We gather & circulate poems & other writing that engage monstrosity, the macabre, the weird & the eerie, horror films, darkness & night, the mysterious unknown, & the perverse urge to speak the unspeakable.
We love horror novels & stories, comics & movies, & want to create another venue for frightening poetry & poetics; critical & literary essays into the purple fog at the edge of town; visual art & collage; & uncategorizable textual excursions. Of course, we’ll publish short stories as well: anywhere writing & horror intersect, we’ll meet you under the always full moon.
We want to bring this writing into conversation with images & visual treatments that also reflect a horror aesthetic, & make these arrangements haunt the mind.
Cul-de-sac of Blood gives us a place to share a lifetime of horror thrills & spills with others whose reading & writing rituals refuse to abandon the shadows that cast their dark comfort over us.
We will start as a web publication & creep toward a color newsprint circular aesthetic. (Thanks to the marvelous publication Movie Jawn for revitalizing this format & getting our fingers inky again.) We hope eventually to publish periodically in the color newspaper circular format, while we continue to haunt the web. We also have some zines planned along the way.
Meanwhile, hold onto your pens & knives, & follow us into the gloom!🔪✒️🕸🕷🌫🖤
We are fly by night & volunteer run, & cannot compensate at this time. If you would like to contribute to our little grimoire, send work or query letters to culdesacofblood@gmail.com. By way of introduction, please say a few words about a favorite horror film. We’ll let you know if we’d like to publish your work. In any case, keep stabbing away at your craft. ⚰️🔪✒️
Beasts,
Gina Myers & J †Johnson
Cul-de-suckers slash editors
Meet the Monsters Behind the Editorial Masks
J †Johnson is the author of Trouble Songs: A Musicological Poetics (punctum books, 2018), and a poetry collection, The Book / Or / The Woods (punctum books, 2021), which features a monster that is also the letter Y. Their writing has appeared in PEN America, Jacket2, Tarpaulin Sky, and elsewhere. Their favorite horrors are Halloween, Ginger Snaps, Us, and the Sixers. They live in Philadelphia.
Gina Myers is the author of three books of poetry. She was six years old when she first saw The Amityville Horror (1979), which set off her love of horror and all things spooky. She particularly enjoys 1970s and 1980s horror movies, the books of Shirley Jackson and Stephen Graham Jones, and the drag stylings of the Boulet Brothers.
Haley Nguyen recently graduated from University of Pennsylvania where she majored in English and served as a Bassini fellow. She is an avid reader and writer with a particular interest in manga. Her favorite horror mangas are Tokyo Ghoul, Chainsaw Man, and Fire Punch. She is from Philadelphia.
ABOUT OUR LOGO
Our logo was created by the poet and designer Laura Theobald. When she shared the concept with us, we were immediately struck by how it worked as a visual poem. Laura writes, “The ‘c’ image achieves the conceptual, clean, simple effect I was after: It’s not only the letter ‘c’ (the first letter of the journal’s name) but actually suggests the shape of a cul-de-sac, since the negative space in the letter ‘c’ resembles the shape of a cul-de-sac (round with an entrance). When you add to that the illusion of dripping blood, the image can be interpreted as the letter ‘c’ and a cul-de-sac dripping in blood—literally a cul-de-sac of blood.”