The
Corpse King (Novella Series #21)
by Tim Curran
• Click here to read a free excerpt
About the Book:
From the fields of the dead, the harvest was brought forth.
Tended by resurrection farmers with grubby fingers, cold hearts, and greedy minds, the fields were worked with shovel and spade and sweat. Beneath a pall of thin moonlight, the crops were plucked from the moist, black earth, torn from wormy boxes and mildewed shrouds like rotting corn from corrupting husks.
The harvest of cadavers was piled in the beds of muddy wagons and taken to market, sold to the highest bidder to supply dissection room and anatomical house. The farmers worked their bone fields night after night, thinking they were alone in their grim harvest.
But there was another who worked the graveyards and mortuaries, another reaper whose cultivation reached back to antiquity. Moon-faced and skeleton-fingered, he was the grand lord of the charnel harvest, master of graveyard harrow and yield.
Enter the world of the late-18th century and join Samuel Clow and Mickey Kierney as they earn their living in the resurrection trade... little realizing that they will soon meet The Corpse King.
About the Author:
Tim Curran is the author of the novels Skin Medicine, Hive, Dead Sea, and Skull Moon. Upcoming projects include the novels Resurrection, The Devil Next Door, and Hive 2, as well as Four Rode Out, a collection of four weird-western novellas by Curran, Tim Lebbon, Brian Keene, and Steve Vernon. His short stories have appeared in such magazines as City Slab, Flesh&Blood, Book of Dark Wisdom, and Inhuman, as well as anthologies such as Flesh Feast, Shivers IV, High Seas Cthulhu, and Vile Things. Find him on the web at: www.corpseking.com
Available in two states:
Limited Edition of 750 signed copies ($30)
Traycased Lettered Edition of 26 signed and lettered copies bound in leather
with a satin ribbon page marker ($175)
Production Status:
The book is ready for the printer and will be sent in the next batch!
Free Excerpt:
Here were cadavers of every age and sex packed in sawdust and hay, sunk in wooden casks and barrels of brine. Here were babies pickled in bottles and salted limbs heaped in cupboards. Staring heads had been salted and women injected with preservative. They waited against the walls like mummies and leered from corners with rictus grins. A great assemblage of charnel harvest awaiting the highest bidder, supply and demand. Like the grisly pantry of a cannibal.
Clow grinned. “Aye, I look around me workshop and see coins spilling from every recess, I do. Would you agree, Mickey Kierney?”
“I would,” Kierney said, pulling a lid off a cask and pouring a bit of grain alcohol from a dusty bottle onto the bobbing head of a woman.
“And look here, would you?” Clow said. “Me latest offerings.”
He approached a table with two small forms shrouded in a graying sheet. Carefully, he pulled the sheet back. There were the cadavers of two four-year old twin girls laying there, cold as clay, eyes gummed shut, tiny stiff hands pressed over white bosoms.
“Oh, me fine darlings, look at you, look at the wonder of you,” Clow said, pouring himself a tin cup of gin and toasting them. “Your mother decided she would strangle you, did she? Decided life was better without you, eh? Well, no matter, me and Mr. Kierney will whisk you off to the medical college at first light. You’ll be in good hands there, I say. Better than the moss and crawlies of the churchyard, I be thinking,” Clow stroked their sunken faces, brushed a stray strand of hair away from the one on the left and cooed to the other, drawing a finger over her seamed, blackened lips. “Sssh, sssh, me doves, me lovies, me fine little darlings. We’ll have none of that now, will we? Samuel Clow will take fine care of you, he will.”
Together, Clow and Kierney gently lowered the bodies of the girls into a vat of brine to hold them over until delivery. Their blonde curls skated over the surface a moment, then sank from view.
“Bless ye, me angels,” Clow said, closing the lid.
***
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