6/3/26
My youngest took his first solo road trip yesterday. New adult achievement unlocked for him, and new parental anxiety achievement unlocked for me.
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Via MarketWatch: The entire $12 trillion creative economy may now be at risk from AI. Let me fix that headline for you, MarketWatch. Change the word “may” to “is”.
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Women In Horror Year: Day 50
Mayan Blue by the Sisters of Slaughter (Michelle Garza and Melissa Lason)
Xibalba, home of torture and sacrifice, is the kingdom of the lord of death. He stalked the night in the guise of a putrefied corpse, with the head of an owl and adorned with a necklace of disembodied eyes that hung from nerve cords. He commanded legions of shapeshifting creatures, spectral shamans, and corpses hungry for the flesh of the living. The Mayans feared him and his realm of horror. He sat atop his pyramid temple surrounded by his demon kings and demanded sacrifices of blood and beating hearts as tribute to him and his ghostly world.
These legends, along with those that lived in fear of them, have been dead and gone for centuries. Yet now, a doorway has been opened in Georgia. A group of college students seek their missing professor, a man who has secretly uncovered the answer to one of history’s greatest mysteries. However, what they find is more than the evidence of a hidden civilization. It’s also a gateway to a world of living nightmares.
Originally published in 2016, Mayan Blue remains one of the most thunderous debut novels on the indie scene to come out over the last decade. A collaboration by real-life sisters Michelle Garza and Melissa Lason (who’d been writing together since they were kids, and who were soon dubbed the Sisters of Slaughter by the editors at Fireside Press) the first novel earned a Bram Stoker Award nomination, accolades from readers, critics, and authors alike, and gave one would-be edgelord more than he bargained for when the ragebait engagement he sought by shitting on it turned into his first (but not last) public dragging from a wide variety of folks on the internet.
Mayan Blue takes that old trope of the archaeological expedition gone terribly awry and turns it on its head. Four college students and an assistant archeology professor go into the meat grinder after their professor, another archeologist, proposes that the Mayan culture existed all the way up to Georgia in North America. What follows is a unique, vividely-realized, no-hold-barred novel that is refreshing in its prose style and relentless in its plotting and descriptions. One part Scott Sigler’s The Ruins, one part slasher, and two parts Edward Lee’s Infernal series if reimagined by Adam Cesare — Mayan Blue is a kaleidoscope of grotesqueries, shape-shifting deities, and sharp characterization based on meticulously researched history. There’s a reason this debut arrived with such a thunderclap, and every single one of those accolades was deserved. Mayan Blue is available in paperback and eBook from Crossroad Press.
