This won’t be the most articulate thing you read today. It’s fueled by absolute fucking fury and the love of children in my community.
Some quick background, I run the Scholastic Book Fairs at my neighborhood elementary school in the huge school district of Plymouth, MA. America’s Hometown. (Remember that slogan as you continue reading.) This school is so small it doesn’t have a bus. Everyone walks their kids to and from Hedge Elementary, they run businesses in this close-knit neighborhood, lead churches of all kinds in this neighborhood, contribute to events at this school—like me—long after their kids have left it.
Hedge Elementary school has less than 200 students, with the highest ratio of ELL students and learning and economically challenged students in the district. I could talk about that for a day, but that isn’t what this is about.
This is about how ICE dragged a man from his car in front of that tiny, 100 year-old school this morning as children were in the crosswalk going to get their breakfast. This is about how the middle school kids who went there, have siblings who go there, who play there after school, watched as ICE wrestled someone out of their car as they got on the bus. Here is a TikTok message that went out to those middle school parents after the bus driver reported the incident:
This is not simply to piss you off, though I hope it does. My fingers are shaking as I write this.
I named my book fairs the #NoTearsBookFair long ago because I fucking refuse to let any child go home crying because they couldn’t afford a book. I’ve been doing this for over a decade, and pride myself on filling classrooms, kids’ hands, the library, new teachers’ rooms with THOUSANDS of books that this economically challenged group would not have access to. And I don’t just send them home with “a book.” No, those kids get EVERY book they want, I don’t care if it’s the Lego book they only want for the minifigure. If they have to open it, it’s making an impact. NO child is turned away, even if they had money and they just want to read more. You can’t imagine how it feels to have a child who literally arrived in the country with nothing 48 hours ago give you a hug because you gave them a “Welcome to Hedge” stack of books.
This matters more than ever today.
My #NoTearsBookFair is starting with tear-filled eyes already. I’ll see them all in a few hours as a bunch of parents who may or may not still have kids at that school sweat their afternoon away building a book fair that’s magical and exciting.
Julie Hutchings tells scary stories with pretty insides. She also likes karate-kicking, collecting robots, guzzling coffee, chasing it with pizza, and running badass book fairs for all the little boys and girls. Julie lives in America’s Hometown of Plymouth, Massachusetts with her hilarious husband, two genius children, and an army of reptiles. They’re probably doing something Marvel or Star Wars-related right now. If you pay her, Julie also does developmental editing for your novel.
The seed in the dirt. Tendrils push forth. Roots grab the earth with clutching fingers and a tree pushes forth, desperate for sun, eager for water, and one day, a fruit grows, is picked, and ends up in my hands where I shove it unmercifully into my mouth and I choose to give this miracle of nature a crass numerical rating between one and ten, denigrating this awesome-in-the-strictest-sense-of-the-world phenomenon where the world we’re ruining grants to us the food that will sustain us.
And eventually I chuck the core of the apple into the weeds, the seeds find the dirt, and tendrils push forth once more. The cycle begins anew, as it must.
This, then, is the plan: I’m starting over, ranking apples as I eat them. This time, I’ll also identify the orchard or store I got the apple from, for comparison’s sake. Why? Well, because — take for example, today’s apple. The Honeycrisp. The Honeycrisp is easily the most popular apple and also one that has been subject to degradation of quality, if you are to believe food journalists. The Rise and Fall of Honeycrisp Apples! Why don’t they taste how we remember? They don’t taste how they used to! They’ve gone from Marvel to Mediocre! Feel free to read any and all of those, but the tl;dr on this is: the Honeycrisp is a fiddly apple to grow, and grows better in some places than others, and sadly massive apple hunger (in German: eine Apfelbesessenheit) has required the apple be grown in places where it doesn’t do as well, often by growers who maybe can’t handle the plant’s delicate needs. Plus? Grocery store apples do not abide by seasonality. They are grown when they grow, and then placed in CAS, controlled atmosphere storage. Or maybe they’re just chucked into cryosleep like any of the poor galaxy-treading fools in Alien.
As such, where you get an apple, and when, matters. Where it was grown matters. How long it has been since harvest… drum roll please, matters.
And so, I begin again with the aforementioned Honeycrisp.
The reason is —
Well, I’ve not been kind to the ol’ Honeycrisp, have I?
I’ve long said, hey, this is a good apple, but it’s also kind of a basic-ass apple, right? It’s THE apple right now — you say to someone, “I like apples,” and eight out of ten people will light up and say, OH I LOVE ME A HONEYCRISP. The Honeycrisp is not only THE apple, and has been for a good decade, at least, but it’s also the origin point for many, shall we say, spin-offs. The Evercrisp! The Cosmic Crisp! The Sugarbee! The SweeTango! The Ludacrisp! The Rosalee, which I’ve never had! Curiously not the Crimson Crisp!
And on and on and on.
The Honeycrisp’s own parents are reportedly a mystery — one parent is the Keepsake, the other the romantically-named MN1627. (Relax, it’s from a Univ. of Minnesota breeding program. They only get the pretty names when they get put in the game, coach.) MN1627 mayyyy come from Duchess of Oldenburg and Golden Delicious? Whatever.
(For those who don’t know, here’s a bit of hasty apple science: you can’t just take the seed of an apple, plant that seed, and get the same apple. Instead, you take a branch from the tree that produces the apple you like, cut it off in an act of botanical body horror, and furthering the grotesquerie, graft it into another tree, forcing that tree to grow your fruit.)
(Nature is a miracle, but is also a nightmare.)
(Also yes, that makes all commercially grown apples clones.)
Anyway, as noted, I’ve given my fair share of shit to the Honeycrisp. I said it’s a basic apple. I also said it’s too sweet — I prefer an apple that has a bite to it, a precious tartness. A sensation somewhere between a lick of lemon and a straight-up electric snap to the tongue. Sweet and tart in balance is to me a fully armed and operational apple, and something too sweet feels… you know, kind of American. It’s like, “Oh we will only eat fruit if it tastes like candy.”
Therefore, it only feels fitting that I begin my re-journey to re-reviewing apples with the Honeycrisp — maligned (by me, for sure, and recently by food media) and yet very popular, it’s where I start.
And, to be fair, I already fucked it up a little, because I didn’t take a proper photo of the Honeycrisp I ate, but look, there’s a whole damn basket of them up at the top of the post, as the kids say, don’t at me, bro. *receives note* I am reliably informed that the kids don’t say that anymore. “They say Skibidi Six Seven. It’s sigma fire.”
ANYWAY, this is a very long preamble to the first review (re-review?) of apples, beginning with the maligned-by-me Honeycrisp.
Let’s get to the actual review.
My review of the Honeycrisp, bought late Sept, Manoff Orchard in PA:
To start with the positive, the first thing I noticed about the apple — and the first thing I really quite liked — was how thin the skin was.* Listen, I don’t love eating apple skin. Particularly with a lot of heritage apples, you can end up with skin that’s tough, waxy, or rough. A russeted apple has skin that feels like you’re chewing on a wet brown paper bag. It’s texturally upsetting! But the Honeycrisp (at one point I mis-typed this as Hineycrisp, which I suspect is a different apple entirely, and also a very nice epithet for a loved one) has a skin so thin it’s barely there. Your teeth perforate it with ease. It does not linger long in the mouth. Some apples you end up chewing the skin like it’s appleskin bubble gum. Always there, never able to properly swallow it.
The flavor also has some complexity — there is, truly, a honeyed component to the fruit, a sweetness that isn’t merely sweet, but that brings richness, variety, a little bit of that honey funk. (Honeyfunk is a less good loved one epithet, I fear. I love you, Honeyfunk. I love YOU, Hineycrisp.) And it has a great crunch — less so a great crispness, despite its name.
(The difference here for me, at least, is notable: a crunch is heavier, crisp is lighter — a walnut has crunch, a cracker is crisp. Crispness has a snap, a slate-like breaking to it, an almost chippish quality. Crunch is deeper, denser, more resonant. I also think an apple can have both crispness and crunch? Maybe? Probably? I’m no crunchologist.)
Point is, the Honeycrisp brought crunch, and a lot of juice.
The complex taste was welcome.
Less welcome was the fact it was very sweet — and only that. Barely any tartness to talk about. And for me, an apple should have a clear and present tartness. As I noted above, it should have bite. This is a sub-acid apple, for sure. And the final problem was — and this is a trait shared with Red Delicious, though here to a much lesser degree — an odd bitterness that arrived with the aftertaste. Not right away! But over time, a foul tang lingered. Which is also the first line of my new epic fantasy novel. “A foul tang lingered, thought Gormox the Evercrisp. He had expected this to be a day of honey, but it had turned with haste to a day of bitter rot upon his rough and russeted tongue.”
Anyway.
The Honeycrisp is fine! I get it. It’s a nice apple. A friendly apple. A total fucking crowd-pleaser of an apple. It’s Optimus Prime. It’s a Marvel movie. It’s one of those books that lives for a really long time on the bestseller list even though you read it and thought it was perfectly cromulent. It’s the Yankees. It’s a beach vacation. It’s good. As an agricultural product, maybe even great. But also, for me? More than a little boring.
Nesi is desperate to earn the patronage of one of the Ninety-Nine Pillars of Heaven. As a child with godly blood in her, if she cannot earn a divine chaperone, she will never be allowed to leave her temple home. But with ninety-six failed auditions and few options left, Nesi makes a risky prayer to T’sidaan, the Fox of Tricks.
In folk tales, the Fox is a lovable prankster. But despite their humor and charm, T’sidaan, and their audition, is no joke. They throw Nesi back in time three hundred years, when her homeland is occupied by the brutal Wolfhounds of Zemin.
Now, Nesi must learn a trickster’s guile to snatch a fortress from the disgraced and exiled 100th Pillar: The Wolf of the Hunt.
1: A Story Is As Long As It Needs To Be But Won’t Tell You Until It’s Done
First, it was a 5000 word tennis match of dialogue, back and forth over the narrative net, the rookie hotshot with anxiety clearly losing to the seasoned pro, a fox with a tennis racket in their mouth talking circles around the poor thing. Amusing, but not a story. Then, it was a very long short story, something close to 8000 words, which was stuffed to the gills with plot, and not the good kind either, no, this plot was stodgy and puffed up weird in the oven and it’s not that it was bad, per se, it just wasn’t done. Then, when it became a very short long story, what the French among us call “le novelette,” it was, how you say, still not awesome. 11,000 words and it was either bloated or too lean, like a funhouse mirror that changed depending on the angle you were looking from. No, it wasn’t until an editor encouraged me that maybe it was book-shaped, or at the very least book-hopeful, that everything began to fall into place. From the outset, I couldn’t have told you it was going to be a novella, (let’s be honest, it’s three words from being a teeny-weeny novel but that’s for the judges to argue about), but I did learn through the six years it took to transform: as always, your story is going to be whatever it needs to be and changing forms to figure it out is all a part of the process.
2: Tricksters Are Tricky On Purpose
Let them be tricky! Let them be a little scamp! No air jail for little fox, no, let them nom upon the hands of those who would lift them from the ground and bite at the ankles of the cruel! Part of figuring out the balance of this story was knowing when, where, and how to deploy the tactical trickster nuke that is the Fox. A being of mischief, lessons, aforementioned scampery, and pranks, the Fox is a god. And a god has very few things to bind them, unless they wish it. Letting the Fox tromp across the narrative is fun, but not engaging. Holding them back is maybe logical but it’s boring, and disappointing to boot; they’re a trickster! If they don’t at least try to tie together the boots of everyone within a mile, readers will be unhappy. Nailing down what made my trickster tick, reasons the Fox would and wouldn’t respect certain boundaries, were essential in showcasing them to the best of my ability. That, and it helped that having a protagonist undergoing a trial; even a god of tricks has to respect that, (kind of).
3: Bitter and Sweet are the Predator Handshake of Narrative
Jokes all the time rob a story of meaning; if nothing is taken seriously in the context of the book, why should the reader take any of it seriously? And if every single thing is treated with the held-breath seriousness of open heart surgery, then are we saying that even in fiction, life is grim, difficult, and needs to be struggled through? I have always been a huge believer that you need the bitter and the sweet working together to create a strong story. If we weren’t able to laugh once in a while, the darkness would crush us. If we didn’t work to overcome the hard times and push through the dark, then the joy of the sun would be rote. Audition For The Fox is a dark book, let’s be clear: it deals with empire, colonialism, torture, oppression, occupation, and more. It looks at these things with clear eyes, and does not flinch from the truth of them. But it is also a book about the very real debate between coffee and tea, a book that laughs when someone falls in shit, that highlights the small joys to be found in community, that sees the world the way it could be, when we lift one another up and help each other smile. I can’t say I did it perfectly, but I did try my very best.
4: Worldbuilding is Scaffolding Around the Building, Not the Building Itself
I’m a firm believer that worldbuilding is awesome, one of my favorite parts of writing, and often, real fucking tedious. Not because it isn’t awesome, mind you, but that I think a lot of writers often mistake worldbuilding to be the creation of a literal building with hundreds of rooms and halls and windows and paintings and stairs and-and-and . . . but it’s not. Your story is the building. That is what needs all that space, those apertures, those details; your worldbuilding is the scaffolding that provides you with the narrative structure to make that building as strong as possible and gives you as many essential parts as you need for the reader to feel welcome, and to help understand the story of the world, and the world of the story. I had loads of fun in Audition For The Fox when I was worldbuilding Oranoya and the Ninety-Nine Pillars of Heaven and everything else but at a certain point, you need to ask: am I adding this explanation, this detail, this texture because the building needs it? Or because I’m worried someone won’t like my building without it? It’s a really hard thing to learn and I know I’m still learning it, but something I really embodied throughout this writing and editing process is that scaffolding, if you can remember to see it that way, helps you build the strongest story possible, and don’t forget: worldbuilding is awesome, yes, but it is NOT the story.
5: Swing For the Imaginary Fences
Publishing is fucking weird, man. It’s picky, it’s hesitant, its non-committal, and nothing is a guarantee. Truly, nothing is certain; even contracts can be broken. So with that being said, if you have the chance to publish and tell your story as close to the way you want to tell it? Fucking go for it, friend. Swing for the fences. Swing like there are no fences. Send your ball into orbit. Blah blah blah you’ll end up among the stars, fuck that, make a new crater on the moon you swung so hard. Who cares if that doesn’t get you “moon points,” right? They made up the rules anyway. This is a weird book. It’s weird! Interstitial linked stories, time-travel-fantasy, non-binary trickster energy by the barrelful, and more. It’s a weird little thing, this book, but you know what I can say, wholeheartedly? It’s mine. It’s a book of my own weird little heart, and at the end of the day, sure, maybe that isn’t for everyone. But I know I took a heckuva swing. And I hope wherever the ball lands, it surprises someone and makes them smile.
Martin Cahill has published short fiction in venues including Fireside, Reactor, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer, and Nightmare. Cahill’s stories “The Fifth Horseman” and “Godmeat” were respectively nominated for the Ignyte Award and included in The Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2019. He was also one of the writers on Batman: The Blind Cut and a contributor to Critical Role: Vox Machina – Stories Untold. Cahill, who works at Erewhon Books, lives just outside New York City.
EDIT: By the way, the two winners were picked and their emails sent off to Tananarive and Steven! Congrats, Micah Southwood and Katharine Dow! Expect emails soon, I wager.
HEY. You. Horror-writing-in-training!
Courtesy of Tananarive Due (the “Queen of Black Horror” and author of the truly vital The Reformatory) and Steven Barnes, I’m giving away two scholarships to Dark Dreams: Writing Horror That Kills.
This is a 3-hour intensive on how to craft haunting horror fiction. How to write horror that lets characters take the lead? What’s the plot framework look like? How the heck do they do it, and how do you do it?
(This class will be live both on Zoom and in person in Southern California.)
Way to be a potential winner —
Drop in the comments below.
Just tell me two things:
a) What’s your favorite horror novel from the last ten years?
b) What are you reading right now (doesn’t have to be horror!)?
Do this by Thursday, noon EST, and I’ll approve all comments and pick two random winners from the commenters to receive those scholarships.
Easy-peasy, blood-a-squeezy.
Just make sure that your account here is using an email address someone can use to reach you; otherwise, you won’t know that you won!
At Doylestown Bookshop on Wednesday the 10th in support of Delilah S. Dawson’s new rock-and-roll horror novella, House of Idyll — event starts at 6:30PM and Delilah is a true BFF so it’s gonna be a damn good time.
(Remember too if you can’t make the events, the store can have books for you signed by the authors and then either picked up or mailed to you directly.)
Aaaaaaand, after this week —
10/1/25, I’m at Curious Iguana with Alma Katsu to talk her newest, Fiend. (Details here)
10/10/25, I’m at The End bookstore in Allentown, PA with Martha Wells to talk about her newest, Queen Demon. (Details here.)
10/14/25, I’m at Doylestown Bookshop with Philip Fracassi for Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre. (Details here)
In February of this year, I started writing a new novel — this horror-fantasy tale, about a group of demon-blooded misfits plagued by dreams of a mysterious structure — called The Calamities, and it serves as the first part of a duology that completes with the second book, Chaos Reigns.
Lemme tell you, starting a novel in February 2025 was a wee smidge harder than I thought. It was difficult then (and honestly, now) not to be endlessly distracted with, well, *gestures erratically at everything everywhere all the time* and so it was a tougher row to hoe than I expected it to be. Writing some parts of this book felt like pulling teeth, and I was pretty sure everything I wrote was terrible? I mean, I was enjoying myself well enough? But it just felt like there was something between me and the book — something that was, I assume, a giant wall of interference called Reality. Still, I’d go back periodically and re-read parts of it and I liked what I read? So I have no idea how to measure it. To be fair, it’s probably gonna need a robust second draft process to kick the shit out of it — er, I mean, to kick it into shape. But that’s why Jesus invented editors!
It’s got a lot of violence and demony occulty business and sex and scads of diabolical worldbuilding. Still horror, but also fantasy — think about how a book like Library at Mount Char took the mode of urban fantasy but treated that mode like it was straight-up, raw horror. (If you’ve not read Library at Mount Char, then honestly, what are you doing with your life?)
Anyway! It’s fun. It’ll also appeal to those, I think, who like those… weird little WENDIGVERSE connections. (For example, if you recall the cat, Orange Lump, from Black River Orchard? You’ll find that cat in this book, as well! Perhaps even hanging out with his new owner from the end of Orchard.)
I thiiiink it comes out August 2026, but I’ll update you accordingly. So watch this space! Watch it! Never unpin your gaze! AFFIX YOUR STARE UPON ME
And holy shit today’s the day — The End Of The World As We Know It, aka The Stand Anthology, is loosed upon the world in a blood-dimmed tide. Huge honor to be allowed to play in that sandbox. Thanks to Misters Keene and Golden for letting me have my playtime there, and of course, to THE KING HIMSELF for blessing this book and allowing it to happen in the first place. (Thanks also to AP News for the nice review, which shouts out my story, “Grand Junction.”) You can pick up the book at Bookshop.org, if you’d like, or from any of the usual suspects, Amazon, B&N, etc. I also note that if you want a signed/personalized copy, order from Doylestown Bookshop and they can ship directly to you. (True of all of my books! Doylestown rules. As evidenced by the success of their now-annual Dark Ink horror event.)
Aaaaand let’s not forget there are signings for the book literally all over the world today, so hie thee hence to find one:
Note I’ll be at Vortex in Columbia, PA, with Alma Katsu, Brian Keene, Bryan Smith, Somer Canon, and Ron Malfi!
I’ve also got a buuuuunch more events coming up in the next couple months:
9/9/25
Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg, PA for End of the World as We Know It, with Brian Keene, Somer Canon, Richard Chizmar
