Welcoming Tim Waggoner
Flame Tree Press welcomes Bram Stoker Award-winning author Tim Waggoner to the blog to talk about his short story “Old Friends”, 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, Tim Waggoner shares an excerpt from his story along with a short glimpse into his inspiration.
Excerpt:
People at funerals and viewings always talk about how lifelike the deceased looks. I think that’s a crock of shit people say to each other to break the oppressive silence. Once the dead have been favored with the attentions of a mortician, they look like stiff wax figures, features partially melted, makeup troweled on clown-thick. It’s one of the reasons I hate funerals, but tonight, looking down at my friend lying in her open casket, I find myself thinking, Actually, she does look pretty good.
This is the first time I’ve seen Aubrey in over twenty years. I can still see the girl I knew in high school, the same narrow face and curly brown hair – although there are threads of white in the latter now. There’s plenty of white in my hair as well. Her eyes (closed, of course) are sunken, the sockets of her skull prominent, and her cheekbones jut out sharply. The skin on her face sags a bit, and all of these details put together makes her seem older than forty-one by at least a decade. But death will do that to you, won’t it?
Waggoner writes:
“The events in this story occurred sometime in the early 1980s, and back then – at least in my small Ohio town – people weren’t open about mental health issues, and they rarely sought professional help. “Aubrey” was the first person I knew who suffered from the effects of deep trauma. At least, I believe her episodes of missing time were the result of trauma, but I don’t know for certain. Back then, I didn’t know how to talk to friends and family about mental health issues, and it would’ve felt like I was violating her privacy and causing her more pain if I had.”
As well as Waggoner’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
