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Release the Horse
RELEASE THE HORSE exhibits the first collection of Ozarkian weird horror from Matthew Mitchell, author of the Nasties-Award-Winning CHAINDEVILS. An outdoorsman is caught in the crossfire between a brutal serial killer and the backwoods’ best-kept secret… Peculiar playmates make contact with an extraterrestrial visitor, while a blue-collar stiff is entangled in cosmic entities…Barnyard terror, rustic cultists, and sonic nightmares abound… A fear-ridden engagement with oppressive masculinity, RELEASE THE HORSE exposes the violent, high-strangeness of Matthew Mitchell’s rural vistas—both real and imagined.
- GenresHorror
190 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 2025
22 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
October 19, 2025
BWAF Score: 8/10
Mitchell writes the sort of rural-weird you only get when you’ve actually huffed dust, bled on gravel, and grown up around men who consider a Stetson a personality. Blurbs from Madison McSweeney, Xavier Garcia, and Edwin Callihan peg him as a storyteller of grime, guts, and wicked humor, and the collection arrives via Filthy Loot Press, an indie home for the beautifully unhinged.
This is a short story collection that keeps its boots in the Ozarks and its teeth in your calf. The opener, “Release the Horse,” follows a narrator who frequents a neighbor’s barn to watch a handmade, maybe unholy horse run, which goes about as well as you’d expect when tweakers treat it like a pony ride. “Muscular Devotion” drops us into a backwoods church that worships brawn, pain, and something named Brother Daniel that looks like a Strongman trophy bred with a boil. “Big Baby” is a fishing tale where the river keeps a very large secret and a jar of stinkbait becomes a survival tool. “Little Man” plays like Ray Bradbury got corn-fed to the point of rot, with two boys finding a dead, many-limbed visitor and one of them being the nastiest kind of curious. “She Catches Birds” starts as a meet-cute with a rescuer who nets a hummingbird in a grocery store and ends with a quiet, awful swerve that makes you rethink who needs saving. The rest of the pieces keep pace: bodies, belief, and folklore squeezed until they squeal.
Mitchell’s big obsessions are right there in the titles. Animals and animality. Bodies as meat, clay, and currency. Faith as a fight gym. The country as a myth engine that prints legends when institutions rot. The horse in the opener is the book’s mission statement: something assembled out of mud, teeth, roots, and dream logic that still runs like hell. The cult in “Muscular Devotion” literalizes American masculinity as a church, then locks it in a cellar until it grows into an eight-foot problem. “Big Baby” turns a cryptid into a neighborhood boundary agreement. “Little Man” asks what makes a person a person, then answers with a stick and a shiver. “She Catches Birds” skewers the performance of care, raising the question of whether salvation is an act or a costume.
The style is pure barn-floor poetry. Dialect that never turns into cartoon. Sentences that swing like a tire iron, then tack on an image so clean it hurts. Mitchell’s narrators talk like they’ve got a Marlboro in their teeth and a story they don’t want to tell but can’t stop telling. The humor is obscene in the best way, a relief valve for the dread. He can do nasty and he can do tender, sometimes in the same paragraph.
Under the gore there is a sustained argument about how communities metabolize violence. Nobody in these stories trusts cops, doctors, or pastors, so the town builds its own answers: handmade horses, amateur militias, folk pacts with monsters, sweat-as-sacrament gyms. Desire and harm keep sharing a bunk. Sex is complicated, sometimes brutal, sometimes weirdly sacred, always honest about what bodies want and what they cost. The collection stacks episodes where people choose complicity because the alternative is admitting their lives are smaller than the myths they inherited. The horror is not only the chomp and crunch. It is the way neighbors choose stories that let the blood keep flowing in the same old ditches.
Originality: High. This is not movie-option bait. The book feels born of place and voice, not algorithm. A mud-built horse with a taste for backflesh, a church of swole worshipers and their idiot-angel, a river cryptid with a palate for stinkbait, a purple glass coffin in the trees. That is not the Funko Pop aisle.
Pacing: Tight. Stories start mid-stumble and finish in a sprint. A couple endings are quick clips instead of landings, sure, but the momentum is delicious. You rarely check the page count; you’re too busy sniffing the air for whatever just cracked that branch.
Characters: They are sketched fast yet vivid. Mitchell is more Flannery O’Connor flash-bang than multi-chapter psychology, but a few pages with his people and you know how they spit, flirt, and lie. The female characters are sometimes framed through male gaze on purpose, but now and then the camera lingers a beat too long.
Scare factor: More unease and gut-turn than jump scare. When it bites, it bites hard. The barn scene in “Release the Horse” is nightmare fuel. The reveal of Brother Daniel in “Muscular Devotion” is capital H Horrid. “She Catches Birds” is the quietest and maybe cruelest.
Strengths
- Voice that feels lived in. You can hear the boots on linoleum.
- Inventive monsters rooted in folklore texture, not CGI vibes.
- Humor that actually lands and doesn’t sand down the teeth.
- Images you will not wash off: spinal manes, halogen-lit crosses, a bird net floating like a ghost volleyball court.
Critiques
- The book sometimes mistakes escalation for revelation. Bigger is not always deeper.
- A couple stories let women function as heat sources or mirrors for male rot rather than as agents with equal weirdness. When the collection gives a woman the wheel, like in “She Catches Birds,” it sings. More of that, please.
- Endings can snap shut a little fast. Let a horror echo. Let it walk the room.
“Release the Horse” is a banger opener that nails tone, place, and the collection’s thesis about handmade myths going feral. “Muscular Devotion” is the showpiece: sweat, faith, guns, and a body-horror reveal that will make your skin contemplate unionizing. “Big Baby” is the perfect campfire moral about local monsters and local justice. “Little Man” is the creepiest because it understands children too well. “She Catches Birds” left me quiet, then mad, then quiet again.
So… is this thing good or just loud? It is both, but mostly good. Mitchell writes with empathy for his dirtbag saints and his doomed rubes. He is not punching down. He’s mapping the same American backroads that birthed urban legends and alt-country, then salting them with cosmic wrongness. The book is bold, atmospheric, and weird in ways that feel personal, not performative. It belongs on the shelf with indie horror that takes risks and bleeds for it.
Weird, daring, and original enough to make us at BWAF grin like a raccoon in a dumpster. Several stories are stick-a-flag-in-it special, and the voice is the real deal.
TL;DR: Filthy, funny, and folkloric, Release the Horse corrals rural myths and toxic devotion into a pen of body horror and bad decisions. The prose kicks, the images bruise, and the best stories are keepers. A few endings skid, and some gender gazes wobble, but the collection rips.
Recommended for: Weird fiction freaks, fans of backwoods dread, and anyone who thinks a horse made of teeth sounds like a party.
Not recommended for: Horse girls who do not want to see the word horse redefined in meat terms.
Mitchell writes the sort of rural-weird you only get when you’ve actually huffed dust, bled on gravel, and grown up around men who consider a Stetson a personality. Blurbs from Madison McSweeney, Xavier Garcia, and Edwin Callihan peg him as a storyteller of grime, guts, and wicked humor, and the collection arrives via Filthy Loot Press, an indie home for the beautifully unhinged.
This is a short story collection that keeps its boots in the Ozarks and its teeth in your calf. The opener, “Release the Horse,” follows a narrator who frequents a neighbor’s barn to watch a handmade, maybe unholy horse run, which goes about as well as you’d expect when tweakers treat it like a pony ride. “Muscular Devotion” drops us into a backwoods church that worships brawn, pain, and something named Brother Daniel that looks like a Strongman trophy bred with a boil. “Big Baby” is a fishing tale where the river keeps a very large secret and a jar of stinkbait becomes a survival tool. “Little Man” plays like Ray Bradbury got corn-fed to the point of rot, with two boys finding a dead, many-limbed visitor and one of them being the nastiest kind of curious. “She Catches Birds” starts as a meet-cute with a rescuer who nets a hummingbird in a grocery store and ends with a quiet, awful swerve that makes you rethink who needs saving. The rest of the pieces keep pace: bodies, belief, and folklore squeezed until they squeal.
Mitchell’s big obsessions are right there in the titles. Animals and animality. Bodies as meat, clay, and currency. Faith as a fight gym. The country as a myth engine that prints legends when institutions rot. The horse in the opener is the book’s mission statement: something assembled out of mud, teeth, roots, and dream logic that still runs like hell. The cult in “Muscular Devotion” literalizes American masculinity as a church, then locks it in a cellar until it grows into an eight-foot problem. “Big Baby” turns a cryptid into a neighborhood boundary agreement. “Little Man” asks what makes a person a person, then answers with a stick and a shiver. “She Catches Birds” skewers the performance of care, raising the question of whether salvation is an act or a costume.
The style is pure barn-floor poetry. Dialect that never turns into cartoon. Sentences that swing like a tire iron, then tack on an image so clean it hurts. Mitchell’s narrators talk like they’ve got a Marlboro in their teeth and a story they don’t want to tell but can’t stop telling. The humor is obscene in the best way, a relief valve for the dread. He can do nasty and he can do tender, sometimes in the same paragraph.
Under the gore there is a sustained argument about how communities metabolize violence. Nobody in these stories trusts cops, doctors, or pastors, so the town builds its own answers: handmade horses, amateur militias, folk pacts with monsters, sweat-as-sacrament gyms. Desire and harm keep sharing a bunk. Sex is complicated, sometimes brutal, sometimes weirdly sacred, always honest about what bodies want and what they cost. The collection stacks episodes where people choose complicity because the alternative is admitting their lives are smaller than the myths they inherited. The horror is not only the chomp and crunch. It is the way neighbors choose stories that let the blood keep flowing in the same old ditches.
Originality: High. This is not movie-option bait. The book feels born of place and voice, not algorithm. A mud-built horse with a taste for backflesh, a church of swole worshipers and their idiot-angel, a river cryptid with a palate for stinkbait, a purple glass coffin in the trees. That is not the Funko Pop aisle.
Pacing: Tight. Stories start mid-stumble and finish in a sprint. A couple endings are quick clips instead of landings, sure, but the momentum is delicious. You rarely check the page count; you’re too busy sniffing the air for whatever just cracked that branch.
Characters: They are sketched fast yet vivid. Mitchell is more Flannery O’Connor flash-bang than multi-chapter psychology, but a few pages with his people and you know how they spit, flirt, and lie. The female characters are sometimes framed through male gaze on purpose, but now and then the camera lingers a beat too long.
Scare factor: More unease and gut-turn than jump scare. When it bites, it bites hard. The barn scene in “Release the Horse” is nightmare fuel. The reveal of Brother Daniel in “Muscular Devotion” is capital H Horrid. “She Catches Birds” is the quietest and maybe cruelest.
Strengths
- Voice that feels lived in. You can hear the boots on linoleum.
- Inventive monsters rooted in folklore texture, not CGI vibes.
- Humor that actually lands and doesn’t sand down the teeth.
- Images you will not wash off: spinal manes, halogen-lit crosses, a bird net floating like a ghost volleyball court.
Critiques
- The book sometimes mistakes escalation for revelation. Bigger is not always deeper.
- A couple stories let women function as heat sources or mirrors for male rot rather than as agents with equal weirdness. When the collection gives a woman the wheel, like in “She Catches Birds,” it sings. More of that, please.
- Endings can snap shut a little fast. Let a horror echo. Let it walk the room.
“Release the Horse” is a banger opener that nails tone, place, and the collection’s thesis about handmade myths going feral. “Muscular Devotion” is the showpiece: sweat, faith, guns, and a body-horror reveal that will make your skin contemplate unionizing. “Big Baby” is the perfect campfire moral about local monsters and local justice. “Little Man” is the creepiest because it understands children too well. “She Catches Birds” left me quiet, then mad, then quiet again.
So… is this thing good or just loud? It is both, but mostly good. Mitchell writes with empathy for his dirtbag saints and his doomed rubes. He is not punching down. He’s mapping the same American backroads that birthed urban legends and alt-country, then salting them with cosmic wrongness. The book is bold, atmospheric, and weird in ways that feel personal, not performative. It belongs on the shelf with indie horror that takes risks and bleeds for it.
Weird, daring, and original enough to make us at BWAF grin like a raccoon in a dumpster. Several stories are stick-a-flag-in-it special, and the voice is the real deal.
TL;DR: Filthy, funny, and folkloric, Release the Horse corrals rural myths and toxic devotion into a pen of body horror and bad decisions. The prose kicks, the images bruise, and the best stories are keepers. A few endings skid, and some gender gazes wobble, but the collection rips.
Recommended for: Weird fiction freaks, fans of backwoods dread, and anyone who thinks a horse made of teeth sounds like a party.
Not recommended for: Horse girls who do not want to see the word horse redefined in meat terms.
June 25, 2025
The author left an ARC of this book, wrapped around a package of jerky of questionable origin, deposited on the passenger seat of my car. Always lock your car doors...just kidding...Matthew sent me an ARC to review. All views and opinions are my own.
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I hear tell that if you were to Play the Record "Mark Twain Tonight" starring Hal Holbrook, backwards on a turn table under the light of a blood moon, and listen to said audio playback on speaker riddled with feedback, you might come towards an approximation of a recitation of the stories found in RELEASE THE HORSE. See, it's important for readers to understand, our boy Matthew is not your average, 9-5 scribbler of stories. This a denizen of the Void Haus, half crazed spinner of yarns from the Ozarks. These are stories you hear in hushed whispers, traded over shared lighters, behind the dumpster of an abandoned Huddle House. There is both Rhyme and Reason to these stories, it's up to the reader to decipher those patterns.
Some of the stories Matthew has tossed out in years passed, scraps of nightmares carried on the wind. One such tale "The Band", I am personally very familiar with, having first read it in "The Shadow of the Horns" Black Metal Horror Anthology.
The point is, this was a story that stuck with me, so when I came upon it within the pages of RELEASE THE HORSE, it was like returning to visit an old friend, relive a nightmare that never faded. Perhaps both...
Old and new brought together, like fresh skins and ancient leather woven into rich and terrible tapestries. this is collection imbued with Magick, full of the whispers of old and terrible things, and soaked in the wonder of someone starring at the stars, by firelight, as they suck that last bit of meat from a human Femur, and begin playing a tune on a whistle. A tune meant for some, but that will cause madness in others.
Come readers fresh, and those old salts of the road I call my reader kin, RELEASE THE HORSE beckons, nay, demands you read. take in the tales, hold this small volume close to your heart. It won't save you from what lurks in the night, but it will bring you comfort.
-
I hear tell that if you were to Play the Record "Mark Twain Tonight" starring Hal Holbrook, backwards on a turn table under the light of a blood moon, and listen to said audio playback on speaker riddled with feedback, you might come towards an approximation of a recitation of the stories found in RELEASE THE HORSE. See, it's important for readers to understand, our boy Matthew is not your average, 9-5 scribbler of stories. This a denizen of the Void Haus, half crazed spinner of yarns from the Ozarks. These are stories you hear in hushed whispers, traded over shared lighters, behind the dumpster of an abandoned Huddle House. There is both Rhyme and Reason to these stories, it's up to the reader to decipher those patterns.
Some of the stories Matthew has tossed out in years passed, scraps of nightmares carried on the wind. One such tale "The Band", I am personally very familiar with, having first read it in "The Shadow of the Horns" Black Metal Horror Anthology.
The point is, this was a story that stuck with me, so when I came upon it within the pages of RELEASE THE HORSE, it was like returning to visit an old friend, relive a nightmare that never faded. Perhaps both...
Old and new brought together, like fresh skins and ancient leather woven into rich and terrible tapestries. this is collection imbued with Magick, full of the whispers of old and terrible things, and soaked in the wonder of someone starring at the stars, by firelight, as they suck that last bit of meat from a human Femur, and begin playing a tune on a whistle. A tune meant for some, but that will cause madness in others.
Come readers fresh, and those old salts of the road I call my reader kin, RELEASE THE HORSE beckons, nay, demands you read. take in the tales, hold this small volume close to your heart. It won't save you from what lurks in the night, but it will bring you comfort.
June 27, 2025
This here is great gritty Southern Weird, amazing and enrapturing stories. Release the Horse plays a lot of fun games, though some of them are dangerous. There are some horror creatures you might have heard of in these pages, but they take forms I couldn't have imagined and have some very strange things happen to them. It captures something about rural Southern culture in the most vivid, fascinating way.
You gotta read this book...as the museum guard says of 'Ronny Bosch, "Don't we all deserve to see the little scamps and bingbongs he came up with way back when?" The same is true of MM, and you definitely deserve it.
You gotta read this book...as the museum guard says of 'Ronny Bosch, "Don't we all deserve to see the little scamps and bingbongs he came up with way back when?" The same is true of MM, and you definitely deserve it.
August 20, 2025
I love a weird tale. I love a short story. I loved this book. Full of unknowable, nightmarish, surreal oddities, this short book full of short stories does not fall short.
From a strange horse to cryptids, a seemingly normal day is anything but. Every story was full of disturbing, vivid imagery that just lingers. I cringed a LOT. Shocking yet believable. Any of these could be true, what do I know?
There is also a connecting thread running through them all…I feel it more than understand it.
My favorites are Big Baby, She Catches Birds, and The Family Whistle. But honestly, they are all bangers.
Go get your stubby hands on this little weirdo today!
From a strange horse to cryptids, a seemingly normal day is anything but. Every story was full of disturbing, vivid imagery that just lingers. I cringed a LOT. Shocking yet believable. Any of these could be true, what do I know?
There is also a connecting thread running through them all…I feel it more than understand it.
My favorites are Big Baby, She Catches Birds, and The Family Whistle. But honestly, they are all bangers.
Go get your stubby hands on this little weirdo today!
Read
August 31, 2025Release the Horse is a fun collection of short stories that explore strange events throughout rural America. She Catches Birds is my favorite of the bunch, followed by Big Baby.
October 17, 2025
Very fun read! I love the vibe in every story very imaginative and put me right there with the characters.
August 19, 2025
Eerie, unsettling, and depraved. Mitchell’s collection of backwoods gothic tales always takes you somewhere unexpected, somewhere you won’t soon forget. An absolute must read.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews