If you guessed NICK CUTTER, author of The Troop (wow, what a good guess!) You'd be correct!

We have to pass along our notes to editorial, let me know what YOU would love to see on the front cover.

Here is the full blurb:

"Gory, claustrophobic, and very dark -- this is a book best read in sunlit places, breathing fresh air, under an unobstructed blue sky." -- Nick Cutter

Hi Friends,

What did you read last week?

I am so proud of myself to sticking to my own reading schedule, so I'm about 1/4 into The Year of The Witching, our Women in Horror Book Club. This one started off kind of slow for me and I'm not really sure where it is headed. I don't feel particularly attached to the main character, Immanuelle yet.

I'm also about 1/4 into The Night Watchman, our Good Day To Read Indigenous book club pick. I am doing the audiobook, but had to pick up the physical as well so that I could do some annotating and take some notes. There are a lot of characters in this one (as to be expected in all of Erdrich's books! I am really fond of Patrice. I am concerned about Vera. And I'm also concerned about all of these creepy men!

If you want to keep up with the book club chatter, don't forget to join our community Discord.

Outside of the book club, I am reading an Indigenous sci-fi that was submitted to me for publishing consideration. I'm about 1/4 into this one as well and I'm really enjoying it. It is very, very humorous. (More to come!)

These are going to be my 3 main reads this week. I may try to pick up one of the others I've started recently also! I've never had so many books going on at the same time.

Let me know what you're reading this week below!

Hello Everyone,

I've attached the weekly community calendar of when you can expect posts from me! our Discord reading sprints and community actions.

A few things to note:

• There is one set day for Discord reading sprints (Friday the 13th, oooooh) I might add a Saturday or Sunday, just not sure what my weekend looks like yet

• On Wednesday, I'm asking everyone to share a post about What Feeds Below. This could look like, a review, a photo of the cover, or just reposting something that I or Tatianna post! The goal is to make sure people are seeing What Feeds Below in their feeds!

• Saturday is support our Bookstore day! This month, Boozhoo Books is supporting Black Walnut Books, an indie Indigenous, queer woman owned bookstore. The idea is that we all buy at lease one book from her this Saturday (I tried to make it after pay day!) You can buy directly from her site or you can click any of the books on one of Bindery posts and you can support us both at the same time. This would also be a GREAT TIME :) to preorder a copy of What Feeds Below! Your early preorders could help guarantee we get to publish a book in Fall 2027! There are over 2,000 of us here. Imagine the difference we can make in one day for an indie bookstore and an author.

  

Bookclub Weekly (join the Discord)

Good Day To Read Indigenous: The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich: The Wake up Shave-The Star POWOW, pg 116-228

Women in Horror: The Year of the Witching by Alexis Henderson: Chapter 10-19 (read until Part 2, pg 91-176

Reading Indigenous voices on identity is a great way to understand history that has been suppressed, to correct false narratives and to counter erasure. Here are some books by Indigenous authors, both fiction and non-fiction, that center on Indigenous identity to add to your TBR.

Non Fiction

1. The Indian Card: Who Gets To Be Native In America by Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz,

A groundbreaking and deeply personal exploration of Tribal enrollment, and what it means to be Native American in the United States.

1. Truth Telling: Seven Conversations About Indigenous Life in Canada by Michelle Good

A provocative collection of essays exploring the historical and contemporary Indigenous experience in Canada.

1. Thunder Song: Essays by Sasha LaPointe

Drawing on a rich family archive as well as the anthropological work of her late great-grandmother, Sasha LaPointe explores themes ranging from indigenous identity and stereotypes to cultural displacement and environmental degradation to understand what our experiences teach us about the power of community, commitment, and conscientious honesty.

Unapologetically punk, the essays in Thunder Song segue from the miraculous to the mundane, from the spiritual to the physical, as they examine the role of art—in particular music—and community in helping a new generation of indigenous people claim the strength of their heritage while defining their own path in the contemporary world.

4: Making Love With The Land: Essays by Joshua Whitehead

A moving and deeply personal excavation of Indigenous beauty and passion in a suffering world

In prose that is evocative and sensual, unabashedly queer and visceral, raw and autobiographical, Joshua Whitehead writes of an Indigenous body in pain, coping with trauma.

Deeply rooted within, he reaches across the anguish to create a new form of storytelling he calls "biostory"—beyond genre, and entirely sovereign. Through this narrative perspective, Making Love with the Land recasts mental health struggles and our complex emotional landscapes from a nefarious parasite on his (and our) well-being to kin, even a relation, no matter what difficulties they present to us. Whitehead ruminates on loss and pain without shame or ridicule but rather highlights waypoints for personal transformation.

Written in the aftermath of heartbreak, before and during the pandemic, Making Love with the Land illuminates this present moment in which both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people are rediscovering old ways and creating new ones about connection with and responsibility toward each other and the land.

1. Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future by Patty Krawec

   The invented history of the Western world is crumbling fast, Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec says, but we can still honor the bonds between us. Settlers dominated and divided, but Indigenous peoples won't just send them all "home."

   Weaving her own story with the story of her ancestors and with the broader themes of creation, replacement, and disappearance, Krawec helps listeners see settler colonialism through the eyes of an Indigenous writer.

   Settler colonialism tried to force us into one particular way of living, but the old ways of kinship can help us imagine a different future. Krawec asks, What would it look like to remember that we are all related? How might we become better relatives to the land, to one another, and to Indigenous movements for solidarity? Braiding together historical, scientific, and cultural analysis, Indigenous ways of knowing, and the vivid threads of communal memory, Krawec crafts a stunning, forceful call to "unforget" our history.

   This remarkable sojourn through Native and settler history, myth, identity, and spirituality helps us retrace our steps and pick up what was lost along the way: chances to honor rather than violate treaties, to see the land as a relative rather than a resource, and to unravel the history we have been taught

Fiction

1. There There by Tommy Orange

   A wondrous and shattering award-winning novel that follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize.

2. A Girl Called Echo by Katerina Vermette

   Echo Desjardins, a 13-year-old Métis girl adjusting to a new home and school, is struggling with loneliness while separated from her mother. Then an ordinary day in Mr. Bee’s history class turns extraordinary, and Echo’s life will never be the same. During Mr. Bee’s lecture, Echo finds herself transported to another time and place―a bison hunt on the Saskatchewan prairie―and back again to the present. In the following weeks, Echo slips back and forth in time. She visits a Métis camp, travels the old fur-trade routes, and experiences the perilous and bygone era of the Pemmican Wars.

3. The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich (our bookclub read this month!)

Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich’s grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C., this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.

1. Buffalo is the New Buffalo by Chelsea Vowell

   Powerful stories of “Métis futurism” that envision a world without violence, capitalism, and colonization.

   “Education is the new buffalo” is a metaphor widely used among Indigenous peoples in Canada to signify the importance of education to their survival and ability to support themselves, as once Plains nations supported themselves as buffalo peoples. The assumption is that many of the pre-Contact ways of living are forever gone, so adaptation is necessary. But Chelsea Vowel asks, “Instead of accepting that the buffalo, and our ancestral ways, will never come back, what if we simply ensure that they do?”
   
   Inspired by classic and contemporary speculative fiction, Buffalo Is the New Buffalo explores science fiction tropes through a Métis lens: a Two-Spirit rougarou (shapeshifter) in the nineteenth century tries to solve a murder in her community and joins the nêhiyaw-pwat (Iron Confederacy) in order to successfully stop Canadian colonial expansion into the West. A Métis man is gored by a radioactive bison, gaining super strength, but losing the ability to be remembered by anyone not related to him by blood. Nanites babble to babies in Cree, virtual reality teaches transformation, foxes take human form and wreak havoc on hearts, buffalo roam free, and beings grapple with the thorny problem of healing from colonialism.
   
   Indigenous futurisms seek to discover the impact of colonization, remove its psychological baggage, and recover ancestral traditions. These eight short stories of “Métis futurism” explore Indigenous existence and resistance through the specific lens of being Métis. Expansive and eye-opening, Buffalo Is the New Buffalo rewrites our shared history in provocative and exciting ways.

2. Warrior Girl Unearthed by Angeline Boulley

   Perry Firekeeper-Birch has always known who she is - the laidback twin, the troublemaker, the best fisher on Sugar Island. Her aspirations won't ever take her far from home, and she wouldn't have it any other way. But as the rising number of missing Indigenous women starts circling closer to home, as her family becomes embroiled in a high-profile murder investigation, and as greedy grave robbers seek to profit off of what belongs to her Anishinaabe tribe, Perry begins to question everything.
   
   In order to reclaim this inheritance for her people, Perry has no choice but to take matters into her own hands. She can only count on her friends and allies, including her overachieving twin and a charming new boy in town with unwavering morals. Old rivalries, sister secrets, and botched heists cannot - will not - stop her from uncovering the mystery before the ancestors and missing women are lost forever.
   
   Sometimes, the truth shouldn't stay buried.

• Which ones have you read? Which ones are on your TBR? Which ones are you reading soon?

• To join the bookclub, join the Discord!

• As a reminder, any book purchased through my bookshop this month, benefits Black Walnut Books, an Indigenous, Woman and Queer owned bookstore. Check these books out below!

Wow! Thank you so much to everyone who has requested What Feeds Below on Netgalley- request here! We are now the number one most requested book in Horror and we are number 6 most requested in all of YA! That is so amazing!!!

Early reviews are in:

If you were approved on Netgalley, please review on Netgalley and Goodreads! These reviews help so much!

If you haven’t preordered yet, Please Order Here

Your preorder supports me, Tatiana and Black Walnut Books, an Indigenous, queer woman owned bookstore.

Early preorders will also make it possible for me to publish another book next year (and I’m reading some really great Indigenous and horror ones right now. If we don’t get enough early preorders- I may miss out on a great story! Please help if you can!)

Thank you so much for supporting me and for all the love you’ve shown Tatiana and this book! We could not do this without you!

I have just under 60 books left for sale!

Some of these are covers that are no longer in circulation, editions no longer in circulation, special editions!

If the book isn’t gone by next Thursday night, it will be in a free little library by Friday morning!

Every order comes with a What Feeds Below bookmark! And orders over $40 come with a What Feeds Below coloring page!

LAST CHANCE! Rescue my books

Carnalis by Tiffany Morris

You know I was obsessed with Tiffany's Indigenous sapphic swamp horror novella Green Fuse Burning, so I cannot wait to dive into Carnalis!

Wealthy party girl Lauren hungers for human flesh. Her girlfriend Alex, a recently injured dancer, is trapped in Lauren's toxic and deadly spiral. The looming threat of capture may prove to be less dangerous than Lauren herself and the lengths she will go to satiate her needs. Will Alex be next on the menu?

Rich bitches? Cannibalism? My favorite!

The Curse of Hester Gardens by Tamika Thompson

We Need to Talk about Kevin as if written by Jason Reynolds and Tananarive Due meets Model Home by Rivers Solomon in an innovative twist on the haunted house novel: about a mother desperate to protect her sons from the twin specters of gun violence and otherworldly menace in their public housing project.

Haunted house horror in the projects? Are you kidding me right now?

Also, blurbed by one of the greats: “Ringing with lyricism and suspense, The Curse of Hester Gardens is a compelling vision of the horror of trying to raise sons in public housing haunted by violence. Despite ghosts and the uncanny, the true terror is the trap of poverty, which tests a mother's love to its limits. Tamika Thompson's sharp characterization and insightful storytelling make this a must-read.” —Tananarive Due, Los Angeles Book Prize and Bram Stoker Award winner, The Reformatory

Indigent by Briana Cox

Live-in handyman Xavier seems to be the only one who notices. Or cares. After a chance encounter with the culprit leaves him infected with something horrifying, Xavier is thrust into a surreal nightmare of starvation and consumption all too familiar to his gentrifying Atlanta neighborhood.

Succumbing to his infection, Xavier is drawn into the cobbled-together family squatting in Leigh Pierce's basement. People who, through a myriad of doomed roads, fell into the same self-destructive cycle of indigency, harboring dark secrets... and darker appetites. Trapped in a dynamic of codependency and complicity, Xavier and his family- new and old- are forced to confront the cost of survival in a world that has disregarded them.

A horror that goes after healthcare? Yeah. Sign me up right now.

Aviary by Maria Dong

A young woman undertakes a terrifying journey―and a terrifying transformation―in this genre-blending speculative suspense novel set in South Korea and the US which mixes fantasy, gothic vibes and queer longing, with a shot of feminist body horror.

This is a horror about violence, power, exploitation and transformation. NEED.

The Sea Hides Its Dead by Megan Bontrager

Trapped in an underwater cave, a group of academics must face a series of deadly, supernatural trials—each one demanding they confront their darkest sins—in this chilling aquatic cult horror debut

Academics studying a sea cult? Trials underwater in a cave to survive? Inject it into my veins. This is crazy.

Will you be adding any of these to your TBR?

As a reminder, any book purchased through my bookshop this month, benefits Black Walnut Books, an Indigenous, Woman and Queer owned bookstore. Check these books out below!

I had the worst reading month in February that I've had in a long time. Anyone else?

I only managed to read 5 books!

What Feeds Below by Tatiana Schlote-Bonne (reread, ebook, arc) I knew that the arc was going to go up on NETGALLEY, GO REQUEST NOW! so I wanted to reread so I could experience the all the fun and horror with all of you. (Yes, I will very likely reread in October before release!)

The book was so much fun to read a second time, picking up on all of the little details I missed. What a crazy, bonkers, imaginitive world. I just love this book so much and I can't wait to read it again. And I can't wait for it to be turned into a horror movie franchise. Who said I can't predict the future?

Speaking of buzz, I finished Buzzard (ebook, arc) by Inez Ray, this is the third book coming out from Michael Laborn's imprint Left Unread. This is a dystopian tale following the last midwife, who is in prison for giving abortions. This is an uncomfortable read that pays off in all the ways you want it to. Incredible storytelling. Current. Gut wrenching. This absolutely should be made into a television series. Add it to your TBRs, right NOW!

Lost Girls of Hollow Lake (audiobook) by Rebekah Faubion this is a solid Yellowjackets comp. Fans of the show will enjoy this. I had a good time with this one. I really wanted more of the island. The relationship with the dog really saved this one for me.

The Trees (audiobook) by Percival Everett was an unexpected read. I saw this on a bunch of horror book recommendations list and while there may or may not be something supernatural going on, I'd say this book leans more literary. Despite the miscategorization, this was a phenomenal read. It follows two detectives in Mississippi investigating some brutal murders in a very racist town. Historical, beautiful, brutal. A must read. If it's on your TBR, move it up immediately.

When Devils Sing (audiobook) by Xan Kaur, YA southern gothic, diverse. A rich town that preys on poor people like their survival depends on it. A deal made with demons. Multi-pov that really works. Moody, atmospheric, thoroughly enjoyable.

Overall, while I didn't read much, I did enjoy what I was able to read. Hoping to double my reads in March!

What was your favorite read in March?

As a reminder, any book purchased through my bookshop this month, benefits Black Walnut Books, an Indigenous, Woman and Queer owned bookstore. Check these books out below!

Run. Request. Read. Review!

I am so, so excited for folks to start reading What Feeds Below, by Tatiana Schlote Bonne, the very first book from this imprint!

This is a YA Horror Fantasy that is unputdownable!

Let me know if you requested down below!

Request here

I still have 60 or so books left for sale! I’ve added a 10 percent discount. If I don’t sell it by 3/13, they’ll all go to free little libraries!

Check out the books

I’m adding a What Feeds Below bookmark to all orders and will add a What Feeds Below coloring page to all orders over $40 (before discount!)