Books & More

My former website, “Gorelets,” was initially a simple platform for sharing horror poems written on and for a tiny Palm Pilot device (a “PDA”) , before ebooks like the Kindle took off. It evolved to host my writer’s newsletter, a blog, and showcased my books. It also contained a lot of creative work, the best of which is collected in a book put out by Raw Dog Screaming Press , called The Gorelets Omnibus.

Due to innumerable frustrating coding issues, I made the tough decision in November 2025 to retire the site (along with the sideblog it housed, The Popular Uncanny) and start fresh under my own byline with the site you are visiting now. Gorelets is gone, but the book is still available in hardcover, paperback and ebook formats, and a sequel is in the works!

My creative newsletter — which actually won a Bram Stoker Award in the retired “Alternative Forms” category — is now defunct. I loved writing it, but over time just couldn’t stand dealing with problematic hosting platforms and spam issues anymore. It’s a real headache.

However, I think of my podcast — 6 minutes and 66 seconds — as its successor. Please follow it! I also am likely to add an announcement list here at michaelarnzen.com — you can join early on my contact page.

Mastication Publications is still in operation as my underground publishing imprint, though I’ve shuttered its website, and will merge its catalog with items on the “For Sale” page here.

I dreamed MP up in the early 1990s along with the late artist (my former wife) Renate Muller. The press was responsible for my first chapbook, Chew, and published a well-received horror poetry anthology, Psychos: An Anthology of Psychological Horror in Verse, among other things.

While the press continues to release limited run broadsides and such in the 21st century, it mostly now serves as a self-publishing outfit for ebooks and audiobooks by Arnzen which aren’t otherwise already licensed to professional companies. It is not a vanity press, so much as a rights warehouse and a punky place to chew on ideas that aren’t quite palatable to the mainstream.

Mastication Publications is NOT open to submissions at present. Do not submit.

Find our latest at your favorite ebook seller, such as amazon (some ebooks can be bough direct on Arnzen’s “For Sales” page, too).

Audio can be found at arnzen.bandcamp.com

The Popular Uncanny was an academic weblog that explored all things uncanny in popular culture. It offered me a way to continue thinking out loud about ideas I was pondering during my PhD research, and I had plans to update the study into book format. This is a project that I’ve temporarily trunked as I consider options for merging the blog’s archive into an updated book.

This site (aka “Diabolical strategies”) was closed around 2022. It was an online “lateral thinking” engine or idea generator, created as a kind of horror genre homage to Brian Eno’s infamous “Oblique Strategies” deck of cards. It also complemented my book, Instigation: Creative Prompts on the Dark Side. I may repurpose the “cards” in the future someday.

If you remember this one, you are an old timer.

This was my first website, and actually one of the first devoted to horror literature, run off a university server from 1994-8 while I was pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Oregon. The banner described it this way:

‘“arbor vitae” [pronounced ahr-burr vie-tee] or "tree of life" is also defined as "the tree-like appearance in a vertical section of the cerebellum, due to the arrangement of the white and grey nerve tissue" according to The Random House Dictionary. Picture the moldy cauliflower in your refrigerator. Now picture the core of your brain. There ya go. I'm no scientist, but I think it's a fantastic metaphor. To me, the phrase arbor vitae connotes several things: brains, guts, grotesquery, and, mostly, the ever-branching world of hypertext.’

The more things change, the more they slay the same.

Thanks for visiting my websites. I appreciate all who have indulged me over the years. I am currently working on longer works as I renew this online presence. I continue to explore new avenues for spreading the dread. Keep reading!