The fire is coming, but OLYOKE is here!
Mar 24, 2026 1:31 pm
Hey Ho, Tenebrous Cult!
Just one news today; it's a big news, though.
Vincent Endwell's OLYOKE is on sale now!
The fires are getting hotter...
...and OLYOKE has arrived. Do you have your copy yet? (cappuccino served in the skull of your enemy strictly optional.)
About OLYOKE:
Welcome to Olyoke, Tennessee: home to a Dollywood-style theme park, generations of troubled families, mysterious plagues, and the prophecies of a dead architect turned cult leader who has foretold a fiery cataclysm.
As the time of the fire nears, inexplicable events compound:
Darcy, a Dolly Parton impersonator, finds strange worms in the swamp and feeds them to her dog, who begins to speak with the voice of Darcy's dead mother;
Recently divorced Lyle Knox is called through its dreams by a strange house, and soon discovers that Lyle Knox itself is not a person, but a structure;
Maggie Warner organizes a theater production to stave off her gnawing misery and becomes convinced that only the people she sees in her dreams are real. Moreover, the Whistler—the man Maggie becomes when she sleeps—welcomes the town’s impending Judgment with open arms.
Many destinies will converge in Olyoke. None will escape unchanged.
Cover art by Jenna Cha
Interior art by Echo Echo
“Lures you into the crevice between Weird fiction and Appalachian horror where something inscrutable yet warm has been gestating. You will come back different.”
- Michael Wehunt, The October Film Haunt
Horror is about place as often as it is about character, or situation. The town of Olyoke, Tennessee positively blooms with life. It doesn't exist, it can't exist, and yet upon reading OLYOKE, you'll feel certain that Endwell has dropped you into an authentic travel guide of some place that has somehow evaded your awareness all these years.
And on its surface, there is very little horrific about Olyoke. It's loaded with seemingly innocuous micro-settings within its macro-environment: outdoor dining at a neighborhood restaurant; a passenger train; a modest theater where a live podcast is being recorded; one's own dining room table; in the middle of the town square on a lovely, sunny day.
interior art from OLYOKE, by Echo Echo
But if you look closely enough, for long enough, the mask that is Normal Small Town Life slips and you get a peek at something utterly, abominably terrifying. Something alien. Not of this world.
Or maybe that's just every town, everywhere.
Anyway. No one can sell you on life in Olyoke quite like its original architect, author Vincent Endwell.
So, the floor is yours, Vincent:
While I don't tend to care for the wikification of fiction or the fan culture tendency to prise apart works in search of tasty lore, I nevertheless find myself drawn to literature that can feel a bit like a puzzlebox. Maybe this isn't a conundrum, because I don't actually want to solve a work. I appreciate a story that feels like it almost fits together, can almost be solved, that rewards multiple readings or speculation, yet resists simplification. (And I really don't think you can "solve" literature at all, regardless of what YouTube Explained videos claim). I've talked about both before, but works like Codex Seraphinianus and Ichor Falls were big influences, as both present facets of worlds that can never be quite known (though both are very different). I really can't say whether I've succeeded in making such a thing in Olyoke. Maybe someone smarter than me will let me know what it all means.
I started writing Olyoke at the end of 2019. Notably, the world has only gotten stranger since then. One purpose of Olyoke was to transmute and portray my feelings of being borne inexorably forward into a changing future, one that is by turns hostile and beautiful, cruel and brilliant to the eye. We all are going into it, after all. I don't know what we get to keep and what we get to change, and I guess we never really do. Wacky how that works.
Well, anyway. It's wild that anyone is reading this. Maybe in another timeline, I would have kept writing and Olyoke would become a sprawling, posthumously-discovered piece of outsider art that concerns as much as it frightens the reader. Thanks to Matt and Alex for taking a chance on my writing, and freeing me up to write something different.
Hail Indie Publishing.
Hail New Weird Horror (+ More!)
Hail the Tenebrous Cult.
🔥Hail OLYOKE. Long may it burn🔥
Matt + Alex + Vincent
