Bleed More, Bodymore (Paperback or Softback)

HORROR IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN EVIL OVERTAKES THE HEART.

Joey's a Baltimore mechanic. One night, she receives a call from her best friend, asking for his car to be picked up from the infamous body dumping grounds of Baltimore: Leakin Park. When she arrives, there's little more around than a stalled-out car and a couple of ravens, so she leaves only with the car. Back at the body shop, it doesn't take long for the smell of rot to permeate the trunk. Inside? A corpse. The cops say her friend did it. His absence is his guilt, but Joey knows better. She will find her missing friend and she will prove his innocence.

But something isn't right in Baltimore. It's not just the feeling that someone is always watching from the city's abandoned buildings... Her search for her friend reveals something much worse hiding under her city. A ghost town, a reaper, regret. Suddenly, the city's rage and the stink rising out of the dirt make much more sense.

A haunting, magical story about intergenerational trauma and how the ghosts of the past can follow us with aesthetics like Edgar Allan Poe meets Tim Burton and the rage of Stephen King. This novel will show you around Baltimore with a little dread and a lot of spunk. Watch out for the ravens.

Probably not a serial killer, Ian Kirkpatrick is an author of speculative fiction, satire, and literary fiction with elements of scifi, horror, and comedy. Her credentials are these: an MFA in Creative Writing, a BA in Theater, and an intense interest in psychology and incongruity. She's particularly obsessed with human nature, rationale, morality, good and evil, absurdity, and the supernatural bend you can find between mythology and reality, so her fiction will often contain these elements. She particularly enjoys using exaggeration, contrast, and incongruity to paint the worlds she creates. While she writes across genres, these elements will often still be found in her works along with innocent characters, psychopathic characters, or a combination of the two.