February 14th, 2023 — With no shortage of breath to voice his creative fire or characters to inhabit the shadows its bellow throws, Jono today announces his return to prose with a seventh book burning to be birthed, and Borden’s first ever of short stories, Cor Hydræ (Heart of the Snake): Twisted Tales.
Forthcoming this Fall, the tome is a tiny gut-punch of nine yarns one yearns to spin into and cut through, or listen to spun for them by some bard, such as Jono is, in those moments when seeking growth, seeming too small in a world too broad becomes more possible to bear hearing words read which another’s pen gifts life, and license to live, large.
Cryptic, gothic, and caustic, this garden of dark goings on blossoms knots of memorable thoughts best encountered at night. Each story wrought from the mind of a hermit protagonist, Alphard, whose presence at the fringe is the thread which binds these eldritch things he witnesses and describes. Stories linked by sinister whispers echoing chains of events each tale paints in dim-lit vignettes, these are curious literary footsteps to be followed with another’s chosen solitude as your only guide.
Fleshing out bones, that the fight to survive its vastness might not die and this infinite, huge Universe we inhabit, if not vanquished, might relent and let be loosed some clues as to our purpose within it, the stories we throw on them in our collective effort over centuries and across cultures to impose upon distant stars our illusion of knowing them, are the close-read myths constellations wear as clothes that we might see in flashing lights so far off something beyond the darkness of our Selves.
“[T]hese absurd stories would best be classed among those defying classification, better exiled than at home alongside[…]yarns defying definition by rewriting it, if not exceeding expectations then conflating them[,]” their description promises. As the synopsis waxes in kind, “These succinct curiosities weave in and out of Borden’s well-known, labyrinthine psyche, not so much consolidating but extrapolating on Jono’s many and varied esoteric interests which thread and pepper the book with a dark flavour those seeking to scorch an alternate path toward the light will savour.”
With a tongue digging a love out of these holes each story holds, each seeming an immersive vessel those seeking not to be held but fulfilled by thrill will revel in their suspense.
Cor Hydræ (Heart of the Snake): Twisted Tales is available everywhere in print and electronic formats on October 17th, 2023.
Jono Borden 