I asked fellow Tales from The Hanging Tree anthology contributors to share some things about themselves prior to publication and those generous enough to do so will be appearing here for the next week or so.
Each entry gives a taste of their contribution, a little about them, how to contact them, how their story came about, and definitely a link to Tales from The Hanging Tree (which you should purchase because it would make each and every one of us happy.
you do want to make us happy, don’t you?
i mean, considering what we wrote, you want us to know you’re a good person, right?).
Matt’s contribution is Death for Sale. Here’s a taste:
“Life for Sale”-no, that felt wrong. That would be offering more than she was ready to give.
“Death for Sale”-that was better. Much less nebulous. Easier, it occurred to her, to die for someone than to live for them. Hadn’t Tyndale decided that the greatest love was to bestow your life for your friends? But Tyndale had died before his time; the surviving translation held that laying down your life was the right of it.
How the story came about:
It’s a tired truism: write what you know. One of the ways you get into an anthology about a tree that feeds on hangings is to have done a lot of thinking about hanging. The fruits of experience, as it were.
This piece is in conversation with another. That one is the inverse: Life for Sale by aesthete and doomed fascist Yukio Mishima. His legacy is tainted by that; there is a form of redemption in the pitiful nature of his failure. He had the unfortunate characteristic of being both a compelling figure and a good writer, all while holding contemptible evil beliefs.
Life for Sale is about a man who sells himself to do anything his patron might wish. Death for Sale considers the obverse: the meaning of death in a transhuman world where the human soul is digitized. When life can be stored digitally, would death, too, become simply one more commodity in the moribund capitalist landscape? But, more than that, it walks through the long night of neurodivergence. It is my hope that it makes those like myself feel understood.
About Matt Usher:
Matt Usher is an agender creature in the big city. Before this, they had no other fiction publications. They write as a critic at Compulsive Reader. They cherish a love of the music of language and a polycule who are the dearest people in their life.
They are the strange sort of being that makes spreadsheets for fun. This is often in service of automatic calculations and data storage for traditional roleplaying games, their most important hobby. Collaborative creativity is one of their most valued things.
They play bass and trumpet, like pro wrestling, and write extremely nerdy poetry. They are immensely neurodivergent and rather queer.
You can find and follow Matt on X and BlueSky.
See all Tales from The Hanging Tree stories here.