Rotary Press (2026)

The Black Recluse is an assemblage of letters, program guides, stories, scripts, historical analyses, legal papers, scholarly chapters, journal entries, and other documents that combine to tell the story of Amelia Whitehearse, a woman who recorded the haunting and horrific experiences of her life in Victorian America in nine pseudo-autobiographical stories collected posthumously as The Hooded Cradle and Other Tales. Narrated in part by Thomas Lockland, Whitehearse’s primary biographer, The Black Recluse follows his path of obsession with the author and details his steady decent into her unsettling pathology. When Lockland learns of a potential tenth story hidden somewhere in Whitehearse’s Gothic Revival house museum that may explain the mystery of her disappearance in 1889, he ventures to her hometown of Chandler in an attempt to answer this and the central question threaded through all of the texts: Was Amelia Whitehearse in fact the daughter of Death?

Praise for Joshua Rex

“I love to read Josh Rex. He’s the poet’s novelist. Dark, funny, mysterious–Josh creates pages that are a joy to get lost in. I would lavish more praise on him if I weren’t so jealous of his writing.”
– NY Times Best-Selling Novelist THOMAS LENNON

“One of the dynamic young luminaries of weird fiction. There are very few writers about whom one can say that they are a pleasure to read regardless of subject-matter, but Joshua Rex is one of them. There is a sheer intelligence to his writing that is highly impressive. He wields a prose style of admirable fluency, elegance, and emotive power, and his weird conceptions are strikingly original and vital.”
– S. T. JOSHI

“A fantastic new talent with a deep appreciation of history, an eye for the telling metaphor and above all a flair for storytelling.”
– SHIRLEY JACKSON AWARD-WINNER ALISON LITTLEWOOD