The Funeral Colony

In this follow-up to his Thirteen Nocturnes collection of verse, acclaimed Texas poet Oliver Sheppard presents The Funeral Colony, a 330-page descent into the Gothic imagination where disease, desire, and death converge. These poems transform the clinical language of contagion into visceral explorations of body horror, drawing from medieval plague chronicles, vampire folklore, and the philosophical extremes of de Sade, Artaud, and Ligotti to create a uniquely unsettling portrait of humanity stripped bare by pestilence.

The Funeral Colony confronts what it means to be human when humanity itself becomes the disease.

Praise for Oliver Sheppard's previous collection of verse, Thirteen Nocturnes:

"Oliver Sheppard is a major new voice in the genre of macabre poetry. Thirteen Nocturnes does in fact announce a 'cold poetics of the macabre in the new dark age of the Anthropocene,' emphasis on that 'po,' if not Poe himself."
-Donald Sidney-Fryer, Spectral Realms (Winter 2021)

"Sheppard's Thirteen Nocturnes is an excellent collection of mostly Gothic poetry."
-Ellen Datlow, Best Horror of the Year, Vol. 11 (2019)

"Thirteen Nocturnes absolutely blew me away. Sheppard's attention to the music of language, as well as his visceral images, make this a haunting collection of contemporary poetry that has clearly come out of the graveyard, Gothic, and cosmic horror traditions."
-Jo Kaplan, author of When the Night Bells Ring &
The Midnight Muse