J. V.MolenaarInk bleeds.

A transgressive horror anthology.

Thirteen years. Thirteen stories. One question asked again and again until it stops sounding like a question: who's the bigger monster?

Let Them Eat Cake is not a novel dressed up as an anthology, and it isn't interested in your comfort. Each of its thirteen stories stands alone, one for every year of the AIDS crisis, 1984 to 1996, and each one drags a different rich, powerful, or simply comfortable villain into the light long enough to show you exactly what they cost. Real history runs underneath every page, the Buckley op-ed that actually proposed tattooing HIV-positive men, the real amendment that gutted AIDS education funding, the real drug that worked, eventually, for whoever could afford it first. This book didn't invent the cruelty. It just refused to look away from it.

The people fighting back in these pages are not heroes. They're damaged, furious, and often just as capable of real horror as the people they're aimed at. You'll root for them anyway. You might feel sick about that by the last page. That's the point.

This is a book for people who already know silence has a body count, and who are tired of being asked to stay quiet about it anyway.

Coming soon.

For readers of Clive Barker, Dennis Cooper, and anyone who ever stood in the back of a room with a fist raised and a sign that said SILENCE = DEATH.

He wakes before the light resolves in a room with no door, no window, no memory of how he arrived.

A corridor stretches in both directions, doors appearing and dissolving at intervals only it understands. A voice, calm and clinical, tells him to stabilize. To keep moving. To not look back.

He cannot remember his name. As the corridor's rules fracture and reassemble around him, fragments of another life surface: a kitchen gone silent with dread, a father's rage, a brother who needs protecting, a silence he learned to keep.

The line between where he is and where he's been begins to dissolve, and the reader is left to piece together, alongside him, what happened and what it cost.