The Plastic Priest, by Nicole Cushing

"Nicole Cushing is one of the sharpest, most innovative writers in the field today." - Thomas Tessier

About the Book:

When the soul has been thoroughly poisoned, the body must abandon it. Everything feels unreal afterwards, but plastic heads shed no tears. Bram Stoker Award® winning author Nicole Cushing offers an excursion into the Weird, a quiet novella of a madwoman in a mad town, as an Episcopal priest grapples with the meaning of faith, reality, and if there is anything real to either of them, at the end of it all.

Published as a trade paperback:
• Printed on 60# acid-free paper
• Featuring full color cover artwork
• Retail price $14.00

Nicole Cushing is a Bram Stoker Award® winning novelist and a two-time nominee for the Shirley Jackson Award. Various reviewers have described her work as “cerebral”, “brutal”, “transgressive”, “wickedly funny”, “taboo”, “groundbreaking” and “mind-bending”.

Her second novel, A Sick Gray Laugh (2019) was named to LitReactor’s Best Horror Novels of the Last Decade list and the Locus Recommended Reading List. Her third novel, Mothwoman was released in late 2022.  Nicole lives in Indiana.

"An intense and uncompromising literary voice." - Rue Morgue

"Have you ever read a book so strange, and so arresting, that you can't tell where one quality ends and the other begins? A book so lucid in its dark experimental weirdness and insight that you can't look away? That was me while reading The Plastic Priest. I couldn't look away. And I'm glad I didn't." - Matt Cardin, author of To Rouse Leviathan

"Through sharp, incisive prose, Cushing insightfully delineates Kaye and her spiritual crisis. Readers will find much to enjoy in this meditation on fantastic possibilities beyond religious orthodoxies." - Publisher's Weekly

“I've never read anything quite like The Plastic Priest, and I'm delighted I have. A witty and incisive portrait of a priest beset by doubts, it mutates into a comedy of uncanny paranoia before exploding into weirdness that's as disturbing as it's liberating. Nicole Cushing's tale is a stimulating challenge, and her spare precise prose is a constant pleasure.” - Ramsey Campbell, author of Alone With the Horrors