I Die”—are there any other takes on Ovid’s Metamorphoses which you’ve enjoyed?

  My Fair Lady with Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison is the first one that comes to mind. Although Henry Higgins takes credit for the changes in Eliza Doolittle, the truth is that she does all the work. I would have preferred a different ending, with her making her own way in the world, because if she wasn’t good enough for him until she changed, I don’t think he deserved her at all.

  The Stepford Wives is a darker take on Pygmalion. Instead of a statue, you have a town full of perfect, robotic wives. The novel and the movie are obviously products of the seventies, when women were breaking out of traditional roles, yet even now the concept resonates because how many women alter themselves to fit a supposed ideal?

  In both cases, though, the original ideas of transformation did not belong to the women, and that is something I definitely did not want with my own story, nor did I want the artist/creator to change Lola Mae into his vision of what she should be.

  Can you talk about how you ended up with the title that you did?

  The first title for the story was “The Breaking of a Girl,” but after I’d named the main character and finished the first draft, I changed it to “The Reclamation of Lola Mae Blue” because the story was about so much more than breaking. I submitted the story with that title, but John asked if I’d be willing to come up with a darker, more evocative title, so I spent a few days wracking my brain and reading poetry for inspiration. I came up with a few ideas, some based on poetry, some not, and then I came across this piece from Emily Dickinson:

  She died—this was the way she died;

  And when her breath was done,

  Took up her simple wardrobe

  And started for the sun.

  The first line struck a chord in me because the story is about death in a sense, the death, and subsequent healing, of the self. I altered the line a bit, sent all my ideas to John, and we both picked this as the favorite.

  Any new projects you want to tell us about?

  I have a short fiction collection, a mix of reprints and new stories, coming out later this year from Apex Publications. I also have short fiction forthcoming in several magazines, I’m busy writing pieces for several anthology invites, and I’m working on a novel framed in a series of intertwined short stories.

• nightmare - http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-damien-angelica-walters-2/

  Nonfiction

  Purchase Issue

  Author Spotlight: Damien Angelica Walters

  by E.C. Myers

  Published in Dec. 2015 (Issue 39) | 1166 words | Related Story: The Judas Child

  “The Judas Child” is one of those stories where I’m actually afraid to ask: What inspired it? And how did it evolve from there?

  I’m honestly not sure. Of late, most of what I’m writing is solicited fiction written around specific themes. I was struggling with one of those stories and needed to take a break. So I opened a Word doc, stared at it for a bit, and then typed this: Sometimes the world cracks open and a monster emerges. People don’t like to talk about it; they like to pretend that monsters don’t exist. It’s better—easier—that way. But monsters are real, they’re worse than you could possibly imagine, and they’re always, always hungry.

  Monsters are always fun to write about, right? Of a surety, the world is full of them. After I wrote that intro, I stepped away from the computer to do some brainstorming with notebook and pen. It didn’t take long for the story to take shape, but when I realized where it was going and the underlying metaphor, I almost didn’t write it. Then I asked myself What Would Livia Llewellyn Do? (my recurring mantra when I hold back) and plowed ahead.

  Although Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are still current and popular, those references immediately recall my own childhood—and it’s probably rarer today to see kids playing alone at the park. Is there a nostalgic element to this story? Although it really reads as timeless, did you imagine it in a contemporary setting or in the 1980s?

  This is where I get to extol the virtues of a good editor. Originally, the boy in the story referred to the others as Blue Cap, Red Shoes, etc., and John Joseph Adams suggested changing those names to reflect familiar childhood characters. Transformers was one of his suggestions. I came very close to using names from Star Wars, but opted to use Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles instead as they aligned more closely time-wise, and picking characters that wouldn’t lock the story down to one specific timeframe was a deliberate choice. With respect to the setting, I see it both ways—from a child’s perspective then and a parent’s perspective now. My hope is that a reader will decide when the story is set according to their own experiences.

  I’m grateful that John has such a discerning eye. The story worked with the original names, but the changes gave it a richer, more poignant feel. I also owe Brian Keene a thank you, too, and he knows why.

  A popular piece of writing advice is “kill your darlings,” but sometimes that’s a challenge even for horror writers. Can you tell us what your favorite line or moment is from “The Judas Child”—or one that didn’t survive to publication?

  My favorite line is: The boy knew this made him a monster too. I think it encapsulates the entire story. Although calling the boy a monster isn’t quite fair, given what he’s gone through, but it’s definitely how he thinks of himself.

  My favorite deleted lines are from the first draft. In one section, the boy was thinking of escape and I wrote this:

  Other ways to escape:

  Sleep.
  Pick the scabs off the bites.
  Count your heartbeats, until you realize that you’re not sure if you’re counting them from one to whatever or hoping you’re counting down to the end.

  I ended up cutting it when I found the right voice to use for the boy and switched the story to third person, but I still like that snippet.

  Do you have any particular writing rituals or habits that are either essential to your process or help your creativity?

  I used to just sit at my desk and write, but I’ve started relying on things like walking away from the computer to write with a notebook and pen or sitting on my front porch, staring off into space while I mull over stories or characters or sticky points, or working things out while walking the dogs. I think, hope, it’s helped me craft stronger stories.

  I was reading your Tweets even before I discovered your fiction. On Twitter, you frequently signal boost other writers and stories that you’ve enjoyed. What are some recent horror novels/stories/authors you think everyone should be reading?

  I love talking about good books and stories, and word of mouth is a powerful thing for both readers and writers. With that being said, the best horror novel I’ve read so far this year is A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay. It’s beautifully written and unsettling. The Death House by Sarah Pinborough is a very close runner-up. It’s dark and lovely and heartbreaking with an ending I won’t forget anytime soon.

  With respect to anthologies and collections, I recommend Aickman’s Heirs edited by Simon Strantzas, Skein and Bone by V.H. Leslie, The End of the End of Everything by Dale Bailey, and you can’t go wrong with Ellen Datlow and Paula Guran’s Year’s Bests. Some of my favorite authors working in the genre right now are Helen Marshall, Laird Barron, John Langan, and, of course, the aforementioned Livia Llewellyn.

  Some of my favorite short stories published so far this year are “Fabulous Beasts” by Priya Sharma (Tor.com, July), “Snow” by Dale Bailey, and “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” by Alyssa Wong, (Nightmare, June and October, respectively).

  Now a little more about your own work . . . You’re very prolific, and I see from your website that you have many stories forthcoming as well as a new novel, Paper Tigers. Can you tell us about the book and what readers can expect to see from you soon?

  Paper Tigers is, at its heart, a ghost story, but it’s about the things that haunt the main character as much as it about the ghosts she encounters. To some degree, it’s also a commentary on the destructive power of society’s concept of beauty.

  I have short fiction forthcoming in several anthologies including Cassilda’s Song, Chiral Mad 3, Autumn Cthulhu, The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction, and others. A complete list can be found here: damienangelicawalters.com/short-fiction.

• Dark Magazine - http://thedarkmagazine.com/authors/damien-angelica-walters/

  Damien Angelica Walters is the author of Sing Me Your Scars, Paper Tigers, and the forthcoming Cry Your Way Home. Her short fiction has been nominated twice for a Bram Stoker Award, reprinted in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror and The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, and published in various anthologies and magazines, including Cassilda’s Song, Cemetery Dance, Nightmare Magazine, and Black Static. She lives in Maryland with her husband and two rescued pit bulls. Find her @DamienAWalters or damienangelicawalters.com.

• Los Angeles Review of Books - https://lareviewofbooks.org/author-page/damien-angelica-walters/

  Damien Angelica Walters’s short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in various anthologies and magazines, including The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2015, Year’s Best Weird Fiction Volume One, Cassilda’s Song, Nightmare, Lightspeed, and Apex. She is a 2014 Bram Stoker Award nominee in the category of Superior Achievement in Short Fiction for “The Floating Girls: A Documentary,” originally published in Jamais Vu. Sing Me Your Scars is her first collection of short fiction; Paper Tigers, a novel, is forthcoming from Dark House Press.

• Gingernuts of Horror - http://gingernutsofhorror.com/wihm/sing-me-your-scars-an-interview-with-damien-angelica-walters

  SING ME YOUR SCARS: AN INTERVIEW WITH DAMIEN ANGELICA WALTERS
  28/2/2017
  BY KIT POWER
  DAMIEN ANGELICA WALTERS INTERVIEW

  On a recommendation from Gingernuts proprietor, Jim Mcleod, I picked up ‘Sing Me Your Scars’ by Damien Angelica Walters late last summer. I was, simply put, blown away. It was therefore an enormous honor to interview Walters about this collection, and some of the inspirations and processes behind the formation of the stories. Here is the result - a seriously in-depth interview, covering this extraordinary collection. Expect mild spoilers throughout. Enjoy.
  Gingernuts Of Horror: Firstly, thanks for agreeing to talk to us about ‘Sing Me Your Scars’ - it’s a brilliant collection and we were eager to find out more about how you came to write it.

  In the 2014 introduction, you mention your love of the short form. Does that love persist in 2017? And could you talk a bit more about what you find so attractive in the short story format?

  Damien Angelica Walters: Thank you very much for asking me, and I'm so glad you enjoyed Sing Me Your Scars.

  Yes, I still love writing short fiction. What's wonderful about the format is that you can break rules, you can experiment with structure and point of view and voice, you can flip-flop between genres. Sometimes what works in the short form wouldn't in a longer length, and it's often easier to provoke a strong emotion that would feel like manipulation if it went on too long.

  GNoH: There are twenty stories in this collection. What’s the span of time between the oldest and newest story? And how many were written specifically for the collection?

  DAW: The collection spans work from 2011 through 2014, and two were written specifically for the collection. The rest are either selected reprints or unpublished stories I'd been working on when Apex approached me about doing a collection. I sat with a spreadsheet, decided which stories to include, and broke them down by theme, tense, format, etc. Then I moved them around, paying close attention to the emotional arc, until I had what felt like a cohesive whole.

  GNoH: The story ‘Sing Me Your Scars’ takes elements of the Frankenstein mythology in an incredible direction, to strong effect. Can you recall now what led you to the central conceit of the body parts retaining the personalities of their source?

  DAW: There were several body-shaming memes floating around social media that said a real woman looks like this, not that. Every time I saw one, I grew angrier and angrier at the concept of a real woman having to appear a certain way, as though we get to pick and choose our parts to make a more pleasing whole. And from that anger, the Frankenstein-creation of many sentient parts was born.

  GNoH: This tale also deals with some themes that recur throughout the book - male subjugation of women, violence - and the story pulls off that incredible trick of both being a stunning metaphor and a gripping story on it’s own terms. What I mean to say is, the metaphor is also a ‘real’ thing in the context of the story, and works utterly on that level. Were you thinking about the metaphorical implications of the subject as you wrote, or did they emerge from the central idea organically?

  DAW: Any metaphors that appear in my work do so organically. But I make my way through this world as a woman and don't have the luxury of not thinking about violence against women in all its various forms, so my fiction reflects that, both overtly and not.

  GNoH: ‘Paskutinis Illuzia (The Last Illusion)’ is an incredibly powerful story. Can you recall where the initial inspiration of this came from?

  DAW: My husband is of Lithuanian descent so I've heard plenty of accounts of the Soviet occupation. After one such conversation, I had a thought that if magic existed, even if it couldn't be used to conjure armies or weapons, the Soviets definitely would've removed those who'd practiced it.

  GNoH: For me, reading it, you combined my fear of totalitarian repression (the strong relationship between magic and story exacerbated this) with the horror of an ill child to stunning effect…

  DAW: Thank you. It's definitely one of the stories I'm proudest of.

  GNoH: One of the many things I love about this story is the Lithuanian setting. How much research did you put into this story, and were the stories told therein real Lithuanian legends?

  DAW: Yes, the story of Jūratė, Kastytis, and Perkūnas is a real legend, and I read as many versions of it that I could find to make sure I stayed as true to the legend as possible, while making it fit within the framework of my story. If there are any errors or inconsistencies, they are mine alone.

  GNoH: ‘Sugar, Sin, and Nonsuch Henry’ is my favourite kind of sci-fi, in that it uses the settings and tropes to explore what it means to be human. What do you enjoy about working in this genre, and what do you find challenging?

  DAW: While a story might be set on a space station or feature an AI, I never approach it as science fiction. It's simply a story with elements of sci-fi. Challenging would be scientific accuracy, which is never what my interest or focus is.

  GNoH: I especially love Henry! Why did you pick him as the historical figure?

  DAW: In spite of appearing to be a fairly awful person, or perhaps because of it, Henry VIII has become this larger than life figure. There are countless books, movies, and TV shows about him, with some offering a more romantic portrait, and others a more monstrous. I thought it would be fun to make him an AI and render him kinder than I suspect he was in real life, while also retaining some of the larger than life characteristics.

  GNoH: I also enjoyed the juxtaposition of an historical character with the sci-fi setting…

  DAW: I'm usually very serious when writing, but I'll admit to giggling more than once with this one.

  GNoH: I really enjoyed the atmosphere of ‘Running Empty in a Land of Decay’ - how do you set about delivering that in a flash setting, where word count is so limited?

  DAW: In truth, I cut my short story teeth on flash fiction. I took part in the flash fiction challenges on the Shock Totem Forum for some time—this story was written for one such challenge—so I learned how to tell a story in as few words as possible. Given this story's theme of isolation, straightforward plot, and its single-character cast, it was fairly easy to keep within the confines of a thousand words.

  Curiously enough, I rarely write flash fiction now. I'm not certain if that means I'm writing more complex stories or I've become verbose.

  GNoH: What do you consider as a writer when taking on a setting as well trodden as the world of ‘Running Empty…’? Are you conscious of trying to attempt something new, or are you more concerned with finding the story you want to tell?

  DAW: I think there's something to be said for trying to breathe new life into well-worn tropes. It might not always work, but there's no law that says everything you write must be publish-perfect. I'm a firm believer in that nothing you write is a waste of time, even if it ends up in the proverbial trunk.

  With this one, I didn’t consciously say I'm going to write a zombie story without zombies in it, but once the idea struck, it wouldn't let go. I thought it the perfect foil for a study in isolation.

  GNoH: ‘Scarred’ was another story that resonated with me very strongly. Often, people who self harm talk about it as an empowering experience - exercising control over pain, externalising it, and so forth. Was that in your mind when you wrote this story?

  DAW: Absolutely. Although the supernatural element turns the story from control into revenge as catharsis, I tried to ground Violet's behavior in reality based as much as I could.

  GNoH: But it turned out to be a false catharsis, in some ways, didn’t it? Did you know ahead of time how this story was going to play out? I found the ending really strong - surprising and yet plausible…

  DAW: I did not. An early draft of this story had a completely different ending, one that wasn't nearly as horror-tinged, but my beta reader urged me to go darker. It took a bit for me to find the proper darkness, but once I did, it all fell into place.

  GNoH: Do you ever worry about writing about subjects like self harm? What do you consider to be your responsibilities as a writer when dealing with such material?

  DAW: I think a writer's responsibility is to handle whatever they're writing about with care, especially so if delving into potentially disturbing subjects. Intent matters; there's a huge difference between exploring a difficult topic and glorifying it.

  With that being said, you can't control how a reader responds, no matter how diligent you are, so you have to be willing to take the risk that you might upset someone.

  GNoH: Moving on to ‘Dystopia in D Minor’, I just adored the central conceit of this story. Can you recall now any of the genesis of this idea?

  DAW: Unfortunately, I don't. I just remember thinking that using your voice to build or destroy physical structures was an interesting concept, and that it was the perfect foil for a story about a changing relationship.

  GNoH: The central relationship is incredibly well drawn in this story. What is your approach to drawing a relationship in the limited word count of a short story? Did your flash background help with this?

  DAW: I think my flash background definitely helped, but I don't really have a specific approach. I start with a character and take it from there. How their relationship develops depends on that character and the concept for the story as a whole. It's all an organic process. Even when I brainstorm story ideas, once I get to the writing, they often veer in unexpected directions.

  GNoH: ‘Melancholia in Bloom’ features another structural device you seem to enjoy using - that of the dual narrative. What appeals about this approach, and what are the dangers of using this technique?

  DAW: When I started to get serious about writing for publication, not just writing for me, I read you should never have more than one point of view in a short story. I took that advice well, don't you think? Seriously, though, I love dual narratives. What appeals to me the most is the ability to tell two sides of a story and have them meet to create a bigger story, especially when it's one the readers can see but the characters can't.

  GNoH: I like that answer! Can you think of any other bad writing advice you’ve learned to ignore over the years? :)

  DAW: There's always bad advice! Some out of genuine ignorance, some out of bright-eyed naiveté. The latter is usually because you haven't learned enough yet to break the rules, so you cling to what you have been taught as though it's a life preserver and the blank page is a sea. I think the worst of the bad advice I received (and, unfortunately, believed for a time) was that with short fiction, you had to work your way up to the bigger magazines. What rubbish advice that is!

  GNoH: Also, on the dual narrative of ‘Melancholia…’; in the final piece, the two stories are beautifully balanced - can you recall if that happened on the page, or as a result of editing? And what is your typical editing process for short stories (assuming there is such a thing as ‘typical’)?

  DAW: For "Melancholia…" I knew the shape of the story when I started writing it. I had the gist of everything in the early draft, but the deeper emotional resonance came with edits.

  I'm not the sort of writer who edits as I go so when I finish a story draft, I have plenty of work left to do. In truth, though, there's no one way it happens. Sometimes there's too much of the story still in my head and not on paper, sometimes there's a piece missing that I know I'll find if I let the story breathe, sometimes I don't realize it's missing until a beta reader tells me. And every once in a while, I get everything right and the story only needs minor line edits.

  GNoH: In ‘They Make Of You A Monster’, there’s scenes of torture both explicit and implied. How do you choose when the violence of a story should be graphically depicted or implied? What informs that decision?

  DAW: I don't write about violence for the sake of titillation. There's plenty of that—too much of that—in fiction already, and violence often has more impact when it's inferred. This story reaches into fairly dark depths, but I hope that even in the more explicit scenes, the horror is slightly veiled as opposed to reading like a set of instructions.

  GNoH: There’s a really oppressive atmosphere to this story. Beyond the subject matter, what choices are you making, at a word or sentence level, to invoke that feeling in the reader? Or do you find that flows organically from the telling of the story?

  DAW: For a story like this, I default to a more clipped tone. I use a lot of sentence fragments and a simpler sentence structure, sort of the equivalent of poking a reader with a stick as opposed to wrapping them in eloquent prose. I don't want them comfortable. I want them unsettled. Again, though, this is something that happens organically, a pattern I see after the fact and then amplify when I edit.

  GNoH: ‘Grey in the Gauge of His Storm’ - the central conceit of this story just floored me. Can you recall now where the idea of cloth and stitching came from?

  DAW: One of the most insidious things about domestic violence is the invisible scars it leaves behind. They fade, but never disappear, rather like the stitches used to repair cloth. With that being said, though, this is one of those stories where I didn't consciously know what it was about when I wrote the opening paragraph. The words struck out of nowhere, I wrote them down, and they lingered in my head for a time. Later, the rest of the story poured out.

  GNoH: This one left me emotionally wrung out. Do you ever find yourself struggling with the subject matter you’re drawn to? Do you ever freak yourself out?

  DAW: Yes, sometimes I struggle with writing certain stories. I never freak myself out, per se, but I frequently write stories that leave me emotionally drained. This was one such piece.

  GNoH: Do you enjoy reading short fiction as well as writing it? What are some of your favourite stories and/or collections?

  DAW: Most definitely. I have more favorites than I could reasonably list here, and I'm always adding stories, but here are some I highly recommend: "The Changeling" by Sarah Langan, "Omphalos" by Livia Llewellyn, "Armless Maidens of the American West" by Genevieve Valentine, "Fabulous Beasts" by Priya Sharma, "The Bread We Eat in Dreams" by Catherynne M. Valente, "Black Box" by Joyce Carol Oates, "In the Year of Omens" by Helen Marshall, "So Sharp That Blood Must Flow" by Sunny Moraine, “The Sound That Grief Makes” by Kristi DeMeester, and "The Summer People" by Shirley Jackson.

  Collections I recommend: Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors and Furnace, both by Livia Llewellyn, Hair Side, Flesh Side and Gifts For The One Who Comes After, both by Helen Marshall, The Moon Will Look Strange by Lynda E. Rucker, The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter, The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares by Joyce Carol Oates, Singing With All My Skin and Bone by Sunny Moraine, and Skein and Bone by V.H. Leslie.

  GNoH: Finally, what can we expect from you in 2017?

  DAW: I'm very excited that my second short fiction collection, Cry Your Way Home, is scheduled for a September release from Apex Publications. I'm still finalizing the Table of Contents, but it will contain my Bram Stoker Award-nominated story "The Floating Girls: A Documentary" as well as other selected reprints.

  I'll also have other stories appearing in several anthologies and magazines, my agent will be submitting my new novel to editors, and I'm working on an outline for another.

  Many thanks to Damien Angelica Walters for agreeing to take such a deep dive into her collection.
  Picture
  In her first collection of short fiction, Damien Angelica Walters weaves her lyrical voice through suffering and sorrow, teasing out the truth and discovering hope.

  Sometimes a thread pulled through the flesh is all that holds you together. Sometimes the blade of a knife or the point of a nail is the only way you know you're real. When pain becomes art and a quarter is buried deep within you, all you want is to be seen, to have value, to be loved. But love can be fragile, folded into an origami elephant while you disappear, carried on the musical notes that build a bridge, or woven into an illusion so real, so perfect that you can fool yourself for a little while. Paper crumples, bridges fall, and illusions come to an end. Then you must pick up the pieces, stitch yourself back together, and shed your fear, because that is when you find out what you are truly made of and lift your voice, that is when you Sing Me Your Scars.

• Raw Dog Screaming PRess - http://rawdogscreaming.com/women-horror-spotlight-damien-angelica-walters/

  Women in Horror Spotlight: Damien Angelica Walters

  WomenInHorrorHeartDamien Angelica Walters on Horror

  Q: Tell us a story about one of your first experiences with the Horror genre.

  I’m eleven and my father takes me to see Alien. I made it halfway through before I begged him to leave. Then I spent a week dying to know how it ended and begging my father to take me back. He did and it scared me, but I loved it. It’s my favorite movie now and I’ve seen it over 200 times at this point, but I was definitely unprepared for that amount of fear the first time.

  I’m still eleven, reading Lois Duncan and the like, and a friend’s mother gives me a copy of The Shining because “you like that scary stuff.” I don’t think I’ve ever gotten over the bathtub scene. Even so, I quickly abandoned Lois Duncan in favor of King, Jackson, Shelley, Straub, Herbert, and the like.

  WomenInHorrorDamienQ: What do you think about the concept of Women in Horror Month? Is it necessary to showcase women in the genre?

  When people ask me if Women in Horror month is necessary, I ask them if they recall the last best-of list they’ve seen or any recent discussions about the best horror authors? As with history, the contributions made by women (and I’m using that term for anyone who identifies as a woman) and people of color are more often than not willfully forgotten and dismissed. Until that stops happening, showcasing women and people of color in genre, in history, in science, etc., is more than necessary.

  Q: Where do your best ideas come from?

  Most of the time, I’ll get an image or a sentence or a title or an intro paragraph. I could be loading the dishwasher or driving and something will pop into my head and stick there like glue, so I’ll jot it down in my notebook. I’ll toss the idea around in my head for a bit and then start writing longhand. When I know it’s going to be a real story instead of a collection of notes, I’ll create a Word doc and start transcribing. If I hit a sticky point or the story tries to veer in a different direction, it’s back to the notebook until I work everything out.

  I think the ideas themselves come from everything I’ve done, seen, heard, experienced. I think the subconscious mind of the creative works as a sponge, soaking it all in. Later, it spits things back out mashed and sewn together a la Frankenstein’s creation.

  Bio: As a child, weekly trips to the library fostered Damien Angelica Walters’ love for reading. At the age of eleven, she saw the movie Alien and read Stephen King’s The Shining and her attraction to all things dark and atmospheric turned into true love. Her novel Ink was released in 2012 by Samhain Publishing (under the name Damien Walters Grintalis). Sing Me Your Scars, a collection of short fiction and Paper Tigers, are both coming in 2015.

• Weightless books - https://weightlessbooks.com/updates/author-interview-damien-angelica-walters/

  Author Interview: Damien Angelica Walters

  by Andrea Pawley April 21st, 2015

  Tags: Andrea Pawley, Author Spotlight, Bram Stoker, Damien Angelica Walters, Dark Fiction, Sing Me Your Scars, Speculative Fiction, Weightless Books

  Sing Me Your ScarsWeightless Books interviews Damien Angelica Walters, a 2014 Bram Stoker Award nominee and author of Sing Me Your Scars, a collection of short stories.

  Q: What do you care about most when you write a story?

  DAW: The characters, most definitely. Most of my stories start as what-ifs: What if there was a woman who was a composite of body parts and each part retained sentience? How would that feel to the dominant part? What if there was a man who was disappearing, one body part at a time, and what would it feel like to watch that happening, knowing there was nothing you could do to stop it?

  I try to put my head firmly into the characters’ hearts and minds from the start, because unless I know how they feel, I won’t know how they’re going to react on their journey and their story won’t ring true.

  Q: If all the main characters in Sing Me Your Scars met on the battlefield, which ones would emerge victorious?

  DAW: I love this question! I suspect the characters would throw down their weapons and go off to have coffee and talk about scars, but if coffee wasn’t an option, I think it would ultimately come down to Olivia from “Girl, With Coin” and Isabel from “They Make of You a Monster.” In the end, though, Isabel would be victorious because although Olivia can’t physically feel pain, Isabel’s ability to kill with a touch trumps all.

  In the alternate universe, they’ve switched from coffee to cocktails and wine and they’re no longer discussing scars, but have moved onto things like what constitutes the perfect origami elephant, black and white versus color photography, and whether or not artificial intelligence should be granted autonomy.

  Q: You’ve published a phenomenal number of short stories in the past five years. What motivates you to do this?

  DAW: I don’t know how to not write. Words and phrases and characters and the before-mentioned what-ifs pop into my head all the time. Some of them turn into stories, countless others become scribbles in my notebook that might eventually be stories or they might remain as is. When I first started to write short fiction, those disconnected bits and pieces were frustrating, but over time, I came to realize that those pieces, whether intro paragraphs, lines of dialogue, or even story titles, were just as important to the writing process as the finished work.

  Q: Though it doesn’t seem to happen a lot, how do you handle the times when your writing is rejected?

  DAW: I think there’s a misconception that once you publish X amount of stories in markets A, B, and C, rejections become a thing of the past. This isn’t true, at all. Rejection is part of the business. Sometimes a story simply doesn’t fit what an editor is looking for. It doesn’t always mean the story is bad or won’t find the right home.

  Truthfully, I’m very hard on my stories. When a story is finished, I jot down three or four markets I think it would be a good fit for, but if the story is rejected by those markets, then I set it aside. But I don’t see this as giving up, because I revisit the story later (might be weeks, might be months), make changes or not, and send it back out. I have trunked stories that I feel are flawed, but I’ve also given a story one last ride on the submission train and had it sell.

  Most of the time, I brush rejections off, but every once in a while, usually when it’s an editor I’d love to work with or a magazine that has previously published my work, there’s a definite sting, a bit of not good enough. But it doesn’t make me want to give up permanently, nor does it last very long. I’m too stubborn and too driven to allow that.

  Q: How does reading affect your writing?

  DAW: I still read a lot as a reader, but there are times I read as a writer. In particular, if I’m trying to find the right threads to stitch ideas together in a story in progress, I’ll step away and reread an anthology or a few of my favorite stories, not for the stories themselves, but for the glue that holds them together or the story arc or the underlying theme. Often, just seeing how another writer has crafted a piece will help the pieces of my own story puzzle fall into place.

  I also like reading successful stories that don’t grab me personally for one reason or another; again, not for the stories, but to discern what makes them work. I think reading with that sort of critical eye has made me a better storyteller and has made me more willing to take risks in format, points of view, and story structure.

  Q: You’ve worked all along the editing spectrum — from associate editor at Electric Velocipede to freelance editing to being edited by senior staff at dozens of zines. If you could give yourself of ten years ago any kind of writing advice, what would it be?

  DAW: It would be the same advice I’d give to anyone starting out: Take your time and don’t send your stories out too soon. Start with the top markets first and work down. Don’t be afraid to submit. Don’t give your work away for free. Rejections aren’t personal. And lastly, you are not in competition with anyone but yourself.

  Q: Your second novel comes out in August. What can you tell us about it?

  Damien Angelica Walters - Author PhotoDAW: Yes, Paper Tigers is my second novel, although it’s the first to be published under the name Damien Angelica Walters. Paper Tigers is about a disfigured young woman and an old photo album she finds at a thrift store. At its heart, it’s a ghost story, but it’s as much about the things that haunt us personally as it’s about the external ghosts. It’s closer in tone to my short fiction than my previous novel—Ink, published as Damien Walters Grintalis.

  Damien Angelica Walters’ short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in various anthologies and magazines, including The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2015, Year’s Best Weird Fiction Volume One, Cassilda’s Song, Nightmare, Strange Horizons, and Apex. “The Floating Girls: A Documentary,” originally published in Jamais Vu, is on the 2014 Bram Stoker Award ballot for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction. Sing Me Your Scars, a collection of Damien Angelica Walters’ short fiction, is out now from Apex Publications and available from Weightless Books. Paper Tigers, a novel, is forthcoming from Dark House Press. Her other short fiction can be found here.

  Posted on Tuesday, April 21st, 2015 at 8:00 am.

• Angela Slatter - http://www.angelaslatter.com/singing-her-scars-damien-angelica-walters/

  Singing Her Scars: Damien Angelica Walters
  March 27, 2015

  Damien-Angelica-Walters-Author-Photo-744x731Damien Angelica Walters’ short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in various anthologies and magazines, including The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2015, Year’s Best Weird Fiction Volume One, Cassilda’s Song, Nightmare, Strange Horizons, and Apex. “The Floating Girls: A Documentary,” originally published in Jamais Vu, is on the 2014 Bram Stoker Award ballot for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction.

  Sing Me Your Scars, a collection of her short fiction, is out now from Apex Publications, and Paper Tigers, a novel, is forthcoming from Dark House Press. You can find her on Twitter @DamienAWalters or online at http://damienangelicawalters.com.

  What do readers need to know about Damien Angelica Walters, and which story of yours would you recommend to a new reader?

  DAW: I fear I’m much like most writers—an introvert, a bookworm, a drinker of too much coffee, and a fan of dinosaurs and Alien.

  For those unfamiliar with my work, Like Origami in Water would be a good story to start with, I think. It’s an older story and while my authorial voice has matured a bit, I think it showcases the tone of my short fiction well. It’s short, too, at just about 1,500 words, so it’s a quick read.

  Who were/are your literary heroes/influences?

  DAW: Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, Mary Shelley, Margaret Atwood, Peter Straub, Ray Bradbury, Jacqueline Carey, Gillian Flynn, Cormac McCarthy, Kij Johnson, Catherynne Valente, Kelly Link, Laird Barron, John Langan, and Ken Liu are some of the writers who’ve either inspired me or influenced me or left me in awe of their skill. Genre fiction holds a jaw-dropping wealth of talent.

  Where did the inspiration for Sing Me Your Scars spring from? SMYS_resized-e1422294840152

  DAW: Do you remember all those hateful memes about real women? Real women look like this, no, they look like that… For a time it felt like I saw a different one every day (mostly posted by men), all with this perceived ideal of feminine perfection and each time, my frustration grew. That frustration turned into a sentence – This is not my body. – and then into a paragraph and then into the story itself.

  What was the story/book that made you think ‘I want to write!’?

  DAW: I don’t think it was one specific book, but a cumulative effect of everything I read, both genre and non-genre, both good and bad. I remember creating illustrated books when I was in third grade and trying to sell them to the other kids in the neighborhood. While I’m fairly certain the books were about ghosts and other creepy things, sadly, none of them survived my childhood.

  Name five fictional characters you’d invite over for coffee and cake?

  DAW: Phèdre nó Delaunay de Montrève from Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Dart, Offred from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the nameless main character from Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men, Rose McClendon from Stephen King’s Rose Madder, and Ludwig Von Sacher from Kirsten Bakis’ Lives of the Monster Dogs.

  Ink-Cover-Art-Resized-e1422296174687Are there any of your own characters that you think you’d like to revisit in longer form at some point?

  DAW: I’ve been toying with the idea of turning The Floating Girls: A Documentary into a novel, but at this point I’m still jotting ideas down to see if it’s viable or not. My fear is that even with the addition of new characters and a larger storyline comprised of events that occur before and after the events in the short story, the central story won’t translate well to a longer work.

  What first drew you to write horror rather than any other genre?

  DAW: It wasn’t a conscious choice, to be sure, but I grew up reading fairy tales and Lois Duncan and when I was eleven, I read Stephen King’s The Shining. Given that my tastes as a reader always skewed to the dark, it was a given that what I wrote would follow suit.

  Who’s your favourite villain in fiction?

  DAW: That’s a hard question to answer. I think it’s a tie between Coleman Collins from Peter Straub’s Shadowland and the Overlook Hotel in Stephen King’s The Shining. Uncle Cole should be all magic tricks and letting the boys stay up too late with ice cream for dinner and cake for desert; he shouldn’t be crucifixion and mermaid girls and glass birds.

  And the Overlook should be rooms and ugly carpet and a big kitchen; it shouldn’t be blood on the walls, fire extinguishers that become snakes when you’re not looking, and it most definitely should not be able to exploit your father’s greatest weakness and turn him against you.

  What’s your favourite short story ever and why? YBW-e1417462947134

  DAW: Another tough question, and I’m going to cheat a bit and give you two. As far as the classics go, I’ll say The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. It’s masterful the way it draws you into a seemingly normal village, even if the gathering of the stones is disquieting. But the townspeople don’t seem worried overmuch, so it’s easy to brush that off. The story pulls the rug out from under you by slow degrees and then at the end, it leaves you suspended in the air and ready to drop with Mrs. Hutchinson. The slow burn coupled with keeping the carnage off-screen works beautifully.

  For newer fiction, Spar by Kij Johnson is brilliant. If you read it quickly, you might be inclined to dismiss it as vulgar or tentacle porn, but if you read it closely, you see the true story underneath. It’s about communication, or the lack thereof, and how destructive, how paralyzing, that can be. It’s masterful.

  ChooseWiselycover-print-front-e1427139773988What’s next for Damien Angelica Walters?

  DAW: I have several short stories and a portmanteau novel currently in the works. I’m also trying to plot another novel about monsters, love, hate, and revenge. I’ve never plotted a novel before so I may or may not be successful, but my novel first drafts are always a mess and I’d love to find a way to make them a bit cleaner.

  Publication-wise, Paper Tigers, a novel, will be out later this year from Dark House Press, and I’ve short fiction forthcoming in several anthologies and magazines, including Cassilda’s Song, edited by Joe Pulver, a King in Yellow anthology of all new stories written by women, The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction, edited by Paula Guran, and Black Static.

Cry Your Way Home
Publishers Weekly. 264.45 (Nov. 6, 2017): p64+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Cry Your Way Home

Damien Angelica Walters. Apex, $14.95 trade

paper (240p) ISBN 978-1-937009-61-8

This collection of 17 subversive short horror pieces focuses on the ways girls and women, particularly mothers and daughters, intentionally or inadvertently harm one another. Focusing not on the monsters as much as on the bystanders and people in power who enable the horror to proceed, Walters peels back the masks of innocence that cover up sins, such as a mother's need for some relief that exiles a colicky baby to wail in another dimension ("Little Girl Blue, Come Cry Your Way Home") or the missed opportunity to really listen, repeated from mother to daughter, that results in a fatal leap ("On. the Other Side of the Door, Everything Changes"). Though the stories feature a number of younger protagonists, they are decidedly aimed at adults, offering an unsparing look at the rivalry between stepsisters competing for parental attention ("Deep Within the Marrow, Hidden in My Smile") and the bullying of a student whose suicide attempt leaves her scarred in a familiar way ("Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice"). Fairy tales are turned inside out, as in the story of a beauty who does not redeem but instead inhabits her beast ("Tooth, Tongue, and Claw"). Short sharp shocks, finely developed settings, and eloquent prose make this collection a standout. (Jan.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Cry Your Way Home." Publishers Weekly, 6 Nov. 2017, p. 64+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A514056609/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6ea19a54. Accessed 4 Mar. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A514056609

Ink
Publishers Weekly. 259.43 (Oct. 22, 2012): p42+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Ink

Damien Waiters Grintalis. Samhain (www.samhainpublishing.com), $5.50 e-book

(320p) ISBN 978-1-61921-079-0

Distraught after his domineering wife, Shelley, leaves him for her best friend, Jason Harford meets an unnerving stranger in a bar who offers to ink him a tattoo. Only after a long, bloody ordeal does Jason realize what the reader knew from the beginning: that the griffin tattooed on his arm is terrifyingly alive and getting rid of it could prove utterly hellish. Until then, the hero of Grintalis's disappointing debut remains, all too conveniently for the plot, passive and oblivious to his problems. The stock characters otherwise populating the novel include, in addition to the shrewish Shelley, Jason's sexist best friend, Brian; his strong, kind father; and his beautiful, understanding new girlfriend, Mitch. The pace picks up near the end, only for Jason's long-delayed transformation into alpha male to occur in unintentionally hilarious fashion, undermining any sense of gravitas before the gruesome, lurid climax. Agent: Mark McVeigh, the McVeigh Agency. (Dec.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Ink." Publishers Weekly, 22 Oct. 2012, p. 42+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A307787808/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b128319e. Accessed 4 Mar. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A307787808

Samhain Publishing Author Damien Walters Grintalis to be a Featured Author at Baltimore Tattoo Arts Convention
PRWeb Newswire. (Jan. 8, 2013):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Vocus PRW Holdings LLC
http://www.prweb.com or www.vocus.com
Full Text:
Cincinnati, OH (PRWEB) January 08, 2013

International publisher Samhain Publishing(R) today announced that author Damien Walters Grintalis, who has been receiving enthusiastic reader and critical response for her contemporary horror debut, INK, will be an attending author at the Baltimore Tattoo Arts Convention, April 5-7, 2013. INK is the tale of a young man whose new, brilliantly realistic griffin tattoo takes on a terrifying life of its own.

According to Samhain Horror Executive Editor Don D'Auria, Grintalis' work has created its own indelible impression. "I knew INK was a perfect fit for Samhain Horror the moment I read the opening pages," D'Auria explains. "Damien's fresh voice, exceptional writing and compelling narrative make for a horror experience you won't forget anytime soon."

Already an acclaimed short story writer, Grintalis has been receiving other accolades for her debut novel as well. According to a recent review in The Horror Fiction Review, "Debut novels should not be this good. Keep an eye on Damien Walters Grintalis. She's starting off strong and probably headed right for the top!" and The Bag and The Crow review site listed INK on its Favorite Reads of 2012.

What's next for Grintalis? Additional INK. The Maryland-based author is applying to receive her own griffin tattoo on an upcoming edition of a tattoo reality show.

To learn more about this title and all Samhain Horror books, and to order books at a special discounted rate, visit the publisher online at http://www.samhainhorror.com.

Additional Reviews:

"Damien Walters Grintalis writes with a distinct voice, yet one which contains whispers of Sturgeon, Bradbury and Ellison."

aJamie Todd Rubin, Writer & SF Signal Contributor

"As soon as I read this one, I immediately wished that I thought of the idea a but if I had, I doubt I could have executed it half so well."

aMatthew Bennardo, co-editor of Machine of Death on "Like Origami in Water"

About Samhain Publishing

Launched in 2005 with a vision of bringing extraordinary fiction to compulsive readers (who sometimes can't wait for a book to actually be printed), Samhain Publishing(R) is an international publisher of e-book and traditional print fiction. One of the most prominent voices of original e-book fiction, Samhain represents some of today's brightest authors of romance and horror fiction. To learn why at Samhain "it's all about the storya[bar]", visit Samhain Publishing online at http://www.samhainpublishing.com.

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/1/prweb10296124.htm

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Samhain Publishing Author Damien Walters Grintalis to be a Featured Author at Baltimore Tattoo Arts Convention." PRWeb Newswire, 8 Jan. 2013. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A314185395/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e8ac6d82. Accessed 4 Mar. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A314185395

"Cry Your Way Home." Publishers Weekly, 6 Nov. 2017, p. 64+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A514056609/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6ea19a54. Accessed 4 Mar. 2018. "Ink." Publishers Weekly, 22 Oct. 2012, p. 42+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A307787808/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b128319e. Accessed 4 Mar. 2018. "Samhain Publishing Author Damien Walters Grintalis to be a Featured Author at Baltimore Tattoo Arts Convention." PRWeb Newswire, 8 Jan. 2013. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A314185395/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e8ac6d82. Accessed 4 Mar. 2018.

• This Is Horror
  http://www.thisishorror.co.uk/book-review-paper-tigers-by-damien-angelica-walters/
  Word count: 890

  Book Review: Paper Tigers by Damien Angelica Walters

  March 23, 2016

  “Thoroughly original, thought-provoking, and lingering in the mind long after the last page is turned.”

  Paper-Tigers-Hi-ResHorribly burned and disfigured, Alison is barely involved in life itself. By day, she hides behind closed doors in shame, unable to handle the stares, or the words people mutter under their breath… go away, Monstergirl. When she ventures out at night, wrapped in her scarf, she feels only a little safer. She knows she must get out more often, but when you’re just as crippled emotionally as you are physically, that’s easier said than done. One night while passing a thrift shop, she spies an old photo album. While most of the pages are stuck together by time and the elements, the undamaged pictures allow Alison to live in a way she didn’t think possible. The photos have captured an essence of life, a world held in time, and each times she escapes to that world, she finds herself a little more whole. But sometimes, no matter how badly you want something, it’s not what you need. As Alison discovers things can be too good to be true. She must find the strength to fight for her very life and destroy a toxic supernatural evil forever.

  Paper Tigers is the debut novel by Damien Angelica Walters, author of the fantastic short story collection, Sing Me Your Scars. Already an accomplished short story writer, appearing in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2015, Nightscript I, and Exigencies, among others, Dark House Press was lucky enough to release her first novel, and what a beautiful book it is. Damien conjures an inspiring, original, and ghostly tale in Paper Tigers, flexing her writing muscles to tackle a highly sensitive subject like body image while maintaining a sense of dread and suspense throughout. It is very difficult to imagine what it feels like physically, emotionally, and spiritually as a burn victim, so writing about someone who has burns over half her body is a daunting task, and not one that many would consider taking on. Walters’ prose makes it look easy, capturing every angle of a recovering burn victim’s life; the shame of disfigurement, the physical therapy, the psychological trauma of knowing you will never be whole again, and she gets all of this on the page realistically and subjectively.

  It is this longing to be ‘whole’ again that forces Alison to venture out at night. She’s painfully aware that her survival depends so much on her facing her fears, yet her fears throttle the life right out of her. The photo album is, at first, a welcome distraction. She enjoys imagining the people in the photos, the life they must have, and by imagining, she lives vicariously through the lives of people she doesn’t know. This quickly becomes an obsession for her, and as she discovers who the people in the photos are, the album opens up to her in a way that initially frightens her, but eventually becomes a way that she could become ‘whole’ again. It is here that Walters really shines, building the suspense with each page as we can’t wait to find out if this is real or imagined, and if it is indeed real, how far down the rabbit hole will Alison go to make her dream come true. The fantastical elements of the story are handled in a very straight-forward, matter-of-fact way that lend to the realistic, and soon we learn that yes, you can go too far down, and the price for what you want is often more than you can afford to pay.

  Paper Tigers is visceral and emotional, with a fully-realized main character readers will come to care about despite her traumatic and fragile state of mind. Typically, reading about survivors of such a terrible tragedy can be an exercise in torture, but Walters doesn’t allow her readers to feel sorry for Alison for very long, understanding that even the most sorrowful of us must make a choice to try and live our lives as best as we can. Alison changes throughout the story, going from weak and fearful, then finally strong and resourceful. The evil she faces inside the photo album is very real, and extremely personal, and once she realizes how powerful it is, makes a decision to end that evil once and for all, knowing the consequences each step of the way. The story conclusion is at once logical and unpredictable, and does Alison’s character justice.

  Thoroughly original, thought-provoking, and lingering in the mind long after the last page is turned, Paper Tigers by Damien Angelica Walters is a stunning debut from a strong literary voice in Weird Fiction that manages to transcend genre by writing a story from the heart. We’ve never quite read anything like this before, so we definitely cannot wait to see what she’s going to come up with next. Readers looking for a creepy story that packs a strong emotional wallop from the first words should get this book in their hands as soon as possible.

  BOB PASTORELLA

  Publisher: Dark House Press
  Paperback (300pp)
  Release Date: 29 February 2016

• Locus
  http://locusmag.com/2015/11/laird-barron-reviews-damien-angelica-walters/
  Word count: 832

  Laird Barron reviews Damien Angelica Walters
  November 27, 2015

  Sing Me Your Scars, Damien Angelica Walters (Apex Book Company 978-1-9370-0928-1, $15.95, 200pp, hc) February 2015.

  The new millennium has indeed proven a bountiful era for readers of weird fiction. Sing Me Your Scars is another debut collection of horror and dark fantasy stories by an outstanding young author. I’ve observed Damien Angelica Walters’s progress over the past few years, not­ing that she has quickly gone from an intriguing newcomer to a mainstay, appearing in various anthologies, including year’s bests. Her literary presence in 2014 and 2015 borders upon ubiquity and this collection jolts out of the blocks with a significant amount of momentum, heralded by a bevy of veteran authors and major literary review organs such as Kirkus and LA Review of Books. All this said, the vast majority of readers are unlikely to have crossed paths with Walters. These folks are in for an enviable experience.

  Sing Me Your Scars contains 21 stories, eight of which are original to the collection. Walters’s narratives travel a spectrum of pure horror literature to the out-and-out weird. She throws aside the curtain on a macabre universe of body horror, ghosts, and murder. She writes of damage and trauma and doomed relationships, and does it with powerful affect that reminds me of Livia Llewellyn and Nathan Ballingrud for its lyric rawness and psychological flensing of numerous protagonists. Recurring scenes of surgeries, mutilations, and self-inflicted poison­ing are also reminiscent of Brian Evenson’s best work, a contemporary master of the surreal and Kafkaesque. Also redolent of Evenson, in a Walters narrative, mythology and supernatural forces routinely impinge upon mundane reality; quotidian existence is punctuated by intrusions of the existentially horrific and the absurdly fantastical. One’s diminishment leads to power, one’s loss is often a net gain (of awfulness), and one’s scars do indeed sing.

  The opening eponymous tale, ‘‘Sing Me Your Scars’’ is told from the perspective of a compos­ite woman, a sewn together slave-bride of a gen­teel madman, á la Frankenstein. The protagonist is the dominant personality, but must contend with the ghostly presences of the other women who contributed limbs or organs. As with much of this collection, powerful crosscurrents are at work – the language is precise and grounded in concrete detail, yet what is described can only be comprehended and accepted in the abstract. Walters wields absurdism and surrealism like twin carving knives. She pronounces afflictions upon her characters with a delicacy that belies the bloody effect. Nonetheless, these characters resist and persist, even as they wither and fade or are remade entirely.

  Rot and renewal figured into the first story and recur elsewhere. Transformation, often at gruesome cost, is a thematic artery that carries lifeblood throughout the body of the collection, albeit, the nutrient supply possesses high levels of toxicity. ‘‘All the Pieces We Leave Behind’’, ‘‘Running Empty in a Land of Decay’’, and ‘‘Always, They Whisper’’ deal with transfor­mation, physical and psychological, and to one degree or another, loss, disassembly, decay, the curse of the masculine gaze (another potent and rightfully squirm-inducing sub-theme that
  recurs), and the death grip of familial and romantic attachment. One of the most devastating pieces in the entire collection is ‘‘Gray in the Gauge of His Storm,’’ an emotionally bruising metaphor of a man- and-woman-as-dolls, their torn burlap stitches and loose stuffing synonymous with scars and let blood. The co-dependent couple, these living dolls, represent the pathology of modern romance, and are ultimately torn asunder not by love, as they might profess, but by a fundamental misapprehension of love’s true nature and their own lack of capacity to love or be loved. At this juncture in her career, ‘‘Gray…’’ is arguably a quintessential Walters story and most definitely a thematic cornerstone of this particular arrangement.

  Congruent with the vast body of popular hor­ror and its Judeo-Christian morality, women are frequently victimized by predatory men or the predacious culture that facilitates systemic violence against women. Walters seizes that convention of women as victims, women as canvases for the horrific fantasies of predatory men, and tears it apart as her characters are torn apart. She remakes that worn-to-the-bone cliché as her characters are remade – with transformation, mock submission, and occasionally, blood-soaked fiery vengeance. ‘‘Turnabout is fair play’’ could be the motto bla­zoned upon this book’s crest.

  Love, loss, and the mutable, yet ineluctable, truth of identity are the bedrock, the steely spine of Sing Me Your Scars. The stories comprise a mirror, shattered to 20-odd bits and reassembled and bound within a frame. Each jagged sliver reflects some distortion of the viewer, each shard bends and traps light and pierces the eye, perhaps the soul, with an isolated wound, but step back and back and a kaleidoscopic effect takes hold. Behold a powerful, important statement writ in the weird.

• Mad Scientist Journal
  http://madscientistjournal.org/2017/12/review-of-cry-your-way-home-by-damien-angelica-walters/
  Word count: 279

  Review of Cry Your Way Home by Damien Angelica Walters
  by scarywhitegirl • December 13, 2017 • Reviews • 0 Comments

  Cover art for Cry Your Way Home

  Cry Your Way Home (Apex Publications, 2018) features seventeen of Damien Angelica Walters’ previously published short stories in a brilliant collection showcasing her beautiful prose and carefully plotted tales. Not for the faint of heart, the stories contained within this book veer frequently toward the creepy and unsettling.

  The opening story, “Tooth, Tongue, and Claw,” sets the stage for what is to come, telling the story of a secondborn daughter who is given to a monster so that her people can enjoy their continued well-being. Many of Walters’ stories involve female protagonists who struggle against the circumstances that life has brought them. And not all of those stories have happy endings, either.

  Among my favorite stories in the collection were “Deep Within the Marrow, Hidden in My Smile,” “S Is for Soliloquy,” and “Umbilicus.” The first of these stories examines the relationship between stepsisters, but goes in an unexpected direction. “S Is for Soliloquy” starts out innocently enough, but the twist in this story is absolutely fantastic. And “Umbilicus” is creepy and atmospheric, while still having just enough touches of realism to keep it grounded.

  If you’re a fan of spooky stories and well-crafted prose, Cry Your Way Home is the book for you. Cry Your Way Home is available for pre-order at Apex Publications or Amazon and other booksellers, with a release date of January 2, 2018.

  The publisher provided us with a free copy of this novel in exchange for review consideration.

• Chicago Literati
  https://chicagoliterati.com/2016/04/11/ola-faleti-reviews-paper-tigers-by-damien-angelica-walters/
  Word count: 448

  Ola Faleti Reviews PAPER TIGERS by Damien Angelica Walters
  Dark House Press (c) 2016

  A paper tiger is something that appears threatening but is actually weak in the long-run. A clever title for Damien Angelica Walters’ book, as most of the main character’s threats come from her own mind’s making. We meet Allison Reese at 3 a.m., her favorite time of day for shielding the world from her scarred face and body, the result of a terrible apartment fire. In these wee morning hours Allison happens upon an intriguing photo album in a messy antique shop. Unaware of the chaos she’s about to invite into her life, she buys it.

  Pasted in the album is a photo of George, a wealthy man from the turn of the century who has trapped members of his family into his own delusional world. When Allison enters George’s time capsule of a world, she risks being trapped too; she’s tempted with the promise of her old life. But George’s universe has its own conditions, and Allison has to decide if a return to normalcy is worth it. Paper Tigers is haunting if nothing else. Besides being haunted by what’s left of her body, Allison is haunted by memories of an old fiance, a once-promising future in teaching, and other flashes of her life before the fire.

  A few secondary characters are scattered throughout, mainly Allison’s ever-worried mother. Aside from that Paper Tigers is a one-woman show. In fact, it’s really towards the last chunk of the book that readers meet Allison’s deadbeat fiance, who jumped ship when he saw her mutilated body at the hospital after the fire. Unfortunately, those cameos come a little too sparse and a little too late for readers to get a true sense of Allison’s former life.

  Paper Tigers’ vivid imagery is strong enough to hook an audience, even those of us who don’t fall into the “horror buff” category. The end of the novel feels hurried, though, as Walters ties up the all the loose ends that emerge over 288 pages. Not only does Allison have to resolve the George situation, she also has to navigate her fraught relationship with her mother, struggle with going out publicly, come to terms with her failed relationship’s aftermath and tackle the personal demons that tell her she’s a monster. Makes me tired just thinking about it. A more focused story would make for a more satisfying read, but if you love the dark and gore-y indiscriminately, Paper Tigers as is will do the trick.

  2.5/4

• Weird Fiction Review
  http://weirdfictionreview.com/2015/03/strange-games-of-sadistic-symmetry/
  Word count: 699

  “Sing Me Your Scars” by Damien Angelica Walters
  Strange Games of Sadistic Symmetry
  Christopher Burke

  Sing Me Your ScarsThe third entry in the Apex Voices series, Sing Me My Scars by Damien Angelica Walters is a sharp treatise on the subject of human pain, in all its forms, and what comes after. Underlying the physical torments endured by Walters’ protagonists are believable emotional horrors with which most readers will relate. Realistic tragedies – loss of love, proxy wars in a messy divorce, parental disinterest, the loss of a relative to Alzheimer’s – are placed side-by-side with more bizarre tribulations, such as the gradual vanishing of a lover’s body, impossible anatomical experimentations, and Inquisitorial ordeals inflicted on wielders of magic. But not all pain is so clearly unwelcome, as we see in one of the stronger selections, “Iron and Wood, Nail and Bone.” Comparisons to Kafka seem inevitable with this piece and its apparently self-inflicted, ritualized torments, but it has a distinct voice that feels more personal and less clinical than the bizarre machinations of the Czech writer.

  In several stories, Walters lightly dips a few toes (hopefully still attached) into splatterpunk waters, to chilling effect. “Sing Me Your Scars”, “Girl, With Coin”, and “Glass Boxes and Clockwork Gods” are particularly unsettling in their explorations of the ways in which we must ask ourselves how much we can be reduced or recombined and still retain a consistent notion of selfhood. The theme of scars, whether physical or otherwise, is present in virtually all of these pieces. Human frailty is juxtaposed in fascinating ways with toughness and a capacity to heal. The initial wound reveals the weakness, the subsequent scarring displays the strength to carry the damage on through life. Such a pattern could become stale in the hands of a less imaginative writer, but the stories here are inventive enough to avoid this potential pitfall. Rather, the collection comes across as a “variations on a theme” concept, and each story is bolstered and informed by those that came before.

  Matching silver bands. Fingers entwined. One hand is hale and hearty; the other frail, the veins standing out like mounds in a field of fresh graves.
   — “Shall I Whisper to You of Moonlight, of Sorrow, of Pieces of Us?” (included in 2014’s Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume 1)

  To Walters, being alive seems synonymous with pain, and scars inflicted by others or by the world often find a way of being perpetually reinflicted by oneself.

  Although most of the stories have a strong body horror element, many of the collection’s strongest moments arrive when Walters relents, if just a little, on the physical components of human suffering. One of the strongest selections, “Dysphonia in D Minor,” uses an elegantly simple tale of fading love as its core, but the beautiful descriptions and grandiose, speculative elements of the story make it fresh and serve as an excellent counterpoint to the more familiar components. Similarly, “Like Origami in Water” calls attention to the fragility of the human form, and it is in this piece that one of the collection’s recurring images — paper and its attendant capacity for being reshaped and repurposed — finds its most affecting expression. Other fragile items, such as flower petals, frequently find their way into stories and accompany the sufferings of those who bear them.

  While the collection is quite strong overall, it falters a bit in a few places. At least one story ends in a fashion that is pointedly ambiguous and would likely have benefited from a subtler approach. On occasion, a story’s premise and characters are compelling enough that the story still seemed to have room to grow before its finish. These examples tend to come from the shorter selections, while the longer pieces tend to be a little more successful at exploring the book’s themes and creating characters in which the reader becomes invested. Bearing this in mind, it will be interesting to see what Ms. Walters does with her next release, Paper Tigers–a novel from Dark House Press due out in August of 2015.

• Vegan Daemon
  http://www.easyvegan.info/2018/01/09/cry-your-way-home-by-damien-angelica-walters/
  Word count: 810

  Book Review: Cry Your Way Home by Damien Angelica Walters (2018)
  January 9th, 2018 7:00 am by Kelly Garbato

  Walters is at her best when she’s playing Frankenstein with fairy tale tropes.

  three out of five stars

  (Full disclosure: I received a free electronic ARC for review through Library Thing’s Early Reviewers program. Trigger warning for violence against women and suicide.)

  Once upon a time there was a monster. This is how they tell you the story starts. This is a lie.
  (“Tooth, Tongue, and Claw “)

  Don’t be fooled by the breadcrumbs in the forest. This is not a fairy tale.
  (“A Lie You Give, and Thus I Take”)

  You won’t catch me in my underwear. I sleep in my fucking coveralls.
  (“The Serial Killer’s Astronaut Daughter”)

  Between the oft-quoted “Once upon a time there was a monster…” line (reproduced above; I just couldn’t help myself!), and the deliciously dark story titles, I was practically frothing at the mouth to read an early copy of Cry Your Way Home. Alas, this collection of short stories – an eclectic mix of science fiction, fantasy, fairy tale retellings, and the stray piece of contemporary fiction, all bound by a fierce undercurrent of feminism running throughout – is more of a mixed bag than I’d hoped. There are a few gems here, but also a good many underwhelming and ultimately forgettable stories, too.

  The collection opens on a strong note with “Tooth, Tongue, and Claw,” easily my favorite of the bunch. A mix of Beauty and the Beast and The Handmaid’s Tale (or perhaps “The Lottery”), the story ends with a surprising twist that’s as satisfying as it is lurid. A mashup of various fairy tales/spin on the entire genre, “A Lie You Give, and Thus I Take” is equal parts beautiful, chilling, and cautionary. While I think Walters is at her best when writing in this wheelhouse, I also quite enjoyed some of her science fiction; “The Serial Killer’s Astronaut Daughter,” “Take a Walk in the Night, My Love,” and “The Floating Girls: A Documentary” are all worth a read or two or three.

  All of Walters’ stories have a strong feminist bent; whether or not you find them preachy most likely hinges on your view of women. (Personally, I thought they were the exact right mix of righteous anger and engaging narrative device.) In “The Serial Killer’s Astronaut Daughter,” for example, we see a woman being punished for the transgressions of a man – and one to whom her connection is tenuous at best. She’s sure to be punished both for her silence and for speaking out – damned if you do, damned if you don’t – and so she settles on a maxim that we’d all do well to adopt: “Be Ripley.” (Or Vasquez, as it were.) Elsewhere, “The Floating Girls: A Documentary” is an allegory about sexual assault, rape culture, and the silencing of women that’s as ethereal as it is (sadly) mundane.

  Of the stories that fell flat for me, “On the Other Side of the Door, Everything Changes” stuck out like a sore thumb because it’s the only non-fantastical piece in the collection (and kind of predictable, to boot). The others don’t suffer from a lack of imagination; rather, I just found them unsatisfying, either in concept or execution. That said, the standouts more than make up for it. Even though I was considering DNF’in early on, I’m glad I stuck around: the book really starts punching up – and with such gratifying force – in the second half, so much so that you can (almost?) forgive the random misses.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Tooth, Tongue, and Claw – 5/5 stars
  Deep Within the Marrow, Hidden in My Smile – 3/5 stars
  On the Other Side of the Door, Everything Changes – 2/5 stars
  This Is the Way I Die – 3.5/5 stars
  The Hands That Hold, the Lies That Bind – 3/5 stars
  Not My Circus, Not My Monkeys: The Elephant’s Tale – 3/5 stars
  The Judas Child – 3/5 stars
  S Is for Soliloquy – 3/5 stars
  The Floating Girls: A Documentary – 4/5 stars
  Take a Walk in the Night, My Love – 4/5 stars
  Falling Under, Through the Dark – 3/5 stars
  The Serial Killer’s Astronaut Daughter – 4/5 stars
  Umbilicus – 2/5 stars
  A Lie You Give, and Thus I Take – 4/5 stars
  Little Girl Blue, Come Cry Your Way Home – 2/5 stars
  Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice – 3.5/5 stars
  In the Spaces Where You Once Lived – 3/5 stars

  (This review is also available on Amazon, Library Thing, and Goodreads. Please click through and vote it helpful if you’re so inclined!)

• Jeff Pfaller
  http://jeffpfaller.com/2016/02/paper-tigers-by-damien-angelica-walters
  Word count: 466

  February 24, 2016
  Paper Tigers by Damien Angelica Walters

  Paper Tigers by Damien Angelica Walters4 out of 5 stars

  I’m usually not a horror guy.

  However, when a Dark House Press title showed up on my doorstep, I decided it was as good of a time as any to try something unusual.

  “In this haunting and hypnotizing novel, a young woman loses everything–half of her body, her fiancé, and possibly her unborn child–to a terrible apartment fire. While recovering from the trauma, she discovers a photo album inhabited by a predatory ghost who promises to make her whole again, all while slowly consuming her from the inside out.”

  Paper Tigers echoed The Others for me. DECADE OLD SPOILER ALERT: A protagonist caught in what they perceive is a haunted house. In reality, they are the intruders, the ones disturbing the undead. Walters doesn’t use the shocking twist, though. She gives her broken main character agency and uses the house as a metaphor for Alison’s struggle to heal herself.

  The standout in this book was the authenticity, as much as you can have authenticity in a story about a predatory ghost trying to trap someone in a photo album. Alison’s introversion as a result of her horrifying scars felt incredibly crippling. The need to recharge alone after something so simple as taking a few steps outside. The desire to avoid human contact, even with someone you love dearly.

  I particularly enjoyed the nuanced relationship with her mother, who had her own struggle between wanting to help Allison return to some version of the person she was before and failing to respect her daughters need for space and time to process.

  While I appreciate a good surprise as much as anyone, Paper Tigers felt like it could have ended earlier. Without spoiling the end of the book, the main storyline that had already come to a close felt like a false ending. In the case of Paper Tigers, I think Walters didn’t go surprising enough, instead trying to rekindle story out of an otherwise satisfying ending.

  Walters prose sucks you in with vivid descriptions that build setting around all the senses. The smell of tobacco, the tautness of scar tissue: many times I found myself simply enjoying the picture she was painting. In a critical scene near the end of the book, Walters delivers masterfully on what I expect horror to be – unsettling, uncomfortable, and placing a character on that delicate knife edge of escape and completely losing themselves.

  As a casual horror fan, I found a lot to enjoy in this novel.
  Buy Paper Tigers by Damien Angelica Walters

• Horror Novel Reviews
  https://horrornovelreviews.com/2012/11/25/damien-walters-grintalis-ink-review/
  Word count: 601

  Damien Walters Grintalis ‘Ink’ Review

  Posted on November 25, 2012 in Authors A-L // 1 Comment

  Written by: Vitina Molgaard

  As this journey begins we find ourselves meeting up with Jason Harford, whose wife has left him after several miserable years. Confronted by the changes that being alone will bring, Jason does what just about any man would do and begins his adventures engaging in acts not tolerated by the marriage bed. Initiating the dark agenda is achieving a good nights drunk. But before the night is over this fellow will inadvertently stumble into far more than he bargained for. Meeting up with a “man” who moves with a roll in his stride and warrants the nickname of “Sailor”, is only the beginning of things one could never rightfully expect.

  Sailor offers up a fantastic tattoo, a welcomed display of rebellion for Jason. However, it’s also one that carries a price well beyond mere greenbacks. Soon we come to know the real name of “Sailor”: John S. Iblis …creator of art, genius with ink; ink that will shine and glow…as though it has a life all its own. The choice image he selects is that of a Griffin….one named Gryphon (which is actually just an alternate spelling for the same mythological creature).

  A string of strange occurrences begin… unexplainable things: missing pets in the neighborhood, the death of a loved; a child disappears nearby. But the nightmares…ah the nightmares …unrelenting and horrendous…are a living hell, and Grintalis does a wonderful job of projecting terror, often through relative subtlety.

  Brian Moreland and Damien Walters Grintalis

  As the story progresses, focused more on character development and excavation than outright primitive violence I should note, Jason meets a beautiful young caring woman that plays a major part in this tale. She also shares the love of ink, as well as that of the Griffin. This is a focal figure not to be overlooked, so pay heed.

  I’ve probably shared enough of the story’s details. From me, you get a brief outline, and a surprise upon opening the novel. However, before I go I must say that I’d be remiss if I did not share a quote from this story that I found to be quite germane…one that I believe well worth showcasing: ”A tattoo can be a work of art…or a curse…The Devil is in the details”.

  There’s a poet in Damien Walters Grintalis.

  Grintalis has laid out a book that will unquestionably be enjoyed. It’s an easygoing ride straight into Hell…one that relies, as I’ve mentioned on character development and crucial decisions people make. If you are a lover of ultra-violence and massive loads of carnage, this is not what you might be looking for. This one is horror to the core, and there are a few animalistic scenes to take in, but don’t expect a scene straight from the mind of Herschell Gordon Lewis to hit the paper. Interestingly enough, that’s the precise reason I’d recommend this novel. To be frightened. To be moved by by the terror we humans can inflict upon ourselves and others. Look out for this blossoming author, she has a wealth of potential and I’d personally be rather dumbfounded if we fail to hear more from her in the future.

  Editor’s Note: Samhain Publishing will drop this one on the shelves come December 4th, 2012.

  Rating: 3/5

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