Joe Koch

Joe Koch writes literary horror and surrealist trash.

Their books include The Wingspan of Severed Hands, Invaginies, Convulsive, The Shipwreck of the Cerberus, and The Couvade, which received a Shirley Jackson Award nomination in 2019. His short stories have been chosen for The Best Weird Fiction of the Year, Year’s Best Hardcore Horror, and Brave New Weird: The Best New Weird Horror. With over 100 short stories published since he cavalierly began his writing experiment in 2015, Joe has appeared in many & diverse anthologies and journals, including Southwest Review, Nightmare Magazine, Vastarien, PseudoPod, The Deadlands, Cosmic Horror Monthly, Seize The Press, Bodypunk, God’s Cruel Joke: Speculative Erotics, and The Mad Butterfly’s Ball. Anthologies featuring his work have won both Shirley Jackson and British Fantasy awards.

Additionally, Joe has guest edited for Cemetery Gates Media, and both conceptualized and co-edited the art horror anthology Stories of the Eye with Weirdpunk Books. Their fiction has also been translated into Spanish and Italian, including an illustrated gatefold paperback edition of The Wingspan of Severed Hands issued by Dilatando Mentes Editorial.

Joe was formerly published as Joanna Koch in several venues prior to 2021, and some websites, bookshops, and libraries still list The Wingspan of Severed Hands under this name, making it difficult for readers to connect with Joe’s entire body of work without the burden of doing extra research. This is very unfortunate.

Find Joe online at horrorsong_dot_blog.