Grave Markings: 20th Anniversary Edition

Grave Markings follows the tortured mental breakdown of Mark Michael Kilpatrick—an artist driven to purge visions of hell from his tainted mind by permanently working his ink into the skins of unwilling victims...the flesh of both the living and freshly dead. News reporter Roy Roberts finds himself drawn into an obsession with tattoo culture, at the same time as Kilpatrick's own compulsions produce sicker and sicker masterpieces that attract media attention, twisting in a spiral that inevitably brings Roberts and his loved ones into Kilpatrick's morbidly perverse universe, and the artist's deadly inkgun turns toward them... Now, for the first time in trade paperback, readers can find out why this novel won the Bram Stoker Award, the International Horror Critics Guild Award, and such widespread acclaim across the horror genre. Included in this special Twentieth Anniversary edition are 50 pages of insightful BONUS material by Arnzen: a new preface, five literary essays, and four short stories (two never before published) involving bikers, tattoo and terror.

About the Author

Amityville-born horror writer Michael Arnzen holds four Bram Stoker Awards and an International Horror Guild Award for his often funny, always disturbing fiction and poetry. An expanded, 10th anniversary edition of the "best of Arnzen" -- his Stoker-award winning story collection, Proverbs for Monsters -- is slated for release from Dark Regions Press in 2017. Other recent Arnzen titles include his novel, Grave Markings (Raw Dog Screaming Press), a non-fiction study, The Popular Uncanny (Guide Dog Books), and a writer's helper, Instigation: Creative Prompts on the Dark Side (Mastication Publications). Arnzen holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Oregon and since 1999 has taught fulltime at Seton Hill University, near Pittsburgh, in their MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction. Always experimenting, Arnzen's work in the genre has appeared in everything from poetry magnets (Fridge of the Damned) and Palm Pilots (Gorelets) to playing cards (Play Dead) and moving pictures (Exquisite Corpse). Learn the latest and sign up for his newsletter at gorelets.com

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