D.L. Winchester & Undertaker Books

By Angelique Fawns

 

D.L. Winchester is a former mortician and is dedicated to innovative storytelling and the myriad voices that make up the horror genre. He’s penned over 300 obituaries, many short stories, and his own collection called Shadows of Appalachia. 

For the first time, the owner of Horrortree, Stuart Conover, and I are sharing a TOC! We both sold stories to Undertaker Books’ latest anthology, Stories to Take to Your Grave: High Seas Edition.

   Starting January 1st – 31st, Undertaker Books is looking for Carnival of Horror stories. Your prompt is, “Amid the rides and games, in the shadows the bright lights don’t reach, are horrors of all kinds…”

AF: Why did you create Undertaker Books? What is the origin story of your press?

DLW: Undertaker started in March 2024 when Cyan and I left a different press because we felt the owner wasn’t doing right by the authors or his staff. We started Undertaker with the intention of publishing our own books and a few anthologies to start out with, maybe the occasional novella or two, with a focus on taking care of our authors.

Then, the press we previously worked for began to implode, and we picked up Rebecca Cuthbert as our Editor-in-Charge. Spring/Summer of 2024 saw a lot of turmoil among presses in the indie horror community, and we were in the right place at the right time to sign some books that lost their previous homes. Before we knew it, we’d filled our 2024 & 2025 schedules, and had almost filled 2026 too!

 

AF: How did you find your audience in the world of indie publishing? What were your greatest challenges?

DLW: It still baffles me to think I have an “audience.” To me, I’m just a guy that writes stuff some people might like.

I think the biggest step, and the most challenging step, to finding an audience is finding your niche. What are you going to write about? For me, it tends to be small town stories, from the old west or Appalachia. Once you’ve figured out who you are, it’s easier to find people who want to read your work.

It’s the same way with Undertaker Books. If you look at our catalog, everything we publish is a “story to take to your grave,” but we also know that we look for works that people can see themselves in. 

 

AF: What was your inspiration for the Stories to Take to Your Grave series?

DLW: Shameless promotion!

We knew we wanted to do anthologies, and Cyan suggested a “loss leader,” a free anthology that we could give readers to promote our other books. 

Since we’re Undertaker Books, Mortuary Edition was a natural theme for our first anthology. Once we published it, Cyan suggested we spread the stories out and send them as part of our newsletter before we compiled them into our anthology, so that’s what we did for Wandering Souls Edition, 13 stories spread out over six months. Our next edition, High Seas Edition, will be spread out over a year, and I’m sure we’ll have some new twist for 2026’s Tattoo Edition.

 

AF: You are a writer yourself. Tell us about your journey?

DLW: I started writing in high school, but I didn’t start submitting until 2023. Occasionally, I’d start a blog or post something on Facebook for my friends, but it was mostly just a personal hobby. I did NaNoWriMo every year, winning four times (2012, 2015, 2018, and 2022), but actually getting published was always a “someday” thing until I started submitting. 

Once I did, things began to happen in a hurry. I can’t say spending ten to fifteen years in isolation just writing will work for everyone, but it did for me! Acceptances started coming in, then came the opportunity at the other press, and now Undertaker Books! I’ve got a short story collection out, Shadows of Appalachia, a flash fiction collection, A Terrible Place, and my first novella, a western horror called The Screaming House, released on November 1.

 

AF: What guidance would you give authors hoping to sell you a story? What is the single most important element you look for?

DLW: Push the boundaries. I intentionally write my calls so authors can interpret them as creatively as possible. Find a story that will take me somewhere unexpected and horrify me in a way that makes me say, “wow, that was good.”

An author who did this really well was Nikki Kirsch in her submission for Mortuary Edition. It’s written in the second person, and while it’s not directly connected to the funeral home, she took a peripheral experience from the grieving family’s perspective and turned it into a great story.

 

AF:  What kind of stories are you seeing far too much of?

DLW: Stories with a lot of exposition on the front end. I want to be dropped into the action and have the environment built around me. Laura Bohlcke did a great job on this in “Her Face” from Wandering Souls Edition. It’s not that I don’t care about the environment, but I’m there for the story, and I want to see the details weaved in as the story progresses, not dropped on me at the start before anything happens.

 

AF: Can you share an anecdote, or bizarre story, from your time as a mortician?

DLW: People always ask me for this, and I’m like, “the dead people were very well behaved. It was the live ones that caused problems…” I’ve actually got a novella scheduled for 2026 that takes a deep dive into this theme.

But one of my favorite stories happened very early in my career. It was a funeral for a ten-year-old boy, and of course everyone is tense. The family because they just lost their son, and the funeral home staff because no one wants to screw up a kid’s funeral. 

So I’m standing by the casket at the end of the graveside, right in the middle of the family and mourners, and the deceased’s younger brother, probably eight or so, comes up to me and innocently asks: “So, do you drop the casket with a ‘thunk?’”

It took every ounce of my self-control not to burst out laughing! The kid was so serious, like it was the most obvious way in the world we’d put his brother in the ground, and yet it also managed to break the tension, at least for me. 

Somehow, I managed not to laugh, and told the kid that we would not be dropping his brother with “a thunk.”

 

 

AF:  What’s next on the horizon for Undertaker Books?

DLW: We’ve got a loaded calendar in 2025! There are some names everyone will recognize, like Erik McHatton, Emma Murray, and Robert Ottone, but we’ve also got some new faces we’ll be introducing to the horror community, like Keller Agre and Ed Downes. Eliza Broadbent has another release next fall, as does C.M. Saunders. We’ve got Kathleen Palm’s middle-grade horror trilogy too. 

Next summer, I’ll be bringing Aggie, my main character from The Screaming House, back for another adventure, and in the fall our EIC, Rebecca Cuthbert, has a collection of ghost stories for us. And as always, we’ll have a few anthologies to round things out.