Welcoming Stephanie M. Wytovich 

Flame Tree Press welcomes Bram Stoker Award-winning poet Stephanie M. Wytovich to the blog to talk about her poem “The Carousel”, 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, Stephanie M. Wytovich shares an excerpt from her poem along with a short glimpse into her inspiration.

Excerpt:

I live in rigor, my muscles starved, 

ghosts soaking blank eyes. I try 

to wake up, to write my name

in the sound of fog, a fever dream 

lodged like death in my throat.

It’s been a month

since I saw my reflection, texted

my therapist there’s a crow at 

my door, a skull in my cup, the night-

mare circling my bed, its breath hot,

sour like mother’s milk. 

Wytovich writes:

“After the birth of my daughter in January 2020, I suffered from an intense bout of Postpartum Depression (PPD), which eventually lead to diagnoses of Obsessive-compulsive Disorder (OCD), Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and a panic disorder. When I try to explain what it means to be stuck, to struggle with a type of paralysis of sorts, people tend to have a lot of questions, especially because, logically, I understand that what I’m going through doesn’t make sense… ”

As well as Wytovich’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

Stephanie M. Wytovich is an American poet, novelist, and essayist. Her work has been featured in magazines and anthologies, such as Weird Tales, Nightmare Magazine, Southwest Review, Year’s Best Hardcore Horror: Volume 2, and The Best Horror of the Year: Volumes 8 & 15. Wytovich is the Poetry Editor for Raw Dog Screaming Press and an adjunct at Western Connecticut State University, Southern New Hampshire University, and Point Park University. She has received the Elizabeth Matchett Stover Memorial Award, the 2021 Ladies of Horror Fiction Writers Grant, and the Rocky Wood Memorial Scholarship for nonfiction writing. Wytovich is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association, an active member of the Horror Writers Association, and a graduate of Seton Hill University’s MFA program for Writing Popular Fiction. She is a two-time Bram Stoker Award®-winning poet, and her debut novel, The Eighth, is published with Dark Regions Press. Her nonfiction craft book for speculative poetry, Writing Poetry in the Dark, is available now from Raw Dog Screaming Press.

Follow Wytovich at https://www.stephaniemwytovich.com/ and on Twitter, Threads, and Instagram @SWytovich and @thehauntedbookshelf. You can also sign up for her newsletter at https://stephaniemwytovich.substack.com/. 

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