Chuck Wendig: Terribleminds

Everything is perfectly normal and fine, and in that world of normal fine normalcy, one might want to read books. And once in a while, I get someone asking me, “Hey, what book of yours should I read first/next,” and I never exactly know how to answer that question succinctly, except for maybe blindfolding you and spinning you around and pushing you into a stack of my books and hoping one falls into your arms. I mean, I’ve now written *counts on fingers and toes and various clandestine appendages* 28 novels, with number 29 (Staircase in the Woods) arriving at the end of April. Plus three more secret books (two more adult novels, one middle grade) coming out, for 32 goddamn novels. That’s not even to mention the three writing books I’ve written, or the novellas, or, or, or.

It’s a lot of books! You’d be right to feel dizzy at the options! I didn’t even realize I’d written that many! What the hell is wrong with me?

Anyway. The question persists: where to begin with my books?

So, here I will attempt to answer this question! But I’ll answer it in a variety of ways, and you can do with it as you see fit. Ready? Let’s do it.

Reading Order

So, beyond chronological order, if I were to recommend a reading order based on… I dunno, vibes? Personal preference? I’d say this would be my reading order for you, if you were an adult person–>

Wanderers -> The Book of Accidents -> Wayward -> Black River Orchard -> The Miriam Black series (in order: Blackbirds, Mockingbird, The Cormorant, Thunderbird, The Raptor & The Wren, Vultures) -> Zer0es -> Invasive -> Atlanta Burns -> The Blue Blazes

Here you might be saying, “But that’s not all your books,” and you’d be right, it isn’t. But that’s for a reason! These are what I’d consider the… I dunno, core books of mine? The canon, so to speak?

But it’s not the only way to approach the work. Let’s keep going with —

My Best Book

If you wanted to know what I consider to be my best book —

It’s this one. Wanderers. This is a book that I’d had in mind for years but it didn’t really have a full story or characters with it — but once I sold it on pitch, and once I sat down to write it (without an outline, no less) it more or less just fell out of my skull. It garnered what was to me a very large amount of blurbs, a lot of starred reviews, and it just opened a lot of doors for me. So, I think that’s my best book. It’s certainly also my bestseller. And it’s a book that broke me. In the best way possible. I thought I knew how to write books? And this book told me I didn’t write them the way I thought I did.

(Buy it here: Bookshop.org print, e-book, audio at Libro.fm, or buy signed/personalized at Doylestown Bookshop)

The Book That Means The Most To Me

I’d tried to write this book two other times throughout my life and I just wasn’t ready for it. And then, one day, in my 40s? I was. I wanted to tell a story about generational trauma and family and how parents sometimes hold back the seawall of their own trauma but how that damages them too — and then, you know, there’s ghosts and a creepy coal mine and a missing serial killer and all sorts of other horror trappings. Plus some big twisty twists in there. But really the emotional core of it is important to me — it was then, and remains so, now. (Staircase in the Woods isn’t out yet, so it’s not included on al this stuff, but I pair it with Book of Accidents in terms of a personal book with something to say about myself and my view of the world emotionally more than sociologically or politically.)

Bookshop.com print, ebook, audio at Libro.fm, or buy signed/personalized at Doylestown.

My Actual Favorite Book

This one’s difficult! Honestly. It may seem strange that I like my own books but, for the most part, I do. I write them so that I like them! I write the kinds of books I want to read. The first time I really wrote a book that I was like, “Oh wait, fuck yeah,” it was probably the third Miriam Black book, The Cormorant. I just vibed really well with it, felt in-sync with it while writing it and after. Then the next one was Atlanta Burns, which started life as Bait Dog and then ended up a proper YA-ish YA-adjacent book, and you know, it’s hard not to enjoy that one, either, because — teen girl taking down small-town Nazis, especially these days, feels right.

But, at the end of the day, my current actual favorite book is —

You sort of had to guess, right? It felt like a stunt, “Oh, I’m going to write a horror novel about apples,” but then it actually happened, and I loved writing it, and it’s really been finding its audience since it hit paperback, which is nice. I think it’s a weird, neat, scary book about apples, and cults, and what happens when you lose your friends and family to bad ideas and social malignancies. It’s got social horror and body horror and probably way too much information about apples.

Bookshop.com print, ebook, audio at Libro.fm, or buy signed/personalized at Doylestown.

The Book I Wished More People Knew About

This might seem like a controversial one but —

If Wanderers is my biggest seller, then Wayward is my least successful book — financially — of my current crop of books. I’m saying that to be honest! It is nowhere near the first book in sales. Now, part of that is normal. You’re never going to get 100% uptake on a sequel; usually it’s about 50-60%, if things went right. And we’re just not there with this book. Most people didn’t even seem to know there was a sequel, and I don’t know how to scream it so loud that all the readers in all the land can hear it. But here’s the thing — I like this book more than I like the first one. It’s not that I think it’s better, per se, but I think it’s more interesting, and it concludes the story from the first one in ways that make me really happy. It contains some chapters that have legit made me weep like a baby. And other chapters where I wanna pump my first like it’s end of the Breakfast Club. I really love this book. There’s a golden retriever named Gumball, for fuck’s sake, and he’s a very, very good boy, perhaps even the best boy. So if any book of mine needs the proselytization, it is absolutely this one. I mean, for fuck’s sake it contains Dolly Parton as an apocryphal character and tells a story about how she deals with Nazis. C’mon.

Bookshop.com print, ebook, audio at Libro.fm, or buy signed/personalized at Doylestown.

That’s How You Get Ants / Elon Musk Sucks Moist Open Ass

Did you know that once upon a time, Wanderers was going to be a sort-of-sequel to this book, in the way that this book is a sort-of-not-really-sequel to Zer0es? It’s true! Hannah Stander, the futurist-daughter-of-doomsday-preppers, actually appeared in the first draft of Wanderers. Anyway. This is a thriller I had a blast writing, and it features both a) creepy freaky skincutter ants and b) a billionaire analog to Elon Musk who very definitely sucks and is evil, and I wrote this shit in like, 2014 or something. Fuck that guy. I hope he gets his skin eaten by ants. Anyway. I’d love to write more Hannah Stander, she’s a character I really like — there was almost a TV show about her, and then that TV show was almost an animated TV show about her, and things got really weird, and then they did not happen because it was bad.

Bookshop.com print, ebook isn’t available at Bookshop so here’s Amazon, audio at Libro.fm, or buy signed/personalized at Doylestown.

If You Want A Whole Damn Series That Tells A Complete Story

Miriam Black knows how you’re going to die, and that’s really fucked her up. Especially because she thinks she can’t do shit about it — until she realizes one day that she can interfere in someone’s death, but not easily, and not for free. There’s always a cost. She’s profane, unhinged, and is a character who is near and dear to my heart. These books were called urban fantasy, and then later on, supernatural suspense — but for me, they’re horror-crime.

(And note, there are also novellas that slot between the books!)

Start with the first book — Bookshop.com print, ebook through Amazon, audio at Libro.fm, or buy signed/personalized at Doylestown.

I’m A Writer Who Writes

There, I have two books for you — Damn Fine Story is about the mechanics of story, plot and character. Gentle Writing Advice is more about the life of a writer, what you can take, what you can leave, and most importantly, how you deal with being a writer in times of strife and stress.

I Have Kids Who I Want To Join The Cult I Mean Become Your Readers

I have two middle grade books out — Dust & Grim is a weird horror-fantasy-thingy that’s funny and strange about a girl who inherits a mortuary for monsters, and Monster Movie! is about a kid who is afraid of everything and ends up doing battle with a monster movie in the most literal sense of the term — the movie is the monster. The latter is a standalone; the former is technically a standalone but one I wanted to write sequels for, but the publisher wanted to stick to one-and-done, even though the book ended up selling well in paperback (enough that it became a NYT bestseller).

I’ve also written YA, and my Empyrean trilogy — which, to be upfront about, is a trilogy published by one of Amazon’s publishing arms — is about the poor dust-scrabble folks who work amongst the carnivorous corn while the richie-riches live in their sky-cities looking down. I think John Hornor Jacobs described it as Star Wars by way of John Steinbeck and I like that. These books tend to be pretty cheap in e-book, if you so desire.

But Chuck, What About Star Wars??

I mean, sure, if you like Star Wars, I wrote some of those. Three books, which I’m proud of, especially writing them under difficult conditions. I don’t get much for them if you buy them, and at the end of things, Star Wars did not treat me particularly well? I’m honestly still a little bitter about the whole affair, and that hasn’t faded much, so that’s on you if you wanna check ’em out. Again, I’m happy with them. But I don’t get squat. They put some of my characters in things and I don’t even seem to rate a thank you or a t-shirt, much less actual dollars in my pocket. *shrug*

Okay! So I think that’s a good primer on where to start with my books. So if you’re looking for some manner of escape from THE CURRENT CALAMITIES, look no further than this list. And of course in April, we have a new one from me if you need something oooh-shiny:

Pre-order signed, personalized copy here (with bonus stickers and unique book-specific specialization).

So lemme ask —

If you’ve read these, where would you tell people to start?

When she learns she has a big Italian family she never knew about, a lonely woman travels to Sicily for a life-changing summer in the new romance from New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Probst.

Aurora York had it all together: loving parents, a steady relationship, and a promising career. But after she loses both parents unexpectedly, she can’t seem to stay on track any longer. Lonely and lost after a public meltdown that threatens her professional credibility, she’s shocked when DNA test results show a blood relative in Sicily. When her cousin reaches out online and begs her to come to Italy to meet everyone in person, Aurora makes the leap.

Aurora arrives in Sicily for a month, and there she meets a colorful, dynamic family steeped in tradition. The younger generation is fascinated by her social media fame in America, and even though her grandparents have more traditional viewpoints, Aurora begins to heal from her grief…and enjoys the attention of a kind and handsome Italian man.

But when the summer ends, a new opportunity calls her back to the States and her old habits threaten to reemerge. Will Aurora leave everything in Sicily she loves behind, or take the chance on a whole new future?

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Trust your voice and process

I’ve written over fifty books yet each time I start a new one, it’s like learning to walk all over again. There aren’t many jobs out there where you can continuously doubt yourself even with a string of successes behind you and proof you can actually do the damn thing. The creative process is truly janky, and mysterious, and kind of magical, so I’ve learned one thing that’s like a rope line in a blinding snowstorm.

Trust.

When I started writing To Sicily with Love I felt completely overwhelmed. Out of my depth. I realized the book I pitched and sold featured a giant Sicilian family steeped in tradition and I had to not only construct a bunch of characters that leapt off the page, but make them all different, set in a culture I simply didn’t know much about.

I also promised my editor the story would be light-hearted, even with the death of Aurora’s mother, but damned if I didn’t find myself in the muck of grief and darkness as my heroine found herself simply incapable of being her usual fabulous, goal-oriented self.

After a brief panic that I was delivering the exact book my editor didn’t want, I relied on the only thing left. My trust to chase the story, no matter what emerged. So, I shut down the monkey mind whispering I could never do this right, and let my voice guide me through. I went to the dark places of regret, grief, and loneliness. When I got stuck in the details, instead of committing to my usual process of writing linear, I jumped around and wrote certain scenes that called to me. I blew up the secure, traditional way of creating a story and trusted with this book, I needed to do something different.

It worked.

Sometimes, you need to go in blind with a story and trust you will get there on your terms.

Setting is a character.

When I first began writing, I hated setting. I wanted to get straight to the good stuff, like dialogue and sex and action. But I realized as I wrote bigger and deeper novels, I needed to up my game. Setting is not just a background where your story takes place. If done well, it becomes another character, and can add an important element readers love.

I learned to slow down and pay attention. I learned to savor not only what I can see and describe, but the taste, feel, and scent of the world surrounding my characters. Readers want escape, and whether it’s a spooky, dilapidated lodge in the mountains during a snowstorm, or the lush earthy hills of Tuscany, our job is to make our readers feel like they are there.

Setting shouldn’t be a distraction from the story. It should be part of it. Whether you write about a cupcake festival in a quirky upstate farm or a six course meal served at a crowded pine table with loud Italian relatives talking over one another, put me there. And please allow me to taste all the food.

Receiving endless letters from readers who tell me they got hungry reading my book, or planned a trip to Italy because of my story is the biggest payoff and worth all the work.

Research your shit.

It’s so hard not to get lazy with research, unless you are a writer who loves it. For me, I don’t mind a little, but with To Sicily with Love, I found myself in the deep end of the pool. I hadn’t gone to Sicily. It took me forever to finally find the perfect town in Sicily for my setting, and I’d get frustrated after hours spent online with no new words.

But it’s a critical part of process. In order to write the story well, I needed to know not only the surroundings of the town, but where people ate, how people made a living, how they thought and spoke within the small community. I refused to allow people who’d visited Sicily to read my book and find a bunch of errors or mis-information.

I put a call out to my readers asking who went to Sicily and if they had relatives there. I spoke with many on the phone, took endless notes, and pored over their pictures. I used maps, blog posts, videos, and watched everything I could find.

I learned the process of olive oil making. I learned about the fish market. I learned how jewelers make precious coral.

And all of this research led to rich, detailed scenes in the book that leapt from the page.

Research is a delicate balance. Use it to enhance the storyline, but be careful not to get so excited about what you learned, you throw in too much detail and drown the reader.

Emotion is key.

When my writing goes off course, as sometimes it does, I bring myself back to the most important element that drives every single book I write.

Emotion.

I can have the most gripping plot and fascinating characters, but if readers don’t care, the story will be flat.

This means digging deep into a character’s mind and dragging out all their secrets. What they want. What they fear. What they dream. And what they believe is getting in the way.

Goal, motivation and conflict needs to be wrapped up in emotion. A character behaving in an interesting way will remain flat on the page unless we dig deep underneath the skin and make them human.

With Aurora, after losing both her parents in tragic circumstances, her perfect life she was so proud of is blown up, leaving her doubting everything she thought she believed in. I needed to allow myself to revisit and process my own grief, depression, and roller coaster of emotion I experienced when I lost my dad. A writer needs to be brave to unearth their own monsters to give life to the characters.

It can be the difference between a good book, and a great book.

Use theme to create a better story

Theme is like the smoke that drifts from the pages of a story but is hard to grasp. I like to compare theme to a luscious gourmet meal, moving from appetizer to dessert. Theme makes a reader feel full and complete at the end of a book.

Themes can include elements such as family, friendship, second chances, home, betrayal, chaos, forgiveness—any big type of subjects we deal or struggle with in our lives. It can be broad or narrow. 

I’ve used themes while planning my book and deciding what I wanted to explore. I’ve also written my entire book before realizing what my themes were. Then I go back and layer the scenes with that specific theme in mind. Books can begin with one planned destination, then lead to the wild unpaved paths one never intended. The surprises are a reason I love my work so much

When I began writing To Sicily with Love, I knew my themes in the book would be grief and forgiveness.

My heroine, Aurora, travels to Sicily and meets her grandfather, who had cut ties with Aurora’s mother after she ran away to get married. Aurora resents him for abandoning her mom. He’s gruff and curt, giving off the impression of non-caring. As the summer unfolds, they form a tentative bond, which deepens over time, mirroring the relationship between the grandfather and mother.  

Both relationships from the past and present rely on forgiveness. Aurora must forgive her grandfather and mother. Her grandfather must forgive her mother. They must both forgive themselves for actions that led to regrets. It is a full circle of forgiveness, given to the reader within the relationships. It’s played out with subtlety, threaded into each building scene and pulling the overarching pieces of the story together.

Digging into the theme you’d like to explore in your story is a vehicle to create a richer, more dynamic story.

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Jennifer Probst: Website

To Sicily With Love: Bookshop.org | B&N | Amazon

I’ve seen people say they don’t want to share their books, their art, their work right now because it seems trivial in the shadows of these dark times, and I thought, I should talk about this. And my first response was going to be a long post — though, to some degree, I already did that post, and I did it way back in 2017, and honestly, it reads like I wrote that post yesterday.

So, instead of some big thing about how writing is resistance and art is an act of optimism, blah blah blah, let’s just scrape away all that stuff and go right for the heart of the matter:

We need the art.

Shit is bad, and we need books, and music, and paintings.

That’s it, it’s as simple as that.

The times are hard, and art helps us through hard times.

As such? You should never feel guilty for sharing your work because what do you think is going to help us through this bullshit? The way through nightmare is not more nightmare. We’re not going to succeed just by gulping from the shit hose and reading bad news until our eyes pop and run down our faces in a gush of aqueous goo. We need the break. We need the good stuff to combat the bad stuff. Doesn’t matter if the art is escapist counterweight or an arrow in the eye of fascism — we need it, we need it all, and we need it now. It’s not trivial. It’s a fucking life preserver.

So, tell us. Share it. Show it. Give us links. Give us that light. We need to see your painting of a penguin or your book about two witches in love or a photo you took of a waffle you made. We need the songs of rage and the poetry of hope and we need it all and we need it today, and we’ll need it tomorrow, and we’re gonna need it a whole lot over the next four years (and then for all the years after). Art is the firelight. Art is the ladder out of the pit.

It’s one of the very reasons we combat all the bad shit going on — so we can continue to make and witness art freely in this world. Art by all the people, just not a subset of them. Make it. Share it. Share yours, share others. Sell it! Buy it! Seek it. And no, this is not a post about how see, the best art is made in difficult times — that’s bullshit, because it’s harder now to make it. I sit here every day writing, and it’s like pulling the teeth out of an angry puma. I’ll write 250 words and then blink and before I even realize what’s happening I’m doomscrolling — sliding down a chute lubricated with an endless slicking of bad, weird news. I have to force myself to stop tonguing the broken tooth and go back to the work. It’s hard right now to make anything, which is all the more reason we must exalt that what is being made.

We need it.

I need it.

It is not trivial.

Rather, it is essential.

Did you knooooooow that you no longer necessarily have to be tethered to Amazon for your e-books? I mean, okay, you didn’t need to be technically anyway — obviously you can buy e-books from a variety of sources, including but not limited to: Kobo, B&N, Apple, and so forth.

But now, you have a new potential bookmonger for your digital reading desires, and this one has a useful impact on local bookstores — it’s Bookshop.org, baby!

The details are here! The key takeaway is: “Every purchase financially supports local, independent bookstores!” Which ain’t a bad thing.

(You can read the books in your browser or download a free app.)

You can go to Bookshop.org and check out links to the e-books for books of mine, like f’rex, Wanderers, Wayward, The Book of Accidents, Black River Orchard, and more. (Black River Orchard also appears to be on sale for $6.99, if you’re so inclined to frolic amongst the fruit trees.)

Anyway, new options are good, and I’ll be making sure to include these as the primary links here at the blog going forward for print and e-book links.

There exists this habit, I think, online where, when we see people experiencing and then displaying an emotion that makes us uncomfortable, we feel the need to challenge it or even to correct it. Case in point, if you’re online and you express any sort of doomy feelings about the world, someone might show up to chastise you for that attitude — oh, you can’t be doomy. Doom is bad. Doom is how they win, they’ll tell you. Doom is what they want so you mustn’t feel doom! Doom gets us nothing, you fool! Don’t you see what you’ve done? YOUR DOOM IS CONTAGIOUS.

And then, the other side of the spectrum is when you express something that is in some way joyful or positive. It’s not just, “I like bagels” and someone replies, “but why do you hate donuts?” It’s like saying, “I like bagels,” and someone shows up to castigate you: “How dare you post this glib thing about bagels when our DEMOCRACY is ON FIRE, must be nice to have FANCY EXPENSIVE BAGELS YOU HUGE PIECE OF SHIT.”

I think it’s important to realize we live in a world where our emotions are not necessarily utilitarian. They’re not here to fit a function. They’re just emotions. And sometimes we display them, and for some reason, that display makes people uncomfortable when it challenges how they feel, and so they attack the emotion-haver and emotion-displayer as if that single post/skeet/image is the thing that’s going to make or break our [insert super-important thing here: democracy, climate, economy, future, existence]. We challenge it, anticipating that we can… I dunno, fix it? That by challenging someone’s doom or joy, we can somehow course correct them and by proxy course correct the rest of human history?

Thing is, it just doesn’t work like that. People individually are messy and we’re not pebbles on a train track able to derail the entire train just be existing as a pebble. Things are fucking shitty out there and it’s okay to feel like they’re impossibly, overwhelmingly shitty and it’s further okay to say how things feel impossibly, overwhelmingly shitty. You don’t need to correct someone’s feelings, because feelings aren’t facts. If they’re happy about something and expressing joy, you also don’t need to correct that joy — I mean, how messed up is that? In the midst of burgeoning chaos if someone finds delight in their new puppy or a fucking sandwich they just made, let them love the puppy, let them eat the sandwich, let them express that small pleasure in the face of overwhelming global bullshit.

Just let people have their feelings.

You can put your own feelings on your own timeline, that’s fine. If you feel like doom is bad, and you have something to counter it, put it out into the world. That’s you getting to feel how you feel, and that’s okay, too.

It’s hard not to feel doomy right now.

It’s also hard not to desperately seek small, significant things of joy.

We’re complicated weirdos, and we feel how we feel and you don’t need to change that. You just need be your own kind of complicated weirdo and put that out into the world, too. The energy is the energy. The emotion is the emotion. If there are calls to action, boost them to an audience, don’t aim them at a person unless asked for. Let people be messy. Let them have their feelings. Life is fucked up enough without feeling like you’re not allowed to feel how you feel — and worse, that you’re not allowed to say how you feel, that you damn well better cork it up inside your heart until it ruptures.

If you’re feeling sad and fucked up about the world, that’s okay. Of course you do! You have your eyes open. Things ain’t amazing! It’s normal to see BAD THINGS and then FEEL BAD as a result.

If you’re feeling desperate and are grasping for joy, yeah, of course you are. A taste of delight, of happiness, in dark and troubled times is very, very, very human. Why wouldn’t you do that? The darkness calls for a flashlight. (Or, when possible, a flamethrower — but I digress.)

Feel how you feel.

Let others feel how they feel.

(And before I get the comments: this is not a suggestion that doom is good. It’s just normal. Yes, obviously we should fight against that tide. If you’re standing in a river of sewage, try to get out of the sewage. And help others do the same. And I’m also not suggesting that in times of difficulty that’s your cue to just sub out, to give up and seek only your own happiness. I’m only saying, feelings are messy, and we all have them. Okay, bye.)

When a mysterious tower appears in the skies over England, thirteen strangers are pulled from their lives to stand before it as a countdown begins. Above the doorway is one word: ASCEND.

As they try to understand why they’ve been chosen and what the tower is, it soon becomes clear the only way out of this for everyone is… up. 

And so begins a race to the top with the group fighting to hold on to its humanity, through sinking ships, haunted houses and other waking nightmares. Can they each overcome their differences and learn to work together or does the winner take it all? What does the tower want of them and what is the price to escape?

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Red shirts are people too (and inevitable in a huge cast of characters)

Having a huge cast of characters and a tower intent on killing them meant that, inevitably, a few of them were going to become the ‘red shirts’ of my latest book. In other words, they were characters clearly destined to meet a sticky end. I didn’t plan it that way. Initially, I wanted to try and pay homage to LOST, creating a very character-centric adventure where everyone is the hero of their own story and you don’t know who’ll make it. But it soon became clear that it’s ridiculously hard to do that in book form. Across multiple seasons of TV you can generously give lots of characters their own episodes, building them up in the viewer’s estimation, before cruelly cutting them down when it’s least expected. In a book? Unless you’re going to be rotating between 13 POVs and your publisher is okay with a brick of a novel, it’s a little more challenging to give everyone their time in the sun. So eventually I had to admit defeat and learn to embrace the red shirts. And while I worked hard to try to tone down the bloody crimsonness of their attire, in the end I kind of like that they’re there. There is a tone to this story that is very 1970’s disaster movie – like The Poseidon Adventure – and leaning into the trope of having characters who are obviously destined to pop off screen early is part of the fun of the piece, I think?

Writing is a very good and very cheap form of therapy

The prologue of The Way Up Is Death was written at a time when the UK was shitting the bed in terms of common sense and decency and professionalism and lots of other things. Consequently, in a couple of scathing pages, it references the kind of political chaos that we were experiencing and would probably be an accurate representation of how we’d have handled an alien tower appearing in the skies above us. It was me venting. My way of shaking my fist at them, by immortalising their ineptitude in a fictional setting. And it felt soooo good.

I can’t imagine I’m alone in being overwhelmed by the sheer idiocy still messing with us? If you feel the same, I highly recommend spilling your bottled angst onto the page. Getting it out where you can see it, mock it, and manipulate it – however you see fit – is incredibly cathartic. You’re the one in control. And that’s not nothing in a world where we might feel perpetually helpless. The Way Up Is Death features a lot of grievances about life for that reason. Not only in the prologue, but in the characters themselves. I also hoped it might shine a spotlight on these things and go “SEE? THIS IS NUTS!” and thus offer a consoling nod to those who think they’re alone in witnessing all this and being baffled. You’re not alone. We’re all in this together and if the tower in this book teaches us anything, it’s that we need to work with each other to get through the despicable challenges ahead.

It’s fun to ponder the meaning of life

When you’re plucked from your Saturday afternoon and encouraged to climb an alien tower in the sky, it’s going to raise a few questions. Chief among them probably isn’t going to be ‘what’s life all about then?’. At least not at first. Yet as you’re thrown headlong into perilous situations, and constantly threatened with death, it may well soon cling to the forefront of your mind. The writing of this book marks one of the few times I’ve actually done research, because I did begin to wonder what life was all about for these characters, and I’m pleased to tell you that far smarter minds than mine have got an answer to that age-old question. Or, at least, they have a theory. Namely that the meaning of life is split into three stages: coherence, purpose, and significance, and that authenticity is key throughout. If you perceive increasing authenticity in your life, it’s supposed to be a sign you’re on the right track. Which felt right to me. It was a lot of fun working this philosophy into the structure of the story, and it gave me the chance to play with the characters and the authenticity they displayed to each other as things got progressively worse for them while climbing the tower. How would any of us react when faced with such unknowable horrors? Would you hold tightly to your carefully curated façade? Or would you accept who you are and embrace the flaws and differences of those around you? Ultimately, I think placing importance on authenticity is no bad way to live your life.

We would very quickly get bored of a mysterious tower hovering in the sky

It’s no spoiler to say that in this book, when an alien tower appears in the sky, hanging over the rolling green hills of middle England, society’s interest is not held for long. Only a few years ago the very idea that we’d get bored of such a thing would be ridiculous. But life in 2025 is a different beast. We are beset by so much information in text, images, videos and sound – increasingly interspersed with AI-generated bollocks – that our attention spans simply can’t cope. If a mysterious tower appeared in the sky right now, I truly believe we’d be bored of it within a week or two. We would have saturated the internet with images, made all the relevant memes, and TikTokked it into a state of normalcy. It’d just be that thing that appeared and we have to live with it and OH FFS HERE’S A BRAND NEW HORROR TO TALK ABOUT and yep we’re onto the next thing. I don’t know about you, but I kind of miss being awed by cool things in the same way that little green men captured Agent Mulder’s attention for so long.

Standalone books can be satisfying too

I love an ending to a book that leaves room for a possible ‘To be continued…’ (ideally in a rad Back to the Future font). There’s something about the knowledge we’re not done here – your favourite characters WILL return to finish the story – that leaves its hooks in you. It keeps you thinking long after the moment has passed and you can’t wait to slip back into that familiar world to explore it a little more. My first two books were deliberately set up to achieve that. The story was done, but also WAS IT? Yet with The Way Up Is Death I was thrilled to write the story knowing this was it, the tale would not continue, and we were going to say goodbye and be done with the tower at some point. I found a joy in the finality of that – to find the end of the long spool of thread I’d been pulling from my mind. I think there is a lot to be said for writing a one-and-done book and in this era of sequels and prequels and spin-offs, it’s kind of nice to have a neat little package that is what it is.

Of course, if you were to ask me for a sequel to The Way Up Is Death, then, yes, I have an idea. But it’s batshit ridiculous, so you probably shouldn’t.

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Dan Hanks is the author of Captain Moxley and the Embers of the Empire, Swashbucklers, and The Way Up Is Death, and has published articles in outlets such as Publishers Weekly. He works as a freelance editor most of the time, but being an over-qualified archaeologist he can’t help but continue to do a little part-time work in the heritage industry too (usually indoors where it’s warm and not as muddy).

Having moved around a lot in his life, Dan is currently content in the rolling green hills of the Peak District, England, where he lives with his two kids and some fluffy canine sidekicks.

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