Girls From the County Coming Later This Year

Raw Dog Screaming Press (RDSP) is happy to announce a book deal with Bram Stoker Award-nominated author and poet Donna Lynch for her poetry collection, Girls from the County. It’s set to release in 2022.

Small towns, farms, open fields, and dark forests—they are all settings of folklore and rural legend. Also, they are locations of the lives of young women in Girls from the County: a poetry collection of true tales of the dark side of growing up rural in the 80s and 90s mixed with the legend, legacies, and tragedies of young county women from generations before. 

From her own penned introduction:

I’ve changed the names, but these poems are true stories.

Some of them belong to me, some belong to my friends and to ghosts, and some are tapestries stitched together from all of us.

Some of the stories are from one hundred years ago. Others, from thirty, and it almost doesn’t matter, because certain things never change.

This book is merely a record of dark events, the kind that you can sometimes move on from, yet can’t help but see in every old house, high school, or crumbling bridge.

“I grew up in rural Maryland, raised by my mother and grandmother—county girls, themselves— in the house my architect grandfather built for them in the 1940s,” Donna said. “I grew up, moved to Baltimore, traveled, but I eventually came back. It’s a part of me, even the ghosts. My goal with this collection was to combine personal horror and trauma of all the young women I knew—myself included, melancholic nostalgia, and rural legends and folklore, especially from eras before the internet, social media, and cell phones. It isn’t just about my county, but the counties, villages, and towns of numerous friends on two continents, too. These pieces exist as a record for so many young women, in so many places.”

RDSP has published Donna’s books and poetry collections for over a decade, including her two Bram Stoker Award-nominated poetry collections, Witches (2018), a collaboration with her artist partner Steven Archer, and Choking Back the Devil (2019).

“We have been lucky to publish Donna Lynch for many years but this collection marks a high point in her writing. I’m excited to see her stretch past boundaries and dig deep for a collection that is both an origin story and place history.”

Now, RDSP is proud to share with readers dark memorials and insight to the lives of these rural women, driven with Donna’s haunted, poignant, and piercing pen, in this important collection.

Donna Lynch, Biography –

Donna Lynch is a dark fiction writer and the co-founder—along with her husband, artist and musician Steven Archer—of the dark electro-rock band Ego Likeness (Metropolis Records). Her written works include Isabel Burning, Red Horses, Driving Through the Desert, Ladies & Other Vicious Creatures, Daughters of Lilith, and In My Mouth. Lynch’s poetry collections Witches and Choking Back the Devil were finalists for the Bram Stoker Award. Choking Back the Devil also won the Ladies of Horror Fiction Award for Best Poetry collection. She and her husband live in Maryland.

Raw Dog Screaming Press

RDSP has spent over fifteen years publishing “fiction that foams at the mouth.” With releases that combine and cross genres including horror, literary, crime, science-fiction, experimental, and bizarro, RDSP continues to bring you the best that fringe fiction has to offer. Their imprints include Dog Star Books which focuses on science fiction adventure, Guide Dog Books for cultural studies and criticism, Anti-Oedipus Press for avant garde works, and Imaginary Books for young readers.

Explore Raw Dog Screaming Press online or find us on most social media platforms. Make sure you subscribe to our newsletter to keep up to date on all our news and new releases.

Media –

Review copies when available can be obtained upon request, and interview inquiries can be coordinated, through Erin Al-Mehairi, publicist, at hookofabook@hotmail.com or twitter or Instagram (@erinalmehairi).