Dead Letter Depot: A Collection Of Short Stories To Kill Yourself To

by Scott Lefebvre

This is a collection of previously published and previously unpublished stories. Most of them more often than not ignored, abandoned, and rejected. Just like you. Stories about life and death and love and hate and after all is said and done, none of it matters. These stories are for every time you thought this time would be different, but it turned out exactly the same. For those times when nothing was beautiful and everything hurt. These stories are for insomniacs, lunatics, and manic-depressives. The homicidal, the suicidal, and the just plain crazy. For every time you wanted to kill someone and that someone was usually yourself. Perfect reading to wash down a mouthfull of pills with a nice glass of wine or while taking a warm bath and shaving your wrists. You may be alone and lonely but at least we can be alone together.

194 pages, Paperback

First published January 8, 2014

About the author

Scott Lefebvre can write about whatever you want him to write about.
Mostly because when he was grounded for his outlandish behavior as a hyperactive school child, the only place he was allowed to go was the public library.
His literary tastes were forged by the works of Helen Hoke, Alvin Schwartz and Stephen Gammell, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Stephen King, Clive Barker, Edgar Allan Poe, and H. P. Lovecraft.
He is the author of Spooky Creepy Long Island, and a contributing author to Forrest J. Ackerman’s Anthology of the Living Dead, Fracas: A Collection of Short Friction, The Call of Lovecraft, and Cashiers du Cinemart.
He is currently working on ten novel-length book projects which will be released in 2014.
He also publishes themed collections of interviews from his interview blog You Are Entitled To My Opinion.
His reviews have been published by a variety of in print and online media including Scars Magazine, Icons of Fright, Fatally Yours and Screams of Terror, and he has appeared in Fangoria, Rue Morgue and HorrorHound Magazine.
He is the Assistant Program Director for The Arkham Film Society and produces electronic music under the names Master Control and LOVECRAFTWORK.
He is currently working on a novel-length expansion of a short-story titled, "The End Of The World Is Nigh", a crowd-funded, crowd-sourced, post-apocalyptic, zombie epidemic project.
Check out the blog for the book here: theendoftheworldisnighbook.blogspot.com
Check out the Facebook Fan Page for the project here: www.facebook.com/TheEndOfTheWorldIsNi...
Check his author profile at: www.amazon.com/Scott-Lefebvre/e/B001T...
Follow him at GoodReads here:
www.goodreads.com/author/show/1617246...
Check out his publishing imprint Burnt Offerings Books here:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Burnt-...
And here: http://burntofferingsbooks.blogspot.com/
Check out his electronic music here: soundcloud.com/master_control
And here: master-control.bandcamp.com
Check out his videos at: www.youtube.com/user/doctornapoleon
Check out his IMDB profile here: www.imdb.com/name/nm3678959
Follow his Twitter here: twitter.com/TheLefebvre or @TheLefebvre
Follow his Tumblr here: thelefebvre.tumblr.com
Check out his Etsy here: www.etsy.com/shop/ScottLefebvreArt
Join the group for The Arkham Film Society here:
www.facebook.com/groups/arkhamscreenings
Stalk his Facebook at: www.facebook.com/TheLefebvre
E-mail him at: Scott_Lefebvre@hotmail.com

Reviews

[Kit Power · Rating 4 out of 5]

Scott Lefebvre can write.

In this grab bag of tales, shorts, intros, extracts and miscellaneous paths-less-travelled, that's the core message that keeps coming back, again and again. Scott can write.

It is, as the full title suggests, horror. Specifically (though not exclusively) apocalyptic horror. Scott has done some thinking about how the work might end, and how those they may remain will react to that ending, and across the pages of this anthology, he walks us through it - the desperation, the lethargy, the isolation, and yes, of course the fear - though it's telling that we're often as scared of Scott's protagonists as we are the world they have inherited.
It starts with 'Whimper' - a really fine stand alone tale, but also one that sets up so well the themes Scott will wrestle with throughout the book.

'Where werewolves come from' is my favourite in the collection, and worth the price of admission on it's own - a series of vignettes, connected by a common thread that you feel, even if you can't fully articulate it. This is a stunning meditation on people and the walls of flesh and mind that separate us all from each other.
The chapter extracts stand up well, but inevitably suffer from being dislocated from their wider narratives, especially, for me, the chapter from 'The End of the World Is Nigh.

'Braindead' manges to be a genuinely disturbing alternate take on the events of 'Whimper' - A Bachman vision, as opposed to King, if you can dig it - and the R/T/M intro made a useful pairing, in that it gave fair warning at to where that book is likely to go, should you be brave enough to attempt it.

And finally 'Till Death us Do Part' takes the premise of the movie 'Warm Bodies' and turns it into the gut-wrencher it always should have been.

This is not a perfect collection. The grab-bag nature of it precludes that. But the best stuff is very very good indeed, and across the piece you catch sight of real talent sweating blood to realise a vision. Scott has a clear and distinct narrative voice (albeit with capacity for variation, as the last couple of entries in this collection show), an unflinching vision, and is fully prepared to shed harsh light on the darkest recesses of the human condition.

I can't wait to see what he does next.