This week we’re hosting a series of spotlights as part of the Pitch Wars 2018 Indie Alumni Blog Tour celebrating the indie authors forged through the event. For those unfamiliar, Pitch Wars was once a mentorship competition where established authors and editors would choose mentees from a pool of entrants and work with their mentor to revise their manuscripts and participate in an agent showcase. Pitch Wars was a great way for aspiring authors to find their agent, but not every author took the trad pub path.
This tour is a celebration of those authors who took a different path via indie and self-publishing, and we’ll be shining the spotlight on their books! To follow the tour across the blogosphere, check out the linktree.
Please welcome our final alumni Steve Hugh Westenra and The Erstwhile Tyler Kyle, an adult comedy horror for fans of Twin Peaks. Check out our review of the book later today!
Tyler Kyle doesn’t believe in monsters.
A washed-up thirty-year-old actor and reluctant cryptid investigator, Tyler is used to playing the Scully to his best friend Josh’s Mulder on their stupidly popular YouTube channel. But when Tyler receives previously unseen footage of the B movie bombshell mother who abandoned him eighteen years ago—footage linked to an isolated island in the Canadian wilderness—the mystery is one conspiracy he’s determined to investigate. The fact that following the scent gives Tyler an excuse to run away from the “straight” Josh, whom he drunkenly made out with, is just the cherry on the shit sundae.
But Echo Island isn’t what it seems. Its eerily scenic veneer hides a twisted secret buried in its roots as a gay conversion camp, and as Tyler retraces his mother’s footsteps, he discovers a supernatural connection between the residents and the island—one they seem to think Tyler and his mother share.
Even worse, the footage of Tyler’s mom came from someone on the island–a stalker whose obsessive fascination with both Tyler and Josh is about to make Tyler wish he hadn’t gone this one alone. Puppeteered by his stalker, searching for his mother, and debating whether it’s possible to queerbait yourself, Tyler comes to realize that it doesn’t matter so much whether you believe in monsters, if they believe in you.
THE ERSTWHILE TYLER KYLE is an adult horror comedy for fans of GHOST FILES, BUZZFEED UNSOLVED, and TWIN PEAKS.
The Erstwhile Tyler Kyle by Steve Hugh Westenra is available to buy online:
About the Author
Steve Hugh Westenra is the pen name of an academic expert on monsters and the monstrous. His short fiction has been published in New Edge Sword and Sorcery. He is the author of the The Erstwhile Tyler Kyle (a queer horror comedy about a cryptid-hunting YouTuber), The Wings of Ashtaroth(a sprawling epic fantasy set in a world based on Ancient Carthage), The Barbarian at Dream’s End (forthcoming from New Edge Sword and Sorcery) and Breadcrumbs on a Forest Floor (an upcoming novella about a trans man from rural Newfoundland who was taken by the fairies and returned on the grave of the changeling who replaced him). Born in England, he grew up on the eldritch shores of Newfoundland, Canada, and has since worked in the slightly-less eldritch Montreal. He is a judge in a number of indie writing competitions and reviews books for an online blog. He is trans and, like all academics, neurodivergent.
- Website: linktr.ee/SteveWestenra
- Bluesky: stevewestenra.bsky.social
