October

"Michael Rowe is one of those writers who can swing from the eloquent prose of a Peter Straub to the brutality of a Richard Laymon."―Monster LibrarianThe time: the waning years of the 1990s at the dawn of the millennium.The place: an isolated rural town called Auburn, which could be anywhere at all―a town where everyone knows everyone else―where dark secrets run through its veins like blood.Everyone knows that sixteen-year old Mikey Childress is “different.” A target for bullies since he was a small boy, everything Mikey does attracts abuse: the way he walks, the way he talks, the way he looks. Everyone knows he’s not like the other boys in Auburn―the boys who play hockey, who fight, the boys who pursue girls. Only his friend Wroxy, a girl almost as isolated as he is, can even guess at the edges of his pain, or the depths of his yearning for love.But even the people who hate Mikey couldn’t dream of how many secrets he has, or how badly he could hurt them if he wanted to.Until the night Mikey is pushed beyond endurance by his abusers. The night he makes a pact with dark forces older than time to visit a terrible vengeance on his enemies. The night he inadvertently opens a doorway that should never, ever have been opened, and unleashes something into the world that should have remained damned.

Monster Librarian

Praise for Michael Rowe"Michael Rowe is one of those writers who can swing from the eloquent prose of a Peter Straub to the brutality of a Richard Laymon."

Vince Liaguno, editor of the Bram Stoker Award-winning Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet

“Rowe’s tale of teenage anguish and loneliness is an exquisitely told cautionary tale, rich in visceral images of horror and the erotic.”

Bracken MacLeod, author of Stranded and 13 Views of the Suicide Woods

“October is the kind of horror novel a lot of adults needed when they were kids. Michael Rowe understands that while it gets better for some people, not everyone can afford to sit back and wait if they want to survive. A powerful and powerfully frightening tale about making hard choices in the name of survival, and what those choices cost. Because becoming who you are really means making a deal with the Devil. And sometimes, the Devil is the only one who really understands.”

Lee Thomas, Lambda Literary Award- and Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The German and Down on Your Knees

“Michael Rowe’s talent shines through in this terrifying story of social persecution, black magic, and desire gone horrifically wrong. Readers will immediately identify with the story of Mikey Childress, and they’ll hold on for dear life as Mikey’s search for acceptance and a dream of love drag them across a jagged terrain of brutality and indifference. With October, Rowe taps into the primal terrors of a teen’s life, exploring the loneliness and misery of an outcast who finds his only salvation in a vicious, dark place.”

Clive Barker

“[Wild Fell is a] superb ghost story that evokes terrors both ancient and modern, and delivers us to a place of profound fear.”

Christopher Rice

“[A] major new talent. Michael Rowe is now on my must-read list.”

Electric Lit

“[Wild Fell] by Canadian author Michael Rowe fulfills the Hobbesian ideal of a haunted house novel: nasty, brutish and short. Also, elegant. With more than a little meta-fictional self-awareness―another trope of the haunted house novel post-1820, when the genre was already centuries old―Rowe tells the story of damaged ingénue Jameson Browning, who purchases the titular mansion on a lake-locked outcropping called Blackmore Island after an accident which puts him in possession of a sizable cash settlement. The ghosts are also real in Rowe, this time in the visage of Rosa Blackmore, a spectral teenager who makes known her presence in grim, strobic flashes around the estate. And yet, as in all the best haunted house stories, the specter in Wild Fell is more than just that; it’s a powerful human emotion made flesh―or un-flesh, as the case may be. While over it all loom the spires of Wild Fell: dwelt in by Jameson, dwelling in him.”

Susie Moloney for CBC Manitoba

“Michael Rowe writes like a storyteller, so seamlessly that the words disappear under your skin.”

About the Author

Michael Rowe was born in Ottawa, and has lived in Beirut, Havana, and Paris. He is the author of the novels Enter, Night (2011), Wild Fell (2013), and October (2017.) A French edition of Wild Fell was published by Editions Bragelonne in Paris in 2016. An award-winning journalist and essayist, he is also the author of the nonfiction books Writing Below the Belt (1995), Looking For Brothers (1999), and Other Men’s Sons (2004.) He has won the Lambda Literary Award, the Queer Horror Award, and the Randy Shilts Award for Nonfiction. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the Sunburst Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. He was for 17 years the first-tier Canadian correspondent for the legendary horror film magazine Fangoria, which he credits as the best job he ever had. As the creator and editor of the anthologies Queer Fear (2000) and Queer Fear 2 (2002), Clive Barker hailed him in as having “changed forever the shape of horror fiction forever.” He lives in Toronto with his husband, Brian McDermid in a Victorian house near an ancient graveyard.

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