About WtD Books

When the Dead Books is a small book company started in Seattle, WA and run by owner and author Michelle Butcher (writing as Michelle von Eschen). WtD Books offers quiet, literary horror and bizarre fiction.

If you’re looking for strange, different, and keep-you-up-past-your-bedtime reading, you’ve found it. If you’ve read something from us, drop us a line and let us know your thoughts!

Our main author Michelle is also active on TikTok, Twitter (general content), and Instagram as yourquiethorror (main account) and the murk of us. Please stay connected with her there!

We are not currently hiring editors or running any submissions for anthologies. Please check back for future opportunities.

What Readers Are Saying

On OFOtN

Is post-apocalypse gothic a thing? If it’s not, it should be … or maybe it is now

Christine Morgan

Author of Lakehouse Infernal, Spermjackers From Hell, and others / Website

On WYBAB

Michelle von Eschen has such a fantastic voice, and it's evident in all of her work. Her prose is beautiful and almost poetic, lulling you into a false sense of security before she pulls the rug out from under you.

Sara Ferrarese

Heartfelt, intelligent, darkly poetic, and beautifully figurative while also being economical

Tylor James

Author of Matters Most Macabre / Website

von Eschen crafts haunting short stories of quiet horror through the lens of loss and grief . . . [She] has a fantastic sense of pacing.

Bob Foster

City of Geek

On MIMDtZA

...slick and clever...

Peter Clines

Author of The Fold, the Ex-Heroes Series, Paradox Bound, and others / Website

As a fellow writer and publisher, generally full of confidence, Michelle is one of those authors whose stellar writing temporarily shakes my faith in my own. She's THAT good.

Jonathan Lambert

Author of GUGGA and Betwixt the Dark & Light: A Collection of Oddities / Owner, Jolly Horror Press

[Michelle] puts words to paper in a way that makes you feel like you're there, on the pages, dancing among the words like it is your whole world and the only one you've ever known. It all feels so natural and relatable. It's a terrifying experience, but in the best of ways.

A. Burke

Reader, Pirate, Software Engineer

[Michelle's] writing will emotionally crush you and physically destroy you. And you come back, asking for more.

T.J. Tranchell

Author of Cry Down Dark and Asleep in the Nightmare Room / Website

You’ll never see salmon sushi the same way again. [To find out more, read The Madness Coil, featured in When You Find Out What You're Made Of]

S. Reese Brook

Reader, Badass, Grandmother

Long Form Reviews

Latest Release

Motel Styx

Tucked away in the Chihuahuan Desert lies a motel unlike any other…
Fueled by online trends, a shift in the American zeitgeist has led to the instatement of the Lazarus Act, legalizing the ‘recreational use’ of human corpses.

Ellis Mercer, recently bereaved, embarks on a secret mission to America’s first ‘necrotel’ to recover his wife’s remains, before her corpse and his memory of her are desecrated by the motel’s twisted membership.

As he uncovers the murky inner workings of Motel Styx, evading its suspicious staff and encountering a wild array of death-obsessed guests, he will be forced to face an unsettling truth: there is more than one way to define love.

Motel Styx is an explicit, disturbing, witty tale about lust, loss, and the last taboo.

Purchase