Two By Valkyrie Loughcrewe: 'Decrepit Ritual' and 'Puppet's Banquet'

I'm as susceptible as anyone to the tendency to lean on major publishers when it comes to must-read horror, but there has never been a better time to read what small presses and indie publishers are putting out in the genre.

This is true for the reasons you might expect – supporting small businesses in the age of Amazon is a good thing, this year's indie debut author are next year's big press bestsellers, etc. – but it's more than that. As comfortable and even welcoming as I am to the natural rhythms of popular fiction, tropes and all, sometimes you just want someone to come in with a sledgehammer and break all of that up, whether it's a veteran author taking a chance on a passion project or a newcomer trying to establish their own voice.

Which brings us to Valkyrie Loughcrewe.

Though earlier readers of their work will know Loughcrewe for things like Crom Cruach, I discovered them this year, when Max Booth of Ghoulish Books starting pushing their novella Decrepit Ritual as a must-read new release. Just weeks later, Tenebrous Press was building buzz for their own Loughcrewe release, Puppet's Banquet, which led me to reading these books back-to-back and also inviting Val on The Scares That Shaped Us for a chat. What I found along the way is a vital, relentless, jaw-dropping new voice in modern indie horror.

I'm not going to dig too deep into the plot details of each of these books, but here's the basic rundown: Decrepit Ritual is a second-person narrative following a suicidal person whose attempts to end it all are interrupted by the discovery of a mysterious VHS tape. Puppet's Banquet is about a couple whose lives are upended by a bizarre series of events that take them through body horror and beyond. Both feature experimental efforts to break up the more traditional storytelling rhythms (a big chunk of Ritual is just recounting what's happening on a TV screen, while Banquet features passages in poetic meter), and both pack unforgettable imagery into low page counts. You can read either or both of them in an afternoon, and if you're pulled into their respective worlds like I was, you probably will.

Loughcrewe's prose is as confident and daring as anything I've read in recent years, but that's not to say they make it look easy. These are not easy books, though they are often (especially in the case of Decrepit Ritual) quite fun. Each is an invocation of sorts, something Loughcrewe sort of confirmed when I interviewed them. There's a sense that you're reading not just something imagined, but something dragged up from the cosmic depths, something we were perhaps not meant to witness. Loughcrewe's writing is a Working in the ritual magic sense of the word, and you feel it on the page as the narrative shapeshifts before your eyes, yet never loses its drive. But even in these moments, when the prose melts into pure, visceral experience, you can see the gleeful energy of an author who loves weird 80s slashers and goopy body horror, creating a compelling juxtaposition that evolves into an alchemical reaction.

It's been months since I read these books, and I have not stopped thinking about them. My experience in reading them calls to mind my experiences with paintings by people like Mark Rothko. You don't look at these paintings, you sit with them, be with them, let them absorb you into the canvas, make you lost for a while. Valkyrie Loughcrewe's books are like that. You are meant to be with them, to allow yourself to be lost in nightmarish, impossible, yet deeply human worlds.

If you're hoping to mix up your reading routines with some indie horror, there are few better places to look.

Decrepit Ritual is available now from Ghoulish Books. Puppet's Banquet is available now from Tenebrous Press.