The Midnight Muse - Paperback

by Jo Kaplan (Author)

When a metal band's lead singer vanishes in the woods, the mushrooms in the forest might know more than they're letting on in this mycelium-metal horror novel from Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author Jo Kaplan.

The dead collect in low places. That's what Brynn Werner, lead singer of metal band Queen Carrion, wrote in her notebook before she vanished while staying at a cabin in Oregon's Umpqua National Forest.

A year later, on the anniversary of her disappearance, the rest of her bandmates visit the cabin to remember her and find a way to move on. But tensions arise over who should be their new singer and who is responsible for Brynn's disappearance-tensions that boil over as they realize not all is as it seems at Trail Creek Cabin.

Strange entries in the guestbook write about visions of a pale form that moves through the trees, figures wearing gas masks lurk in the distance, and there's a strange fungus growing from the wall of a tunnel in the cabin's basement. Then they hear Brynn's voice echo impossibly through the forest--and the pale form that emerges from the trees is her perfect likeness. Is it her ghost...or something else?

Brynn knew there was a secret in these woods. It's why she chased her muse here to finish her masterpiece. The Midnight Muse is an alluring and grotesque dissection of self and fungus. Kaplan delivers an ominous spiral of psychological torment as the members of Queen Carrion slip into a more natural skin.

Author Biography

Jo Kaplan is the Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of It Will Just Be Us and When the Night Bells Ring. Her short stories have appeared in Fireside Quarterly, Black Static, Nightmare Magazine, Vastarien, Horror Library, Nightscript, and numerous other anthologies and magazines. In addition to writing, she teaches English at Glendale Community College and is the co-chair of the Horror Writers Association's Los Angeles chapter. She also plays cello in both the Symphony of the Verdugos and the band Guerra/paz.