“A world where the enchantment of puppetry inexorably descends into a magical perdition.“
–THOMAS LIGOTTI

Amazon

Jealous of the attention lavished upon the puppetry talents of his dear sister—and tormented by visions of her torture at the hands of his 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.

Author Testimonials

“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

“A magically unnerving tale of loyalty, artistic passion, and revenge that digs into your skin and pulls you through the back alleys of period France. Harris assuredly directs his characters with the precision of a puppeteer through this fever dream of a novella.”

–Sequoia Nagamatsu, author of How High We Go in the Dark & Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone

“Strange and compelling, Master of Rods and Strings is a fantastic foray into the realm of occult puppetry. Like Patrick Suskind’s Perfume, this book is memorable for its vivid sensory detail and portrayal of an obsessive protagonist exploring an arcane world.”

–Susan Hubbard, author of the Ethical Vampire Series

“Boundlessly unique and charmingly strange, Jason Marc Harris’ Master of Rods and Strings is a breakneck tale of occult puppetry and the toll of seeking revenge. What a cracklingly compelling book. I can’t get it out of my head.”

—Robert James Russell, author of Mesilla and Sea of Trees

Reviews

“It’s a rare pleasure – especially nowadays – to find a new author whose horror fiction is truly compelling. But this year, Jason Marc Harris is that author, and Master of Rods and Strings is a morbidly fascinating little book. With its release, Harris joins the pantheon of weird fiction’s modern masters, alongside figures like Laird Barron, Nicole Cushing, and Ligotti himself.”

—Alex Skopic, Signal Horizon Magazine

“I loved the uniqueness of this novella. Haunting. . . . I enjoyed the delve into the bloody world of using the dead and the puppets to perform dark rituals. This isn’t your average horror puppet read by any means.”

—Chandra Claypool, Cemetery Dance

“The story begins quietly, and slowly develops a growing sense of horror, reaching a truly apocalyptic climax. The setting, several locations throughout France, is vividly realized. Perhaps the most compelling aspect of this expertly crafted tale of terror is the way in which the narrator changes from an ordinary boy into a man capable of performing great evil in his quest for revenge.”

—Victoria Silverwolf, Tangent Online

“while 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.”

—Max Malone, Heavy Feather Review

“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.”

—Paul English-Wolfe, Queen’s Book Asylum

“There’s little more chilling than being menaced by a literally inhuman monster, from antique dolls to futuristic robots, a killer with no compassion, no remorse, no desire other than extermination. I know the movies best, but there are countless literary equivalents, and Master of Rods and Strings is a chilling new addition to that body of work.”

—Terence Taylor, Nightmare Magazine

Jason Marc Harris teaches creative writing, folklore, and literature at Texas A&M University in College Station, TX. He graduated with a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Washington, and an MFA in fiction from Bowling Green State University, where he served as Fiction Editor of Mid-American Review. Creative work in journals such as Apex and Abyss, Arroyo Literary Review, Marvels and Tales, Midwestern Gothic, Psychopomp Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, and Writing Texas. He wrote the scholarly book Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth Century British Fiction and cowrote with Birke Duncan two folklore books based on fieldwork—The Troll Tale and Other Scary Stories and Laugh Without Guilt. His novella of weird horror Master of Rods and Strings was included in the Horror Writers Association Bram Stoker Award® Reading List for 2021 and was just republished by Crystal Lake Publishing in 2024.