Darkest Days and Haunted Ways

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With Darkest Days and Haunted Ways, renowned horror poet Ashley Dioses shows us the twisted roots at the very heart of her bleak and macabre vision. Once meant for inclusion with the rest of her formative work in The Withering but omitted for stylistic reasons, these poems nevertheless attain a doomful thematic cohesion all their own. Originally written by the young poetess between the impressionable ages of fourteen and seventeen, but now polished by an experienced hand, these poems directly reflect—as in a cold, cracked mirror—the angst and emotional turmoil that informed those years of her life. With the publication of this book, these macabre paeans and lamentations of the damned take their rightful place beside The Withering as its indispensable companion volume.

With a foreword by K. A. Opperman and an afterword by the author.

100 pages - 6x9 trade paperback - Illustrated

"...if ever there was a sorceress of imagery and language, that poet is the magnificent Ashley Dioses." —W. H. Pugmire

"Gruesome, gory and glorious. Ashley Dioses' latest collection is the splayed corpse of a young poet. Lovers of dark poetry, those fascinated with the whole spectrum of all of death's colors, will find exquisite work in these pages.” —S. L. Edwards, author of In the Devil's Cradle

"Darkest Days and Haunted Ways is sensuous and sensual, grim and madly gay. It evokes primal, hungry rites, and recalls the half-forgotten myths of an ancient feminine who is to be both feared and desired. These poems are the mutterings of a witch-woman deep in her cave, wrapped in bones and roots as she listens to the whisperings of worms. Discomfiting, disturbing, galvanizing, and startling." —Rebecca Buchanan, author of Not a Princess, But (Yes) There Was a Pea and Other Poems to Foment Revolution

"Refracted by the splintered looking-glass of adulthood, Ashley Dioses' Darkest Days and Haunted Ways whispers in the language of teen angst: lachrymose, lyrical, and evocative." —Jessica McHugh, 2x Bram Stoker Award® Nominated author of The Quiet Ways I Destroy You

"In Darkest Days and Haunted Ways, Ashley Dioses exposes the flayed heart of her teenage years, and, in so doing, she reveals some of the origins of the sublime nightshade with which her poetry is filled." —D. L. Myers, author of Oracles from the Black Pool

CONTENTS:

Foreword: Autopsy of a Poetess

I. PULSE

Twisted Grin
That Which Builds from Fear
Twitch
So Sick
Pulse
A Pin-Prick
The Resolution

II. TORN UP INSIDE

Misery vs. Happiness
Divine Strength
Locked Within
Torn Up Inside
Just a Glimpse
Confined Within

III. WITHER

Drained
What You Don’t See
Blackout
Sweet Sixteen
Level Unreached
Wither

IV. THE WRATH INSIDE

The Alternate Choice
The Disdain
Shards
Silent Lies
The Wrath Inside
The Fork in the Road

V. EMRACE THE DARKNESS

Forever Lost
Embrace the Darkness
Cold
When All Things Stop

Afterword
Chronological Order