![The Wingspan of Severed Hands by [Joanna Koch]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41zaYIQKeEL.jpg)
THE BOOK: The Wingspan of Severed Hands
PUBLISHED IN: December 2020
THE AUTHOR: Joe Koch (formerly Joanna Koch)
THE EDITOR: Sam Richard
THE PUBLISHER: Weirdpunk Books
SUMMARY:
Three Women, One Battle
A world gone mad. Cities abandoned. Dreams invade waking minds. An invisible threat lures those who oppose its otherworldly violence to become acolytes of a nameless cult. As a teenage girl struggles for autonomy, a female weapons director in a secret research facility develops a living neuro-cognitive device that explodes into self-awareness. Discovering their hidden emotional bonds, all three unveil a common enemy through dissonant realities that intertwine in a cosmic battle across hallucinatory dreamscapes.
Time is the winning predator, and every moment spirals deeper into the heart of the beast.
THE BACK STORY: This book began for me as an exploration of the Grimm’s fairy tale The Maiden Without Hands. I’ve written several retellings of classic tales, but never tackled this gruesome and little-known story of an abused daughter stripped of autonomy and seeking empowerment. At the same time the story was gestating, I was frustrated with all the talk of kings and masculine figures in Lovecraftian mythos. I’d been threatening to create a Yellow Queen mythos in answer to Chambers’s Yellow King for some time before the plot of The Wingspan of Severed Hands appeared to me, and when I connected the story of mother-daughter abuse with a twist on classic cosmic horror, it opened the narrative possibilities up into a book I’d never read before and wanted to bring into the world. I really didn’t think I could write it! The conceptual challenges and plot intricacies still feel a bit beyond my ability, not to mention my commitment to retaining a level of ambiguity that some readers find frustrating but is essential to the truth of the story.
In the final draft, the story is about many things both cosmic and personal, such as how memories and internal reality are never as simple as mere facts, and how we as humans are intricately complicated creatures with multifaceted surfaces we may or may not show the world, and how we have a tremendous capacity for growth and change.
WHY THIS TITLE: The style of writing in much of the book is hallucinatory and image-driven. I wanted the title to be true to the book by reflecting the dream-like madness of the narrative, painting a significant symbolic visual image from the story in the reader’s mind, and communicating a sonic rhythm and presence that would have more impact than the average book title. I wanted the title to give you a good idea of what you’re in for if you decide to read it.
WHY SOMEONE WOULD WANT TO READ IT: You’ll want to read it if you like having your mind blown a little bit, if you want to feel the joy of insight we get after years of deep meditation practice or what people more commonly describe achieving through psychedelic drug use. I’ve done the meditation and packaged a nice little dose of insight for you to enjoy! It’s not an easy book, but that’s part of the formula that gets you where you want to be. The complexity of the layers will creep up on you and stick around in your thoughts for a long time after reading, or so I’m told.
REVIEW COMMENTS:
“Prose so evocative black letters on white pages become as vivid as leaves of an illuminated manuscript. If human bodies are temples, The Wingspan of Severed Hands is holy writ delivering the glorious news that the dawn of flesh & blood & dreams of grotesque wonder has arrived. Stunning book.” –Christopher Slatsky, author of The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature
“Koch’s latest novella is what might have happened if Robert W. Chambers had been a surrealist with a penchant for body horror. A strange trip to Carcosa offered in thickly evocative language, The Wingspan of Severed Hands is a highly original hallucination.” — Bian Evenson, author of Song For The Unraveling Of The World, A Collapse Of Horses
“That degeneracy infects the writing, with Koch creating wonderfully dense and poetic prose that puts the reader into a dreamlike state, evoking a literary version of a death metal Sun Ra.” — Chris Deal of Horror DNA
“Wow- does this book have me by the throat. If Clive Barker, David Cronenberg and Kathe Koja grew a beautiful abomination of a baby in a lab and it escaped and went berserk, that would be this book.” — Daniel Swenson
“In spite of being at turns a vividly grotesque and terrifying story, what moved me to tears in this story was the deeply embodied pain and the pathway through it. If you’ve ever been taught to hate who you are, been told that there is something wrong all the way through you, then what Joanna Koch has provided here is a reminder that you aren’t alone and that healing can be ugly and painful, but also liberating” — Michael Tichy
AUTHOR PROFILE: Joe Koch (he/they) writes literary horror and surrealist trash. A Shirley Jackson Award finalist, Joe is the author of The Wingspan of Severed Hands, The Couvade, and the forthcoming collection Convulsive from Apocalypse Party Press. Their short fiction appears in Year’s Best Hardcore Horror, Not All Monsters, Liminal Spaces, and many other anthologies and journals of horror and speculative fiction. Published as Joanna Koch prior to 2022, you can find Joe online now at horrorsong.blog and on Twitter @horrorsong.
AUTHOR COMMENTS: I’m honored and truly touched by the unsolicited responses from readers, many of whom are authors I admire and respect. I’d be thrilled for the book to find its way to more readers who want an unusual experience from a book and a big payoff for the hard work of reading deeply.
SAMPLE CHAPTER: (Provide link). https://www.frightgirlsummer.com/the-wingspan-of-severed-hands
LOCAL OUTLETS:
WHERE ELSE TO BUY IT: Amazon
PRICE: Paperback: $12.00 E-book (discounted on Godless.com): $3.99
CONTACT THE AUTHOR: https://horrorsong.blog/contact/
Snowflakes in a Blizzard 