Charcoal by Garrett Cook

It was said that he had given his soul to something inhuman to be part of artistic immortality. It was said that his very ashes were used to make a set of charcoals still imbued with his spirit. When Shannon Hernandez, a traumatized and repressed art student, is tasked to draw with them by her lecherous professor, she feels a change in herself and something menacing calling out to her. She is offered a chance to create work that breaks boundaries and hearts alike but comes bound with a connection to a legacy of immortal terrors.

Raised on the North Shore of Massachusetts in a house half the town called haunted, Garrett Cook grew up obsessed with everything curious, monstrous and perverse as well as struggles with body image, gender role and intense trauma. He has since moved on to Portland, Oregon, where there are fewer ghosts but still a great deal of perversity. His work has appeared alongside Joe Lansdale in Best Bizarro Fiction of the Decade, Michael Moorcock in Kizuna and Jack Ketchum in DOA III and James Joyce in I Transgress. He is the winner of the Wonderland award for Time Pimp and an Honorable Mention in Best Horror of the Year 7 for his story Beast with Two Backs. His work has been translated into Spanish, Japanese and Russian.

"Written with the haunting lyricism of early Clive Barker and with the poetic prowess of Kathe Koja, Garrett Cook's Charcoal is an elegantly beguiling tone poem of trauma and suffering. To miss out on this masterpiece would be to miss out on watching a master craftsman at work. An utterly bewitching read."
-Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

"With echoes of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, Garrett Cook's poetic, lyrical Charcoal explores with a licentious butcher's cruel insight the bloody thread that connects the darkness in man, the darkness in the medium by which art is created, and the darkness in art itself."
-Matthew M Bartlett, author of Gateways to Abomination

"Garrett Cook's prose is meticulous and beautiful."
- Lori Bowen, director of I am Monster

"A whirlpool of consciousness, smoothly drawing you in and then sweeping you along in ever-faster tightening spirals to plunge into a dark, mind-blowing vortex."
- Christine Morgan, author of Lakehouse Infernal

"Charcoal nails the pain that every artist knows - the agony of creation and the despair of grasping for recognition -- and lays it bare on the page, naked and shrieking, like nothing before."
--Bitter Karella, Hugo Award Nominated creator of The Midnight Society Twitter

"Charcoal expertly weaves different levels of reality, going from past to present to canvas to dream"
-Joe Koch, author of The Wingspan of Severed Hands

"Charcoal is full of brilliant darkness and on-point observations about people, trauma and the ways we interact with problematic art. Gothic, nightmarish, and feels very much like falling into a historic painting of hell."
- Madeleine Swann, author of The Sharp End of the Rainbow