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What if all your favorite horror writers, artists and creators could come together around the campfire to share their spookiest, creepiest yarns? At @Midnight_Pals, you get an inside look at just such a hypothetical gathering: From Stephen King's dad jokes to H.P. Lovecraft's unfortunately named cat, no aspect of the horror business remains unskewered when these horror maestros -- and some not-so-maestros -- get together!
In 2020, we indiegogo-ed our first Midnight Pals book, "Submitted for the Approval of the Midnight Pals," a beautiful tome of ungodly lore with so much EXTRA bonus material! People's responses completely blew away our expectations -- our original crowdfunding campaign made 208% of goal! In 2021, we indiegogo-ed the sequel -- creatively titled "Submitted for the Approval of the Midnight Pals II" -- and did even better, hitting 400% of goal!
Now, in the best of horror traditions, we're indiegogo-ing the final leg of the trilogy: Submitted of the Approval of the Midnight Pals III!!! This will be the biggest and best Midnight Pals collection yet, with an estimated delivery date of Halloween 2023!
What do the experts think about Midnight Pals?
“Midnight Pals 3 feels like you’re reading an old style comic or magazine that exists in another, more fun dimension... Honestly made me five times jollier than I was before reading.”
–Madeleine Swann, author of The Sharp End of the Rainbow
“Spot on social commentary and bitingly accurate literary parodies form an essential online lore woven through with running gags and the underlying implication that we are all invited to gather round the campfire to participate. An absolute gift to the genre.”
–Joe Koch, author of Convulsive and The Wingspan of Severed Hands
“Karella’s Midnight Pals segments are like a delicious trail mix made of coffin nails, eyeballs, and teeth: juicy, crunchy, and surprisingly sharp.”
— Gretchen Felker-Martin, author of Manhunt
“Midnight Pals B
ook 3 has a lot to offer hardcore fans and casual enjoyers alike... And the collections are a joy to revisit or read for the first time. If you are a fan of horror fiction and like to laugh, this is a must buy!”
-- Eve Harms, author of Transmuted
“Clever, subversive and merciless, Bitter Karella has created a marvelous satire of authors behaving badly, battling egos and increasingly baroque in-jokes, which joyously skewers pretension, topples statues, and pokes fun at our literary heroes and legends.”
–Joanne Harris, author of Chocolat
“Hilarious and clever as hell, you won’t regret attending this meeting of the Midnight Pals.“
–Alan Baxter, author of The Gulp and The Roo
”People will love it, or some will love to hate it and give you free publicity like spaghetti lawyer.”
–Bogleech, creator of Awful Hospital
“Oh my God, this is pretty funny!”
— Brian Keene, author of Earthworm Gods and Dark Hollow
“I was one of the authors included in the Midnight Society tweets. Those tweets were unfair, oversimplified my interests, and stung my pride. I’m pretty sure that means this is genius.”
— Richard Roberts, author of Wild Children and Quite Contrary
“HUGE NEVER-ENDING ENDORSEMENT. Best entertainment thread in Twitter history!”
— Gail Simone, writer for Birds of Prey, Secret Six, Deadpool, and Wonder Woman
“Midnight Pals is one of the greatest things to grace the hell that is social media! A loving tribute to the all-stars and obscure weirdos alike of horror literature.”
— Slimyswampghost, creator of Sirenhead and Longhorse
“The Midnight Pals make me laugh like nothing else online these days. It’s good!”
— Victor LaValle, author of The Ballad of Black Tom and The Changeling
“Keep your friends close but keep your Midnight Pals closer!”
— Betty Rocksteady, author of In Dreams We Rot and Arachnophile
“WARNING: Do NOT read while drinking any beverage, especially hot and / or fizzy ones as The Midnight Pals will make you laugh so hard it will come out your nose!"
–Buzz Dixon, writer for GI Joe, The Transformers, Thundarr the Barbarian, Jem
"A gift to genre fiction, a reminder why we do this and a snake-eating juggernaut of satire with enough spaghetti to go around!"
-- Garrett Cook, author of Charcoal and A God of Hungry Walls
The @midnight_pals Twitter account has lampooned everyone from Thomas Ligotti to Junji Ito and now we want to collect even MORE of the best, funniest tweets into an all new big, solid, physical grimoire that you can put in your own personal library and possibly rig up so that pulling it from the shelf opens a passage to an underground laboratory or forgotten crypt. That's up to you. But we want to provide you with the perfect book to use as the linchpin of that scenario. Something you can enjoy at home with your own cult or coven!
But why back Midnight Pals 3, you ask?
If you've watched enough horror films, you already know that the sequel is always a lesser effort compared to the original, right? Not this time! We've worked hard to make Submitted for the Approval of the Midnight Pals III into the MUST HAVE companion piece to our other books.
- More of the hilarious microfiction that you've come to expect from @midnight_pals!
- Wacky, funny listicles like Lord Byron's Top 5 Hair Care Tips and Alan Baxter's Top 5 Vacation Destinations!
- Fake ads spoofing the classic inserts from 1990s pulp horror magazines!
- Cover by Gentlemonster!
- Illustrations by Jennifer Albright!
- An introduction by Stoker Award winner Hailey Piper (Author of The Worm and His Kings, Queen of Teeth)!
- Single page "horror" spoofs written in the style of some of your favorite horror writers, like Bram Stoker, Neil Gaiman, Angela Carter and more!
- A BONUS section with a handy introduction to haunted houses by Midnight Pals author Bitter Karella, sure to be beloved by any horror buff!
And, of course, long time Midnight Pals devotees will be pleased to see know this follow-up collection includes some of the Midnight Pals' most popular bits:
- The Pals Visit the Ackermansion!
- Margaret Atwood's robot Retweet-o-tron!
- Franz Kafka discovers hopepunk!
- Aleister Crowley's Ritual Magic Threesome!
- Mary Shelley and the Original Goths cause trouble!
- The saga of Diane Duane and JK Rowling's ducts!
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It only takes a sponsorship of a mere $5 to get your hands on a deliciously decadent e-book PDF version of 'Submitted for the Approval of the Midnight Pals III' and a mere $10 to ensure that your name will live on in infamy as a sponsor of highest caliber. But surely what you most desire is the tome itself, the truest, purest physical book version! And, to get that, tis a mere $25 sponsorship. Or $30 if you want it signed by the scribe herself. Is that all? Of course not! At higher levels, you can even get extra goodies...
For $55, you will receive not only a physical copy of Submitted for the Approval of the Midnight Pals III, but also a physical copy of ONE of our previous books: Choose from Submitted for the Approval of the Midnight Pals I, Submitted for the Approval of the Midnight Pals II, Misunderstanding Comics (A hilarious parody of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics), or Firebrat (A hilarious horror-comedy parody of the Polar Express and 80s TV Christmas specials about kids fighting Santa Claus on Christmas Eve)!
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For $80, you will receive not only a physical copy of Submitted for the Approval of the Midnight Pals III, but also physical copies of TWO of our previous books: Choose from Submitted for the Approval of the Midnight Pals I, Submitted for the Approval of the Midnight Pals II, Misunderstanding Comics (A hilarious parody of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics), or Firebrat (A hilarious horror-comedy parody of the Polar Express and 80s TV Christmas specials about kids fighting Santa Claus on Christmas Eve)!
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Have ideas about a particular horror author/artist/director/creator that you'd like to see receive the Midnight Pals treatment? You can designate a victim of your choice to be skewered in up to a full page of new tweets for a mere $150 sponsorship. You can request a page of tweets about an author who has appeared before or someone totally new! It's up to you! (If you have any questions about whether a particular creator would be appropriate, please contact me before you pledge!)
And if you'd like to see a full short story written in the style of your favorite (or least favorite) creator? We've got an option for that too, at the $250 sponsorship level! (NOTE: Authors who were already skewered in this fashion in the first two Midnight Pals book are exempt, so I will NOT accept requests to spoof Stephen King, Clive Barker, Dean Koontz, Junji Ito, Thomas Ligotti, Anne Rice, Octavia Butler, HP Lovecraft, Edward Lee, Mary SanGiovanni, Carlton Mellick III, JK Rowling, Shirley Jackson, RL Stine, Poppy Z Brite, Edgar Allan Poe, or Jonathan Sims! If you have any questions about whether a particular creator would be appropriate, please contact me before you pledge!)
Bitter Karella (@bitterkarella) is the writer and horror aficionado behind @Midnight_pals. She's been involved with four successful book crowd-funding campaigns: Misunderstanding Comics, Firebrat: The True Meaning of Christmas, Submitted for the Approval of the Midnight Pals, and Submitted for the Approval of the Midnight Pals II. He lives in a hut on fowl’s legs in the dark of the deep woods and can be summoned by the sacrifice of a white cockerel on the eve of a new moon.