Author: terribleminds (page 63 of 478)

It’s been two weeks since haunted houses, coal mines, missing serial killers, and other nightmares have been on the menu with the release of The Book of Accidents, so I figured I’d talk a little about the book and where it’s at now.

This was not a book whose success I felt was sure — it’s a complicated, big-hearted horror book with a lot going on under the hood. And though my editor (the very wise Tricia Narwani) assured me it worked, I just had no way of really knowing. Balancing all those pieces together was tough. As I’ve noted in many of the talks and conversations I’ve given over the last few weeks, this was a book truly made in the edit (as many are). The first draft had all the bones and most of the meat, but subsequent drafts were an act of rewiring capillaries, neurons, sinew. A great editor sees what the author is attempting to do and helps cut the path in that direction — helping to bring the writer’s vision out so it becomes the very best version of that vision, and I certainly hoped that’s what happened here, but I really had no way of knowing.

Plus, I did the edits largely during the pandemic. The book was originally slated to come out in October 2020, and we ducked that date because of the election, not because of the pandemic (which at the time we still didn’t know about, but certainly would soon enough aahahahahaha aaahhh sob). So, that gave time to take it slow and steady with edits, and though I had a hella hard time writing new material during the first half of COVID-19, editing seemed to be the thing my brain could do. Something about getting lost in that tangle of threads. Something about the methodical task of picking out the BBs from the meat of a shot bird. I could focus on pacing, on cutting bits of tissue and then suturing, on making sure all the narrative connections were there, and made sense. It was hard, weird work, but I really enjoyed it.

Was it a book that would and could work? Was it a book that made sense to the time in which it was written, but also a book that works beyond that time? Is horror really a “market” again, and did people have an appetite for that type of horror novel that prevailed in the 80s and 90s, but decidedly colored with what’s going on now? I mean, again, there’s no way to tell. Writing a novel feels like painting in a wind tunnel — you have to hope that the mess that ensues is a happy, beautiful mess that says something to those who see it, and not… well, just a splatter of worthless color.

And this book is horror, which is both very much not new for me, since most of my books are in some way horror novels… but also, it is kinda new. This is my first official original horror novel. It’s a horror novel from snout to tail, from teeth to taint, and that’s a jump. I’ve already been fortunate enough not to establish a “””brand””” in one genre over another, which lets me stick and move a little more easily from story to story without worrying that my “””audience””” won’t follow me from, say, nine books of intense Cat Mysteries to a tenth book of Grimdark Portal Fantasy. (Remember, a brand is the thing a farmer burns into the ass of a cow to make sure everyone knows where it belongs.) I’m lucky enough to not have secured an early epic success in one direction, so I’m allowed the freedom a little more easy go in any direction I’d like.

Even so, I still worried — would this book work, would it connect, would people read it?

And so far, the answer seems to be… maybe, cautiously, yes?

So, while we did not hit the vaunted-and-often-indecipherable New York Times Bestseller List, the book did land on a few lists, if such a thing matters to you:

USA Today

Publishers Weekly

PNBA (Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association)

ABA (National Indie Bestseller list)

So, that’s very gratifying to see! Thanks to readers, of course, and to booksellers, too, who supported the book and continue to share it with their book-hunting clients. Booksellers are magic, do not forget. Bibliomancers of the best and highest order.  Librarians, too, share this magic, and thank you to all the libraries who have added this to their shelves.

What else?

Financial Times says:

“This is a full-blooded rural haunted house chiller with something for everyone…”

I appeared on WFMZ to talk about the book.

WCNC in Charlotte hosted Park Road Books, and they recommended the book (but pro-tip, everybody there — I went to school in Charlotte, to Queens, and so you should totally mention that because yay Charlotte?).

A reminder that the book is an IndieNext pick for August.

I’m chilling with with Brandy Schillace on Peculiar Book Club on August 12th at 7pm. It should be fun!

I did a big sprawly interview at Sci-Fi Bulletin about the book.

Aaaaand. Yeah. Yeah!

ANYWAY. That’s it, I think. At this point it’s mostly… out of my hands. I mean I’ll keep holding up the book and pointing to it, but me doing that is far less effective than you doing that. The book is all yours now. You adopted it. I hope you love it and it loves you and it doesn’t poop on the rug. Or something. I hope you’ll keep talking about it. I hope you can review it somewhere. I hope you buy a thousand copies and give them out at airports like the members of a religious cult.

I’ll see you soon with Dust & Grim. And I guess at some point I should write up the connections between those two books…

Point is, thank you. Thanks to Del Rey, to my agent, Stacia. To my in-conversation partners: Cassandra Khaw, Kiersten White, Delilah S. Dawson, Stephen Graham Jones, Paul Tremblay, Aaron Mahnke. And thanks to the bookstores that hosted: Boswell Books, The Strand, University Bookstore, Powells, Doylestown Bookshop, Midtown Scholar, Let’s Play Books, Fountain Bookstore.

NOW, I NAP.

Just belly-flopping into the ol’ blog here to splash you with a few drops of chlorinated update-water: first up, I’m doing a Reddit AMA today. Right now, in fact. Go there. Ask questions. I’ll be hanging out, A’ing your Q’s.

Second, Dust & Grim received a starred review (!) from Kirkus (!!):

“Chills and thrills ensue when long-separated siblings find themselves custodians of a very special funeral home and cemetery… not only is Wendig a dab hand at concocting extremely creepy critters, but here he also pulls together a secondary cast of quarrelsome but supportive allies for the beleaguered teens, featuring a (generally) low-key vampire, a mercurial fox spirit (“Cat software loaded onto dog hardware,” as one observer puts it), and other slyly tweaked supernatural grown-ups.”

Tomorrow night, I’m chatting virtually with Kiersten White at Boswell Books! And the final virtual event of the TBOA tour is getting to hang out with Cassandra Khaw at Powell’s on Thursday night. Come hang out, too! One event! Two events! Go back in time and do the other events! I don’t know! Where are my pants!

The book continues to be in the Top 100 at B&N, btw. Signed copies still available there. And available too at the other bookstores I visited and will visit virtually. And I can still do personalized copies through Doylestown Bookshop.

Finally, a reminder that The Book of Accidents is an August Indie Next pick! Woo!

THAT IS ALL

*ejects*

It’s been a really nice launch week so far for the book — I’m honestly in awe of how many people are reading the book and sending me photos of it and who are tweeting me their excited responses as they get through it. (I’ve had a few people DM me their read-throughs as they happen and it’s kinda awesome to watch people wriggle around in the story, trying to figure out just what the sweet hot hell is going on.) So, thanks, folks. It means a lot.

It means a lot in part because… this isn’t one of those easy books to describe, at least not for me. I’ve never really gotten a grip on how even to talk about it. Some books are very, very easy to give a snap-your-fingers pitch for — Grady Hendrix’s novels, for instance, come with a catchy logline that pops like the bubble from bubblegum — “It’s a horror novel written inside an Ikea catalog” is like, what the fuck, I’m in. Buying the ticket, taking the ride. My middle grade coming out in October, Dust & Grim, is blessed I think with an easy way to pitch it: a girl inherits a funeral home for monsters and has to share that inheritance with a brother she’s never met. Hell, you could cut it to, “a girl inherits a funeral home for monsters.” And that’s your open door. That’s the hook sunk into the meat of your cheek. The Miriam Black books: “Miriam Black* can see how you’re going to die by touching you.” Easy. You could add, “But if she wants to change fate, she’ll have to defy the stars” or something, but you don’t even have to say that — you get the hook or you don’t and that’s that.

But The Book of Accidents resists that kind of… logline characterization, which is ostensibly a no-no in Fiction Land. You bring this book to a writing conference and try to expound on it and they’ll spritz you with a water bottle like you’re a cat on the counter, fttz, fttz, BAD KITTY, YOU NEED A THREE-SECOND ELEVATOR PITCH OR NEW YORK PUBLISHING WILL TURN YOU INTO POTTED MEAT. I have ways, of course, of selling TBOA in a quick beat — “It’s a haunted house story that isn’t a haunted house story,” and that’s true, even though it doesn’t tell you a lot, it might be enough to get someone interested. “It’s about a family’s love in the face of evil,” or “A family moves back to the father’s childhood home and finds that something worse than ghosts haunt them,” or whatever. All fine. And you could get deeper, too, saying oh it’s about the pain we carry, it’s about being haunted generational trauma and cycles of abuse, it’s about bullies, it’s about empathy as our ultimate weapon against evil, it’s got ghosts and a serial killer and an evil tunnel and a boy who can do dark magic and a woman whose artwork comes alive and a father haunted by the ghost of his abuser and, and, and. It’s all of those things and even there, it’s not quite right, and now I’ve gone and spent a whole paragraph trying to tell you what the book is about.

Part of me thinks, well, that’s fine. Or it should be. Not every story should be “easy to pitch.” Certainly one of my favorite horror novels in recent years is Library at Mount Char, which… defies description, and even now I’m not going to tell you what it’s about, only that you should read it. You could probably quick-pitch a book like Cabin at the End of the World or The Only Good Indians (or The Three or Annihilation or, or, or), but… you also shouldn’t, I don’t think. Part of your willingness to buy those books is because you trust the author or you trust people telling you about the book, and sometimes it comes with a whispered entreaty like, “Don’t read anything about it before you start.” A warning not to look deeply. Don’t try to figure out what it’s about. Just read the book.

Hopefully, this book, TBOA, is that kind of book.

But, who knows?

What I will ask you is this: books like this really thrive in the light of love from readers. What that means is, anything you can do will help the book a lot more than anything I can do. That means, telling people about it. Yelling about it. It means leaving reviews somewhere (Goodreads, Amazon, and no you don’t have to buy the book at Amazon to leave a review there). It means ideally buying from an indie bookstore or at least a physical bookstore like B&N, because indie bookstores will hand-sell books in a way that a giant online-only space-dong retailer cannot. It means requesting from local libraries, because libraries are a fundamental community good, and there is no harm in using them, there is only goodness. It means you carrying a torch for the books you love, be it this one or another book. I think there’s a sense that authors are somehow above readers, like we’re on a stage and you’re in an audience, but it’s really that we’re down in a hole, and you’re all standing above it, and the only way we get up out of this darkness is by you reaching down and taking our hand and pulling us up. Readers matter in this way a whole, whole lot.

Especially with this kind of book. A weird book. Weird books need love.

So, that’s my ask: check the book out, share it, review it, duct tape the book to a rock and throw it through a neighbor’s window, let lightning strike the book and when it becomes animated by primal forces you begin to worship the Living Book as a brand new god in this realm. Or something, I dunno, I’m just fuckin’ spitballing over here.

To re-up, your procurement options include:

Indiebound | Bookshop | The Strand | Powells

B&N | BAM | Amazon | Apple | Kobo | Google

Audible | Libro.fm

So, there we go.

A quick news-scented update mist for you —

Reminder that tonight I’m virtually chatting with wonderful friend and amazing author Delilah S. Dawson at the University Bookstore in Seattle — but you don’t have to be in Seattle, you can stream our chat into your home via the magic of ALCHEMY I mean THE INTERNET. Details here. It’s 7:30PM EST (4:30 PST).

Also, Fountain Bookstore has been kind enough to put up my chat with Stephen Graham Jones last night for free to watch, if you’re interested — and you should be, because it was really fun and goddamn, he’s just a sharp, funny guy about writing and horror and everything. I should note that in the talk he asks me about my favorite haunted house movie and novel, and I completely whiffed it — my brain evacuated any haunted house media I’ve ever consumed, and I was left with only the howling void. (The other day I couldn’t remember Christopher Walken’s name either, and all I could come up with was, “He played Whitley Streiber.” WTF, brain.) So! Let me answer here — my favorite haunted house movie is probably The Changeling, or maybe The Orphanage. Best haunted house novel, besides Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, I’d say — nnnmmmngh, it’s tough, but Beloved is it, probably. And Hell House, by Matheson.

Tor.com posted a great review by Martin Cahill:

“The Book of Accidents really does live up to those memories of summers spent between the pages of enormous tomes, horror or fantasy or science fiction, that gripped me by the throat and wouldn’t let me go until their tale was done. I finished this mighty book in two and a half days. Wendig has written a huge horror story with a surprising amount of heart that he earns with each page. It gets dark, it gets scary, and at times, it can seem like there’s no way forward. But there’s light at the end of the tunnel, and that’s no accident. I think readers are going to love this, especially if they’re craving that big summer read.”

And the Daily Mail reviewed it thusly:

“…what a ride.”

Okay, that’s the spoiler-free version. If you want the spoilery version, I’ve posted it here.

Let’s see, what else?

I’m gonna be on Brandy Schillace’s new show, Peculiar Book Club, on August 12th, 7pm. We will talk weird science and science fiction and how to make fiction feel real and feel true and all that stuff.

If you missed it, I got to hang with my buddy Steven Spohn, and talk about… well, anxiety and what makes us all tick and how we can be good to ourselves. A mental health booster. Check it out.

Oh, and finally, though I don’t think I’m supposed to care about this sort of thing, yesterday the signed hardcover of THE BOOK OF ACCIDENTS was #5 (!) in all of B&N (!!) so I dunno what the heck that’s about but I’m very excited, and thanks to B&N for putting the book out there with such gusto and prominence.

ANYWAY, I think that’s it for now.

Thanks, all. Have a wonderful weekend. Go watch Ted Lasso.

* I note that Blackbirds is on sale in e-book for $1.99 for the rest of the month.

WELL, the book is out, innit? It escaped the electric chair it was strapped into, and now, with a flash of searing lightning, it is free. It’s out there. Calling your name from the tunnel, from the rocks, from the old house. You can’t really stop it. So you might as well go along with it, yeah? Yeah.

Figure it’s worth doing another round of updates, if you’re the type of person who cares:

First up, tonight I’m talking with the Mighty Paul Tremblay, one of my favoritest writers, an always-buy author who knows how to write books that rip your heart out of your chest and eat them in front of you. We’re speaking virtually, ON THE COMPUTERS, hosted by The Strand and Metaverse/ReedPop. It should be a great conversation, so please do join!

What else?

In no particular order —

Fangoria has a new excerpt posted! Fangoria! I’m in Fangoria! A moment that, were I to travel back in time to meet Previous Self, Previous Self would casually shit his Previous Pants.

Polygon reposted an earlier excerpt, too, so check that out.

I did a podcast with Talking Scared, really one of my favorite conversations I’ve had yet not only in general, but around this book — if you like horror and fiction and all the squirrely bits about how to do it right or wrong or in-between, then I think this is a conversation you’ll enjoy: Chuck Wendig and the Comforting Embrace of Horror.

Rob Bedford at SFFWorld did a stellar review:

“The result, a modern masterpiece of Dark/Horror Fiction. Highest possible recommendation, it will tough for another book to knock this off of my top spot for 2021.”

And one of my favoritest people, Sadie Hartmann, reviews the book over at Tor Nightfire, with a review title that already has me a-swoonin’ — The Book of Accidents Cements Chuck Wendig’s Status as a Master of Horror (!!).

“In the end, the destination was so worth the harrowing journey. Every worry, every heart-pounding moment, every hitch in my chest, and every swear word uttered…”

The Day also recommends it thusly:

“…Wendig — an outstanding craftsman with clever turns-of-phrase, a sharp descriptive eye, similes-as-miniature-works-of-art and a casually complex ease with character development — throws a variety of sci-fi and folkloric elements into the standard ‘Is there really Evil personified?’ recipe. I wouldn’t say it’s a bonus because his characters ARE so well drawn, but there’s a lot of observational wisdom in here that applies to our sad times.”

I’ll be doing a Reddit AMA this coming Tuesday.

And finally, if you’re still seeking a personalized copy, Doylestown Bookshop is ordering more books for that very purpose, so give them a call or put in a note during your online order.