Have you always wanted to join a book club, but just can’t find the one for you? Tired of mom trying to recruit you to read The Vowwith her friends? Wanna read great horror fiction and chat about it with like-minded folks? Well, the Dreadful Tales Book Club is the group for you because this ain’t yo mamma’s book club!

What do I have to do to join, you ask?

(1)   Get a copy of the book of the month.
(2)    Visit The Mortuary: THE PSYCHOPEDIA NECRONOMICON forum, Book Club – April 2012 thread, to chat with readers about the book.

And that’s it. Pretty simple, huh?

For those that don’t know, The Mortuary was formerly The Rue Mortuary, Rue Morgue Magazine’s official online forum, until it was shut down due to a lack of activity. Turns out people had to lose their favorite online hangout to realize how important it is to the horror community. Seeing the devastation this caused longtime board members, Stuart F. Andrews (a.k.a. FEEDBACK) stepped in to revive our beloved boards. FEEDBACK recruited Cinephobia Radio’s webmaster Craig Clark to get the boards in working order (which was arduous and time consuming) and Rue Mortuary veteran Mark Brown (a.k.a. Dark Mark) to design the layout for our new bloody playground and now we’re back in black!

You can find out more about the resurrection of the boards at The Mortuary, but the short version is our online forum is alive again, a place where we can chat about all things horror with great folks. There’s even a separate forum dedicated just to horror literature (novels, plays, poems, essays, and reference books), THE PSYCHOPEDIA NECRONOMICON, which will be the new home for the Dreadful Tales Book Club.

April 2012 marks the launch of the Book Club and I hope many of you can join me to read and chat about this month’s title. We’ll have opportunities to hold Q&As with authors sometimes too, so this will be loads of fun and a great way to connect with fans and writers alike.

The inaugural book of the Dreadful Tales Book Club – April, 2012 is – drum role, please! – Zippered Flesh: Tales of Body Enhancement Gone Bad! (Smart Rhino Publications 2012) edited by Weldon Burge. It’s a collection of about 20 short stories including contributions from Graham Masterton, John Shirley, Scott Nicholson, Lisa Mannetti and others. Zippered Flesh is readily available in paperback or Kindle format here.

Get a copy of Zippered Flesh, join the forums to chat about the book, and let’s get weird!

Hope to “see” you there.