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The Mouth is a Coven
Have you ever seen a ghost? In Starling City, there are spirits on every street corner. Everyone in town seems to have at least one ghastly tale to tell.
So, it’s no wonder that a place like this breeds people like Blue and Julie, who summon demons just for fun and are obsessed with a local legend of a vampire named Matter. They hang out in dark clubs on a desolate downtown street and hope, desperately, that Matter will one day find them.
Because if they could become vampires, all of their problems will disappear. Just like the movies, they’ll never get old, and they will never die. They won’t have to worry about working or making rent, because the mundane world will no longer apply to them.
One night, their wish comes true: It turns out Matter is real. Except Blue and Julie soon learn that being a vampire isn’t exactly like you see in the movies. Abandoned, they are left on their own to figure out how to live as the undead – not to mention what to do with all those dead bodies piling up.
So, it’s no wonder that a place like this breeds people like Blue and Julie, who summon demons just for fun and are obsessed with a local legend of a vampire named Matter. They hang out in dark clubs on a desolate downtown street and hope, desperately, that Matter will one day find them.
Because if they could become vampires, all of their problems will disappear. Just like the movies, they’ll never get old, and they will never die. They won’t have to worry about working or making rent, because the mundane world will no longer apply to them.
One night, their wish comes true: It turns out Matter is real. Except Blue and Julie soon learn that being a vampire isn’t exactly like you see in the movies. Abandoned, they are left on their own to figure out how to live as the undead – not to mention what to do with all those dead bodies piling up.
222 pages, Paperback
First published September 27, 2022
About the author
Liz Worth
11 books66 followersMy latest title, Going Beyond the Little White Book: A Contemporary Guide to Tarot, is now here.
This is my fifth book, and the first I've written on the subject of tarot.
In 2017, my latest poetry collection, The Truth is Told Better This Way, will be published by BookThug.
I thought her one and only career would be as a writer, but I started reading tarot in 2008 on the advice of an astrologer and my life has never been the same.
Today I tarot help others move past emotional and creative blocks, overcome any obstacles or setbacks, and begin to live their truth through personal freedom and creative liberation.
I'm based in Toronto, but read and teach clients all over the world thanks to the wonders of Skype.
Locally, I read tarot at Likely General and SeeSaw Cafe, as well as at a number of events throughout the city.
I also write an astrology column for Spiral Nature (www.spiralnature.com).
If you'd like to book a private reading with me, or sign up for a workshop, please visit my website.
Interested in more of my writing? Feel free to check out my current books: PostApoc (fiction), Amphetamine Heart (poetry), and Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond (non-fiction).
I find poetry in empty parking lots, inspiration on long bus rides, and clarity in the woods.
Lifelong obsessions include The Smiths, ghosts, black leather boots, John Hughes movies, The Outsiders, Poppy Z. Brite, The Cure, experimental writing, early mornings, thrift stores, and bike rides.
This is my fifth book, and the first I've written on the subject of tarot.
In 2017, my latest poetry collection, The Truth is Told Better This Way, will be published by BookThug.
I thought her one and only career would be as a writer, but I started reading tarot in 2008 on the advice of an astrologer and my life has never been the same.
Today I tarot help others move past emotional and creative blocks, overcome any obstacles or setbacks, and begin to live their truth through personal freedom and creative liberation.
I'm based in Toronto, but read and teach clients all over the world thanks to the wonders of Skype.
Locally, I read tarot at Likely General and SeeSaw Cafe, as well as at a number of events throughout the city.
I also write an astrology column for Spiral Nature (www.spiralnature.com).
If you'd like to book a private reading with me, or sign up for a workshop, please visit my website.
Interested in more of my writing? Feel free to check out my current books: PostApoc (fiction), Amphetamine Heart (poetry), and Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond (non-fiction).
I find poetry in empty parking lots, inspiration on long bus rides, and clarity in the woods.
Lifelong obsessions include The Smiths, ghosts, black leather boots, John Hughes movies, The Outsiders, Poppy Z. Brite, The Cure, experimental writing, early mornings, thrift stores, and bike rides.
Ratings & Reviews
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
November 30, 2022
I stumbled on this macabre literary gem completely by accident (I read tarot and Liz's tarot guide has been instrumental in shaping my practice), but it already feels like fate. Partly a dark & sensual punk-chic mythology of Starling City, it's living and undead inhabitants, told in a Baudelaire-like lyrical language, in part also an instruction scrapbook for building your own urban magick practice. The setting, characters, mood and language..a true gift to all of us glorious outcasts obsessing over all things occult, haunting and underground. I really hope we get to revisit Starling City again!
October 20, 2022
Hauntingly beautiful; a dark and captivating read.
March 13, 2023
My review for The Mouth is a Coven, by Liz Worth, first appeared in The Horror Zine (https://thehorrorzine.com). Please go there to see more reviews by me and other staff book reviewers as well as fiction, poetry, and art by many of today's established and up and coming horror-creatives. This review is reposted with permission.
Liz Worth saves no cats in The Mouth is a Coven, but she does manage to challenge the reader with a very questionable omniscient narrator, who may be somewhat insane and possibly one of the sordid people trapped in this novel; or maybe she is just completely telling the truth, as weird as it is. “Now I’m just a girl in someone else’s dream, pointing at a sticky note pasted to a wall and saying, “This is all you need to know about this story.”’
I tossed in the towel about half-way through, then had the towel tossed back in my face. There is a rhythm to the many “there’s a story told…” lead-ins to the mysteries surrounding the locale, and there is a method to the folie à deux here. Worth dives deep into the empty lives of Blue and Julie as they desperately seek escape from the mundane through vampirism with the help of some living, and dead, acquaintances.
Why all of her doom-buggy riding people (actually, there are many folies à deux) are so empty inside and out—and intent to be so—makes this novel something you can take at face value as the horror extant, the search for Matter, the godlike vampire Blue and Julie hope will give them immortality and power; or the horror internal as you disbelieve the truthfulness of the narrator as she recalls events like a bat on the wall* and the shaky social relationships recalled.
This is not your usual vampire story. No romantic yearnings with fangs, no frilly-sleeved pathos.
Instead, there is the weird Starling City, deep with its vibe of a Lakeside or Derry or Sunnydale, where people go missing often, ghosts walk the streets often, and the Goth scene is thick as clotted blood.* Then you have Matter, the supreme vampire, who, hopefully, will turn Blue and Julie, but he is hard to find and indifferent to mere mortals. There are others: Jenny and Dorian, the oracles of Starling City, leaving witch bottles around town full of screams; the ghost of Samantha, Blue’s sister; Crook and Cassie, who may or may not have sex on freshly dug graves; and the girl buried in the basement of an old house who may know how to get Matter’s attention.
Blue and Julie dig her up and she provides messy guidance to them. Sacrifices must be made and without a handbook for the recently turned vampire to guide them, things soon get out of hand and very bloody. Like all gods, Matter is aloof and bored with mortals who come calling.
Worth weaves a series of mixed memories recalling memories—are all these people really ghosts, haunting their actions over and over again?—and provides descriptions that carry depth beyond the showing.
"Blue takes a towel off the rack. It’s gone through the washing machine so often that it’s frayed at the edges. The towel is so old that it looks dirty, even though it’s clean. He hugs it around himself and ignores the dust that sticks to his wet feet, the pebbles that lodge between his toes, as he pads back into his room. He lays back on his bed and closes his eyes. The sun is in a different place in the sky now and when Blue wakes from his nap, it will be even deeper into the horizon, signaling the late afternoon."
Blue is revealed through his actions: he is often oblivious; he is taciturn; he is not sexually interested in Julie; he is aimless except when it comes to extending his aimlessness by drinking blood. For him it would be cool to be a vampire. For Julie, she has a different reason but the same need.
"Julie is one of many in Starling City who hold fantasies of immortality and power. Julie lives for the depth of midnight and craves the dampness of the dark basement bars she frequents. She seeks obscure clubs and strange faces in the hopes that the rumours she’s always heard about who and what lives in the shadows of Starling City are true. She works her wishes around the idea of escape: Escape from a life of work, the mundane realities of rent payments and errands and aging. Julie watches old Dracula movies as stories of hope. She doesn’t see them as fiction, but as veiled truths that promise an alternate route."
One wonders which Dracula Julie likes. Lee, Bela, Langella maybe? Both seek change but soon realize that being vampires is not at all what they thought it would be and, as Blue soon realizes, teeth are useless.
“Experimental” and “conceptual” are words used in the marketing for this novel but they tend to be apologetic sounding more than revealing. The Mouth is a Coven needs no apologies for its piercingly unnerving look into the lives of those not knowing what they are getting themselves into; a deeper and deeper plunge into the sanguine void for immortality as mortal weaknesses get in the way. Worth presents an engrossing narrative that leaves the vampire fluttering* in the background while focusing on the Renfields, those who truly yearn for the vampire mythology. There is no toothy gothic romance here, no glorified blood-soaked staking of hearts, and no Van Helsings. If you are looking for a refreshingly different take on vampiric horror, you should put the bite on this one.*
*To pun, to really pun, that must be glorious!
Liz Worth saves no cats in The Mouth is a Coven, but she does manage to challenge the reader with a very questionable omniscient narrator, who may be somewhat insane and possibly one of the sordid people trapped in this novel; or maybe she is just completely telling the truth, as weird as it is. “Now I’m just a girl in someone else’s dream, pointing at a sticky note pasted to a wall and saying, “This is all you need to know about this story.”’
I tossed in the towel about half-way through, then had the towel tossed back in my face. There is a rhythm to the many “there’s a story told…” lead-ins to the mysteries surrounding the locale, and there is a method to the folie à deux here. Worth dives deep into the empty lives of Blue and Julie as they desperately seek escape from the mundane through vampirism with the help of some living, and dead, acquaintances.
Why all of her doom-buggy riding people (actually, there are many folies à deux) are so empty inside and out—and intent to be so—makes this novel something you can take at face value as the horror extant, the search for Matter, the godlike vampire Blue and Julie hope will give them immortality and power; or the horror internal as you disbelieve the truthfulness of the narrator as she recalls events like a bat on the wall* and the shaky social relationships recalled.
This is not your usual vampire story. No romantic yearnings with fangs, no frilly-sleeved pathos.
Instead, there is the weird Starling City, deep with its vibe of a Lakeside or Derry or Sunnydale, where people go missing often, ghosts walk the streets often, and the Goth scene is thick as clotted blood.* Then you have Matter, the supreme vampire, who, hopefully, will turn Blue and Julie, but he is hard to find and indifferent to mere mortals. There are others: Jenny and Dorian, the oracles of Starling City, leaving witch bottles around town full of screams; the ghost of Samantha, Blue’s sister; Crook and Cassie, who may or may not have sex on freshly dug graves; and the girl buried in the basement of an old house who may know how to get Matter’s attention.
Blue and Julie dig her up and she provides messy guidance to them. Sacrifices must be made and without a handbook for the recently turned vampire to guide them, things soon get out of hand and very bloody. Like all gods, Matter is aloof and bored with mortals who come calling.
Worth weaves a series of mixed memories recalling memories—are all these people really ghosts, haunting their actions over and over again?—and provides descriptions that carry depth beyond the showing.
"Blue takes a towel off the rack. It’s gone through the washing machine so often that it’s frayed at the edges. The towel is so old that it looks dirty, even though it’s clean. He hugs it around himself and ignores the dust that sticks to his wet feet, the pebbles that lodge between his toes, as he pads back into his room. He lays back on his bed and closes his eyes. The sun is in a different place in the sky now and when Blue wakes from his nap, it will be even deeper into the horizon, signaling the late afternoon."
Blue is revealed through his actions: he is often oblivious; he is taciturn; he is not sexually interested in Julie; he is aimless except when it comes to extending his aimlessness by drinking blood. For him it would be cool to be a vampire. For Julie, she has a different reason but the same need.
"Julie is one of many in Starling City who hold fantasies of immortality and power. Julie lives for the depth of midnight and craves the dampness of the dark basement bars she frequents. She seeks obscure clubs and strange faces in the hopes that the rumours she’s always heard about who and what lives in the shadows of Starling City are true. She works her wishes around the idea of escape: Escape from a life of work, the mundane realities of rent payments and errands and aging. Julie watches old Dracula movies as stories of hope. She doesn’t see them as fiction, but as veiled truths that promise an alternate route."
One wonders which Dracula Julie likes. Lee, Bela, Langella maybe? Both seek change but soon realize that being vampires is not at all what they thought it would be and, as Blue soon realizes, teeth are useless.
“Experimental” and “conceptual” are words used in the marketing for this novel but they tend to be apologetic sounding more than revealing. The Mouth is a Coven needs no apologies for its piercingly unnerving look into the lives of those not knowing what they are getting themselves into; a deeper and deeper plunge into the sanguine void for immortality as mortal weaknesses get in the way. Worth presents an engrossing narrative that leaves the vampire fluttering* in the background while focusing on the Renfields, those who truly yearn for the vampire mythology. There is no toothy gothic romance here, no glorified blood-soaked staking of hearts, and no Van Helsings. If you are looking for a refreshingly different take on vampiric horror, you should put the bite on this one.*
*To pun, to really pun, that must be glorious!
November 24, 2022
I’ve always been a fan of Vampire Lit, from the days of Anne Rice, and, dare I even admit, the Twilight Series by Stephenie Meyer. I knew Liz Worth would offer insights and take me places no one has gone and this book rose to that occasion. Worth’s writing is sensual and devastating, tapping into the loneliness and longing for more. But, should the call be answered, will it fulfill you or destroy you? Every character in this work is fleshed out and fulfilling and now more than ever, I see the ghosts of the past in the most unseeming of places.
October 11, 2022
If you are drawn to modern day magic, witchcraft and vampires this book will keep you entertained all through the night. A well written, fast paced, exciting read.
August 28, 2023
Worth crafts a unique take on vampire mythology in this short novel. Weaving her experience as a poet and tarot reader into the passages, she writes an atmospheric and clever story. With a subtle start full of 90's nostalgia, the intensity soon ramps, retaining the allure of captivating images and infusing intense scenes worthy of the title. This compelling and unique piece is well deserving of maximum appreciation.
June 14, 2024
Liz's writing is swoon-worthy poetry punctuated with raw, brutal, bone-crunching horror, and I love it! If you were a small-town goth in the 80's or 90's, this is the vampire book for you. Gritty and real, and full of folk horror magic that brought to mind classic films like The Hunger and Lost Boys, and newer ones like Pyewacket. Loved it!
January 13, 2026
I really love the poetry hidden in sentences throughout this novel- there were so many phrases I wanted to highlight and remember. The story moves very quickly, taking you on a really unexpected journey into a witchy quest for what Blue and Julie hope will be immortality. This is a very different take on a vampire-esque theme, feels very contemporary, and the writing is beautiful.
May 28, 2025
The Mouth Is a Coven is a wonderfully dark tale that explores the fatal attraction of vampires through a Bauhausian lens. The characters' egocentric descent into self-destruction wore on my psyche long after going to bed each night. Recommended!
July 29, 2025
A weird, dark, gloomy, almost poetic story of vampires. Definitely a quick and easy read but beautifully written. Overall it was a fine book and balanced out all the shitty reads I’ve been having lately
December 22, 2025
loved this.. couldn't put it down!
November 10, 2023
This was a good vampire horror story. Blue and Julie get caught in the legend of Matter and with the guidance of some witches and the help of a dead girl, summon a vampire who is not the idol that he seems. It was a bit slow to get going but paid off in the end.
3.5/5 Stars
3.5/5 Stars
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews