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Lizard Brain
tragickal presents LIZARD BRAIN
20 authors return to reptile in 20 horror stories mapping the musculoskeletal, reproductive, endocrine, prosthetic, and nervous systems.
“My husband wants me to kill him. I tell him he’s already dead.” –Tade Davis
20 authors return to reptile in 20 horror stories mapping the musculoskeletal, reproductive, endocrine, prosthetic, and nervous systems.
“My husband wants me to kill him. I tell him he’s already dead.” –Tade Davis
- GenresHorrorAnthologies
203 pages, Paperback
First published May 4, 2024
3 people are currently reading
99 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
August 6, 2024
Lizard Brain offers an intriguing survey of the current new wave of indie/alt horror—or whatever you want to call it—framed around the idea of the 'lizard brain' aka the parts of the brain that humans share with lizards. This encompasses the brain stem, cerebellum, and basal ganglia, which control functions like breathing, balance, coordination, feeding, mating, and defense. The stories are organized under different body systems: musculoskeletal, reproductive, endocrine, nervous, and prosthesis (not a body system, but could replace one or parts of one). It wasn't always obvious to me why a particular story was slotted in its location, but to be honest I didn't try too hard to figure it out. It's still a cool idea...I think it does help when an anthology has a specific theme, and this one is pretty original. There is a lot of stylistic variance in the book, ranging from fairly traditional horror to highly experimental, and I was particularly glad to find stories by a number of writers I'd been interested in checking out, as well as others I'd read before. As with all anthologies, not everything was suited to my taste, but it was still a solid collection. My only real disappointment was in finding there were no contributor bios. Certainly I could look up each author online myself, but it's nice to have this information in the book for future reference, as well as to receive some small bit of authorial context for the stories. (3.5, rounded up)
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November 11, 2025Nice work to fellow indie comrades Tragickal. Inventive sectioning of the pieces. Highlights include John Trefry, Nick Greer, Matthew Kinlin, Derek Fisher, Blake Butler, and Rebecca Gransden.
August 12, 2024
Cool, broad collection, of experimental/indie/alternative science-fiction and horror stories.
May 15, 2024
This is now my favorite horror anthology, featuring an epic line up of writers. All of these writers are doing incredibly new and exciting things, each story has its own unique voice. This body of work has introduced me to so many new authors I’m excited to explore, like Rebecca Gransden, Matthew Kinlin, Derek Fischer, and David Kuhnlein, while also featuring works from favorites like Charlene Elsby and Gary Shipley. Highly recommend
August 16, 2024
basal ganglia
October 29, 2024
I feel like I just read a collection put together by the local insane asylum. Favorite was Hereditary 2. I had been wondering when they would make a sequel to that.
May 23, 2025
weird n wild collection
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August 12, 20253.5 ⭐️
May 21, 2024
Great anthology of weird horror tales with an unhealthy, subversive dose of the avant garde. Honestly, when I started hearing of this book’s specs, the publisher and the editor and the list of contributors, my eyes grew up out of my head on prehensile stalks and haven’t blinked since. I knew many of the contributors from the ripples they’ve made on twitter where I see them swimming back and forth.
This volume gets you in touch with the unsettling lifeform within. The lizard brain is that evolutionarily leftover aspect of the nervous system that presumably links us with some base, amoral animal millions of years back, just fighting for survival and reacting in sinister ways. Less than human, subhuman — or more human than human?
I read the book in one sitting and will have to go back to reread many if not all of the stories. Some of the more chilling selections from the book were ones that left the human intact and revealed that (this is a cliche of sorts) the alien is us. I have tendencies toward liking crime fiction and Anna Krivolapova’s “The Domovoi” and Charlene Elsby’s “The Upstairs Neighbours” gives you the human being, nothing particularly supernatural but enough to make your skin crawl off your bones and do heebie-jeebie dances. I need to read more Elsby. We all do.
Other highlights from the book: Matt Lee’s “SLLLLLLLLLMRRRRRRRRRE” or a title something similar to that is about the barcode found throughout the modern world for the purpose of sales, drawing from a similar well to the freaky fiction/non-fiction hybrid as his novel Crisis Actor, which was double scary because it was drawn from real life research into our media environment, our culture, our shared history. Lee’s work seems to be informed by JG Ballard’s on some level (or what little I know of it): nothing is so disturbing as our times, our psychology reflected back at us in a mirror cracked.
The book is split up into sections according to divisions of a body’s systems: musculoskeletal, reproductive, endocrine, prosthesis, and nervous. One of the fun aspects of the book is to read the 20 stories and try to figure out what editor David Kuhnlein meant by grouping them like this, what qualifies them for their particular aspect of embodiment.
Another standout story was Chris Kelso’s horripilating “The Yawn That Yearned for Dina” (this seems to be drawn from the same storyline in his book Voidheads, which likewise pulls me in and insists to be added to the TBR pile). By the time I made it to John Trefry and Blake Butler in the “nervous system” portion of the book, my own nervous system was so blasted by the book in tandem with the geoelectric storms from the sun that day that I thought I had died and gone to hell. Trefry’s writing style gives you a seemingly infinite field of information and slips in arcane hints and jokes like background/foreground tests in a psychological experiment. It’s more artistic than your average genre horror story. Many of the stories in Lizard Brain are like this: Trefry, Butler, Shipley, Kilpatrick are working in prose styles to trigger belletristic effects more than they are trying to establish narratives per se. It’s a heady experience that has more to do with writing that knows it’s being read than with the smoothly written tale that disappears into the reader’s mind without leaving a trace (Lizard Brain has those too). You may like the range of stories offered here, you may not, but open minded readers will be able to appreciate the horror angle in each one. Tragickal’s anthology is a good one from the standpoint of introducing a host of writers as they are riding a crest in their respective spaces in the indie lit community. It’s an interesting time. I know I’m going to keep going with many of these authors to see what else they do.
Recommended.
This volume gets you in touch with the unsettling lifeform within. The lizard brain is that evolutionarily leftover aspect of the nervous system that presumably links us with some base, amoral animal millions of years back, just fighting for survival and reacting in sinister ways. Less than human, subhuman — or more human than human?
I read the book in one sitting and will have to go back to reread many if not all of the stories. Some of the more chilling selections from the book were ones that left the human intact and revealed that (this is a cliche of sorts) the alien is us. I have tendencies toward liking crime fiction and Anna Krivolapova’s “The Domovoi” and Charlene Elsby’s “The Upstairs Neighbours” gives you the human being, nothing particularly supernatural but enough to make your skin crawl off your bones and do heebie-jeebie dances. I need to read more Elsby. We all do.
Other highlights from the book: Matt Lee’s “SLLLLLLLLLMRRRRRRRRRE” or a title something similar to that is about the barcode found throughout the modern world for the purpose of sales, drawing from a similar well to the freaky fiction/non-fiction hybrid as his novel Crisis Actor, which was double scary because it was drawn from real life research into our media environment, our culture, our shared history. Lee’s work seems to be informed by JG Ballard’s on some level (or what little I know of it): nothing is so disturbing as our times, our psychology reflected back at us in a mirror cracked.
The book is split up into sections according to divisions of a body’s systems: musculoskeletal, reproductive, endocrine, prosthesis, and nervous. One of the fun aspects of the book is to read the 20 stories and try to figure out what editor David Kuhnlein meant by grouping them like this, what qualifies them for their particular aspect of embodiment.
Another standout story was Chris Kelso’s horripilating “The Yawn That Yearned for Dina” (this seems to be drawn from the same storyline in his book Voidheads, which likewise pulls me in and insists to be added to the TBR pile). By the time I made it to John Trefry and Blake Butler in the “nervous system” portion of the book, my own nervous system was so blasted by the book in tandem with the geoelectric storms from the sun that day that I thought I had died and gone to hell. Trefry’s writing style gives you a seemingly infinite field of information and slips in arcane hints and jokes like background/foreground tests in a psychological experiment. It’s more artistic than your average genre horror story. Many of the stories in Lizard Brain are like this: Trefry, Butler, Shipley, Kilpatrick are working in prose styles to trigger belletristic effects more than they are trying to establish narratives per se. It’s a heady experience that has more to do with writing that knows it’s being read than with the smoothly written tale that disappears into the reader’s mind without leaving a trace (Lizard Brain has those too). You may like the range of stories offered here, you may not, but open minded readers will be able to appreciate the horror angle in each one. Tragickal’s anthology is a good one from the standpoint of introducing a host of writers as they are riding a crest in their respective spaces in the indie lit community. It’s an interesting time. I know I’m going to keep going with many of these authors to see what else they do.
Recommended.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews