We gather & circulate poems & other writing that engage monstrosity, the macabre, the weird & the eerie, horror films, darkness & night, the mysterious unknown, & the perverse urge to speak the unspeakable.
We love horror novels & stories, comics & movies, & our mission is to host a venue for frightening poetry & poetics; critical & literary essays; visual art & collage; short fiction & screenplays; Friday Features on cultural artifacts; & uncategorizable textual excursions. We bring this writing into conversation with images & visual treatments that reflect a horror aesthetic & haunt the mind.
Cul-de-sac of Blood gives us a place to share a lifetime of horror thrills & blood spills with others whose reading & writing rituals refuse to abandon the shadows that cast their dark comfort over us. Anywhere writing & horror intersect, we’ll meet you under the always full moon.
We center the work of queer writers & artists, anticapitalist, anti-racist, antifascist & anti-patriarchal perspectives, & we support radical, liberatory, revolutionary aesthetics & community. We uphold these values through our publishing model & explore them through the ongoing “What Is Horror Poetics?” column written by J †Johnson and edited by Gina Myers.
In addition to our web publication, we have an annual chapbook series. Stay tuned as well for announcements of reading events in our hometown Philly.
Meanwhile, hold onto your pens & knives, & follow us into the gloom!🔪✒️🕸🕷🌫🖤
We are fly by night & volunteer run, & cannot provide monetary compensation at this time. If you would like to contribute to our little grimoire, read the publication for context and send work or query letters to culdesacofblood@gmail.com. By way of introduction, please say a few words about a favorite horror film. We’ll let you know if we’d like to publish your work. In any case, keep stabbing away at your craft. ⚰️🔪✒️
Beasts,
Gina Myers & J †Johnson
Cul-de-suckers slash editors
Meet the Monsters Behind the Editorial Masks
J †Johnson is the author of Trouble Songs: A Musicological Poetics (punctum books, 2018), and a poetry collection, The Book / Or / The Woods (punctum books, 2021), which features a monster that is also the letter Y. Their writing has appeared in PEN America, Jacket2, Tarpaulin Sky, and elsewhere. Their favorite horrors are Halloween, Ginger Snaps, Us, and the Sixers. They live in Philadelphia.
Gina Myers is the author of three books of poetry. She was six years old when she first saw The Amityville Horror (1979), which set off her love of horror and all things spooky. She particularly enjoys 1970s and 1980s horror movies, the books of Shirley Jackson and Stephen Graham Jones, and the drag stylings of the Boulet Brothers.
Haley Nguyen recently graduated from University of Pennsylvania where she majored in English and served as a Bassini fellow. She is an avid reader and writer with a particular interest in manga. Her favorite horror mangas are Tokyo Ghoul, Chainsaw Man, and Fire Punch. She is from Philadelphia.
ABOUT OUR LOGO
Our logo was created by the poet and designer Laura Theobald. When she shared the concept with us, we were immediately struck by how it worked as a visual poem. Laura writes, “The ‘c’ image achieves the conceptual, clean, simple effect I was after: It’s not only the letter ‘c’ (the first letter of the journal’s name) but actually suggests the shape of a cul-de-sac, since the negative space in the letter ‘c’ resembles the shape of a cul-de-sac (round with an entrance). When you add to that the illusion of dripping blood, the image can be interpreted as the letter ‘c’ and a cul-de-sac dripping in blood—literally a cul-de-sac of blood.”