LOVE IS THE ONLY

SHOCKING ACT LEFT

We all know horror. It’s in our face every day. You can try to negotiate the nightmare but total chaos and destruction is just one button-push away.

In this intensely personal collection of short stories, screenplays, and essays, horror legend John Skipp walks you through the light and the dark with an unflinching eye. Revealing both the best and worst of us, one laugh and scream at a time.

It ain’t pretty. But it’s beautiful. Once you go all the way.

PRAISE FOR DON’T PUSH THE BUTTON

“Startlingly honest, refreshingly revealing, funny, freaky, upsetting, unsettling. His best yet.”

Josh Malerman, author of Bird Box

"Skipp's writing is so good, so insightful, so honest, gross, trippy and what-the-fucky, it makes you feel the dearest of friends has suddenly opened their heart all the way up to you, and you alone."

 Lucky McKee, writer/director of May, co-writer (with Jack Ketchum) of I Am Sam

"DON'T PUSH THE BUTTON is John Skipp at his very finest. Funny, scary, weird AF, and always surprising. Very highly recommended!"

Jonathan Maberry, NY Times bestselling author of Ink and V-WARS

"DON'T PUSH THE BUTTON is a beautiful, bluesy, angry, affectionate howl of a book. It wants to tear you apart to show you what's wonderful deep inside of all of us. A wild, unpredictable portrait of a bright, burning mind, it showcases Skipp's radical range, dark-hearted humor, and enormous empathy. There's a grace and honesty to these stories that moved me, and made me grateful that John Skipp will always choose to push those buttons."

Jeremy Robert Johnson, author of Entropy in Bloom

“As writers age, we refine our craft to compensate for a creeping disengagement with the world outside our heads. John Skipp has been working against that curve all his life, tearing down fusty literary conventions and bringing the raw realness with a wrecking ball. Don’t Push the Button hits with the urgency of a ransom note and the hard-won wisdom of a prizefighter’s face. To see so unflinchingly into the dark corners of life and still give a shit is less a gift than a miracle, but Skipp wraps that gift in his own skin and he’s giving it to you. Open it!”

Cody Goodfellow, author of Unamerica

“A genie of fire-eating brilliance. In his virtuoso trove, Don’t Push the Button, John Skipp’s X-Acto gaze slays artifice, heals with true, golden heart. No fathom can resist his maestro dives.”

Richard Christian Matheson, author of Dystopia

“John Skipp has never, ever been afraid to walk in the dark: he knows that's where all light shines hardest. Walk with him, trust his vision and his voice. Push the button.”

Kathe Koja, author of The Cipher

"John Skipp is still splatterpunk, knocking your teeth out to a hard and heavy beat. But he's also a goddamn hippie trying to levitate the Pentagon with the power of his words and as you read him, sometimes you could swear it's working. In the war to keep our hearts alive in this heartbreaking world, Don't Push the Button is the essential treatise of our pal in the trenches."

Laura Lee Bahr, author of Haunt

“An electric collection that showcases the passion, strain, grief, and impulses of what it means to be human. These stories get dirty. They get political. They get uncomfortable. Sometimes they just make you laugh. And all the while they shine through with John Skipp's acid-god light and his love for us all, even at our worst. Even when we push his buttons.”

 Autumn Christian, author of Crooked God Machine and Girl Like a Bomb

John Skipp's 2021 Splatterpunk Lifetime Achievement Award encapsulates his long, weird, colorful career as a Rondo award-winning filmmaker (TALES OF HALLOWEEN), Stoker Award-winning anthologist (DEMONS, MONDO ZOMBIE), and New York Times bestselling author (THE LIGHT AT THE END, THE SCREAM) whose books have sold millions of copies in a dozen languages worldwide. His first anthology, BOOK OF THE DEAD, laid the foundation in 1989 for modern zombie literature. From splatterpunk founding father to bizarro elder statesman, Skipp has influenced a generation of horror and counterculture artists around the world.

ISBN: 9781944866976