It always felt like the night before Halloween and the day after an earthquake in Walpurgis County. Everything had to be taken at face value—monsters existed, the dead sometimes kept their day jobs and sinister cults made plans to rule the world.

Walpurgis County (a.k.a the Purg) was the star (or maybe the costar) of Kyle Toucher’s latest anthology of connected monster tales. Like Tess of the d’Urbervilles, The Wizard of Oz, The Martian Chronicles and, my favorite, The Monster From Earth’s End, The Medusa Psalms: Welcome to Walpurgis County elevates the stories prime location into a major character. It was the catalyst that animated the narrative. 

Walpurgis never appeared in the same place twice on a map because of “the Shimmer”—a slipstream of non-linear time. “Everything here was a ghost trapped in an immense time prison,” said Beeley Ballantine, a character featured in both the first and last stories of this mosaic-like novel. The Shimmer was real and it was an expressway to the Great Elsewhere. 

Time warp tomfoolery wasn’t the only thing local citizens had to worry about, however. There was also Walpurgis Peak, a sentient summit that resembled the Devil’s fang and was 100x more evil than the land surrounding it. “If you died in the shadow of the mountain,” warned Toucher, “your soul remained in the Shimmer, where decades were stepping stones, and the centuries a crooked path that always led you back to where you were.”

Even more scary, the mountain had a secret agenda that, if fulfilled, spelled doom for the entire world. Below the earth’s surface, a loathsome devilry murmured; “An idiot darkness scheming since the primal days of the world.” 

But what exactly was going on? Toucher pens an epistolary origin story early in the book, but readers don’t get a clear picture until much later. To his credit, the author is totally forthright when the time comes to expose Walpurgis Peak, the Winter Howl, the Great Machine, the Shadowless Ones, the Medusa Cult, the Architect of Zero—and all of the unspeakable secrets of secrets. 

The Medusa Psalms wraps up nicely like a Christmas gift from Krampus. “Billy Beauchamp and the Monster Cartel,” takes all the information previously revealed and throws it together in a thrash metal smashup.  

The story follows Billy Beauchamp (the Evictor!) as he travels through the Shimmer to perform an exorcism on a rampaging monster. You read that right—Billy’s hired by the Medusa Cult to expel a monster from a monster. A tricky assignment indeed. 

What starts as a quirky adventure quickly turns into a time-traveling shitstorm. To collect his Bitcoin booty, Billy has to tangle with a drug-addled monster and a family of anatomically incorrect spider-people.

When the Shimmer spits Billy back to the present, he knew that his job wasn’t complete—he needed to stay in Walpurgis County. “I’ve been too tolerant, lacking vigilance, almost tolerating evil,” he said upon reflection. “And that attitude has kept everyone in the Purg complacent. We’ve all become blasé.”

He added: “If you’re born knowing there are fallen angels and monsters in your backyard, you learn to accept them. We should never be all right with that.”

[ The Medusa Psalms: Welcome to Walpurgis County / By Kyle Toucher / First Printing: September 2024 / ISBN: TK ]