Gina Myers and I started Cul-de-sac of Blood in 2022 as a horror poetics circular, launching on September 12 with the first installment of my “What is Horror Poetics?” serial. We publish online one piece at a time, biweekly and in cycles, and are currently in the midst of cycle 5. We initially called it a circular because we like the materiality of the slim, saturated newspaper print circular and the era it evokes. Our aesthetic home is suburban horror, though we aren’t tied to any particular venue or approach beyond the foundational queerness of our outlook. As an online publication, we want to emphasize the material basis for our enthusiasms, cultural conditions, and the internet itself. We also always intended to make periodic print publications under the CDSOB banner. In late 2024, we published a set of four print chapbooks in a series we hope to continue in the future. We also published three digital chapbooks and have plans to publish zines focused around specific themes and highlighting our Friday Features series.
Our cycles are arbitrary in length, and have as much to do with season and mood as our energy levels and sense of when to take a break. We are generally open for submissions and tend to keep a cycle going as long as we have things to publish. When we run low, it’s time to rest, attend to other responsibilities, and reach out again to potential contributors.
We’ve always published poetry, essays, film and music writing, visual art, and fiction. In the last few months, we’ve seen a bump in fiction submissions, so it seems like we’re on the radar for horror story writers. It’s been fun, and it’s also a new challenge for us. Part of the reason we created CDSOB is to give writers a place to publish things that other publications might not welcome. We encourage writers to explore horror poetics and push their genre writing out there rather than conform to traditional literary categories and sensibilities. We started from the assumption that genre fiction already has venues for publication, while, for example, horror poetry and theory are less supported. That said, we are open to all forms of radical critical and aesthetic exploration that engage horror, sci-fi, and fantasy aesthetics. There may be more opportunities out there for genre fiction writers to publish their work, but we can still make a space for queer and innovative prose writers who want to share their work in the context of other genres and weird or monstrous forms.
On that note, one of our favorite texts is J. Halberstam’s Skin Shows, where Halberstam argues that to make monsters, writers have to make monstrous texts—radical assemblages, hybrid forms, linguistic abominations. “The question, What is it? in other words, has to be directed at the book and the monster.” So there’s an ontology for the monstrous text. And what really motivates us as writers and publishers is where Halberstam goes from there, with the example of Mary Shelley’s gothic horror novel: “The monstrosity of Frankenstein is literally built into the textuality of the novel to the point where textual production itself is responsible for generating monsters” (Skin Shows, 31). Halberstam calls this the technology of monsters. And that’s our profane ambition with Cul-de-sac of Blood. We want to make monsters with you.
