Welcoming Emily Ruth Verona

Flame Tree Press welcomes Bram Stoker Award-nominee Emily Ruth Verona to the blog to talk about her story Bangs, 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, Emily Ruth Verona shares an excerpt from her story along with a short glimpse into his inspiration. 

Excerpt:

     I stretch my jaw as wide as it can go, put the partially opened scissors in my mouth, and press it up against the inside of my left cheek. Not too deep. Too deep would pierce the outside and I can’t have that. I close my eyes. Hold my breath.
     Snip!
     The pain is immediate and ongoing mostly because the scissors are too dull to completely cut away a clump of fat in one go. A little piece of loose cheek is still clinging to the inside of my mouth. I can feel it pulling. And so, I cut and cut and cut until I am sure it is loose and spit the freed flesh into the sink.

Verona writes:

   "When I was maybe five or six years old, I became convinced that I’d grow up to be pretty. It felt inevitable. I had a cute little face and beautiful eyes and a lovable smile. How could I not turn out pretty? It felt exciting to get older. I couldn’t wait to grow into myself. Then, puberty hit. I developed curves I didn't want, and my nose became longer and less smooth than I had expected. It felt devastating, as if my body had betrayed me. Everyone else in my life, my friends and my family, were all so beautiful and I was...not. Or, so I believed. It is easy to believe such a thing at such an age. Society breeds specific and unrealistic expectations, especially in young girls."

As well as Verona'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

Emily Ruth Verona is the author of the novel Midnight on Beacon Street, published by Harper Perennial in 2024. Her upcoming novella, Shiva, is expected from Dark Matter Ink in 2026.

Emily received her Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing and Cinema Studies from the State University of New York at Purchase. She is a Pinch Literary Award winner, a Bram Stoker Awards® nominee, and a Rhysling Award Finalist. Her work has been featured in magazines and anthologies that include Under Her Skin, The Ghastling, The Jewish Book of Horror, Under Her Eye, Monstrous Futures, Coffin Bell, Monster Lairs, Rust & Moth, Strange Horizons, and Nightmare Magazine. She lives in New Jersey with a small dog.

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