‘Split Scream: Off The Map’ Authors John K. Peck and Íde Hennessy Talk Indie Publishing and Punk Rock
The Split Scream series has become something of an institution in the modern indie horror scene. When you get down to the basics, the idea is delicious: two novelettes—weird as fuck—presented in a single volume like an old-fashioned double feature, or a split album. Over seven volumes, the series has debuted and spotlighted much emerging talent in the indie horror-sphere—including myself (“The Guts of Myth”), all the way back in Volume One.
Since that first book, Split Scream has continued its reign of weird terror, even after the series switched hands from Dread Stone to Tenebrous Press. Now, with Volume Seven (subtitled Off the Map) arriving on March 27, 2025, we’re treated once again to daring, defiant, and strange storytelling from two authors on the rise.
And in that way, this seemed like a serendipitous project. Interview the latest Split Scream folks from the perspective of the prodigal son. Shake hands, pass the torch, and slap backs. Shotgun beers in the back alley of indie publishing and scream into the night an indomitable and sloppy, “Hell yeah!”
But it turns out, John K. Peck, Íde Hennessy, and I have more in common than just a book series.
You see, before I wrote horror, I wore a denim vest that smelled like PBR and spent most of my weekends in dive bars, watching touring acts play to audiences of nearly 30 people. I documented these nights, reviewing shows and albums, at an online punk zine called DyingScene.com. So, imagine my delight when I found out that both John K. Peck and Íde Hennessy were musicians with their hands in punk projects.
Punk and horror are a likely alliance, made all the more fruitful by the state of publishing in both mediums. Musicians and writers rely on DIY to make their names, working with labels or presses run by one or two malcontents from a home stuffed with packing supplies. Simply put, being an artist in 2025 demands a punk rock ethos.
I was lucky enough to meet John and íde to discuss their stories in the latest volume of Split Scream (John’s co-writer, L. Mahler, was unavailable for this interview), their history with music, and how independent art makes the world turn. So, grab a beer, stand in the back, and complain about the headliner.
Carson Winter: Thank you for joining me today! I absolutely loved your stories in Split Scream: Off the Map and am excited to dig deeper into the creative process, your respective histories with music, and other cool stuff. But first, do you mind introducing yourself?
John K. Peck: I was born in Northern California and have lived in and around Berlin for the past eleven years. I write fiction, poetry, essays, reviews, and humor, and I’ve been published in a fairly broad range of venues on subjects from architecture to video games. Over the past five years I’ve focused more on horror, Weird fiction, dark fantasy, and all the wonderful combinations thereof.
Íde Hennessy: I like to mash up genres like cosmic horror, eco-horror, folk horror, sci-fi, and cli-fi into weird genre blobs. I’ve also played in some bands with nebulous genres under the umbrella of post-punk, including, most recently, Control Voltage. Before that I was in a minimalist synthpop girl band called Blood Gnome, plus a brief stint as a guest vocalist in the experimental floorcore band Starving Weirdos.
CW: “Evergreen” is unique to the Split Scream series because it’s co-written. What was the process like working with L. Mahler?
JKP: It’s funny, people have asked us, “Did you really write this piece together?” And when we say yes, the inevitable response is, but how? I’m not sure either of us can fully answer that, but maybe I can give a little background.
From the concept of mycelial structures (more on this below!), the overall structure of the piece emerged pretty quickly. Both L. and I grew up in northern California, so we had a shared vision of the isolated forest town and its inhabitants. We are also intimately familiar with each other’s writing and process (my fiction, L.’s academic writing).
In concrete terms, we each wrote specific sections, then edited and revised each other’s sections extensively, and I think this accounts for the (hopefully) cohesive voice throughout. The final big phase of revisions we did together, sitting at the same computer—a process that was totally new for each of us. It was highly laborious but also not entirely unfun. I think I can speak for both of us when I say we would gladly do it again. For us, the collaboration worked almost like a generative device, but it was also really freeing to craft a collective voice and style.
CW: What I loved most about “Sequoia Point” was the parade of weirdness that marches through the proceedings, giving it a sort of surreal air. Do you think it’s important for fiction to break realism?
IH: When I was writing in my teens and twenties, it was hammered into me that realism was something to strive for. But it wasn’t what I enjoyed reading. I was really into Kafka and Borges and Vonnegut at the time, but I was reading how-to articles in Writer’s Digest. I eventually realized the best part about fiction is that literally anything can happen if you build a world for it. There’s definitely a place for slice-of-life literary realism, but it isn’t what I’m interested in.
Moving to Humboldt County in northern California also stretched my definition of what’s realistic because every day, I have stranger-than-fiction interactions with people who do the opposite of what you’d expect them to. I’m inspired a lot by this place, with its backwoods conspiracy theorists, wonderfully artsy weirdos, and the darker aspects of it that can make people slip through the cracks and vanish.
CW: The stories in Off the Map have such a wonderful sense of place to them. There’s an immediacy there that makes me think they were pulled from somewhere close to you. Can you tell me a little about how you chose the setting for these pieces?
JKP: Falls Valley, the town in which “Evergreen” takes place, is fictional, but very much inspired by the stretch of towns off Highway 101 that border the Eel River. The setting is part of the broader “forested West” region, less coastal and more vast swaths of forest stretching eastward to the Rockies.
Nature-wise, what I miss from my time in California isn’t the coast, but the capital-w West—in particular, its scale. It’s a place you can still disappear, by choice or not, even in the modern era, and it has a vastness that’s rare in the rest of the US, and Europe for that matter. So while there’s a lot of beauty there, there’s also an underlying menace, in the sense that it could swallow you up without a trace.
IH: The town of Sequoia Point is loosely inspired by a real place called Shelter Cove, an isolated coastal town in my Northern California county. It has an odd history as a sort of mass real estate investment scam. It’s this remote place that was difficult to get to unless you chartered a small plane, but people all over the world were roped into buying plots of land there to live the California Dream. They’d eventually find out their land was basically a vertical cliffside and nothing could be built there. We also have an unusual number of missing people here in Humboldt County, which was highlighted a few years ago in the Netflix show Murder Mountain. So, I took Shelter Cove as a jumping-off point and made it even weirder as a fictional place.
CW: There are strong currents of eco-horror in “Evergreen” and “Sequoia Point.” What urged you to use nature to explore horror, or vice versa?
JKP: Since moving out of Berlin several years ago, I’ve gotten much closer to nature than at any other point in my life. I don’t mean that in the sense of being “one with nature,” but rather I’ve really had to get my hands dirty and get up close with earth, trees, and animals, and all their requisite scents and sounds. We have a large semi-wild garden, and through that, I’ve discovered more beauty in plants and trees. I’ve also discovered the darker sides, of how rot and decay and also an extremely slow form of forcefulness and violence are built into nature’s life cycles.
Since living here, I’ve also gotten heavily into woodworking, particularly in carving blackthorn and applewood, and the sheer combination of time and technique it takes to coax a piece of wood into a certain shape is mind-blowing. Between that and the largely devoid-of-people forests in the region, I’ve felt the frightening strength of trees a lot more in recent years. Our dominance over plants comes down to our respective senses of time: if they moved on the same timescale we do, we’d be fighting for our lives around them.
The core inspiration for the story was my co-author L. Mahler’s research in mycelial structures, which form networks that are essentially invisible to humans. Mycelium, being fungal, is a “third kingdom” that is neither flora nor fauna. It can be a sort of bridge between the two. The thing with these structures is that when they do make themselves visible or known in unexpected ways, it can be all the more uncanny and impressive.
IH: I’ve always had a deep love for nature, a fascination with non-human intelligence, and an interest in all the strange processes working outside our little bubbles of human experience. I think we’ll always be playing catch-up with science, so nature will always be The Unknown to some extent. A lot of my favorite horror involves pulling the pedestal out from under humanity and disrupting our self-appointed status at the apex of everything. Eco-horror and cosmic horror are a couple of my favorite genres for that reason.
CW: Both of you have a musical background. John is the bassist of punk band American Steel (a fact that had me geeking before this interview), and Íde has a post-punk project called Control Voltage. I’m always curious about artists who work within different forms because there’s a tendency to define an artist erroneously by a single medium. What’s the impetus for expressing yourself in one versus the other?
JKP: Thinking about my playing and prose styles, I’d call both “understated until they’re not”. There are, of course, flamboyant and over-the-top versions of both punk and horror, which can be fantastic if done right. But that’s never really been my thing. So I like to hang back a bit and then emerge with a big and perhaps even overstated fill, or in writing, a very dense or baroque or violent section in an otherwise minimalist story. Being flashy is more fun on stage because you get to put your foot up on a monitor while you do it; I haven’t yet figured out what the writing equivalent might be.
IH: For me, both forms are a response to the impending sense of doom that tends to creep into every waking moment when I’m not creating. Sometimes, writing or playing music feels like trying to exorcise a demon, but the demon is the reality of living in the twenty-first century. The real impetus for writing over playing in bands, for me, is not having to wrangle multiple people into the same point of time and space. Both serve the same purpose, though.
CW: John, when I found out that you were the bassist for American Steel, I was ridiculously excited. American Steel has been one of my favorite bands for years. Realizing that you were also a horror writer made me consider the fact that the world is indeed a very small place. So, I’m curious, what’s your history with writing? How did you get into it?
JKP: Thanks! We’ve always been a very underground band, but the fact that so many of the people who dig us are themselves musicians, writers, and artists has always made me especially proud.
I’ve actually played music and written since I was a teenager, but until recently, it was only the former that got any traction or attention. But even in our early days of touring, there were always books and zines in the van, particularly in that pre-smartphone era. I’d always bring along a spiral notebook and pen, and I mostly wrote journal entries or poetry back then. Rarely, but occasionally, I sent them off to journals. During that era, I also worked at Small Press Distribution, the indie book distributor in Berkeley, so I had access to an incredible range of underground books, overwhelmingly poetry. Whether it was my own naivete or the skewed ratio SPD carried, I figured at least half of the books published in the world were poetry, a view I stubbornly held for at least a few years.
Some of my earliest touring memories involve books. For example, reading Gravity’s Rainbow while cruising down a highway somewhere in the south, hungover in 100-degree heat with the windows open because we had no AC. Whenever I hear a passage from it, I feel the blast of air on my face like a hair dryer. Perhaps that’s the perfect way to read Pynchon, I couldn’t say.
On a different tour, we all read and passed around a copy of Jonathan Ames’ What’s Not to Love? that a friend had given us, which paired perfectly with the seediness of touring. The short answer is that music and writing have always been intertwined for me. Though I now consider myself a writer first and a musician second, I’m still and always will be both.
CW: Íde, Control Voltage is interesting as a project because storytelling is baked into its concept. Can you tell us a little about Control Voltage as a vehicle for storytelling?
IH: When I joined the band, it was described to me as a sci-fi concept band with songs about intergalactic drug smuggling, so of course, I was instantly interested. When it comes to writing lyrics, I work better with limitations than with a blank slate. So, a concept band was really appealing.
One of the two founding members is focused on a solo project right now, but while the band was active, I was singing about being chased through the astral plane by psychic spies, billionaires leaving everyone behind on a dying Earth, things like that. I miss it, so my partner (the other founding member) and I bought a drum machine and we’re starting another concept band, this one leaning more into the goth side of post-punk. I do hope to record some more Control Voltage songs as well, because I love that project.
CW: Punk and social consciousness have always gone hand-in-hand. But prose and music are very different beasts. Did you find any punk views or values working their way into your story?
JKP: Coming from the East Bay and particularly the Gilman scene of the mid-90s, punk to me was really about finding a core group of people who shared your interests, starting up a project, and taking that project to the world directly, without worrying too much about how polished or perfect it was. Style-wise, it was a pretty scrappy and patchwork scene, which I mean in the most loving way. The East Bay managed to squeeze an incredible diversity of bands and genres into shows and compilations, all under a big punk/DIY umbrella. And that fluidity of genres, cannibalizing whatever parts you most like from any style or era of music, is something I’ve carried over to writing.
So while I play “punk” and write “speculative fiction”, I like to think of each as less a strict genre or restriction, and more a way of giving myself permission to use whatever tools and tricks I come up with to take the song or story where it needs to go.
IH: Although this particular story isn’t as openly anti-corporate or anti-authoritarian as some of my fiction, there’s a thematic element of empathy, which I think is at the heart of all social consciousness.
CW: Having worked in both, do you think there are any similarities between punk and indie publishing?
JKP: Absolutely. Working with indie publishers like Tenebrous gives me the same warm fuzzy feeling I get from some indie labels, where there’s the buzz of genuine energy and love for what they do that’s missing from so much of modern life. These projects are more about letting the uniqueness of bands or writers shine through versus tidying it up for consumption. That doesn’t mean good indie pubs and labels don’t work their asses off to make the work they put out look, read, and sound as good as possible. But it’s all in service of bringing out what’s unique about each work.
The best labels and presses build their communities not because the work they put out is all the same, but because the community trusts them with new and exciting work; work they may not read otherwise. And the more unique voices they put out, the more their catalogs start to take on an identity.
IH: I think indie publishing embodies that classic punk value of non-conformity, embracing stuff the big traditional publishers wouldn’t necessarily touch. I knew I didn’t have to tone down any of the Weirdness when I queried Tenebrous Press—or add a more traditional romance subplot, or make my female protagonist under 30.
CW: What’s next for you two?
JKP: I’ve got a few book-length projects in the works, including my first story collection. The band has also been newly reactivated since last fall, so you may hear more from us in the coming months. Since moving to Germany and living in the former East, I’ve also developed an obsession with abandoned places and modernist/brutalist architecture, which I write about on my own blog, Degraded Orbit (degradedorbit.com). Otherwise, once L. finishes her dissertation, we might also embark on a new co-authoring journey. We’ll see what the future holds.
IH: I’m currently working on a sci-fi horror novella—unless it morphs into a novel—set in a near-future Northern and Southern California grappling with climate change. I’m an obsessive researcher when it comes to sci-fi, so I’ll be lucky if I finish by the end of the year. I don’t want to give spoilers on the concept, but it involves a mother searching for her lost son amidst what seems to be a pandemic of mass hysteria. In shorter fiction, I have a story called “A Body Is Horror” coming out in the Winter issue of Chthonic Matter Quarterly. It’s a folk horror story about gender-based medical gaslighting, invisible illness, and rural poverty.
Split Scream: Off The Map is out from Tenebrous Press on March 27, 2025.
Carson Winter is an award-winning author, punker, and raw nerve. His short fiction has appeared in over 20 publications, including Apex, Vastarien, and Chthonic Matter Quarterly. He is the author of Soft Targets, The Psychographist, and A Spectre is Haunting Greentree. A former Pacific Northwesterner, he now lives amidst the cold in Saint Paul, MN.
Categorized:Interviews
