#pine float press

Got my copy of Palookaville from Pine Float Press today. Very honored to have provided the illustration for the cover of this amazing anthology.

“PALOOKAVILLE is a wonderfully weird, occasionally violent, often funny, deeply twisted revisionist look at the super hero genre.” –Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of Punisher: Naked Kills and Black Panther: Power

Palookaville is a blue-collar supervillain antholology set in the shadows of the superheroic world. Second-string criminals, masked mooks and clued-in henchmen leave the stresses of the criminal world behind and live “normal lives” in the sleepy bedroom town of Powell Heights until the outside world muscles its way in.

Fortunately, the citizens of Palookaville know all about muscle work.

Probably not that wild. You can never tell, though. 

Pine Float Press is getting its collective hustle ON. 

Pine Float Press is proud to announce the publication of Palookaville, our second shared-world anthology. 

Palookaville is a blue-collar supervillain antholology set in the shadows of the superheroic world. Second-string criminals, masked mooks and clued-in henchmen leave the stresses of the criminal world behind and live “normal lives” in the sleepy bedroom town of Powell Heights until the outside world muscles its way in. Fortunately, the citizens of Palookaville know all about muscle work.

Powell Heights has always kept its distance from the City. The town, half an hour away from the Federal Penitentiary and the State Hospital and twenty minutes by train from the City, has made a handy living from crime since Vincenzo “Pretty Vinnie” Buonatesta muscled his way into defacto ownership of the prison during his incarceration and rebuilt the town as a place where his crew and hangers-on could regroup and live out from under the eye of the law.

In the spirit of the season, Pine Float Press is proud to present an excerpt from A.E. Ash’s upcoming collection, Kudzu. As with all of Ms. Ash’s best work, “Cypress” is lush, evocative and wonderfully, uniquely uneasy. We hope you enjoy this excerpt and are as excited as we are to see Kudzu make its way into the world in 2018.  Cypress

 Easy now my girl, my boy don’t

go past the

bottle trees. Stop. Shhh-

 --Don’t move--

 In the shallows, see it?

In the moss-shadow where

the moon can’t go?

 Hear it?

 Quiet now. Those scritches on bark,

that hissssssss,

that soft splash--

 --Stay where you are--

 Don’t tread soft ground,

my children, my loves...

Don’t go near the knees of cypress trees--

 Wait. Sniff the air.

 Pluff mud, fish gut,

no breeze by why does the moss stir?

Salty inland low tide--

 Watch. It parts the water,

cuts pondscum down the middle

dips back into the warm dark.

 --Back on up now--

 It doesn’t want to steal

your breath but

your bloodwarm hearts beat so strong…

 It doesn’t mean to borrow

your soul, to drain your marrow

through a hole in the light.

--hush, child, hush--

 Do as I say and fast.

Get behind the bottle tree, away

from water like oil like

 a long, late shadow. My children,

my loves, swamps ain’t for play.

So, we find ourselves at an... impasse. 

You have, as always, underestimated our resolve. “The Palookaville submission period will never end at noon on January 31,” you said, chuckling. “I’ll let it mature for a few more weeks, do a final development edit and then send it out. Those lunatics don’t have the stones to close the door on my magnum opus!” 

Oh, but we do have the stones, my dear. As you shall soon see. 

Twenty-four hours. You have a mere TWENTY. FOUR. HOURS. If your submission has not been sent to [email protected] in that time, there will be consequences. 

Deliciously severe consequences. 

Twenty-four hours. The conditions stand.