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Available for preorder NOW. Copies should start shipping on or around May 24. For wholesale purchasing, contact us directly at [email protected]
Welcome to the lore of David Simmons: four stories that read like a lost history of Baltimore, drug users staring into the uncanny, an apocryphal account of those in the trenches. These are ordinary people butting up against extraordinary circumstances; there’s emotional weight and prose that cuts like a knife while dripping style. This is David Simmons’ world, we’re just lucky enough to live in it.
— Justin Lutz, author of Gemini Rising and Gone to Seed
The fifth volume in the BRUISER Zines series, Foul Black Rookeries is a collection of four stories by Baltimore writer David Simmons. Printed and assembled in Baltimore, this limited edition zine is a startling portrait of Baltimore as seen through Simmons’ grimy lens, taking the warts-and-all approach of crime fiction and pushing it somewhere stranger and more terrifying.
Simmons is a chameleon of prose, slipping into the minds of his characters and the landscapes of his bizarro Baltimore with ease, imbuing each story with a profound authenticity borne not only from an attentiveness to the world, but even more so a clear and ineffable passion for the inner workings of things– whether they be fantastic biologies or makeshift weapons or philosophical frameworks. It’s all as real as it is surreal.
— Arzhang Zafar, author of Founders’ Day(BRUISER Zine 003)
David Simmons is the Joyce Carol Oates of Charm City.
— Brian Allen Carr, author of Opioid, Indiana and Bad Foundations
David Simmons is the most exciting, wildest writer I’ve come across in years.He’ll make you wince from horror, laugh from dialogue, and then, when you’re distracted by eldritch gods and conceptual madness, he’ll emotionally gut you. One of the very best.
— e. rathke, author of Howl and Glossolalia
Foul Black Rookeries is a small collection of short stories with a brilliant yet uncompromising imagination and colossal prose. You’ll find an intermingling of urban grit with old school horror sensibilities that only Simmons could cook up. These stories will cut you with a surgeon’s precision and unearth emotions you didn’t even know were lying dormant.
— Grant Wamack, author of Bullet Tooth
David Simmons burst on the scene with a voice so confident and precise that he must have honed it in a past life. He will be one of the greats. I have no doubt about that.
— J. David Osborne, author of Dying World and War in Heaven
Not since Vonnegut has there been a more distinct and perfect alchemy of absurdism, heart, and intellect than in the work of David Simmons.
— Kelby Losack, author of Mercy and Letting Out The Devils
Simmons replicates the experience of stress into a surrealism of violence. Not a portrait of evil but of its consequences.
— O.F. Cieri, author of Backmask
