The Gothic Tarot That Will Sew Your Lips Shut.

 

Anyone can make a “gothic” deck by sticking a few skulls and bats into the designs. When I made CROOKED WAY GOTHIC TAROT, I didn’t hold back. I made a gothic deck where:

• Children lovingly feed on lambs
• Wives steal half their husband’s brain
• Skulls levitate hearts in ritual flames
• Ghosts flirt with revenants—and get rejected
• Family dinners involve drained peasants and crystal goblets of blood
• And Edgar Allan Poe cuts out his own heart, because of course he does.

This isn’t “dark aesthetic.”
This is Gothic with teeth.

And brains.
And hearts.
And a Hand of Glory.

If you’re just playing at Being Gothic—painting your lips black and calling it a day—this might not be your Cup of Spleen.

But if you live Gothically, embrace the darkness, and want your tarot to bite back… this deck is 100% up your Dark, Haunted Back-Alley of a Soul.

It is THE Gothic Tarot deck. Accept No Substitutes.

A DECK THAT READS LIKE A BLOOD OATH

CROOKED WAY doesn’t just look intense—it reads intensely.

Open this deck, and prepare for alchemical symbolism, razor-sharp archetypes, and readings that don’t just shove fluffy-bunny trivialities out of the room—they bury them six feet under.

CROOKED WAY TAROT speaks with brutal honesty, emotional depth, and symbolic precision.

MEET THE FAMILY (BUT DON’T SHAKE THEIR HANDS)

Around the heart of CROOKED WAY curls an entire extended family of ghouls, vampires, witches, and monsters. And they’re all Out For Blood. Preferably yours.

You’ll encounter the decadent Thorn matriarch, the murderous Fate Twins, the corpse who won’t stay politely dead, and a host of other beautifully horrible residents of Dreary, Maine.

Every card is lushly illustrated in decadent, vintage-gothic detail—
equal parts beauty and horror. 

DREARY, MAINE: WELCOME TO YOUR NEW OBSESSION

The Thorn Family sits at the core of Dreary, Maine—the terrible township behind all the stories, decks, downloads, and nightmares Now Emanating from the Ghastlight District.

Visit today and snag FREE downloads that are only beginning to unfold a vast, twisted, colorful saga about the ghastliest family in the history of the world.

AND THE SHADOWS GROW DEEPER…

The Dreary Lenormand is coming soon.

And we have much more waiting in the wings… ready to pounce.

This isn’t just a collection of decks. It’s an entire Gothic universe.

It’s your Whole Shadow World.
And it remembers your name.

--Thorn.

This Year Has Sucked . . . so the Suckers are Here

 

This isn't a real New Yorker cartoon -- just an incredible simulation.

Welcome to Dreary, ME

 

The terrible township of DREARY, ME is the setting for my next series of projects, unfolding now across a variety of releases in different forms. It all begins with a cartload of completely free downloads available in THE GHASTLIGHT DISTRICT — a dark corner of my main website: https://tarotbyducksoup.com.

Learn the horrifying history of the town so awful the state quarantined it for more than thirty years! Meet the strange folk who were frozen in time — and who are dying to meet you. See eerie sights not witnessed in decades. Discover a many-layered story guaranteed to shiver your October nights.

The official Travel Brochure for Dreary, ME is available now as a FREE download, along with two sets of Perturbing Postcards (out of print for more than a century!). Coming soon: the first issue of the town newspaper, The Morbid Morgue. I’ll be adding a new free download to the site every week through October, each one expanding the lore of Dreary and building toward even bigger projects ahead.

It would make my day if some of you out there have as much fearful fun with these freebies as I’m having making them. Thank you for stopping by The Ghastlight District!

And since no October would be complete without a touch of the arcane…

Make your next reading a treat, not a trick.

Don’t wait until the last minute — shipping takes time, and you don’t want to be stuck with a bland, everyday deck at your Halloween party! Whether it’s Trick or Tarot, Crooked Way Gothic Tarot, Tinker’s Damn Tarot, or the slightly spectacular Arthur Rackham Oracle, you’ll find something to match your eerie aesthetic. All are available now in my newly remodeled and expanded Halloween section: The Ghastlight District. Visit today!

--Thorn.

Culture of Offense

The American Culture (Art, Books, Movies, Music, Television) was already Terminally Ill in 2010. By 2017 it was dead, and we are witnessing now its Decaying Corpse. Of the Reasons Why this happened, the Impossibility that artists face of Doing Good Work is just one. And just one of the reasons behind that impossibility is the Culture of Offense that we live in today.

It is a contradiction in terms to suggest that a creative person can do good, interesting, challenging work that doesn't offend SOMEBODY, SOMEWHERE. The human race is itself far too contradictory, always ready and able to argue about any damn thing, no matter how trivial. 

In years past, you could offend a few people and it wasn't the End of the World, but today? Offending even a single person carries a Death Sentence. That person will wear their Offense like a Hair Shirt and go out into the world with it and take it online and make it their Life's Work to Utterly Destroy The Thing That Offended them, and the person that created it.

And the money people aren't stupid. Nobody is going to sponsor an artist whose work could possibly destroy their Peanut Butter sales figures.

American Culture has always tended toward the Bland for this reason, but now it has become braindead. A creative mind cannot function properly in a Police State that is heavily patrolled by jack-booted thugs existing at both ends of the political spectrum as well as the middle, middle-left and middle-right. Nothing rational can survive that kind of scrutiny. If the the right to offend is removed from the culture, freedom of thought and expression is removed as well.

When people can be raised to Ire by the color of the socks a character wears, art becomes untenible.

And now we live in a place where art has become so Inoffensive and bland that it's possible be offended by Inoffense, which offense itself offends a whole other group of people, and on and on and on.

There never was any chance of Winning the game of life, but most people now living refuse to acknowledge it. And by refusing to acknowledge that Winning is Impossible, the masses have killed Discourse. Not coincidentally, Discourse is where Art and Culture live.

And today it seems that the only thing that can get the extremists of the Right and Left to Unite is the place where they can both stomp culture out of existence.

"Good!" they will both say as they look down at the bloody, mangled corpses of Discourse, Culture and Art. "Good Riddance! They were a Rum Lot!"

Meanwhile, those of us for whom art and Fiction are the only way of coping with existence will have to crawl ever-deeper into hiding, and glean what we can out of the fragments to the past that remain.

—Thorn.

 

Dave

 I suppose that everyone begins to feel, at some point, that they belong to a Lost Generation — especially when they begin to see significant losses from among their own ranks. Death being the main Occupational Hazard of Life, after all.  

In July, my friend Dave Peabody, known professionally as Dave Naybor, died from a cancer that shot through him at an astonishing speed.  This was him just last year, on the day when all my oldest friends came up to visit me here at the DuckHaus.

He was a guy with a great sense of humor, who always, always came at an idea from a direction that no one else would have thought of. In a world of Sameness, Dave was Daringly Different. He had a great laugh and he always made me laugh. He had a lot of friends. It’s a testament to him that a lot of folks have remembered him online. One thread on Facebook alone holds 111 comments as a type this. A good round number. 

For now, I’ll turn you over to our mutual friend Bruce Canwell, over at the Library of American Comics. Comics were the connecting thread that held us all together over the years, and they were part of what connected Dave to a lot of other people as well. Bruce’s comments about Dave’s passing are closer to what I feel than any words I could possibly muster. 

https://libraryofamericancomics.com/my-job-is-talking-to-people/

I’ll just add that along with the loss there is a sense of shock that I know all of Dave’s friends are feeling. He was just 63 — his illness came quite suddenly, and Dave had no more than informed us that he was in a lot of pain when the announcements came, in rapid succession, that he had lost 100 pounds (Dave never had that much extra weight to lose), that cancer was confirmed, and then that he was in hospice.

We all should have benefitted from his recommendations, his observations, his humor and laughter, his unique perspective, for many years more. We all expected that he would be around with us for a lot longer. There's a sense that the gods have cheated us, by taking him so soon. It's the same sense we felt when our mutual friend Howard was taken from us a decade ago. 

The world is greatly diminished without him.

He was a better friend to me than I was to him. He will be missed. Good night, my friend.

Oh: his collection of Walking Christendom comics is still available at Amazon, here: https://www.amazon.com/Walking-Christendom-One-End/dp/055741167X. A taste of Dave’s humor runs throughout, and is evident in the name he took to publish them: Ed, the Masked Dog Global Empire.

Trailer for SEE THEM DANCE

 

Step right up! SEE — positively the most Astounding Collection of Oddities You Have Ever Witnessed! SEE — a Circus of Terrors and Wonders! SEE — clowns, fortune-tellers and alien beasts! SEE THEM DANCE -- in the trailer for a Fantasy Horror Adventure that will rattle your cage! Sound unhinged? See for yourself!

📘 Get the book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1492176060

🎥 Watch the trailer:https://youtu.be/GVN2GNeG_ck

New Trailer for PERSEPHONE'S TORCH

Available in paperback and eBook editions, at Amazon or Duck Soup Productions.

 

Bemused But Not Amusing

Am I now retired? Or semi-retired? Or even that?

I guess that if one has to ask oneself the question there must still be enough life left in the corpse to fall back on a semi-plausible denial, but the facts in the case appear exceedingly slim at this moment, even to me. Social security has begun, and Thank Goodness for that, because the money from all other income streams has dried up to an alarming degree. Mind you, the drain on finances has not slowed at all.

Likewise, the desire to do Creative Work has not abated, but the interest in banging one's head repeatedly against a brick wall until the blood flows has dimmed considerably. If no one likes what I'm doing, why keep doing it? The ability of my Ego to absorb continuous punishment is decreasing by the minute.

For now, there's laundry to do and a lawn to mow. You know, whilst my brain makes up its mind or is made up for me. I'm sure that I can find some Busy Work to keep me occupied Between Meals and Sleeps. But coping with the restlessness is still a Question. Am I taking a few Involuntary Vacation Days, or is This It?