Welcoming Amanda Cecelia Lang
Flame Tree Press welcomes writer Amanda Cecelia Lang to the blog to talk about her chilling short story “Nothing and the Boy”, 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, Amanda Cecelia Lang shares an excerpt from her story along with a short glimpse into her inspiration.
Excerpt:
Nothing waits in the forgotten red house with the chain-link fence and splinter-bone porch. No sunken face peers out the murky windows at an abandoned road and forbidden mossy woods. No crooked feet pace the floorboards, creaking planks beneath a hideous weight. No serrated fingernails scratch the stained yellow wallpaper, and no wheezing lungs exhale against twitching cobwebs. Certainly, Nothing smiles when the family arrives home with their tiny moving van and their nine-year-old boy.
A family of three, not four. The mother and father laugh with desperate joy and hidden bruises as they carry boxes inside the red house, their second house in a year. The boxes marked with black stars go into the old nursery at the end of the darkling hallway, and the boy trails behind. Without tin-can robots and comic books and bunkbeds, the room feels upside-down and strange. While his parents return to the daylight to retrieve his mattress, the boy tiptoes toward the open closet only to choke on a gasp, going wide-eyed.
Lang writes:
“With “Nothing and the Boy,” I wanted to explore the power of belief and the stories we tell ourselves. Fact or fiction, truths or lies, we weave narratives around our lives for countless reasons. For enlightenment, for comfort, for safety. Stories can be an escape, a refuge, a place to puzzle out the world. And belief can be monumental in ushering us through troubled times and elevating us during the good times. Belief in who we are, belief in our family, friends, and neighbors, belief in something bigger than ourselves.”
As well as Lang’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
This Way Lies Madness is out September 9th 2025: Pre-Order Now
