BLACKGUM LAKE Stains a Page In RUE MORGUE Magazine

I’ve been slacking on this one.

With a degree of (welcomed) astonishment, I’d like to note that the latest issue of Rue Morgue magazine (#231) includes a favorable review of The Sacraments of Blackgum Lake (Lethe Press). Monica S. Kuebler writes, “Clint Smith’s The Sacraments of Blackgum Lake offers up a solid reminder that not every cabin-in-the-woods story is a slasher tale—and that our genre is infinitely better for that variety.” 

Read more of Kuebler’s reflections of TSoBL in the July/August, 2026 “Summer Slasher” issue of Rue Morgue.

A Wound That Never Heals

The recently-released anthology, Male Pattern Violence (CultureCult Press, 2026), contains my story, “The Gyrification of Violence.” Edited by the press’s founder, Jay Chakravarti, the story is a reprint-inclusion originally appearing in Vastarien: A Literary Journal (lamentably on indefinite hiatus, but hopefully in some dark hibernation).

“The Third of May 1808,” Francisco Goya (1814)

Male Pattern Violence houses thirty-five stories from an eclectic selection of contributors. “From the housing projects of France to the fishing villages of Bangladesh, from Victorian England to the digital wastelands of social media moderation, Male Pattern Violence traces the architecture of male violence: not as aberrations, but as a pattern, perpetuated consciously or otherwise, since time immemorial.” 

“The Third of May 1808,” Francisco Goya (1814)

As for my own offering, the editor’s intro follows: “A single punch in a middle-school hallway, then decades of aftershocks. [Clint] Smith dissects male violence not as spectacle, but as a wound that never heals.”