MARTIN MUNDT WEEKEND!
Read "A Bird In Hand" free ... and Grab the #1 Horror-Humor Bestseller on Amazon for 99 Cents!
MANY OF YOU PROBABLY know that in addition to being an author, I'm also a small press publisher. I started
Dark Arts Books 10 years ago, back in 2006. It was a press designed to let me play with one of my favorite things -- book and cover layout and design, as well as to allow me the chance to expose the authors I enjoyed to more people.
One of those authors -- in fact, the leadoff author of our very first release,
Candy in the Dumpster, is
Martin Mundt. I'm a pretty jaded fiction fan, honestly, and there are very few authors any more who get me excited.
Martin Mundt is one of them.
Peter Straub -- a
New York Times bestseller! -- once wrote this about Mundt's stories:
“Martin Mundt is a nasty, warped, zero-temperature so-and-so who can’t put two words together without first snickering, then slitting their throats. No wonder reading him is such a pleasure.”
That's probably the best description there is of Mundt's work. So I am super excited to now be publishing all three of his short fiction collections via Dark Arts Books (two of them were previously released by other presses, but went out of print so I picked them up). His latest -- which Dark Arts released last fall -- is
Synchronized Sleepwalking, and it is one of the best books you have never read. I'm serious. I chose all the stories for this, and did the wacky chicken cover (most of the pictures in that photo collage are from my trip to Hawaii a couple years ago LOL!) It has some of Mundt's best stories, and half of them have never been previously published.
This weekend only,
Synchronized Sleepwalking is on a special 99 cent Kindle Countdown Sale on Amazon. Yes, I am blatantly asking you to buy this book today.
It's a
buck.
It's great.
And I bet if you read it, you will be telling all of your friends to check it out.
I'm even going to give you a free story from it. At the end of this e-newsletter is the short story that won Mundt the top honors in the World Horror Convention's Flash Fiction Contest a few years ago. "A Bird In Hand." It's a great teaser to show you just how twisted (and funny) Mundt's sense of humor can be.
B
ut first... one other plug. In addition to
Synchronized Sleepwalking, I've put Mundt's first collection,
The Crawling Abattoir on a Kindle Countdown Sale this week as well. I paid a big advertising bill for a BookBub e-newsletter promotion on that book Wednesday, and it did bring big payoffs -- the book is currently the #1 Bestseller on the
Kindle Horror Humor chart. And for good reason.
The first time I heard Mundt read one of the stories from this book at a live reading event about a necrophile writing personals ads to a dead girl, I laughed so hard my stomach still hurt the next day. I'm telling you... the guy is amazing. So... maybe be brave, and check both books out... they're 99 cents! Until the end of Sunday.
And to prove to you why I am pushing these books so hard (c'mon - when have you EVER seen me give my entire newsletter over to another author?), pasted below is a teaser story that leads off
Synchronized Sleepwalking. You can also read this on the web,
here, on the Dark Arts Books site. And there's another free teaser on that site as well -- "A Perfect Plan" a story from
Candy in the Dumpster that is available as a free PDF download
here.
Hope you'll enjoy this story and become as much of a Martin Mundt fan as I am!
Winner of the World Horror Convention Flash Fiction Contest, 2005
A BIRD IN HAND
“Punish me, Mistress,” I said.
Lady Mistress Godiva’s black hair flowed in braids to her knees, shining from the silver wires that were bound into them, the steel tips glittering in the dungeon’s candlelight. She whipped her favorite slaves with her barbed-wire braids, raking up blood with the needle-points. I deserved a whipping like that.
“Your obedience will be unconditional, unquestioning, utterly complete,” she said, her braids shimmering down her back like violet wands as she paced.
I nodded. She paid no attention. What more agreement was needed beyond my eager presence?
“You’re new, of course,” she said, “so you’ll need a safety phrase …”
“Please don’t sue me.” I blurted out the phrase I’d used so often before with women. She glared at my interruption. I hung my head. “I’m a lawyer,” I mumbled, radiating shame.
“I must finish with another slave,” she said after a terrible moment of silence. “When I return, you will be naked and kneeling.” She left without another word.
I stripped and knelt, then glanced around the room, having noticed nothing while my Mistress was present.
Coiled bullwhips swirled like sadistic graffiti on tables. Buckled harnesses hung on the walls, straps spread like black blood-splatter. Unidentifiable chrome devices, like medical equipment gone feral, menaced me with the promise of unbearable stretching and hoisting and piercing. And I saw the parrot, perched on a padded leather stand.
I stood, having never in my wildest fantasies, my most pornographic researches, my most humiliating cravings, ever imagined any possible use for a parrot.
“Kneel!” the bird screeched.
My knees flinched, reflexively obedient. Had the bird merely repeated a word spoken so often in its presence that it mimicked the sound and inflection of command without understanding? Or did Mistress’ mind-games extend even to hidden cameras and demonstrations of abject servility shown even to her personal bird?
“Kneel!” shrieked the bird.
I couldn’t take the chance. I knelt.
“You’ve been a bad, bad boy.”
Guilt — my familiar pre-ejaculate — squirted into my brain. I hung my head, having indeed been a bad, bad boy.
“Awk, you’re a pathetic worm, awk,” squawked the parrot, though I heard only my Mistress’ voice. “Give me your cock, awk.”
In seconds, the bird squirmed in my hands like a clawed vagina.
“Give me your cock!” it squealed, feverish, frenzied.
“I’m trying,” I pleaded.
I was harder than I had ever been before, and I gave the bird my cock in the only opening I could. The sharp, bony clamp of claws on my testicles was a new, if welcome, agony. I thrust my hips, swabbing my penis with the warm, bloody, horrible, lovely bird. Thrust and squawk drowned out the world for minutes or hours, until, suddenly, the bird detonated, feathers exploding everywhere like green shrapnel. I collapsed in a pool of blood, semen and parrot-nuggets, totally spent, barely alive, and certainly no longer fully human. I lay in a post-coital fugue, autistic static filling my mind, until, at long last, Mistress’ stilettos straddled my face, now glued to the drying puddle of my bestial humiliation.
“Please don’t sue me,” I croaked, thinking I meant it, but Mistress knew better. She lashed her fee out of me in blood with her braids, and I gladly paid extra for the bird.
READ MORE stories from Synchronized Sleepwalking!
Get a copy of the e-book or trade paperback now from Amazon.com
I hope you discovered a new author, thanks to this "special edition" of my newsletter. Back to more Everson-centric things next time around!
Yours in Dark Arts,
John
