When Michael W. Phillips started From Beyond Press, he joined a long history of publishing horror fiction in the Chicago area, beginning, more or less, when Weird Tales set up offices here in 1926. Originally from Michigan, Phillips moved to the Windy City in 2001, establishing himself and eventually the press in Hyde Park to publish horror, science fiction and poetry, and to revive the writings of overlooked authors. Currently working at the University of Chicago as an event planner, Phillips is a filmmaker as well, creating documentaries and “found footage music videos for local bands.” We spoke about From Beyond Press, horror, and more.
What inspired the establishment of From Beyond Press? Why horror? You started with chapbooks, featuring horror stories by Cynthia Pelayo and others, and then moved on to books. Talk about that progression.
The chapbooks were kind of a happy accident. I have an online bookstore called It Came From Beyond Pulp, where I sell vintage sci-fi, fantasy, and horror on eBay and formerly on Instagram. Through that, I "met" Kealan Patrick Burke, who is a super-approachable guy. I've found that just about everyone in the horror community is friendly. I hatched the idea of inviting him to Chicago for a reading/signing, which Bucket O'Blood Books and Records agreed to host. Because we're both film nerds, I asked him to curate a program of short horror films for the event. I wanted a cool poster, so I asked Corinne Halbert, a local horror comic artist, to make one. It was just brilliant. At the event, I had the bright idea to publish a chapbook with a new story by Kealan and illustrations by Corinne. Both of them loved the idea, and that first book Distinguishing Features came out in April of 2020.
It sold out in a couple months. I asked Kealan to recommend authors I could approach about doing another one, and he introduced me to Cynthia Pelayo, who said she'd love to do a chapbook. For that one, I found a Mexican-American comics artist named Vheto Gutierrez Vazquez to do the cover and illustrations. Snow White's Shattered Coffin sold out too. And for the next one, I wanted to go a different route. My friend Lloyd Brodnax King is a musician, podcaster, and co-founder of Vocalo. He had this Twitter project called "Stoopin," where he'd sit on his front stoop on a rapidly gentrifying Bronzeville block and Tweet about what his neighbors were up to. The project turned into a document of how gentrification is affecting Bronzeville. That one sold out too.
I had been thinking about doing something more in-depth, and that summer a couple of indie horror presses self-destructed; Silver Shamrock, after announcing a horribly racist-seeming project, and another I can't remember. I literally thought, well, I could do better than that. I talked a bit with Cynthia, since she has experience running a small press, and got a lot of advice from Joe Mynhardt at Crystal Lake, who was incredibly helpful. For my first project, I went with horror stories about bugs, since I had Cynthia's story (which involves ladybugs), and I had discovered John B.L. Goodwin's 1946 story "The Cocoon," which is one of the creepiest things I've ever read. I invited a bunch of authors to be in it, thinking maybe one or two would say yes, but they almost all said yes: Kealan wrote something, also Paula D. Ashe, Laurel Hightower, Felix I.D. Dimaro. We got 500 submissions, so it obviously struck a nerve. That book is This World Belongs to Us: An Anthology of Horror Stories about Bugs, which came out earlier this year.
You publish mostly but not all horror. Tell me about your other titles.
The only non-horror thing we've done so far is This Is Life: Rediscovered Short Fiction by Black Chicago writer Frank London Brown. He was a musician, journalist, and novelist who covered the murder of Emmitt Till for the Chicago Defender, and also wrote a novel called Trumbull Park, which is probably the best portrait of segregation in northern cities. He died really young, just 34. I learned through my spouse, who is an art historian, that Brown wrote some stories for the Defender, so I went looking, and I found 133 flash fiction stories that he published over the course of a year, November 1959 to November 1960. They're these vibrant little portraits of Black life in Chicago in the late 1950s. They were never collected, and even Brown's family didn't know about them. I tracked down Brown's daughters and talked to them about doing the book. The stories are public domain, but I believe that they deserve to profit from their father's work, so I'm splitting sales with them. That book is in 25 branches of the Chicago Public Library and is being taught at Northwestern and University of Chicago. I'm really proud of it.
What do you look for in a horror story?
That's a good question! I told slush readers for the bug book that I wanted good stories first and foremost. The horror aspect can be strong or mild, but I'm interested in well-crafted prose, interesting stories, a unique take on the topic, a unique perspective. I'm really interested in using my resources to boost the work of queer authors, BIPOC authors, any marginalized authors. I'm really proud of This World Belongs to Us and the forthcoming Escalators to Hell: Shopping Mall Horrors for their incredibly diverse author lineups.
What's coming next from From Beyond?
We're doing a series of books called Beyond Pulp Reprints. The idea is to highlight writers, mostly women, who wrote for pulp magazines in the 1920s–50s, who for whatever reason aren't remembered today. The first one just came out: Fettered and Other Tales of Terror, by Greye La Spina. She published more than 100 stories in a variety of genres between 1919 and the early 1950s: horror in Weird Tales and similar magazines, but also romances, mainstream fiction, etc. She was consistently one of the most popular writers in Weird Tales, but after the 1950s, she kind of disappeared. I'm hoping the new book prompts more interest in her work. Future books will either be single-author collections or themed anthologies, again mostly of forgotten women.