From the Town Where Strangeness Lives

 

For months, we’ve been digging up the bodies in the vile village of Dreary, Maine—and whispering to you of what we’ve found. Now, you can see for yourself.

The Dreary Tarot is a fully realized divination deck rooted in the folklore, inhabitants, and quiet terrors of Dreary. The traditional structure remains—but every card is connected to a single haunted world.

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90 cards, including the exclusive Twelve Omens
Includes a 246-page illustrated PDF companion volume
Plus a collection of downloadable artifacts.

These are not abstract symbols.
They are people, places, and incidents from a living narrative—one that continues beyond the edges of the cards.

See The Dreary Tarot at tarotbyducksoup.com.

Spring Comes to Dreary

On the night of the first full moon in April, the citizens of Dreary celebrate the arrival of spring with Badger Day, one of the town’s oldest and most enthusiastically observed traditions.

At the center of the festivities is the ceremonial arrival of the Great Badger, a figure always portrayed by one of Dreary’s resident were-badgers in full animal form. Emerging from the countryside after nightfall, the Great Badger enters the town bearing symbolic offerings: an apple, representing the promise of growth, and a small pail filled with earth, worms, and grubs—tokens of the soil’s renewal and the less visible labors of the season.

The procession is greeted with cheers, lantern light, and general revelry. Children are encouraged to follow in the Badger’s wake, while adults partake in food, drink, and a variety of less easily described entertainments. The atmosphere is celebratory, though not without a certain underlying roughness characteristic of Dreary observances.

The identity of the Great Badger changes from year to year. The role is considered an honor among the town’s were-badgers, and is taken with great seriousness.

In the most recent celebration, the Great Badger was portrayed by Claude Clemhopper, a local carpenter and furniture maker. Clemhopper has lived as a were-badger for nearly forty years, having been bitten during a solitary excursion in the woods north of Dreary Lake.

“I went out looking for Erystys Tower,” he later remarked, “and got bit instead.”

Full record found in The Dreary Archives.

 

Dreary Personages No. 2: Nancee Laithe

 

Southern novelist whose unpublished feminist epic is said to be "unspeakable." Moved north to Dreary in 1924 with her young daughter Poppy, because she found the town to be more "hospitable" than anything in her native Mississippi. Which does not say much for Dreary's hospitality.

As part of the Ice House gang, Poppy has had some hair-raising experiences, but Nancy dismisses them as imaginative nonsense, something that she believes Poppy inherited from her.

Perceived by most as obscene, unreadable, or worse, Nancee’s ponderous novel is said to contain sentences that no one can repeat aloud without choking. On a quarterly basis, she reads passages at the Mortimer Hask Grave Memorial Library to a dwindling audience of masochists, moths and chair creaks. Rumor holds the book is unfinished because she keeps adding new characters and material. In 1945, she led the committee to launch the Dreary Arts Festival.

Full Record found in The Dreary Archives.

Dreary Personages No. 1: The Gray Stinger

 

A Dark blur along the Bog Road generally means one thing: THE GRAY STINGER is on the prowl!

Aspiring Pulp Novelist Stockbridge Groan is a part-time stockboy at Maudlin's Mercantile, part-time clerk at Black Street Books, and part time Want-to-Be Hero, THE GRAY STINGER! He created the character to star in his own pulp-flavored Superhero Fantasy stories, but when the stories failed to sell, he decided to bring his creation to life in the only way that he could: BECOME him.

The Gray Stinger is the perfect Superhero for Dreary, Maine.

He is living the scream.

He has a lair (his upstairs apartment above Maudlin's Mercantile). He has gear. He has multiple costumes. He has a crime-monitoring station. He has a signature vehicle.

And he walks through that door every night and faces Evildoers in the town that he's chosen to "protect."

You don’t have to be good at the dream.

You just have to love it enough to keep going.

Full Record found in The Dreary Archives.

THE DREARY LENORMAND IS HERE.

 

The Dreary Lenormand

Portents from the Town that Shouldn’t Exist

Welcome to Dreary, Maine—

a fog-choked town where omens gather like crows, secrets rot under the floorboards, and the dead are notoriously restless. The Dreary Lenormand unlocks the symbols whispered through generations of this haunted place, blending traditional Lenormand meanings with unsettling charm.

The Dreary Lenormand is a 36-card oracle deck steeped in gothic atmosphere, eerie folklore, and decaying elegance. Each familiar Lenormand symbol is reimagined through the lens of Dreary’s haunted history—its broken fortunes, forgotten graves, cursed romances, and storm-lashed cliffs.

Inside, you’ll find 36 cards rich with eerie symbolism, melancholy beauty, and whispered secrets. Each card is illustrated in atmospheric vintage style—part Victorian mourning art, part tattered carnival poster, part ancient divination relic.

The cards read clean, clear, and sharp—as Lenormand should—but every symbol oozes story and shadow.

For readers who crave Atmosphere over sugarcoating, symbolism with narrative weight. A deck that reads like a ghost story and bites like truth.

Perfect for collectors, writers, diviners, and lovers of gothic fiction, crumbling circuses, moonlit cemeteries, and the delicate horror of memory.

See it now at https://tarotbyducksoup.com

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.