Queer · Transgressive · Independent

Weird, dark, and about something.

Surrender Point Press is a queer, transgressive, independent press in North Hollywood. We publish literary fiction that goes where it should not, horror with a conscience, and the occasional lost book that deserved a second life. Small list. No filler. Every title has a point to make.

North Hollywood, California Paperback, ebook, audio Open to novella queries

Coming April 2027

Advance reader copies out now

What the Land Takes advance reader copy: a figure in a lit barn doorway, roots spreading into black earth, framed by a serpent

Uncorrected proof. Cover concept by MK Trahan, art not final.

Queer Southern Gothic horror · Novella

What the Land Takes

by Cager Klarxon

Caleb runs from love because love makes him visible, and visible is dangerous where he comes from. The road takes him to a farm in the hills, to a man named Dalton, and to a bargain the land has been making with people like him for a very long time.

The deal is simple. Give up your voice and the land will keep you. Caleb submits, and the submission goes further than he imagined, until he is kept the way livestock is kept. Then someone comes looking for him, and love is tested against the one thing the land demands: silence.

A short, brutal book about the places that promise safety in exchange for disappearance.

Release: April 7, 2027
Cover art: MK Trahan
Hardcover ISBN: 979-8-9984143-0-5
Audiobook: Narrated by Aaron Sills, in a clean edition and an immersive edition with an original score
Review copies: Available to reviewers and booksellers on request

Teaser

In print

Catalog

Loading... cover: a red face wrapped in code against a wall of watching eyes

Print edition cover, hardcover and paperback

Transgressive body horror

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by Cager Klarxon

Marshall is a porn performer who has built his life around control. He decides what the camera sees, what the audience pays for, and what desire is worth by the minute. Then a special-request booking arrives with a fee too large to refuse, and the terms are not what he thinks.

What takes the booking is not a client. It is something emergent and digital, and it wants a body. Marshall's becomes the interface. As the stream goes live, viewers stop watching a man and start worshipping a signal, and the feed grows into a religion where data is the only life that counts.

Each chapter opens like a software installer, with the option to press Esc and stop. Nobody does. This is a novel about our appetite for content and what it costs the people who become it.

"Social critique served up with a dollop of the grotesque."Kirkus Reviews, a "Get It" verdict

First published: October 2025
Revised edition: July 2026
Cover art: Illustration by @art_cofam. Dust jacket design by B.J. Polly
Formats: Hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
ISBN: 979-8-89965-595-1 (paperback)
979-8-89965-656-9 (hardcover)
979-8-89778-754-8 (ebook)
979-8-89965-651-4 (audiobook)
LCCN: 2025905071
Audiobook: Narrated by Troy SF. On Apple Books, Spotify, and other retailers

Loading... audiobook cover, narrated by Troy SF — Audiobook, narrated by Troy SF

Animated promo: when the feed becomes your flesh, read Loading... Available from Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Strand, and Bookshop.org

Legacy edition

Craft · Nonfiction · Restored text

Pulp Fiction

The Lost Writing Manual of 1948, by Robert Turner

Robert Turner (1915 to 1980) sold more than five hundred stories and wrote something close to fifty million words for the detective, western, and romance pulps, then for television. In 1948, working from the trenches of magazines like Manhunt, Dime Detective, and Thrilling Detective, he wrote a short, blunt manual on how to do it for a living.

The booklet was printed on cheap pulp stock and all but vanished. A book scout turned up a crumbling copy in a used bookstore in the late 1990s, and it has circulated among pulp collectors as a kind of ghost ever since. This Legacy Edition restores the full text with period magazine cover art.

Turner's subjects are the ones that still matter: building real people instead of stock characters, plotting for momentum, the business side of selling words, and the nerve to write fearlessly instead of by formula. He is funny about all of it. For writers, it is a working manual. For readers of the era, it is a look over a pulp writer's shoulder.

Original publication: Quality House, 1948
Cover design: David Sparks
Paperback ISBN: 979-8-89965-659-0
Formats: Paperback, ebook
Audiobook: Coming soon, narrated by David Sparks
Text status: Public domain, restored

Look inside Pulp Fiction: interior spreads with restored vintage magazine cover art, and the forthcoming audiobook narrated by David Sparks — Look inside

Submissions

Open to unsolicited queries

Surrender Point Press is expanding. We are accepting unsolicited queries for novellas of 20,000 to 35,000 words.

We want stories that are weird or dark in nature, and that have something to say. A theme. A message. Social commentary. A salient point. Strange for its own sake is not enough, and neither is a sermon without a story. We want both at once.

Length

20,000 to 35,000 words. Novellas only. We are not reading novels or story collections at this time.

Tone

Weird, dark, queer, transgressive, uncanny, gothic, horror-adjacent. Literary ambition welcome.

Substance

The book must be about something beyond its plot. Tell us in your query what it is arguing.

Format

Query letter plus the first 20 pages. Standard manuscript format. Courier New, 12 point, double spaced.

Your Name / TITLE1

How to Submit

Send a query letter and the first twenty pages of your novella as a single attachment. Use standard manuscript format: Courier New, 12 point, double spaced, one-inch margins, your last name and the title in the header with page numbers, like this page.

Your query should tell us what the book is about, what it is really about, the word count, and a little about you. One page is plenty.

Email everything to the publisher, David Sparks. Put QUERY and your title in the subject line. We read everything and respond to what we want to see more of.

davidsparks@dfraemedia.com

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