Loren Rhoads

Latest News:
January 2010: Loren is working on a collection of cemetery travel essays called Wish You Were Here. It includes essays published on Gothic.net, in Morbid Curiosity, and on Morbid Outlook, as well as new pieces written specifically for the book.
November 29, 2009: Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues is nominated for a Black Quill award at Dark Scribe magazine.
October 2009: Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues joins the Thrillpeddlers for a night of staged mayhem at the Hipnodrome. See the videos soon on YouTube.
October 23, 2009: Loren was interviewed at Morbid Outlook. Read the interview here.
October 2009: Morbid Curiosity Cures The Blues was featured in a Rue Morgue story called "Chicken Soup For The Morbid Soul."
October 5, 2009: Loren's story "The Angel's Lair" from SINS OF THE SIRENS made Ellen Datlow's Honorable Mention list of the Year's Best Horror: view.
October 4, 2009: Loren's photo "The Bone Chalice" is chosen for the permanent collection of the Museum of Death. It will be displayed in the Museum's photography room.
October 3, 2009: The MORBID CURIOSITY CURES THE BLUES book tour begins. Keep up with Loren at booktour.com.
September 13, 2009: The new website for Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues is up now. The book will be out in just over two weeks!
September 3, 2009: I guest-blogged about Rabbi Loew’s tomb in Prague’s Old Jewish Cemetery at the amazing Quigley’s Cabinet (Link). It’s my favorite blog.
August 23, 2009: Mason and I put together a trailer for Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues, featuring music by his band Numinous Eye. Check it out at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2euCWtVxFA
April 2009: The Morbid Curiosity magazine garage sale is going on now! Back issues 5, 6, 7, 9 and10 are available in limited quantities for $4 each, U.S. postpaid. The Morbid Curiosity page is here. Now with handy PayPal buttons!
April 15, 2009: “A Cemetery that Once Rivaled Niagara Falls,” about my visit to Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, appears on Morbid Outlook (http://www.morbidoutlook.com/art/articles/2009_04_greenwood.html). I sold the essay to City Slab last year as the first of my new cemetery columns. City Slab, R.I.P.
March 2009: I will be at the Stoker Weekend in Burbank, California June 12-14.
February 2009: Scribner accepted the manuscript for MORBID CURIOSITY CURES THE BLUES: True Stories of the Unsavory, Unwise, Unorthodox and Unusual from the magazine "Morbid Curiosity." In addition to 40 essays, the book will include sidebars and illustrations from the magazine. It goes on sale September 29. (http://books.simonandschuster.com/9781439124666)
January 2009: “The Drowning City” was bought by Burning Effigy Press for their FRESH BLOOD, Vol. 2 chapbook, due in Spring 2010.
June 2008: Scribner bought MORBID CURIOSITY CURES THE BLUES at auction. The book will contain 40 essays previously published in Morbid Curiosity magazine. It will be out October 2009.
March 27-31, 2008: I’ll be at the World Horror Convention in Salt Lake City, reading at the Persephone Writers Organization’s game show, reading SIRENS, doing my first-ever Mass Autograph Signing, and swanning around the Dark Arts Pajama Party.
February 23, 2008 at 3 p.m.: Maria Alexander and I will read from SINS OF THE SIRENS at Borderlands Books.
February 16, 2008: My first interview as an author, rather than purely as an editor, appeared at Macabre Ink.
January 19, 2008 at 2 p.m.: My first-ever book-signing with Maria Alexander and Christa Faust -- to celebrate the publication of SINS OF THE SIRENS -- at Dark Delicacies in Burbank, California!
January 2008: SINS OF THE SIRENS, the book containing four of my stories, alongside work by Maria Alexander, Christa Faust, and Mehitobel Wilson come out from Dark Arts Books.



For 10 years, Loren was editor of the cult nonfiction magazine Morbid Curiosity. She still believes curiosity is a radical, transformative trait. The contributors and contents of Morbid Curiosity magazine can be found here. A collection drawn from the magazine has been published by Scribner. Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues is available from your local bookstore or from Amazon.

Loren's writing ranges from dark urban fantasy, dystopian science fiction, and morbid erotica to worrisome personal essays and gleefully gloomy travel articles. Her short fiction has appeared in City Slab, Cemetery Dance, Not One of Us, the chapbooks Ashes & Rust and The Paramental Appreciation Society, and in the book Sins of the Sirens: Fourteen Tales of Dark Desire, alongside Maria Alexander, Christa Faust, and Mehitobel Wilson.

Magazines like Tail Spins, Unzipped, and Jane have featured her peculiar personal essays. Loren's travel stories darkened the pages of two Traveler's Tales books, the anthology Pills, Thrills, Chills, and Heartache: Adventures in the First Person, and Instant City. Her explorations of graveyards manifested monthly for almost four years at Gothic.Net.

Loren is a member of the Horror Writers Association and the Association for Gravestone Studies.


"Loren Rhoads has a taste for the most breathtaking insights to be found in macabre topics...Her work is at once arresting, haunting, unsettling, and gorgeous." — Thomas Roche, editor of the Noirotica series.


Photograph by Mason Jones

This website copyright © 2006-2010 by Loren Rhoads. All rights reserved.