Welcoming Sumiko Saulson

Flame Tree Press welcomes Bram Stoker Award-nominated poet Sumiko Saulson to the blog to talk about their poem “My Ghosts Have Dreams”, 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, Sumiko Saulson shares an excerpt from their poem along with a short glimpse into their inspiration.

Excerpt:

I am haunting myself tonight

Distended voices bickering

Geists populating the edge of sleep

Stretched thin through a taffy machine

Of emotions in endless motion

Caught up in my racing thoughts

Creatures are wearing my face

Saulson writes:

“I have experienced the deaths of several people close to me – such as both of my parents (who died of cancer), a former fiancé, and a best friend, over the last decade or so – and often the racing thoughts and the voices are in the form of loved ones who have passed away. Some voices feel like earlier forms of myself from the past or other defined separate personalities. That’s why I used the metaphor of ghosts for this poem, with my body as a haunted house in which they reside.”

As well as Saulson’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

Sumiko Saulson is a two-time Bram Stoker Award® Finalist for Poetry for The Rat King (2022, Dooky Zines) and Melancholia (2024, Bludgeoned Girls Press). Elgin Award Nominee (2022). 2018 Afrosurrealist Writers Award, and 2021 Ladies of Horror Readers' Choice Award winner. Their novel Somnalia: The Metamorphoses of Flynn Keahi is available on Mocha Memoirs Press

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