The New Queen of Publishing
10/4/26
By: B.E. Miller
Susan Russell saw the book I was trying to write before I had the language for it.
I came out of music production. Tracks, mixes, tension you can hear. I was new to putting that same pressure on a page, and my sentences felt stiff. My scenes wanted to get ugly and strange, and I kept sanding them down the way I used to master a song for radio. Then I landed in Susan’s orbit at Grendel Press, and she did not treat me like a tourist. She treated me like somebody who already carried a sound. She clocked what I was chasing, ran me through her editing masterclass, and helped me keep the unique madness instead of boiling it into something safe.
That is why I call her the new queen of publishing. It isn’t because the phrase is pretty. It’s because she builds a house for work that would get sanded to death somewhere else.
A press for the other
Grendel Press, founded in 2022, is a remote independent press based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, publishing horror, dark fantasy, and dark romance. The name comes from the monster in Beowulf, and Susan has been clear about the point. She wants monsters who are more than monsters and heroes who are more than heroes, because people are never one-dimensional. Susan started as an editor for a gaming website, then took on freelance clients and noticed how many self-published books could be elevated by the right editor. Grendel grew out of that. The press motto says it plainly: Where the Feared and the Forgotten Find Their Voice.
Susan wears every hat. She is founder, editor-in-chief, and Keeper of the Sass. She edits, she coaches, and she still takes freelance clients through Sassy Edits. When she isn’t working, she is usually with her cats, Grayson and Lilah. Authors at Grendel get a human on the other end of the conversation, one who polishes the work without losing the voice inside it.
What the masterclass did for me
I felt that in her masterclass. She never flattened the rhythm I brought from music. She showed me where the beat was hiding inside the paragraph. She let the ugly verbs stay, pushed the image when it got timid, and made every scene cost something. An editor who wants a clean product and an editor who wants the thing you actually meant are very different people, and Susan is the second kind.
The books
The catalog shows that taste at work. Grendel opened in 2023 with anthologies. Paramnesia, edited by Susan, gathers fourteen stories about broken memory and the fear that your own mind is lying to you, from a theater owner casting a plague-city diva to a woman who thinks her taxidermy is moving. More Than a Monster collects sixteen stories that stand on the line between creature and person, including a woodwose trying to join polite society and a tentacled thing with an unstoppable hunger in a quarry. The Devil Who Loves Me leans into supernatural seduction and dark want, and Uncanny & Unearthly Tales gathers hauntings, folklore, and odd domestic dread. Later came The Midnight Labyrinth, a collection of strange rooms and lost people, each told by a different Grendel author.
The novels followed. Cyril Mezden’s An Empty Embrace pairs an elven cleric with a vampire in a story of queer desire, devotion, and captivity. S.A. Gonsalves’s The Blood Princess and The Corrupted Prince split a royal life into rule and revolt. Chantal Noordeloos’s Alleria and Charlotte Platt’s One Smile More add more dark fantasy. J.M. Faulkner’s Her Being Toward Death sinks a woman into a Louisiana plantation, a family curse, and a madness that does not knock. Kelly Barker’s Beneath the Bridge brings fae law, secret gardens, and a love that will not stay hidden. C.H. Riley’s Sound of the Future drags science fiction through transformation and the ugly music of a world going wrong. In 2026, the press also released Rebekkah Ford’s The Last O’Clery Witch, a small-town story about a reluctant witch with real stakes and dark humor, and Leon Peter Blanda’s Old Soul.
Horror readers also have Counted With the Dead by Peter O’Keefe, Thrall by Richard Beauchamp, The Women Without Eyes by Micah Castle, and IXIXIKLIS by Jason Wyckoff. All of them are outsider stories told from inside the outsider.
What Grendel offers authors
The press offers authors direct support. Grendel publishes completed manuscripts in dark fantasy, horror, and dark romance, with editing, cover design, typesetting, and marketing handled at no cost to the author. Theme matters more to Susan than a tidy genre label, and the editing is hands-on. Books come out in print and digital, and the press runs its own storefront, events, and mailing list. To see the door for yourself, visit grendelpress.com.
For me, the offer was sharper than any contract. I was a musician learning to write. Susan heard the mix I was after and helped me make the madness hold. That is a rare editor, and it is why Grendel feels like a throne instead of a logo.
Long live the work that would not sit still. Long live the woman who refused to sand it down.