Horror Maven Katherine Kerestman Pays Homage to Lovecraft in her New Collection of Weird Tales,
Cultes des Goules

WordCrafts Press and author Katherine Kerestman are pleased to unveil Cultes des Goules, Kerestman’s new collection of Lovecraftian horror stories, which released to retail on July 30, 2025, in hardback, paperback, ebook, and audiobook versions. Cultes des Goules found an eager audience awaiting its release as it debuted at Number 54 on Amazon.com’s Hot New Releases chart in the Occult Suspense category and at Number 72 on the Mystery, Thriller, and Suspense Literary Fiction New Releases chart.

“Life can be pleasurable, exciting, adventure-filled, and horrific. It ends in death, though—always,” Katherine explains of her fascination with the horror genre.

“There are times, when we are forced to face the inevitable: pain, fear, loss, and death. It is the natural order of things. Sometimes these dire things occur out of nature or chance—but unfortunately, sometimes they are the result of malignant human agency. People, I have found, tend to be scarier than the most horrible monsters, demons, or deities dreamt up by horror writers. The evil among us will sacrifice their fellow earthlings in a heartbeat, if they think there is something in it for them.

“Horror stories oblige us to take time from the business of life to examine the darkness that dwells within our species and our world—in a very pleasurable way, for those of us who enjoy things that go bump in the night.”

As with many authors, Katherine says the tales she unfolded in Cultes des Goules were inspired by her real-life experiences and embellished by her fertile imagination. A seasoned travel writer, she says the Black Mountain stories in this volume were inspired by her trip up the dreaded White Mountain in New Hampshire, an adventure detailed in her travelogue, Creepy Cat’s Macabre Travels: Prowling around Haunted Towers, Crumbling Castles, and Ghoulish Graveyards (WordCrafts Press, 2020).

“The landscape is as isolated and remote in real life as in my tales,” she recalls. “I rattled up the highest mountain in the eastern U.S. in an unheated, antique small-gauge train in a raging blizzard. Eighteen inches of snow had fallen on the mountain overnight, and power was out at the station, which was half-lit on generator-power. I felt that were the car to break down or I were to get lost in the remote country, it would be people whom I would have to watch out for, more than the wildlife.”

The novella, Lethal, evolved during the Covid pandemic and developed out of her horror at the manipulation of society and the rise of an oligarchical media and political dictatorship that co-opted decades of established medical protocol, relegating individual interactions to computer screens and electronic devices, devoid of human contact.

“I watched the vibrant elderly shrivel into nonverbal husks, having been locked in their rooms in solitary confinement for a year. None of them were asked how they would like to spend the last year of their lives—attending a beloved grandchild’s wedding, or scratching off items on their bucket lists. I watched our population withdraw from relationships with other people, unless they were people on a digital screen. I shuddered as I witnessed people being taught, through fear, to believe every word that came from the mouths of the talking heads on their screens—and who were taught not to question, but to obey.”

As an added bonus, Cultes des Goules also includes Katherine’s essays, “America’s Stonehenge” and “The Horror of Consensus: Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

About the Author

Katherine Kerestman (B.A. English and History, John Carroll University; M. A. English, Case Western Reserve University) is the author of Creepy Cat’s Macabre Travels: Prowling around Haunted Towers, Crumbling Castles, and Ghoulish Graveyards (WordCrafts Press, 2020), Haunted House and Other Strange Tales (Hippocampus Press, 2024), and Lethal (Psychotoxin Press, 2023).

Furthermore, she is the Editor (with S. T. Joshi) of The Weird Cat (WordCrafts Press, 2023), Shunned Houses: An Anthology of Weird Stories, Unspeakable Poems, and Impious Essays (WordCrafts Press, 2024), and Witches and Witchcraft (Hippocampus Press, 2025).

More than 80 of her Lovecraftian and gothic poems, essays, and short stories have been featured in numerous anthologies, popular magazines, and academic journals. Katherine thinks Dracula and Wuthering Heights are the greatest books ever written, and she is wild about Dark Shadows and Twin Peaks. Her name is etched forevermore among the inscrutable glyphs of the Esoteric Order of Dagon and the Dracula Society.

She invites her fans to stalk her at:
www.creepycatlair.com