Launch day for Master of Rods and Strings from Crystal Lake Publishing!
Video of reading the opening pages of Master of Rods and Strings!
Thanks to Steve Pattee over at Horror DNA for the opportunity to share “Five Obsessively Ambitious and Wildly Vengeful Protagonists.”
And here is an interview about the writing of the book. Thanks to Rick Hipson and his new column “What Screams May Come” at Cemetery Dance.
Sadly, Vernacular Books closed up in November 2022, but one bit of good news here: got signed by Crystal Lake Publishing:
We are super excited to have signed MASTER OF RODS AND STRINGS, a novel by Jason Marc Harris.
Jealous of the attention lavished upon the puppetry talents of his dear sister—and tormented by visions of her torture at the hands of the mysterious Uncle Pavan who recruited her for his arcane school—Elias is determined to learn the true nature of occult puppetry, no matter the hideous costs, in order to exact vengeance.
“Jason Marc Harris’s Master of Rods and Strings is a masterful work the likes of which I have not read in many years. Among its other admirable qualities, it is an adept exemplar of the novella, a literary form peculiarly suited to tales of dark and mysterious themes, among them being Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Henry James’s “Turn of the Screw, Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” and Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, as well as numerous other works of a nightmarish or fantastical nature. In captivating and expert prose Master of Rods and Strings brings to life a world where the enchantment of puppetry inexorably descends into a magical perdition.”—Thomas Ligotti
Thanks to Colin Martin at the Horrorific Podcast for performing an excerpt from Master of Rods and Strings on October 28th, 2022.
Heavy Feather Review (January 2022) :
“Master of Rods and Strings is certainly both a classic revenge story and a model of the difficult path toward truly mastering a craft, it is also a thoughtfully constructed warning of how it is all too easy to let the pains one suffers in the name of ambition supplant—and even corrupt—one’s goals, no matter how good or pure or heroic those goals may seem at the offset.
In the end, Master of Rods and Strings asks us a simple question: what would you give to achieve greatness?”
Queen’s Book Asylum (March 2022) “Harris manages to create not only a vivid breathing ‘here’ but weaves around it an ominous and malignant ‘other’ leading to each and every scene being loaded with both the seen and the unseen.
For a novella that runs at just ninety-two pages, there is an incomprehensible amount of depth and plot, perfumed throughout with the occult and drenched in such eldritch esoterica. Master of Rods and Strings is a novella that can be devoured in a single sitting, but whose taste will linger long into the night.”