Brenda S. Tolian is a member of HWA, the Angela Carter Society, and Denver Horror Collective. She earned her B. A in Secondary English at Adams State University and her MFA from Regis University in Creative Writing and is currently earning her Doctorate in Literature at Murray State University. Brenda is a lead instructor at Denver's Alchemy Writing Workshop in Dark Fiction. Her work appears in Haunted Mtl.com, the Anthology 101 Proof Horror, Twisted Pulp Magazine issue 3, the Denver Horror Collective's anthology Consumed Tales Inspired by The Wendigo, and the forthcoming The Jewish Book of Horror. She also co-hosts The Burial Plot Horror Podcast with Joy Yehle. Currently, she writes about the haunted high San Luis Valley surrounded by the Sangre de Cristo and the San Juan Mountain ranges—known for its eerie tales of cannibals, skinwalkers, UFOs, cults, vortexes, and other strange occurrences.

Blood Mountain by Brenda S. Tolian

In this mosaic of Southwestern Gothic Horror tales, a primordial goddess awakens deep within the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The mountain hungers for revenge as invaders leave her emaciated with their greed and brutality. She cries out for blood, infusing the minds of those who do not belong—twisting them outwardly into the dark forms of their true intentions.

An Under Sheriff struggles to grasp brittle threads of hope within the valley and mountains, his soul tormented by the unanswered questions of crimes he can't explain and the dead and missing he could not help. The demented Red Women fracture the meaning of being maiden, mother, and crone within the shadows of twisted belief systems. Men and women devolve into the grotesque, drowning in their greed and violence transmuting into creatures too hideous to name. Others find seduction on her rocky hips and release within the baptism of her blood. The valley steeped in cults and crime hides something dark, where mirage plays with the senses, disappearances go unexplained, UFOs and creatures await watching in hunger.

This composite of interwoven stories and brief vignettes invites the reader to hear the hypnotic call of the Blood Mountain. Will she ask you into her vortex or swallow you whole?

CURATOR'S NOTE

Monsters emerge from memory and myth to wreak vengeance on those who dare transgress in the interwoven Southwestern Gothic tales that make up Brenda S. Tolian's mosaic novel Blood Mountain. Set in Colorado's beautiful and harsh San Luis Valley, home to legends of skinwalkers, UFOs, cults, cannibals, vortexes and even stranger Americana, Tolian's dark fables sing from the mountaintops and echo hungrily from the abyss. – Mike Allen

 

REVIEWS

  • "Along the face of Tolian's mountain: real horrors exist beside sudden, lavish declarations. Angsts and awes, polished and raw. A mosaic of mountain songs that penetrate all the way to the beating, blood heart. A tremendous knotting of setting, mood, and mind."

    – Josh Malerman, New York Times best selling author of Bird Box and Goblin

  • "...a bloody mosaic novel that brings together smart writing and pure horror with beautiful prose and important topics. At once a powerful chant about Earth and womanhood, a shapeshifting narrative packed with blood that centers Otherness, and a strange literary creature that slides into your flesh..."

    – Gabino Iglesias, Coyote Songs

  • "Brenda Sue Tolian never flinches at staring into the abyss and reporting precisely what she finds in the darkness. Her stark, provocative prose sticks in your memory like a fish hook into your eye."

    – Stanley Wiater, host of Dark Dreamers
 

BOOK PREVIEW

Excerpt

[1]

Your eyes drag across the valley, rolling over the uncountable hunched forms of sage and rabbitbrush. Not for the first time, you wonder what it would have been like living anywhere else in America. Your sight travels from the rearview mirror then drops through the windshield resting on the hot mirage that wavers before the Great Sand Dunes. Each location carries a memory both good and bad for you. It's the bad that has your guts tied up. You sigh, your vision ripped across the rocky sides of the Sangre de Cristo mountains.

"Blood of Christ," were the last words of the first priest before he died here so long ago. Blood of Christ might just be your last recollection. The asphalt shimmers under the sun almost like it could be melting. You see a raven and a hawk sharing opposite ends of a telephone pole, just waiting for something to turn up dead.

Your coffee went cold hours ago, and the department radio is silent, only waking to sputter fuzz or clip a report of some speeder on Highway 17, twenty miles behind you. The AM radio crackles then rolls into Eddy Arnold yodeling the beginning of "Cattle Call." Your wife Sandy probably has supper laid out on the table, waiting for you to pull up in the drive. Even if you left now, it would be close to an hour before your headlights lit up the front step. Your fingers curl around the steering wheel, but the patrol car is not on, not moving.

Your Glock 19 lies across your lap, black and cold. You've been thinking about it for an hour. Not the first time, and if you don't pick it up and press the barrel to your head, it won't be the last—a game of Russian roulette, the cylinder spinning in your brain.

Every time you cut out of a crime scene, you drive here, wrestling with the demons of valley and mountain. You hear the voices of the dead. They call out in singsong from caves, old mine shafts, and under floorboards. They scream from the belly of the mountain herself. They push fingers from inside, scraping to get out in your daydreams and nightmares: the ones you found, and the ones still listed as missing.

Today they found a head and two hands minus a body, left on a Buddha shrine up on the holy highway. The head even had payment for the afterlife left under the tongue—a shiny 1979 Iraqi Dinar someone said. Didn't matter it was crazy, that made it almost normal to you; a U.S. quarter would have seemed strange. Normal here was strange.

The dead eat part of your soul. You never forget. It's like a movie reel of corpses that just got tattooed into your psyche. You can't run away because they only follow in dreams and flash up, glitching in the daylight. No one who knew could argue that you didn't follow every clue, every tip called in. The public destroy you on cable and pop-up internet podcasts, but they don't understand that you are left a hollow man.

Your grandfather warned you that the job takes something from you daily, but you didn't listen even after he told you the stories days before he blew his brains out. Your daddy obeyed and became a low-key government official straying far from enforcement. But you—you took that badge as a challenge, ignoring all the old man said.

"Blackwood?" a voice asks wrapped around static from the P25 radio.

You ignore it at first, moving your hand over the gun and then hanging it out the window.

"Dave, Sandy has called in twice."

Silence.

"She's worried about you."

You lift your hand, dropping it till it hovers over the gun before reaching for the radio. You click the button filling up radio space, air, speech. Your eyes still locked on the mountains that seem to transcend from blush into blood.

"Tell my wife I'll be there in a while."

You hold the radio to your lips, watching out the window. You want to say so much more, but you don't.

Your grandfather lived longer than most, and those stories, when he told them, made you wonder if he suffered from fragility of mind. They seemed impossible, dreamed up to scare you out of taking the badge. He told the first one directly from his father—cracking open the great hunger of the mountain. You enjoyed that first tale, but he didn't tell it with the usual humorous glint in his eye; in fact, he said it with dead seriousness. When you still didn't believe he pulled out an old yellow newsprint dated from the 1880s.

Cannibal escaped from Cottonwood Jail House…