BOOKS
IS IT ENOUGH YET?
My debut short story collection is being published by Glory Box Press and releasing fall 2024.
Everything is always too much and not enough at the same time.
A woman who can edit your life into oblivion. Teen rebellion started with menstrual blood. Cottagecore raves that make you feel your age. Love so transformative it will make you sick. A fear of bodily betrayal that takes one to the extremes. A house for living dead girls. Dinners that are off the menu, way off. A body that screams itself bloody to be seen. Malevolent music for the jilted generation. A reconfigured fairytale for disabilities. And a femme confessional of the mundane turned to madness.
This mixtape of millennial malaise, melancholy, madness, and monstrosity is directly inspired by the music of The Strokes, The Smashing Pumpkins, Mother Mother, Sufjan Stevens, Placebo, Chvrches, Interpol, Metric, Arctic Monkeys & Taylor Swift.
Order Little Ghost Books/Pick up in store (Toronto)
KILLJOY FOR DINNER (FORTHCOMING EARLY 2026)
A hard to digest duo that contains a short horror story that decimates domestic bliss in a manner most foul and an essay describing what I call ‘dinner table horror.’
This bite-sized book cordially invites you to a dreadful dinner where you will gorge on the grotesque, masticate on the massacre of out-dated gender roles, feast on the fury of oppressed femmes and introduce you to an entirely new genre for dessert. Through the lens of Sara Ahmed’s feminist killjoy, filmic examples, and personal anecdotes, dinner table horror is served as the intense fusion of familial discord and disordered eating.
Eat up or throw up!
Pre-order - coming soon
ROT GIRL MOVEMENT (COMING FALL 2026, WHISPER HOUSE PRESS)
RESIST PSYCHIC DEATH!
START A RIOT!
They were just words Avis heard in songs. Just words--until the day of her death when she finally learned what they meant.
Behind the gates of the beautiful Granado Glades neighborhood, girls are disappearing--disintegrating, in fact. Adolescence is killer, but for thirteen years, puberty has literally plagued the community. The strange affliction forces them into quarantine, for once the rot begins, there is no stopping its steady decay from eating away every pound of young flesh and bones.
Growing femmes fear it, while the adults ritualize it. Sequestered to putrefy in private, only the stricken know the true nature of rotting. There is no mourning. No funerals. No questions. Just gone girls and their silence.
Amidst all the secrecy, last cis girl standing, Avis, has no idea what to expect when she feels the dreaded cramps and sludge oozing out of her. It’s the start of her rot and the end of everything. Nothing is what she imagined, from her parents’ reaction and the isolation protocols to her own decomposition.
There’s barely any pain, in fact, the changes in her body are almost beautiful--then there’s the smell. Avis is emitting something strangely sweet. She can’t understand the need to hide it all, or why she should be hidden away until the end. With minimal time left, too many thoughts, and songs filled with anger and angst, Avis feels something else stir in her. Energy. Injustice. Urges. Impudence. She won’t take this lying down, won’t be quiet, and won’t be forgotten like the rest.
When a girl grows up expecting to die, she forgets to live. Taking to the streets with Cass, the only other girl in town, for a final night of fun, fury, newfound friendship, and teen rebellion, the pair discover the rot runs deeper than the flesh one of them is running out of. The corruption lives deep in the core of the town’s paranoid history and has been feeding The Glades for years. Learning the sinister truth shows Avis exactly what girls are made of.
Pink horror to its core, Rot Girl Movement is a powerful and painful portrayal of girlhood. Exposing the insidious workings of the patriarchy to shelter, shame, and silence girls into submission, it doesn’t shy from graphic body horror or sugarcoat the rough but radical realities of resistance when one’s body is on the line. Set to the backdrop of the ’90s riot grrrl moment, each chapter is named for a femme song from the era. The story is structured like a song, the primary plot spliced with pre-chorus background to build tension, as well as a bridge and outro that are a crescendo kick in the guts.
Combining coming-of-rage and supernatural religious horror, the youthful protagonists do not equate to YA. It is a darkly relatable read for fans of Ginger Snaps, Camp Damascus, American Rapture, and The Haunting of Velkwood.
ANTHOLOGIES
YOUR BODY, MY RAGE: A CHARITY FEMININE RAGE HORROR ANTHOLOGY
Rage is power. Fury is creation. What does yours look like?
Your Body, My Rage is a haunting, visceral exploration of feminine rage through the lens of horror. From the grotesque to the psychological, from ghostly whispers to strangled screams, this collection showcases the bold, unapologetic voices reclaiming the narrative.
This anthology brings together a diverse array of stories and artwork, centering women, queer, and marginalized creators to create a tapestry of defiance and raw emotion with one thing in common: the men in these stories are the ones who should be scared.
Feminine rage is often silenced, misunderstood, or weaponized. This anthology aims to transform it into a source of power, action, and change. Join us in this cathartic exploration of horror and empowerment.
All proceeds go to advocacy organizations supporting women’s rights, with a focus on the Black and queer communities.
My story, Killjoy For Dinner, is what I call ‘dinner table horror.’ Think of the scene from Hereditary. Growing up, this was a tense space for an unhappy family that came with rules and a place from which it felt there was no escape.
Order it here.
THE GOTHIC: A READER
What is the Gothic?
From ghosts to vampires, from ruined castles to steampunk fashion, the Gothic is a term that evokes all things strange, haunted and sinister.
This volume offers a new look at the world of the Gothic, from its origins in the eighteenth century to its reemergence today. Each short essay is dedicated to a single text – a novel, a film, a comic book series, a festival – that serves as a lens to explore the genre. Original readings of classics like The Mysteries of Udolpho (Ann Radcliffe) and Picnic at Hanging Rock (Joan Lindsay) are combined with unique insights into contemporary examples like the music of Mexican rock band Caifanes, the novels Annihilation (Jeff VanderMeer), Goth (Otsuichi) and The Paying Guests (Sarah Waters), and the films Crimson Peak (Guillermo del Toro) and Ex Machina (Alex Garland).
Together the essays provide innovative ways of understanding key texts in terms of their Gothic elements. Invaluable for students, teachers and fans alike, the book’s accessible style allows for an engaging look at the spectral and uncanny nature of the Gothic.
My essay is about interactive gothic motifs in the game The Path by Tale of Tales. The Red Riding Hood reimagining that inspired me to make games.
Buy it from Peter Lang Press
DREAD MONDAYS: A WORKPLACE HORROR ANTHOLOGY
Dread Mondays will drown its readers in the miasma suffusing the workplaces where we toil. In this collection, the ghastly underpinnings of our daily lives, the nightmares baked into our routines, are given form. In three parts, Dread Mondays uncovers what terrifies us about the absurd mundanities we working stiffs confront in earning a paycheck. "Retail Hell" highlights some awful truths inherent in customer service. "Institutional Terror" explores the dread lurking in structured environments like libraries and schools. Finally, "Corporate Nightmare" finds ambition, technology, and alienation a ghastly breeding ground of horrific speculation. This collection offers a chilling exploration of backrooms and workplaces, where the ordinary mutates grotesquely and each profession’s unique set of horrors is well-lit and impossible to ignore. The real monsters aren’t under the bed or in the closet: They’re sitting beside us at work.
Featuring Bram Stoker Award-winners, contributors to esteemed literary magazines, 'Best of' sci-fi authors and playwrights, and emerging voices from around the world, Dread Mondays blends established talent with fresh perspectives, delivering a chilling vision of workplace horror from a diverse cast of authors.
My story, Cute Aggression, is named for and inspired by the obscure emotion. We follow a marketing executive for a beloved children’s character and her mutating relationship to the iconic idol.
Check out the list of contributing authors
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THE DARK SIDE OF GAME PLAY: CONTROVERSIAL ISSUES IN PLAYFUL ENVIRONMENTS
Games allow players to experiment and play with subject positions, values and moral choice. In game worlds players can take on the role of antagonists; they allow us to play with behaviour that would be offensive, illegal or immoral if it happened outside of the game sphere. While contemporary games have always handled certain problematic topics, such as war, disasters, human decay, post-apocalyptic futures, cruelty and betrayal, lately even the most playful of genres are introducing situations in which players are presented with difficult ethical and moral dilemmas. This volume is an investigation of "dark play" in video games, or game play with controversial themes as well as controversial play behaviour. It covers such questions as: Why do some games stir up political controversies? How do games invite, or even push players towards dark play through their design? Where are the boundaries for what can be presented in a games? Are these boundaries different from other media such as film and books, and if so why? What is the allure of dark play and why do players engage in these practices?
I contributed a chapter to this anthology called Don’t Forget to Die: A Software Update is Available for the Death Drive. I describe the trivial ways in which death is depicted in games and how, as a representation of failure, forces us into patterns of repeated play that which mirror Freud’s observations of the earliest manifestation of ‘The Death Drive’ - fort-da. This is when an infant repeatedly drops and toy onto the floor and waits for a parent to retrieve it for them, a cycle of exerting their limited agency over a guardian.
I argue, that by playing games that feature a play-die-retry structure, we are still playing that game of fort-da.
GAME LOVE: ESSAYS ON PLAY & AFFECTION
What does love have to do with gaming? As games have grown in complexity, they have increasingly included narratives that seek to engage players with love in a variety of ways. While media attention often focuses on violent emotions and behavior in gaming, love has always been central to the experience. We love to play games, we have titles that we love, and sometimes we love too much or love terrible games for their shortcomings. Love in gaming is rather like love in life—often complicated and frustrating but also exciting and gratifying. This collection of fresh essays explores the meaning and role of love in gaming, describing a number of ways—from coding to cosplay—in which love can be expressed in, for and around games. Investigating how gaming involves love is also key to understanding the growing importance of games and gamers as cultural markers.
My chapter in this collection focused on a niche fandom for kusogē, or shit games. I looked at the community who celebrates the most terrible experiences that the medium has to offer, such as the famed ET: The Extra Terrestrial Atari game that failed so famously, it killed the games industry. Far from being ironic or absurdist, these fan communities collect with love and revel with a camp affection in the discovery of weird, broken, and just plain bad games, wearing their ability to play them like a badge of honour.
This essay is about taking shit seriously.
Order McFarland