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Joe Koch @horrorsong.blog · 14/10/2026

Early readers are saying Dead Boys Don't Cry is impossible to describe.

queer horror!! This sounds WILD thank you for the arc!!

this is an AMAZINGLY WEIRD READ. surreal fever dream horror full of the violent and grotesque and erotic. queerness and violence, birth through violence and death. so much death: aids, sexual violence, closeted gays, closeted trans men. it feels like a collection of stories but theyre all connected through a cosmic mythos. so very weird. a piece of literary horror. even the language grows erratically and inaccessibly. I've never read anything like it, something impossible to describe

definitely Not for the faint of heart or a mainstream audience. Very much in the mode of The Weird

💭 non linear?
🌡️ fever dream
⁉️ confusion and unreliable narration
🥩 body horror
🫀 meat and flesh and bodies
🌌 cosmic horror
🪦 queerness and death

Joe Koch @horrorsong.blog · 05/10/2026

Reading nothing but absolute BANERS these days: "The Alligators of Abraham" by Robert Kloss (defeats Cormac McCarthy as hallucinatory historical) "Blue Lard" by Vladimir Sorokin (the way I cringed in respiratory agony when I thought Hitler was gonna fuck the dog) Next up, "Works Of Vermin"!!

First 2 books mentioned in the post pictured.

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Joe Koch @horrorsong.blog · 30/09/2026

And here's the Filthy Loot section of my vanity shelves:

Bodypunk, New Meat In A Clean Room, Like You Never Had Wings, Isolation Is Safety, and Soft Ceremonies.

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Joe Koch @horrorsong.blog · 28/09/2026

Oh no, I'd forgotten about them. Might have to change my answer!

Twink cuck-son and pseudo-mother in Greenaway's 9½ Women.

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Joe Koch @horrorsong.blog · 28/09/2026

I don't really do favorites, and was mistaken about the year as this is from 2000; but it's a grimy, passionate, cruel film with an incredible ensemble cast. It meant a lot to me during that (personally horrible) time and in retrospect may have been my first visit to Carcosa. Very underappreciated!

Movie poster for The King Is Alive. Draped and hooded figures in a sun-scorched landscape seen only from behind or in ssilhouette. You may be asking yourself: Is this Carcosa?

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Joe Koch @horrorsong.blog · 17/09/2026

Sure I play with knives while writing, what could possibly go wrong?

Bloody thumb, knife, desk, kissing skull earrings, library book, pens.

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Joe Koch @horrorsong.blog · 17/09/2026

Daddy issues? Who, me?! 😆 (Not beating the charges on this one for sure) www.goodreads.com/book/show/25...

This book is at once a nightmare and wet dream. It will leave the reader shaking and damp with sweat. Rapturous and vile, a masterwork of psychosexual queer horror.

Dead Boys Don't Cry is written in a very abstract style that makes more emotional sense than literal sense. I'd compare it to something like a David Lynch movie but with Clive Barker's sensibilities. An absolutely harrowing experience, but one I'm glad I was able to have. Fans of extreme horror do not skip this one!

Tags: body horror, daddy issues.

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Joe Koch @horrorsong.blog · 11/09/2026

Today is the last day to get 25% off of all B&N preorders. While you're picking out new books, please consider adding my forthcoming and perhaps my best, Dead Boys Don't Cry. www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dead-boys-...

Dead Boys Don't Cry by Joe Koch-gold and sepia image of a blurred figure whose gesture's meaning is uncertain.

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Joe Koch @horrorsong.blog · 02/09/2026

Wow, first review for DEAD BOYS DON'T CRY is already up. Thank you for reading, Michael! www.goodreads.com/book/show/25...

This was my first time reading Joe Koch, and I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered prose quite like his. Florid, strange, and utterly its own thing, it’s almost impossible to describe without diminishing it.

At first, I wasn’t sure what I was reading. I kept rereading pages, trying to find some kind of footing, until I realized I probably wasn’t meant to have one. Once I stopped trying to make sense of everything and simply surrendered to the experience, the book began to work its particular spell on me.

DEAD BOYS DON'T CRY unfolds more like a dream than a conventional narrative, with horror, memory, emotion, and atmosphere bleeding into one another. Some things make perfect sense; others remain elusive, more impression than explanation. There’s a constant feeling of being suspended somewhere between nightmare and waking life.

Koch’s prose creates a mood as much as it tells a story. It’s hypnotic, unsettling, and completely singular. This isn’t a book to read expecting everything to neatly resolve itself. Its power is in the language, the imagery, and the experience of letting yourself be carried somewhere just beyond the familiar.

Joe Koch clearly writes in a league of his own. I may not have understood every piece, but I’m not sure that’s the point. If you’re willing to let go and go with the flow, let Joe take you.

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Joe Koch @horrorsong.blog · 02/09/2026

This Saturday, come by if you dare.

One Of Us horror fest in Iowa city at public space one sept 5th from 12 to 4 p.m. with Daniel Kraus, Weirdpunk Books, Gabriel Hanks, Filthy Loot Press, Joe Koch, Cursed Morsels, Ghoulish Books & more.

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Joe Koch @horrorsong.blog · 27/08/2026

Art only for less distracted viewing

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Joe Koch @horrorsong.blog · 27/08/2026

Art only for easier veiwing:

Crop art of Guernica as MPLS ICE invasion (see above post for full text).

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Joe Koch @horrorsong.blog · 27/08/2026

Please sit with this & view full screen if you can.

Picasso's Guernica reimagined as crop art of the Minneapolis ICE invasion by artist Jennifer Nelson. She has replaced Picasso's cold, stark monochrome pallette with luscious earth tones, and centered a thunderbird-like symbol among images of community observers, both alive and murdered, from which the bird rises. Her artist's statement reads, "I thought there was a fitting parallel between these incidents about the high price paid by ordinary people when aggressive regimes try out new tactics of war, as well as a fitting juxtaposition of the darkness of living such an experience and the light we shone through it in our own resistance and care for one another. The patterns near Renee Good and Alex Pretti's mouths are actually their last words in morse code: "I'm not mad at you," and "Are you okay?"

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Joe Koch @horrorsong.blog · 22/08/2026

View from a bike on the Lowry bridge

The great Mississippi River stretches toward downtown Minneapolis. In the distance, the city looks tiny, like a child's playset.

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Joe Koch @horrorsong.blog · 18/08/2026

Would you believe 3 of my books are available to purchase and that buying or reviewing them helps me write more? Links here, plus a few you can't buy anymore to make you suffer envy. horrorsong.blog/books/

Sutter Cane fan asking Sam Neill, "Do you read Joe Koch?" Sam at Weirdpunk Books made this.

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Joe Koch @horrorsong.blog · 12/08/2026

COME SEE ME IN IOWA CITY AND GAZE INTO THE VERY FORGE OF CORRUPTION

One Of Us fest poster with a little screechy black cat on the name, plus authors & publishers listed including me, Daniel Kraus, Gabbie Hanks, Weirdpunk Books, Filthy Loot, Cursed Morsels, and Ghoulish Books. September 5th, 12 to 4 p.m., at Public Space One in Iowa City.

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Joe Koch @horrorsong.blog · 04/08/2026

Have I showed you my tomato hornworms (which are hummingbird moth larvae) with parasitic wasp larvae hatching from my former garden? If not, here you go. (It's larvae all the way down.)