Blood Letters - by Gmb Chomichuk & Ariel Gordon (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"The multimedia approach to the book is effective at communicating the transformational effects of the war, to which no one is immune. Psychological and body horror given multiple forms, all of them scarring. " -- Kirkus Reviews

When your entire family is caught up in a world war with flesh-eating fog and robotic monstrosities, the only question that matters is: what are you willing to do to survive?

Siblings Kris, Albany, and Millie each inhabit a different part of the war - special ops and cannon-fodder at the front and codeworks behind the line - which transforms and transmutes how they think of themselves and their allegiances. They dump everything they know?confessions and consolations alongside poems for fallen friends and battleground sketches - into letters.

Review Quotes

"The multimedia approach to the book is effective at communicating the transformational effects of the war, to which no one is immune. Psychological and body horror given multiple forms, all of them scarring." -- Kirkus Reviews

"With Blood Letters, Gordon and Chomichuk present a tense recounting of a war at once foreign and all too familiar--a powerful epistolary trek through the personal loves and losses of a single family forced to contend with the manipulation, dehumanization, and disruption that comes to define their lives." -- AGA Wilmot, author of Withered and The Death Scene Artist

"BLOOD LETTERS is an artifact from the future, a jumbled archive of robots, soldiers, dot-matrix print-outs, ID cards, propaganda posters, photos and maps: Human detritus offering hints that something has gone horribly wrong.

Letters fly back and forth as siblings strive to stay in contact in a world at war. This cascade of communication, chaotic attempts at human connection, may ultimately be doing more harm than good. Family letters improve morale, which in turn leads to increased lethality. Love hurts--or in this case, kills.

In BLOOD LETTERS, Ariel Gordon asks timeless questions. How do we maintain our Humanity without being absorbed by technology and war? Is survival the best we can do? How can we go on in the face of shock, PTSD, lasting harm and other traumas?

Throughout BLOOD LEETERS, poems sustain our heroes. Art, then, shows us a possible way through. Wars end, lessons aren't learned, wars begin again... but even among the destruction, Humanity marches on.
-- A.G. Pasquella, author of Welcome To The Weird America, co-editor of Devouring Tomorrow

About the Author

Ariel Gordon (she/her) is a Winnipeg/Treaty 1 territory-based writer, editor, and enthusiast. She is the ringleader of Writes of Spring, a National Poetry Month project with the Winnipeg International Writers Festival that appears in the Winnipeg Free Press and the poetry editor for The Goose. Her most recent books include Siteseeing: Writing nature & climate change across the prairies (At Bay Press, 2023), written in collaboration with Saskatchewan poet Brenda Schmidt and the essay collection Fungal: Foraging in the Urban Forest (Wolsak & Wynn, 2024). Her work has appeared recently in Best Canadian Essays 2025 and Prairie Fire's 50 Over 50 special issue.

GMB Chomichuk is an award-winning writer and illustrator whose work has appeared in film, television, books, comics, and graphic novels. His work ranges from the heart warming to the bloodcurdling with graphic novels like Cassie and Tonk, Midnight City, and Will I See?. He is the host of Super Pulp Science, a podcast about how genre gets made. His newest full-length graphic novel, Apocrypha: The Legend of Babymetal, was featured on The Hollywood Reporter, The Nerdist, and Billboard magazine.