Debutiful is excited to reveal the cover of The Joplin Horror, the debut novel from award-winning screenwriter Jason Kaleko. This cinematic psychological horror follows a crew of graverobbers who descend into an ancient mausoleum expecting an easy score, only to find an impossible labyrinth, disappearing memories, and something hunting them from just beyond the light.
Perfect for readers of Mark Z. Danielewski, Chuck Wendig, and Paul Tremblay, The Joplin Horror is a claustrophobic descent into buried trauma, fractured reality, and a place that seems determined to keep its visitors forever. It will be published by DAW on May 25, 2027. It is available for preorder now.
Debutiful is honored to reveal The Joplin Horror‘s cover, designed by Adam Auerbach, along with an exclusive excerpt from the novel.
I’ll tell you what we saw. Standing in that blank mausoleum interior, looking down into what we thought was a display pedestal. Into what was definitely not a display pedestal—
A stairwell.
A narrow set of steps leading into sheer darkness. Not that it was bright where we were standing, headlamps on now.
But down there, below the ground: emptiness.
That’s the only way I can describe it. Empty, blank, dark. Whatever you want to call it. Maybe three or four steps and then everything was swallowed. Less of a passage, more of a gullet. A throat begging for food. Rayner shined his beam straight down, let it catch on the edges of a few dozen stone steps descending indefinitely beyond.
It was hard to say what we all felt then. That strange mix of hope and fear dancing in our eyes. The same all around, only in different proportions. Perhaps a little more fear in Carrie, a little more hope in the rookie Lee. I remember how my gut churned, screamed.
Forget the possibilities, let someone else sort it out. Not so much fear as it was laziness. This wasn’t the gig I’d signed up for. No clue what I was looking at, but one thing for sure—
It would be a lot of work.
I glanced at Rayner. Our fearless leader. His face would tell me how to feel, what would follow. But his eyes held no emotion. Instead, a series of calculations running through. Figuring out the odds, the next step. Until they settled. And I knew what he had decided before he said it.
“We’re going in.”
#
The ensuing argument was a mess. A shouting match refereed by the pounding rain and occasional thunderclap. It boiled down to two sides: Rayner versus Carrie. The limitless potential below versus the safety outside. And Bridgers, of course, caught between her business partner, her lover, and a helluva migraine. Finally getting it, that old “money and blood don’t mix.”
Rayner claimed Rodrigo said nothing about this. That he pitched it as a simple tomb raid. Bigger than most, sure, but not ‘secret underground staircase’ big.
I bought it. But looking back, why did I buy it? After the mule omission, the Cookeville payphone… how long had I really known Rayner at all? Two months? I’d known many people longer and trusted them less.
Carrie whined and wailed. Tried to call upon any excuse she could find to not go down there. Even invoked a classic Bridgers line (“it goes against protocol!”) despite being the biggest protocol breaker of us all.
While everyone else could be counted on to stay in line, follow the rules, get in and get out, it was Carrie who regularly clepto’d extra shit from unrelated graves or littered dig sites with crumpled Skittles bags and Reese’s wrappers (aka evidence). And that’s not even mentioning her role as our very own spray paint Picasso.
Sure, she claimed she used to be a tagger back in high school, before she got her act together and went all bookish. But my guess? That spray can in her hand was a plea for acceptance. She came from a different place than the rest of us—a cleaner, far more straight-laced place, where rebellion was just a hair color. Here, with us, vandalism was her way of showing she belonged. As for why Rayner let her get away with it time and time again, considering our entire goal was to evade detection… well, only Bridgers had the answer to that one.
Carrie’s opinion, while loud, was a manifestation of the gut feeling we all had. The flight response. Rayner’s argument was sounder.
“We thought this could be the big one,” that deep bass reverberated around the mausoleum walls. “Well, now we know: it’s the biggest one. Massive. A hidden entrance to some place that has never been touched. Whatever is down there, it’s ours.”
He was right. We could take the bricks from the walls and nobody would be the wiser. We’d be fools not to grab what we could. Who knows, maybe after this we could all pull a Justin, grab a few pieces of Alaska and spend our days growing fat. American dream shit.
Not to say Carrie didn’t make a few strong points. “Didn’t Alexis say there had been disappearances? This is probably where they disappeared to!”
But there was just too much against her. Lee was already rubbing his mitts together, mouthing “paypah fa dayz” in my direction. Ultimately, even Bridgers’ vote fell to Rayner.
I knew it would, too. Deep down, she must have felt what I felt. The high of our last hit bubbling back up. The promise of an even bigger rush. Nothing could have turned her away from that, and despite my initial reluctance, Rayner’s rallying had me feeling the same way.
Never could resist calling an all-in, to be honest. Easy to do when you’re someone like me, always the short stack. So when Rayner’s eyes flashed my way last, I just nodded my head.
And that was that. No going back. Not then, perhaps not now. If you put the curtain back in place and said, “You have a 50/50 chance, certain death or unlimited wealth…” Yeah, I’d probably still go for it. Maybe probably.
And so we went in. Obviously we went in.
One-by-one. Rayner, me, Bridgers, Carrie, Lee. There were five. Remember that. Five of us into the earth, the nightmare. Headlamps on, stepping down into the plate of black.