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The Still Beating Heart of a Dead God
A drunk widower wanders through an endless, abandoned mall while the war machine marches.
90s queer metalheads repeatedly try to burn down a regenerating church.
Denizens of a punk house are confronted with the reality of what happened to their missing roommate.
An artist with acidic bodily fluids finds another like him.
With The Still Beating Heart of a Dead God Award-Winning author Sam Richard returns with eleven new stories exploring the raw honesty of grief, isolation, brokenness, and desperation through weird horrors ranging from body to cosmic to existential and beyond.
90s queer metalheads repeatedly try to burn down a regenerating church.
Denizens of a punk house are confronted with the reality of what happened to their missing roommate.
An artist with acidic bodily fluids finds another like him.
With The Still Beating Heart of a Dead God Award-Winning author Sam Richard returns with eleven new stories exploring the raw honesty of grief, isolation, brokenness, and desperation through weird horrors ranging from body to cosmic to existential and beyond.
150 pages, Kindle Edition
Published December 15, 2024
1 person is currently reading
75 people want to read
About the author
Sam Richard
44 books108 followersSam Richard is the author of several books including The Still Beating Heart of a Dead God and the award-winning To Wallow in Ash & Other Sorrows. He has edited ten anthologies, including the cult hits Profane Altars: Weird Sword & Sorcery and The New Flesh, and his short fiction has appeared in over forty publications. Widowed in 2017, he slowly rots in Minneapolis where he runs Weirdpunk Books. You can stalk him @SammyTotep across most socials or at weirdpunkbooks.com
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 16, 2025
Solitary except for molten images that change shapes and colors over time, revealing the most sought after place that you want to be. Life is lonely, but even though choices exist, we only have one destination. It is a place that we can rest without need for solid fortification. Our minds soothe us with twisted expectations that may be dangerous. But the flame, it is so beautiful in the dark spaces we crawl into. We want to stay.
March 9, 2025
I received a copy of this book as the final title release in the Weird Punk Books 2024 Subscription Club.
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If you ever meet Sam you may wonder at first how someone that nice has the headspace to generate the kind of stories found in The Still Beating Heart of a Dead God. That's the beautiful paradox of horror fiction, some of the darkest, most transgressive, bizarre and grief pilled works out there are written by generous, kind and absolutely stellar human beings. I feel the need to stress this point, there's the misconception in popular cultural that persists, that horror authors are of an unhinged, cruel and heartless ilk. Why else would they be penning these tales saturated with body horror. cosmic terrors, death etc. There comes a time when the broken record doesn't need replacing, you just need to unplug the turn table.
" Ok", you might say.
"So? what's that have to do with the review of this book?"
I'm glad you asked! The Still Beating Heart of a Dead God is Sam bringing together Tales of Grief, grieving and the strange transformations that come from that process. Yes, some of it is related to grief from the death of an individual, but grief, like horror has many faces, takes many forms. This grieving for friends, for lost chances in life, for things sought after that defy naming...yet we know have passed us by. These are very much individual tales, yet Sam has taken previously published work, allowed it continue to shift and grow, and brought together pieces that move with a symmetry bound with pulsing veins. This is about embracing pain, emotion, Trauma, growing mutating through it. Things genuine folk who care, who struggle understand.
If this collection happens to be your fist time reading some of Sam's work, then you are in luck. I would argue this book is an excellent intro into the authors style, and your gate-way into the writings of the other authors that make up the Void Collective..Don't know what that is? You'll find out sooner or later. Just look for something possibly a Crow or perhaps it's a Bee. It's color will be that of an oil slick and will be of unsettling proportion. beyond that it'll be your tale, your journey... good luck and may your path lead you to the Void Haus.
-
If you ever meet Sam you may wonder at first how someone that nice has the headspace to generate the kind of stories found in The Still Beating Heart of a Dead God. That's the beautiful paradox of horror fiction, some of the darkest, most transgressive, bizarre and grief pilled works out there are written by generous, kind and absolutely stellar human beings. I feel the need to stress this point, there's the misconception in popular cultural that persists, that horror authors are of an unhinged, cruel and heartless ilk. Why else would they be penning these tales saturated with body horror. cosmic terrors, death etc. There comes a time when the broken record doesn't need replacing, you just need to unplug the turn table.
" Ok", you might say.
"So? what's that have to do with the review of this book?"
I'm glad you asked! The Still Beating Heart of a Dead God is Sam bringing together Tales of Grief, grieving and the strange transformations that come from that process. Yes, some of it is related to grief from the death of an individual, but grief, like horror has many faces, takes many forms. This grieving for friends, for lost chances in life, for things sought after that defy naming...yet we know have passed us by. These are very much individual tales, yet Sam has taken previously published work, allowed it continue to shift and grow, and brought together pieces that move with a symmetry bound with pulsing veins. This is about embracing pain, emotion, Trauma, growing mutating through it. Things genuine folk who care, who struggle understand.
If this collection happens to be your fist time reading some of Sam's work, then you are in luck. I would argue this book is an excellent intro into the authors style, and your gate-way into the writings of the other authors that make up the Void Collective..Don't know what that is? You'll find out sooner or later. Just look for something possibly a Crow or perhaps it's a Bee. It's color will be that of an oil slick and will be of unsettling proportion. beyond that it'll be your tale, your journey... good luck and may your path lead you to the Void Haus.
January 1, 2025
Man what a collection of stories. Sam Richard deserves more attention because he is a fucking awesome writer. Sam Richard writes in a way that is beautifully tragic. The way he can make you feel the pain, the loss, the happiness and grief that makes you spiral into the madness and horror with his stories is awesome. I highly recommend this one and everything Sam Richard writes. Awesome collection
November 26, 2025
This is a fantastic collection. The stories run the gamut of horror, but there are common threads of grief, trauma, and body transformation running through them.
You get the feeling that these stories truly needed to be written, a way of processing death and exorcising the pain and isolation that follows it.
Some personal favorites include Flesh Crucifix, Portrait of a Red Tower, Meslithe, From the Past Comes the Storm, and The Antecedent.
Highly recommended.
You get the feeling that these stories truly needed to be written, a way of processing death and exorcising the pain and isolation that follows it.
Some personal favorites include Flesh Crucifix, Portrait of a Red Tower, Meslithe, From the Past Comes the Storm, and The Antecedent.
Highly recommended.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews