Welcoming L.E. Daniels

Flame Tree Press welcomes Bram Stoker-nominated author-editor L.E. Daniels to talk about her poem “Speak”, 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, L.E. Daniels shares an excerpt from her poem along with a short glimpse into her inspiration.

Excerpt:

I: Child

A stutter is living in a house haunted by the sea:

Pressurized by gust and tide—panes buckle, salt gnaws, trees lean—

Bleached by focus of hungry sun and seabirds who cannot fly

Rollers threaten outside-in as the drowned gather, washed out, 

Muttering in corners—obsessed with shipwrecks but legless, 

Handless in periwinkle rot, waiting to—

Daniels writes:

“Living with a stutter creates a precarious relationship with our internal and external worlds. We learn as children that we can’t trust ourselves to get it right no matter how much we practice. Repeatedly, we stumble into well-worn traps, our noisy struggle a beacon for bullies and the ignorant. We’re told that we’ll grow out of it, but instead we grow around it, and while the fear and humiliation of our youth recedes, the lessons remain.”

As well as Daniels’s poem, 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

A Bram Stoker Award® finalist, L.E. Daniels is an American author, poet, and editor living in Australia. Her novel, Serpent’s Wake: A Tale for the Bitten (Interactive Publications) is a Notable Work with the HWA’s Mental Health Initiative. Lauren edited Aiki Flinthart’s legacy anthology, Relics, Wrecks and Ruins (CAT) with Geneve Flynn, which won the 2021 Aurealis Award. With Christa Carmen, she edited the 2022 Aurealis finalist, We are Providence: Tales of Horror from the Ocean State (Weird House Press) and the 2024 release, Monsters in the Mills (Interactive Publications). Recent publications include “Silk” in Hush, Don’t Wake the Monster (Twisted Wing Productions), “Darkness Repeats” in Monsters in the Mills, and “Hangman’s Coming” in Where the Silent Ones Watch (Hippocampus Press). Lauren runs Brisbane Writers Workshop.

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