This debut collection by LC von Hessen drops in a little more than a month, and let me tell you: it's gonna knock some socks off.
Preorder here.
Big reviews coming down the pike soon.
In the meantime, advance praise for the book:
“Dark, lyrical, and grimly charming, Hessen’s prose is marvelous. In league with the literary forces that have inspired Aickman, Tuttle, and Dahl.”
—Laird Barron, author of Not A Speck of Light (Stories)
“Von Hessen’s much-anticipated collection constructs a machine of strange encounters, twisted folklore, and an industrialized universe, an entrancing experience that injects lightning through your mind. Each story carries a near-tangible sense of knowing, held just out of reach, and by each finale you’re as likely to be left awestruck as mortified. A dreamlike dissection of the human condition and the madness we create for ourselves.”
—Hailey Piper, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Queen of Teeth
“What a voice! LC von Hessen is like some perverse antiquarian puppet-master, delivering exacting prose that couples the cadence of Ligotti with the bright irony of a discourse on modern art. They inject a sense of timelessness via historical detail that fascinates the reader at every turn. Reading Spiritus Ex Machina is a surgical experience. Utterly cold, rich, unflinching, and unforgettable.”
—Joe Koch, author of The Wingspan of Severed Hands and Invaginies
“My description of LC von Hessen’s writing as the progeny of Ligotti’s bleak universe, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s macabre fairy tales, and Maria de Naglowska’s Satanic eroticism is only due to my inability to properly convey the uncanny ambiance of their stories. Here, marginalized people who have been far too rarely celebrated seek the allure of decadent liberation in a realm of carnivals, fetish clubs, city apartments, and rooms where transgressive experiments are inflicted. Spiritus Ex Machina is as carnal as a bite into the flesh of a black widow’s plump abdomen, and as dangerously seductive as eating a poisoned apple, razor blade tucked beneath tongue.”
—Christopher Slatsky, author of The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature and Alectryomancer
“Perverse and absurd. Ornate and crass. Erotic and deeply unsettling. LC von Hessen proves themself as one of our most thoughtful and talented stylists with Spiritus Ex Machina—a collection of outsiders looking in on a world stranger than themselves.”
—Carson Winter, author of The Psychographist
“LC von Hessen deserves your attention. Mordant wit, vibrant fantasy, keen insight into character, artful eroticism, and an authentically historic voice. Every piece in this collection will reward you.”
—Michael Cisco, author of The Divinity Student and Antisocieties
“Sometimes you encounter the work of a writer whose name you want to shout from the rooftops. LC von Hessen is such a writer. von Hessen expertly weaves the macabre, the grotesque, and the phantasmagorical into an intricate, artful black web. Count me among their new fans. I suspect there’ll soon be many, many more.”
—Matthew M. Bartlett, author of Gateways to Abomination
