The Sacraments of Blackgum Lake (Lethe Press, 2026)
“The setting itself is the novel’s most arresting element, thick with muck, dead fish, and submerged histories. As events unfold, the reader begins to sense that the lake’s true horror may be the emotional rot passed between generations.” — Publishers Weekly
“The Sacraments of Blackgum Lake is a gripping tale of fathers and sons, of guilt and transformation and the inescapable pull of the past.” — Dan Chaon, author of One of Us
“Clint Smith’s slick imagery oozes with eeriness—the thick mud of the lakeside, the rotten stench of the detritus, the chilly obscurity of the night: all of it slithers under the reader’s skin until the climax unzips and the ending spills forward.” — Rebecca Rowland, Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of Eminence Front
“History is weird—how it catches up to the present, how it reveals (Denisovan tooth plaque!), & what it reveals: that the stories we believe in–the stories that define our sense of who we are in the world–are so often wrong. & if those stories are wrong…? Clint Smith’s The Sacraments of Blackgum Lake scoops up slime (personal, national, & cosmic) & slops it onto a once-familiar shore & erases now & then, hero & good-guy, & this American life.” — Adam Golaski, author of Stone Gods
“In The Sacraments of Blackgum Lake, Clint Smith transforms a deceptively mundane Midwestern backwater into a supernatural vortex of tangled histories and weird nostalgia. Much like a horrifying occurrence in the narrative, I was subsumed into the wonderfully unsettling depths of Blackgum Lake while reading Smith’s book.” — Adam Ochonicky, PhD, University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh, and author of The American Midwest in Film and Literature: Nostalgia, Violence, and Regionalism
“The Sacraments of Blackgum Lake is a knife slash of a novella; it will leave you wounded and gasping, wondering how you didn’t see the horror that was coming. Shocking, gut wrenching, and full of utterly frightening moments, this is yet another stellar title from Clint Smith, master of the weird and purveyor of the wondrous.” — Christa Carmen, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Daughters of Block Island
“In a ferocious tale of loss and betrayal, Clint Smith captures the mysteriousness of memory and the ways in which it affects one young man’s chosen path. Sentence by sentence the language is often gorgeous, creating a lush atmosphere in dream-like sequences. Urban legends of gangsters on the run are tied to more mundane yet emotionally devastating familial crimes, and both contribute to the protagonist’s understanding of adult life. For much of the story we don’t know exactly where we’re going, but the power of the writing sustains us. And when we arrive at the spot where all of the elements come together, the final pages convey the weight and sadness of experience itself. It’s a moment both deeply poetic and earned, thanks to the artistry of a considerable literary talent.” — S.P. Miskowski, author of If You Knew Me
“In The Sacraments of Blackgum Lake, nostalgia is a looming and possessive force. Author Clint Smith ushers us into another world—the idyllic wilds of the midwest—where history festers alongside the impending present. With prose that is both complex and seemingly effortless, Smith’s tale of a father-son summer project drifts deftly between timelines as the Weird encroaches.” — Carson Winter, author of Portraits of Decay
“In The Sacraments of Blackgum Lake a pervasive sense of disquieting wrongness coalesces into hauntingly weird images that lead to a chilling conclusion you won’t soon forget.” — Ramsey Campbell
“The Sacraments of Blackgum Lake is a beautiful example of what happens when a horror writer isn’t afraid to step outside the boundaries of his genre and bring back something new and exciting. Smith is inviting us to challenge ourselves––it’s an invitation I strongly recommend you take.” — David Surface, author of These Things That Walk Behind Me, and Terrible Things
“Count me as an admirer of Clint Smith. A model practitioner of contemporary weird horror.” — Laird Barron, author of Not a Speck of Light (stories)
“Simultaneously dreamlike and literally visceral, The Sacraments of Blackgum Lake explores the tension between fathers and sons, the ethics of criminality and dangers of nostalgia, and the hiding behind masks in the form of human faces. These nested tales are a terrifying and deeply weird family story, historical crime story, and monster story all at once. With his crystalline prose and the murk of the lake, Smith presents a compelling and driven novella. Sharing connective tissue with Stephen King’s The Body, and The Fisherman by John Langan, this mob-inflected Swamp Thing shows that Smith’s storytelling is comparable to both.” — Emma J. Gibbon, author of Dark Blood Comes from the Feet
“The Sacraments of Blackgum Lake should start the renaissance that Clint Smith deserves. It contains all the things that have made me love Smith’s work for years: a lean, compact story, with the author’s signature flourishes of language, soaring with rich imagery and an ending that packs a wallop. Smith manages to evoke works as disparate as This Boy’s Life by Robert McCammon and John Carpenter’s The Thing, but the voice and the heart is decidedly his own. It makes for outstanding reading.” — Douglas Ford, author of The Bloody Bucket
“Smith writes expertly of distorted memories, Depression era violence, threats lurking in sediment thick depths, and traumatic family history to form a morass as dark and immersive as sapropel. His prose is this beautiful concinnity of classic dread and contemporary terror; he’s one of the best stylists writing today. Phenomenal work as usual.” — Christopher Slatsky, author of The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature
The Skeleton Melodies (Hippocampus Press, 2020)
“Fully-realized characters and evocative prose distinguish the 13 horror tales in Smith’s outstanding second collection … This superior volume should garner Smith the wider audience he merits.” — Publishers Weekly, August, 2020
“Smith’s affect is a pendulum that swings from the classical and the mannered into his own vision of contemporary darkness; a darkness that conceals all sorts of hazards. The Skeleton Melodies is a splendid collection brim with viscerally elegant horrors.” — Laird Barron, author of Worse Angels
“Smith is a real find, an elegant stylist with an imagination that’s unsettling, paranoid, gruesomely funny at times, and startlingly original. He’s written one of the scariest sex scenes I’ve ever read, but he can even make vacuuming your own house seem scary.” — T.E.D. Klein, author of The Ceremonies and Dark Gods
“Clint Smith’s engaging stories have the verve and energy of classic pulp horror, and the character depth and attention to detail that one finds in literary fiction. Very enjoyable work!” — Dan Chaon, author of Ill Will
“With unflinching clarity and an unwavering voice, Clint Smith diagrams the locked doors, dark passages, and thin veils that separate our meager world from the myriad darknesses beneath. Haunted and harrowed, The Skeleton Melodies is a richly detailed anatomy of the horrors — human and otherwise — lurking just below that skin, as well as a postmortem of their ravages.” — Gordon B. White, author of As Summer’s Mask Slips and Other Disruptions
“Clint Smith is a wordsmith of the weird beyond compare, a writer of fierce intelligence and originality well-versed in both contemporary and classic Horror. He uses this knowledge to fashion tales of carefully-wrought brilliance, and the end result is a shadow-stricken oeuvre that is impossible to forget.” — CM Muller, author of Hidden Folk
“Witches, werewolves, and Frankenstein’s Bride: Clint Smith refashions pulp motifs from the bones of the American Midwest, transposing familiar melodies to a minor key. Disorienting and devastating.” — Daniel Mills, author of Revenants and Moriah
“The Skeleton Melodies evokes the hauntingly familiar subverted into nightmare delirium. No other writer pokes at the carcass of our mundane world to expose something malignant quivering inside quite as skillfully as Smith. Drug addicts, the apartment renter down the hall, kids poring over a stash of adult mags and worse; the resurrected flesh of old love, feral homo indomitus, or even deranged cultists, these stories offer glimpses of damaged souls confronted with the impossible. While too much weird horror seems content with concluding predictably like a baleful hand thrust from that nightmare space between bed and floor, clutching vulnerable ankles in the dead of night, Smith’s latest presents those talons as only the beginning. The Skeleton Melodies suggests these are terrors destined to deteriorate into an existential dread that may very well have no end.” — Christopher Slatsky, author of The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature
“In his compelling sophomore collection, Clint Smith dives deep into his characters’ psyches, unearthing the histories, the mysteries driving them toward horrors visceral and cosmic. His stories make reference to the work of John Cheever, of George Orwell, and his fiction displays the same attention to style, to grace and elegance of expression, which distinguishes the writing of those writers. In Smith’s work, carefully rendered portraits of daily existence open into the weird and terrifying. There are images of body horror in these pages that would not be out of place in the early films of David Cronenberg, and there are evocations of vistas immense as any in the work of Machen and Klein. With these stories, Smith solidifies and extends the gains made in his first collection, and leaves us eager for another.” — John Langan, author of Children of the Fang and Other Genealogies
Ghouljaw and Other Stories (Hippocampus Press, 2014)
“The 14 stories in Smith’s first collection of short horror fiction range from the poignant and unsettling to the viscerally horrific … Virtually all of the horrors that Smith conjures take their shape and substance from the emotional responses of characters to the estrangement, loss, or death of spouses and family members. Although narrated in a straightforward fashion, these stories have refreshingly unpredictable plots that spring their horrors unexpectedly.” — Publishers Weekly
“These smart, unsettling stories give us, with vivid detail, both the squalidly ordinary and the terrifyingly extraordinary-and make clear how closely the two are linked.” — Ben H. Winters, Edgar-Award-Winning author of The Last Policeman
When It’s Time For Dead Things To Die (Unnerving, 2019)
“Clint Smith is a true wordsmith of the weird, and this excellent story underlines that fact. The first half of When It’s Time For Dead Things To Die has all the hallmarks of a compelling gangster tale: the green protagonist who is in over his head based on a poor decision and an unwanted pregnancy; an elderly but potent crime-boss with a terrible secret; a careless, would-be usurper-son who tries to enlist the hero’s help in rising to power. Smith creates a rich, detailed and strange atmosphere–complete with compelling characters and plotline. As the story continues, though, the weirdness of the tale–suggested from the beginning by Smith’s rich, evocative and musical prose–begins to come to the fore in the shape of a truly bizarre and macabre “jukebox” and the man called Gregory Bath.” — Jon Padgett, author of The Secret of Ventriloquism and Co-Editor-In-Chief of Vastarien
Clint Smith Fiction 