By Dee Holloway 
Welcome to Dead Leaves, an occasional table stacked high with recent horror tomes! Today we’re spelunking through the Major Arcana with Clairviolence: Tales of Tarot and Torment by Mo Moshaty. Shuffle your cards, light a few candles, and prepare for the descent, because these characters aren’t playing with full decks…
What is tarot but the triumph of the story? Esoteric tarot, or the customs and practice of card-based divination, is one of the more recent innovations in fortune-telling. Yet the cards’ art, language, and interpretations are so evocative that a new iteration is published seemingly every day (Llewellyn Worldwide, the biggest occult goods supplier in the US, has 38 pages of decks alone). The story of tarot as a true (and ancient) occult technology, promulgated by the Victorian occultists onward, is a testament to imagination and narrative flexibility. Small wonder, then, that tarot imagery and structure provide such fertile soil for books, film, and music. Cyberpunk, The Love Witch, Six-Gun Tarot, Nightmare Alley, Tarot, Castle of Crossed Destinies, Penny Dreadful, Coven of the East, The Rebis: these are a mere sprinkling of tarot-adjacent popular art. In 2025, post-Etsy witch scandals and with apps like co–star netting millions of users, the occult arts are more mainstream than ever. The latest addition to the media scene is Mo Moshaty’s Clairviolence: Tales of Tarot and Torment, arriving October 21 from Tenebrous Press.
With a stacked resume including editor-in-chief duties at NightTide Magazine, collabs with horror media titan Shudder, and workshop offerings, Moshaty’s fiction is steeped in fright lore. Clairviolence calls on tarot’s archetypes to form its table of contents, inflect its stories, and create a meta-narrative about the powers and uses of storytelling itself. A tarot spread, after all, is a story in miniature; tarot readers may use the cards to parse clients’ questions into narrative form. In its interior art, prose themes, and physical form, Clairviolence echoes and interrogates the stories we tell ourselves and each other.
Clairviolence doesn’t begin with The Fool, tarot’s zero card and the ostensible starting point for its Hero’s Journey. Instead, the book takes a winding tour through half of the Major Arcana, exploring provocative cards like The Devil (“The Fever Man”) and The Lovers (“Dandelion Wine”), as well as subtler motifs deployed through Justice (“Shallow”) and my favorite, The Hanged Man (“The Human Seed”). Some stories, such as Death’s “I Wish I Could Grow Plants,” are a straightforward link to their cards; others, like The Empress’s “Mourning Cloak,” are more interpretive. The collection is rife with contemporary anxieties, including Candyman-esque housing horror “The Severity of Things” and pandemic paranoia personified via “Stained Glass.” There’s also plenty of old-school dread and slasher vibes: “Surface” offers grotesquely erotic mermaids, while “Magic Hour” depicts an outsized response to home invasion and denouement “Rumpus” turns ghost stories on their head. It’s unexpected and yet fitting to conclude a tarot horror collection on The Wheel of Fortune, a card which reminds us that what goes up must come down and even the worm will turn.
Throughout the book, chapters are punctuated by simple but effective illustrations by Moshaty and Matt Blairstone. Tarot art is always a ripe chance for artist interpretation, with contemporary decks often straying far from the Rider-Waite-Smith template (you can get a DC Comics-themed deck, for instance, or one entirely based around bees). Clairviolence‘s card depictions, like its stories, are sometimes frank (a horned skull for The Devil) and sometimes nuanced (a series of broken windows for The Tower). Art and stories together create a rich, varied, and most crucially subjective portrait of the author as cartomancer. In appreciation of the artistry on display in Clairviolence, and the chance to read this book early, Dead Leaves offers a mini-spread inspired by “Rumpus” for the Halloween season. The Librarian pulled these cards–which will you pull?
Clairviolence: Tales of Tarot and Torment is available for preorder in a variety of formats from Tenebrous Press. Follow Tenebrous and Mo Moshaty on Bluesky for the latest weird news and literary horror chatter. Happy reading, ghouls!
