We Are Here to Hurt Each Other

SHIRLEY JACKSON AWARD WINNER! BRAM STOKER AWARD NOMINATED With these twelve stories Paula D. Ashe takes you into a dark and bloody world where nothing is sacred and no one is safe. A landscape of urban decay and human degradation, this collection finds the psychic pressure points of us all, and giddily squeezes. Try to run, try to hide, but there is no escape: we are here to hurt each other. CONTENT WARNINGS FOUND INSIDE BOOK "My god, this book. Where do I even begin? The exquisite language. The devastation. The slow, creeping dread. Truly masterful. I‘m a new and devoted fan of Paula D. Ashe." -Eric LaRocca author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke "Gooey, gory and utterly mesmerizing, Paula D. Ashe‘s debut short fiction collection reads like the sloppy love-child of Clive Barker and David Cronenberg--Barker for sheer gruesomely sensual intoxication, the language of blood-soaked angels, Cronenberg for bodies flipped inside-out and messed around back-to-front like suppurating biological Rubik‘s Cubes. I want to study it; I wish I‘d written it." -Gemma Files, author of In That Endlessness, Our End and Experimental Film "Poignant, grim, and startling, the remarkable stories of We Are Here To Hurt Each Other shine with luminescent dread. In this collection, Paula D. Ashe reminds us that monsters aren‘t just real: they‘re here and they‘re human." -Tiffany Morris author of Havoc in Silence "Clive Barker is her Virgil, but Paula D. Ashe is Dante guiding you ever deeper into an Inferno more hellish and cursed than the 14th Century Catholic poet could‘ve possibly envisioned. The only salvation possible for these damned souls is to find rapture in suffering and release in condemnation. Most are lucky just to find the one, true end to all woe. Paula D. Ashe is a Prophet of Pain." -Christopher Ropes author of These Tales Are Winter: A Phenomenology of Ghosts. "Paula D. Ashe came to hurt me, refused to apologize, and left me in a forensically unfeasible state of despair. Holy fuck." -Joe Koch author of The Wingspan of Severed Hands "The stories in Paula D. Ashe‘s debut collection are brutal, intense, and will have you questioning what lies beneath the veneer of strangers, of loved ones, and of yourself." -Doungjai Gam, author of glass slipper dreams, shattered and watch the whole goddamned thing burn "To hold the reader‘s undivided attention, such a degree of blistering honesty requires an equally high level of storytelling skill, and Ashe does not disappoint. Here is a writer whose impeccable prose grips the reader from the first sentence, and commands attention. The stories in this collection convey a chilling urgency, as all truthful and uncompromising fictions do." -S. P. Miskowski, author of I Wish I Was Like You