How Deep the Sharpened Blade

How Deep the Sharpened Blade brings together eight voices from the Greater Pittsburgh area in a collection of fiction that skirts the edge of modern pulp. Eight authors from the Greater Pittsburgh area share stories of characters moving, shimmering, sharing, and despairing. The settings vary but the current underneath them stays the same.

Authors Holly Thyen, Jeremy Corn, John Al, Susan Iannuzzi, Jason Brown, Lisa McCormack Tajak, Meghan Snatchko, and Beverlee Blair, share stories that show what happens when memory shifts, patterns emerge, legacies turn into curses, curses turn into internalized anxiety, and standard procedure loses all meaning. What feels like happenstance starts to look like something intentionally set in motion. Coincidences repeat and people try to outrun what they have inherited.

Something is always about to give. A body is found and truth surfaces too late to matter. A childhood settles into something harder to name and a place meant to hold people together starts to come apart. What once passed for love turns into something sharper, quieter, and harder to tolerate. Loyalties shift as authority slips. What should feel safe begins to feel surveilled. Some of it is quiet. A lot of it is violent. At the end of each day, no one actually knows who is in charge.

The stories echo and contradict but what connects them is the sense that something has already begun, and the characters are just now catching up to it.

Black and white, meant to be read all over, one at a time, or straight through.

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