Below is my current catalogue of self-published books; while most are pay-what-you-want, there are a few exceptions mostly to account for rising costs of living. If any links don’t work for you, let me know directly!
CHAPBOOKS/COLLECTIONS
REVENANT’S HYMN (Poetry/Prose)
“Hell is empty, and all the devils are here –
All the devils are here, wandering around trying to figure what comes next.”
Asmodeus and his siblings were brought into the world in the middle of the bombing of Berlin, forty years ago. Their master never finished giving them their mission, their direction or their orders; instead, Asmodeus has spent the intervening decades as a restless force of chaos and despair.
Asmodeus’s story wraps around other short stories and poems about the dead, undead, and unholy, in Elliott Dunstan’s third collection. A teenage girl’s near-death experience turns her into a fractured kaleidoscope in ‘Bury Your Lovers Bury Your Friends’; a ghost of a former rock star visits a poet in ‘The Transient’; a censor tries to keep herself safe in ‘Mary Mary Ordinary’, and a bricked-up wife fights restlessness and doubt in ‘The Dripping Tap’.
Please note that Revenant’s Hymn contains adult content. A non-exhaustive list of trigger warnings is as follows: death/grief, dissociation, domestic violence, drug use, dubious consent, graphic depictions of violence, mental illness, Nazism/Holocaust references (offscreen largely), necrophilia, psychosis, sexual assault/abuse, suicide, and other dark/mature topics.
Digital: https://books2read.com/u/31R8dW
Physical: Coming in 2024/2025, finances willing!
Goodreads: Review it here!
The Shining Wire is a collection of poetry and prose, exploring what it’s like to be partially healed – almost better, but not there yet. The collection includes rabbits, robots, propositional calculus and Russian Roulette as themes.
Trigger warnings for this book include: mental health, dissociation and psychosis, partner abuse, emotional and physical, attempted suicide and suicidal thoughts, gun violence, self-harm, separation and abandonment, chronic illness, and ableism.
Digital: PWYW
Physical: $15 USD
Goodreads: Review it here!
‘Post-Traumatic Anatomy’ is a 40-page chapbook of original poetry by Elliott Dunstan, centering around PTSD, trauma and borderline personality disorder. The cover is a design by Linda Mota of Rubberneck.
Trigger warnings include attempted suicide, self-harm, sexual assault and violent imagery.
Digital: PWYW
Physical: $15 USD
Goodreads: Review it here!
‘Home is Where the Ghosts Are’, assembled May 2017, is 12 pages long and contains mixed poetry and prose telling a linked paranormal narrative. The narrator moves into their first apartment and finds traces of the old tenant left behind – both physical and spiritual.
Trigger warnings include drugs, death/grief, dolls, and minor violence.
‘Deep in the Bone’, first assembled in May 2015, is a 14-page collection of poetry and prose centered on the strange border between the mythic and the ordinary.
Trigger warnings are limited but include some very mild body horror and unreality triggers. It’s pretty chill.
ALKIMIA FABLES UNIVERSE
Ghosts in Quicksilver is a New Adult urban fantasy/hopepunk serial, and Book One: Salt edits, refines and collects the first twenty chapters in a paperback, complete with images and author commentary.
Jamal Kaye is not what you would call ‘destined for success’. She’s a struggling teenager with a stubborn smoking habit (gross), a Facebook page for a private detective firm (employees: one) and an annoying ability to commune with the dead. But soon, she’s stuck with her first case – a missing persons case she already knows is a murder mystery – and before long, she’s pitched headfirst into Ottawa’s supernatural underbelly. Who is Greeneyes? Why do they care so much about Jamal? Time to find out, or become another statistic.
Trigger warnings include death/grief, PTSD, child abuse, implied sexual abuse, transphobia, homophobia, racism, police brutality, murder, stalking, gaslighting, ableism/sanism, unreality, hallucinations, violence against children, and attacks on/near a place of worship.
Read Online: AO3, WordPress
Digital/Ebook: PWYW
Physical: $15
Goodreads: Review it here!
Book Two: Sulfur collects the second book of Ghosts in Quicksilver with edits and commentary, picking up right where Book One left off.
Hunting a murderer isn’t supposed to be the job of a would-be private eye with a fake ID, but after narrowly avoiding death at Kiera’s hands, Jamal Kaye doesn’t have a choice. Speaking to the dead means she has plenty of ghosts of her own, and Kiera’s fascination with her is bringing up her past more than she’d like. Finding Gurjas’s runaway before Kiera does promises answers, but that’s easier said and done when all she has is a knife, a cellphone, a bad temper – and, on good days, a powerful right hook. And all of this would be so much simpler, if she didn’t keep wondering why Kiera feels so familiar.
Trigger warnings include – in addition to the ones from the first book – ableism/sanism, anti-sex worker bigotry, anti-homelessness, aphobia (backstory), car accident trauma, domestic violence & murder (backstory), child death, gun violence, lesbophobia/butchphobia, mental manipulation/mind control, psychiatric abuse (backstory), psychosis/hallucinations/unreality, racism and anti-Blackness, sexual and child sexual abuse (backstory), self-harm (non-standard and cutting; the second is not directly depicted), and transphobia/transmisogyny (backstory).
Read Online: AO3, WordPress
Digital/Ebook: PWYW
Physical: $15 (soon!)
Goodreads: Review it here!
Elliott Dunstan 