My novelette ‘The Black Hand’ is now available from Raphus Press. An excerpt, (about a quarter of the text), titled ‘The Songbird of Medina’ originally appeared in a lovely avian themed anthology called ‘Ornithologiæ’ from Egaeus press. The text has been further expanded to its final form.
Set during the second year of the Covid Pandemic in Malta, Tarik Osman, a non naturalized Libyan port authority official, has been summoned to aide the Maltese police and immigration authorities, in the investigation of a series of savage murders of refugees. Over an eight month period, five mutilated bodies are discovered on the cliffs by the sea, covered in a shoal of brightly colored feathers.
Books, short stories, novelettes and novellas currently available from these very fine publishers.
The Inhuman Ladder- stories – from Zagava books, Germany – (Now Sold out) Civilian, a long novella from Raphus Press, Brazil The Secretariat of Tenebrous Anatomies, second printing re-issue, novelette and rulebook, with Bethany White. Raphus Press Brazil. (March 2023). My story ‘The Songbird of Medina, published in Ornithologiæ, from Egaeus Press, England. Not pictured, my story, ‘The Man of Irrational Numbers’ appearers in ‘On A Dark, Raging Sea,’ January 2023 from Exile in the Margins.
Eleven fictional tributes to Duluth’s finest, embracing all that is beautiful, disquieting, brief, heart-breaking, euphoric, experimental and distorted within their vast catalogue of songs.
ART/FICTION.
Edited by Martin Jones. Art and design by Rik Rawling.
With contributions from Clare Archibald, David Banning, Anthony Fielding, Karim Ghahwagi, Colin Insole, Timothy J. Jarvis, Martin Jones, Rosalie Parker, Rik Rawling, R.B. Russell and O. Jamie Walsh.
(All profits from the book will be donated to the Hebridean Whale & Dolphin Trust.)
A4 landscape format. 60 pages. Black and white illustrations throughout. 250 unnumbered copies.
This is a pre-order release- all purchased copies will ship in January 2023
On this midsummer eve Raphus Press in Brazil have published “As Augústias do Livro de Satã”, a Portuguese translation of my novelette “The Sorrows of Satan’s Book”. Translated by Alcebiades Diniz Miguel and Fàbio Waki. With photography by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz and Fàbio Waki.
The story originally appeared in England in Egaeus Press’s wonderful anthology of maritime tales ‘A Book of the Sea’. The story was later collected into ‘The Inhuman Ladder’ and published by Zagava Books in Germany. Raphus Press has previously translated my story ‘Horrill Hill’ in a similarly wonderful edition. My humble gratitude to all involved.
ORNITHOLOGIÆ, Egaeus Press’s long-awaited collection of strange, dark and hallucinatory stories and poems on the theme of birds, is now available to order.
Herein, and alongside the more or less familiar, feathered avian varieties, you will find creatures of pure myth, impossibilities; birds reimagined, reconstructed; birds as symbols and metaphors for all that is both irreconcilably fascinating and alien to humanity.
The book comprises a total of 27 stories and poems, including, amongst other gems, a previously unpublished story by the late and greatly missed Ron Weighell.
The full table of contents is as follows:
Oystercatcher – Martin Ruf
Aberration & Essence – Charles Wilkinson
Ravenbaby – Die Booth
Chattering Pies – Henry Everett
The Spirit Plate – Sara Rich
Being A True Account of The Death & Burial of Poor Cock Robin – William Curnow
My Love Will Shine from Depths Unknown – John Llewellyn Probert
The Sin-Eaters – Suzanne J. Willis
Pretty Bird – Florence Sunnen
Chanticleer & The Peacock – Rose Biggin
Huitzilopochtli – Lorraine Schein
Oileán na nÉan – Albert Power
The Jingwei Bird Filling Up The Eastern Sea – Ngo Binh Anh Khoa
The Hunger – Romy Wenzel
Leather Cormorant – Richard Gavin
Doctor Cuckoo – Douglas Thompson
The Dread Machinery – Martin Jones
The Owl is Called Mother – Rebecca Lloyd
My Avian Daughter Devours Meteors – Alicia Hilton
The Embassy at Fontainebleau – Damian Murphy
Eyes Like Small Black Stones – David Surface
Soul Catcher – Ron Jon
The Songbird of Medina – Karim Ghahwagi
Flight – David Yates
Calling – Ruhul Amin
Spirits of the Dead – Ron Weighell
Edited by Mark Beech
A lithographically printed hardback with colour endpapers, limited to 460 copies.
Civilian by Karim Ghahwagi // Raphus Press// Autumn 2022
Set a few years in the future, the Behavioral Science department of the FBI are on the threshold of fully implementing a new technology which enables access to the memories and sensations of the human mind.
For almost a decade Simon Wakefield and his team of federal agents have developed and utilized the technology in their most challenging cases. Now they are confronted with their most perplexing case. A renowned child psychotherapist has kidnapped three of her own child trauma patients and hidden them away in an undisclosed location without food and water. She will only reveal their locations on live national television. A few hours before she is to make her grand exposé, she tries to commit suicide in her cell. Dying and unconscious, she has never revealed the secret locations of the three children.
Aberrant pathologies and new technologies collide in this short novel of science fiction and horror.
D.P. Watt CRAFT Mark Valentine THE CLERKS OF THE INVISIBLE Jonathan Wood THE IDYLL IS OVER Karim Ghahwagi CODEX OF LIGHT Mark Samuels POSTERITY Rebecca Lloyd ANCESTOR WATER Mark Valentine STAINED MEDIUM Timothy J. Jarvis THE PURBLIND BARDS Reggie Oliver THE WET WOMAN R.B. Russel A HOUSE OF TREASURES Rosalie Parker HOME COMFORTS
Forma da Colina (Horrill Hill) // Karim Ghahwagi // Translated into Portuguese by Fábio Waki and Alcebiades Diniz Miguel //Vergê Berilo paper 180 g // 19×12.5 // Ateliê Phonte88 // Raphus Press // São Paulo // Brazil // June 2021
Collected for the first time and arranged into a chronological sequence which spans over six hundred years, are tales of fevered investigation into the strange and supernatural- spurred by appetites glimpsed in the cracks and fissures of history; tales of exile and estrangement, of mystery and imagination, of psychological fugues and austere spiritual ecstasies, of unraveling human nature and its transcendent aberrant manifestations, of awe and horror, of ritual and magik – from folk horror to dystopian existential terror.
This book comes in 3 editions:
a paperback edition.
a limited edition hardcover, bound in striking blue fabric, with a die-cut window in the front cover showing a detail of the illustrated endpapers
a signed lettered edition bound in a canvas print of the cover painting (“Medusa” by Alice Pike Barney – 1892), housed in a slipcase, which comes with a complimentary paperback reading copy which will be sent very soon.
‘By the precepts passed down by the village Elders, the story was never to be consecrated in the absence of candlelight. Upon the advent of its telling, the wicks of candles were therefore always kindled by bedsides at night, along the windowsills in classrooms, and upon the mantelpieces of every home. A single beeswax candle always burned in the heart of the Great Hall. Tall as a man and thick as a tree-trunk, the candle was rooted in an ornamented brass candelabra, its yellowed beeswax surface richly carved in commemoration of the story it embodied. For generations the flame had never darkened, and the Elders had sustained its light from month to month, from season to season, always marking each transition to a new candle with solemn ceremony.’
Hand-sewn booklet, printed on handmade cotton rag pages with deckled edges. 10x30cm.
My story Horrill Hill has been made available for free download by Mount Abraxas Press. Originally appearing in Wound of Wounds, An Ovation to Emil Cioran, the anthology is edited by Damian Murphy and Dan Ghetu. Featuring stories by Douglas Thompsen, Justin Isis, Alcebiades Diniz Miguel, Rhys Hughes, Thomas Strømsholt, Damian Murphy, Jonathan Wood, Adam Golanski, Stephen Friedman, Andrew Condus, John Padget, Colin Insole, Adam S Cantwell, Charles Schneider, and with an introduction by Eugene Thacker.
The Liminal Void by Karim Ghahwagi
Mount Abraxas Press July 2019
Limited edition deluxe oversized hardcover, clothboards with blind folio, silk ribbon, and printed on thick colored paper in two editions.
From the publisher:
”Western sulphur, cults, atavism, murders, heathan rituals and metaphysical journeys, all collide in the Liminal Void, a new superlative horror / folk horror novella by Karim Ghahwagi.
The ghosts of three martyred women trapped in a single body, are assigned by their collapsing Kratocratic pagan regime, to investigate a crime against humanity, in a distant and secluded village, stationed at the end of time. The regime itself, the women suspect, has instigated the very crime they have been charged to investigate. An occult existential terror novella of the dark fantastic, forensic investigation, ancient pagan ritual, and the end of days.”
Books can be purchased by contacting exoccidente@gmail.com, or other fine booksellers.
A diptych of dark, richly wrought, strange tales, exploring faith, identity, and those mysterious currents which inhabit the spaces in between them. At once psychological tales of mounting spiritual horror, and investigations into the dark fantastic.
The title novella,Children of the Crimson Sun, concerns a young medic of the Hospitaller Knights of Malta, charged with investigating an unsettling case in a local fishing village, where spiritual forces both contemporary and ancient saturate the sprawling archipelago’s villages, churches, monasteries, megalithic temples, and deep subterranean caverns.
In the second piece, A Haunting in Miniature, a village in the Moravian region of the Czech Republic is unsettled by a series of ghostly visitations. The supernatural intrusions give rise to suspicions that the region’s history has resurfaced in strange and foreboding circumstances.
The book is a lithographically printed, 192 page pocket sized sewn hardback (105mm x 165mm); limited to just 220 copies. ISBN 978-1-916465725.
Books can be purchased for 21 English pounds / 27 US Dollars / 24 Euro, including worldwide shippingHere
I had the opportunity to work with some extraordinary artists this year. Huge thanks to Alcebiades Diniz Miguel, Márcio Simões and Bethany White at Raphus Press who all did truly magnificent work on Secretariat. Thanks also to Dan Ghetu and Damian Murphy at Mount Abraxas Press for including my story Horrill Hill in their remarkable Cioran anthology Wounds of Wounds. Much gratitude to Mark Beech at Egaeus Press for including my novelette The Sorrows of Satan’s Book in his wonderful anthology Book of the Sea. I couldn’t possibly ask for better circumstances and instances to work with these immensely talented publishers, editors, designers- all truly great artists. And humbled to be in print with such wonderful writers in these two anthologies. I am also grateful for those who have responded to this work including Des Lewis, Mark Andresen, and Dejan Ohnjanovic of Rue Morgue, and all those who have responded or supported my work. Heartfelt gratitude. You look up, and year is coming to an end already! Immensely looking forward to 2019. Happy Holidays and New Year.