Underground Bookshelf

Q: Please introduce yourself! Share your name, pronouns, and something fun, interesting, curious, or important (take your pick) about yourself that you would like your audience to know.A: Hi! I’m K.R. Thompson (he/him) and I’m a husband, father to my adorable little 9 month old daughter, engineer, planner, and now an indie author. My favorite hobbies are reading (I know, very original for an author to say this), running, video games, and movies. Oh, and pizza is by far my favorite food. I should have mentioned earlier that I like eating food. Add that to my list of hobbies :)

Forbidden love. Divine powers. A vengeance that could tear the world apart.

The Underground Bookshelf community comes from ALL OVER! We have writers from the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia. People connect with Underground Bookshelf through the website, email, Booksie, Neobook, Wattpad, Facebook, TikTok, Bluesky, Instagram -- but each of these social spaces can get easily siloed. Discord is a way to bring people from all of these different virtual platforms together.

Soothing, cleansing, stormy, destroying, restoring, life-bearing, violent; there are many ways that water can go. The theme for our April contest is WATER!

Thank you to everyone who participated in this month's Flash Fiction and Poetry Contest! Everyone deserves a round of applause for their great work! Please take a minute to read one another's work and to support each other on your writing journeys. These contests are about community, and connecting with each other over our writing is an important way to uphold this community.

Musical Inspiration: Dragonfly, lyrics by John Grim, music by Suno

*This is part one of a longer story. Continue reading this story on Neobook.

Genre: romance

I'm thrilled to introduce guest essayist, Bryce Raffle, and his discussion on Dreadpunk which he defines as "gothing horror with an edge." Raffle marks the history of punk fiction as a genre and the development of its subgenres: cyberpunk, steampunk, dieselpunk, and dreadpunk. This essay was originally published on Threads That Bind. You can find more of Raffle's work at Deadsteam.

Q: Please introduce yourself! Share your name, pronouns, and something fun, interesting, curious, or important (take your pick) about yourself that you would like your audience to know.

To all who read this, if you're going through something, keep going, and find something to smile or laugh about. If not you’ll be constantly frowning. When you feel upset, defeated, or depressed, look within yourself, and say, “I’ve already won!” We win not because we are winners, but because we refuse to quit. Because we’ve never laid down! Because we are sick of losing! That’s what my, “Victory Lap” is...

I'm so excited to introduce this essay by Valek Akechi which discusses religious readings of Dracula and their interpretations of characters who represent the conflict between Christianity and the religion of "the other." In particular, this essay studies the suppression of folk religion, magic, and superstition as Christianity spreads outward in the context of the nineteenth century. It also details the role that Gothic literature plays in critiquing the faults of religious while embracing the asthetic and the folk superstitions underlying varoius Christian traditions. This essay was originally published on Scorpio Assassin Studios. It can also be found on Neobook. I hope you enjoy!