New work for Goth Acid Western written by Jardine Libaire

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What if you suddenly found yourself playing bodyguard for a stranger? This Acid Western novelette, a collaboration between writer Jardine Libaire and artist Denise Prince, takes place on a seemingly never-ending night in 1983 and stars 25-year-old Corbelle, a goth loner from NYC with a fruitbat tattoo, a mullet, and dominatrix boots. An outsider anywhere she goes, Corbelle arrives in West Texas to collect an inheritance from an unknown aunt, and checks into a grand adobe hotel. Tired, her plan is to eat and sleep, but she runs into another hotel guest, Lois, who is combative, needy, drunk—and vulnerable. When two traveling salesmen, Clyde and Willer, get on Lois’s scent, Corbelle falls into being her protector. Over the hours, murder ballads play on the jukebox—Corbelle never heard these lurid country songs before—and by the next morning, wishes she could un-hear them.

With a nod to country stars Porter Wagoner, Tanya Tucker, and Eddie Noack, to spaghetti westerns, to punk-goth 1980s feminism, A Lesson in Murder Ballads is a psychedelic Texas storybook, with a noir heart—narratively and visually. Libaire’s characters weave webs enticing enough to walk into wide eyed.

Published by the dynamic Neotext Books, A Lesson In Murder Ballads is a “ghost track” to a new (forthcoming) Jardine Libaire novel, Peach