Horror just had its biggest sales boom since the 1980s, and Marion County, FL, doesn't have a single bookstore dedicated to it. I want to fix that, on wheels.

I'm Walt, and I've watched independent bookstores come back as real community hubs, but there's something that traditional brick-and-mortar stores can't do very easily: show up at conventions, at breweries, at festivals, or wherever horror fans already are.

That's what Strangleroot Books & Games will do. We're going to be Marion County's first mobile bookstore built entirely around horror, from slashers to splatterpunk, in both books and tabletop games.

A full 25% of the shelves will go to small-press and self-published authors (including local writers), because horror has always been a genre that thrives outside the mainstream, and those books deserve the spotlight.

We also intend to partner with local crafters/makers and businesses, from candlemakers and printers to bakeries. This is a unique opportunity for us to help the community as a whole, while bringing killer books to those who'll love them.

Why horror? Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth is a great example of why I love this genre: horror scares us, sure, but its real power is that it gives us a way to talk about the things that scare us for real, like monsters in human skins, environmental collapse, cultural erasure, and the world we're leaving behind.

What do donations go toward?

Every dollar raised here goes straight into getting Strangleroot on the road. If you can give, thank you. You're putting real shelf space under horror writers who don't usually get any. If you can't give right now, sharing this campaign helps just as much. Either way, I'd love for you to be part of this from the very beginning.