Amanda Helms
Amanda Helms (she/her) is a biracial fantasy, horror, and science fiction writer whose short fiction has appeared in Uncanny, FIYAH, PodCastle, and other fine venues. Whatever the mix of genres, she enjoys infusing her work with humor, especially since that allows her to be funnier than she can be in real time. In her previous professional life, she worked as an editor for an educational publishing company, and her experiences there influenced The Upper Tentacle (though fortunately she did not have to contend with eldritch horrors or betentacled hamsters). Now, she puts her editorial skills to work as part of the editorial team on the web magazine Diabolical Plots. Her free time is often spent fantasizing about what she’d do with an unlimited travel budget, cooing over cute puppy pictures, or cursing her seasonal allergies. She lives with her family in Colorado. Though all of them are natives, none ski or snowboard, proving that such creatures indeed exist.
The Upper Tentacle
A cosmic horror/murdery mystery/corporate satire mashup in which the admin for a corporate retreat and a body splitting alien team up to solve the murder of the company's president at a closed ski resort before their alien overlords inflict dire consequences for humanity's collective insubordination.
Khearozoth is an adjutant for their dimension-traversing, body-splitting, entity-eating and betentacled species. This means they handle the undesirable tasks their Greatest Supreme doesn’t care to, such as minding the educational publishing company acquired when the Greatest Supreme ate an Earth billionaire and assumed the billionaire’s assets. It’s not too hard to keep the humans in line (threatening them with consumption makes them biddable), but the job also involves the boredom of bearing witness to corporate retreats.
Yet a murder makes the latest retreat much more interesting, and it falls to Khea to uncover who killed their Greatest Supreme’s prized human underling. Only when the human executive assistant, Nia, catches Khea in a state of re-amalgamating their split halves, their previous ruse of disguising themself as their alien boss fails. Khea and Nia form an unlikely pairing to solve the murder—but as unpleasant as they mutually find it when Khea is forced into Nia’s brain, it's still better than the alternative of being eaten themselves.
Publication
US: Hachette (Union Square & Co.)
Release date: 30 March 2027
