Welcoming Alma Katsu

Flame Tree Press welcomes Bram Stoker Award-winner Alma Katsu to the blog to talk about her haunting short story “The Familiar’s Assistant”, which appears alongside a stellar line-up in the groundbreaking anthology This Way Lies Madness, releasing in September from Flame Tree Press in our Beyond & Within series. In the introduction to the work, the book’s co-editors, Dave Jeffery and Lee Murray, say the anthology “defies convention by bringing together authentic, sensitive portrayals of mental illness in a genre that has notoriously lacked such tenets.” Comprising 23 stories and poems, the book also includes accompanying vignettes offering insight into the authors’ motivation for their work.

Today, Alma Katsu shares an excerpt from her story along with a short glimpse into her inspiration.

Excerpt:

Dan is to meet me at an abandoned industrial park outside of town. You can’t take an Uber to this kind of rendezvous, so I borrowed the keys to Sarah’s old sedan. I hope to be back before she realizes the car is missing, but frankly it’s a gamble I have to take.

I lean against the hood, chain smoking, while waiting for Dan to show up. We’ve used this location about six or seven times for our little operations, Sarah and me, and it’s worked like a charm. It’s dead deserted. No one comes out here. There’s no road traffic and it doesn’t overlook a highway. Oh, it might play host to drug deals or other nefarious activity (and I can feel their presence on the periphery like rats, those junkies and prostitutes, curious about Sarah and me but keeping their distance), but they’re not the kind to go to the police.

It’s half-past midnight when a shiny muscle car comes around the corner of a building. I recognize Dan’s bald head but don’t recognize the guy at the steering wheel. Of course; Dan wouldn’t come alone, even if it’s just little ole harmless me. Sweat blooms under my arms; we’ve never brought two victims for the master at the same time. Will he do it?

Katsu writes:

“The funny thing about The Familiar’s Assistant is that I didn’t know what it was about until after I’d written it. It was the first short story I’d written in a long, long time and was just grateful for something to come to mind. The words came out in a torrent, scene after scene almost writing themselves, but I didn’t know what the story was trying to say. Mainly, I didn’t understand why the main character did what he did. Why he was so self-destructive.”

As well as Katsu’s story, Murray and Jeffery invite readers of This Way Lies Madness to discover “tales of trauma, dissociation, body dysmorphia, psychosis, depression, anxiety, and more, captured in all forms of horror from the extreme to the nuanced. There is jaw-dropping violence, skin-crawling body horror, and quirky dark humour, alongside the quiet, heartbreaking introspections of people spiralling into madness. Yet all the stories and poems in this volume are framed so that the insensitive, stereotypical presentations of mental illness commonly found in horror are resoundingly and appropriately absent.”

"A mesmerizing and remarkably ambitious mosaic of delicate minds possessed, of spoiled and haunted hearts, of gaping wounds both seen and unseen. This Way Lies Madness weaves a beguiling and profoundly revealing tapestry of psychological terror with such nuance and depth in each collected story." – Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

Alma Katsu is the award-winning author of eight books and numerous stories in a variety of genres, including horror. Her next horror novel, Fiend, will be published by GP Putnam’s Sons in fall 2025.

[Photo by Matt Mendelsohn]

This Way Lies Madness is out September 9th 2025: Pre-Order Now