Best Collection: Clairviolence: Tales of Tarot and Torment by Mo Moshaty (Tenebrous Press)
The Tarot holds mystery, prediction, and unsettling omens for those who practice, divine, or are sensitive to it. A turn of the cards weaves CLAIRVIOLENCE through space and time to delve into the stories of those shaken by life-shattering choices that threaten to tear their souls apart:
A warring couple is forced to reconcile during the end of the world.
A young man is drawn into the surreal prison-scape of an elderly woman.
A dead woman’s curse travels miles and decades to bring her killer to justice.
CLAIRVIOLENCE: TALES OF TAROT AND TORMENT unearths one novelette and ten short stories– each one exclusive to this volume– beneath the exterior of an otherwise charmed and quiet existence.
“The Horror take on Tarot I didn’t know I needed.” –Melody Cooper, OMNI, African Ghost Short Stories
“Unsettling and thought-provoking. Moshaty’s characters rise from the page.” –Tim McGregor, Lure and Eynhallow
“Mo knows what horror lovers want. Incredible tales from an incredible talent. These stories pop.” –Mark Matthews, To Those Willing To Drown
“Mo Moshaty has dealt a killer hand with CLAIRVIOLENCE.” -Clay McLeod Chapman, Wake Up and Open Your Eyes
Mo Moshaty is a writer, lecturer, and producer. She has incorporated her extensive Horror background, as well as her career as a Cognitive Behavioral Therapist, into lectures with Prairie View A&M in Texas as a keynote speaker for Nightmares from Monkeypaw: A Jordan Peele Symposium; Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies on From Inside the House: Dissecting Women’s Trauma in Horror, and The Whole Damn Swarm: 30 Years of Candyman with University of Sheffield; Fear2000 for The Horror Evolution Will Be Colorized; and many more.
She is a core member and producer with Nyx Horror Collective, whose 13 Minutes of Horror Film Festival screened on Shudder; of Stowe Story Labs, a collective focused on supporting woman-identifying creatives over 40 working in the Horror genre; and she is the Editor-in-Chief of NightTide Magazine. Mo featured in 160 Black Women in Horror by Sumiko Saulson, Kenya Moss-Dyme, and Kai Leakes. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous venues, and her novella, Love the Sinner (Brigids Gate), was released in 2022. Beginning in 2026, Mo will be releasing a multi-volume non-fiction exploration of Horror across history and cultures, THE ANNEX OF OBSCURITIES, also through Tenebrous Press.
Not bad for a little Brown girl from NY who fell in love with space, Frye and Laurie, and slasher films.
Best Novel: Black Brane by Michael Cisco (Clash Books)
“An unapologetic and disorienting journey into theoretical physics and the uncanny mystery of holes. You don’t need to be aware of Ligotti’s work to enjoy Black Brane; you just have to be open to a type of weird fiction that is less about plot and satisfying resolutions and more invested in the uncanny and testing the fabric of reality.” -LOCUS
“The alchemy of words ceasing to be words, words seamlessly melting before our eyes into grandiose imagery, into soaring hallucination, into fever dreams that tap directly into our subconscious and perfectly describe emotions that cannot be described is something no author achieves with more effect than Michael Cisco.” -Paul Tremblay, author of The Cabin at the End of the World
Weird fiction icon and award-winning author Michael Cisco’s Black Brane, begins with the physical pain of a bad foot and later voyages into absurdity, mad science, occultism, and existential dread.
A man lying in a bed of pain flees from physical torment into his own memories, and into speculations about life and reality. He was, once, employed by the Temporary Institute for the Study of Holes, a think tank pursuing research that ranges from occult studies to advanced physics, including black holes-or, as they are known in string theory, black branes.
He meets and interacts with the various other members of the institute. Its founder, Dr. Marilyn Shitansky, a formerly homeless woman who claims to have a thinking hole in her brain; its resident occultist, the chain-smoking Daladara with his magic abacus; Ernie Allegre the engineer, who designed and built a decoherence reactor to power the institute; Dr. Liu, the string theorist; the linguist Dr. Corngholm, who can’t sit still; and Dr. Shitansky’s secretary, Renbrui, who seems to carry a mystery with her wherever she goes.
In memory, the speaker finds them again, in a story of physical and emotional pain, of social and quantum entanglement, that turns comic, speculative, and nightmarish. Echoing the work of Blake Crouch and Thomas Ligotti, Michael Cisco shows in Black Brane why he’s beloved by weird fiction and horror readers.
Michael Cisco is an American writer, Deleuzian academic, teacher, and translator living in New York City. He is best known for his first novel, The Divinity Student, which won the International Horror Guild Award for Best First Novel of 1999. His novel The Great Lover was nominated for the 2011 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel of the Year, and declared the Best Weird Novel of 2011 by the Weird Fiction Review. His nonfiction book, Weird Fiction: A Genre Study, was nominated for a HWA Stoker award in 2023. Pest, a novel, was published by CLASH in 2023. He teaches at CUNY Hostos.
He is interested in confusion.
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Congratulations to the winners, runners-up, honorable mentions, all the authors and publishers from your friends at Bizarro Central. We are excited to see what art blossoms in the wake of 2026 and what 2027 will bring.
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