Two more things: first up, I finished the first draft of my next horror novel, THE STAIRCASE IN THE WOODS, and it rolled up at just over 100,000 words. Which for me is pretty slim! I don’t think I’ve written an adult novel that short since… maybe Invasive? Even Zer0es was like, 125k.
I expect it’ll come out in the first half of 2025 — April, I think, is the current plan, but that can change depending on a whole unholy host of factors. So don’t quote me on it. So! Its off to the editor, Tricia at Del Rey, and she’s the bee’s knees and will know how to kick it into its ideal nightmare form.
Also, I’ve had my pitch approved for my next middle grade, tentatively titled DO NOT OPEN THAT DOOR. (It’s weird how my books tend to carry little things over from their previous narrative entrants — and I guess here the parity is in architecture. Staircases! Doors! Don’t go up them! Don’t open them! Ahhhhh!) I don’t want to say more about it yet, except it’s not really explicitly horror, but is meant to evoke the eerie fantasy of stuff like Labyrinth, or Miyazaki’s work, or Neverending Story. That otherworld kind of eerie, you know? Now I guess I have to write it? Are we sure there isn’t just a way to reach into my brain and squish it onto paper? Well, dangit.
Also, third thing is, the anthology I announced being a part of earlier, New Demons, I sadly am pulling out of at present. I’ll let you know if that changes. I’m still writing my story for The Stand anthology, and I think it’s pretty all right (set in Colorado!) so more as I know it.
Don’t run! I have cool stuff to talk about! Do not make me use the tranq darts again, please. You know how how you get when you’re full of the sleepytime juice. “Oh, I’m so hungover-feeling.” BOO-HOO.
Here, let me speak of cool things.
Thing the First:
Yep, that’s a brand spankin’ new cover for the (ahem) Bram Stoker Award nominated BLACK RIVER ORCHARD — particularly, for the trade paperback edition, which is coming out…
*blows the horn*
6/25/24!
(Here, actually, is the whole spread, front cover to spine to back:)
Cover designed by Regina Flath, who rules.
Anyway! You can preorder the paperback now —
If you want a signed, personalized edition, order from Doylestown Bookshop, and make sure to let them know in the notes you want me to deface your book with my ink.
Otherwise, you can get from anywhere books are sold — your own local bookstore, Bookshop.org, B&N, Amazon, and so forth.
ALSO, if you have read the book, please be so kind as to leave a review somewhere. Every review you leave gives you 3% more sex appeal. It’s true. It’s just science. I wouldn’t ever lie to you about science.
Thing the Second:
After some minor digital obstacles, Canines & Cocktails is now out both in e-book format and in print-on-demand! You can get novellas from Kevin Hearne, Delilah S. Dawson, and yours truly. Mine is called Whiskey Sour, and is set after the events of Wayward, and mayyyyyyy very well feature a Very Good Boy named Gumball. So I do hope you’ll check that out.
Oberon the Irish wolfhound and his Boston terrier buddy, Starbuck, not only witness humans waste perfectly good sausage, but also a sneaky murder committed right before their eyes in THE CHARTREUSE CHANTEUSE by Kevin Hearne. Justice demands that someone pay for both crimes, and together with their Druid, Atticus O’Sullivan, and D.I. Rose Badgely of the Launceston police, they’ll show the dastardly villain they messed with the wrong good dogs.
THE BARTENDER AND THE BEAST introduces the enchanting world of Arcadia Falls, the setting for Delilah S. Dawson’s return to Paranormal Romance. When no-nonsense bartender Cassia King returns to her sleepy hometown in the Georgia mountains to help her sister, she can’t help falling for well-dressed wildlife rehabilitator Riley. But as Cash learns, Arcadia Falls has a secret, and so does the bar’s rescue pit bull, Peach Pit…
In WHISKEY SOUR by Chuck Wendig, It was the end of the world and Harry Campbell wanted a drink. He’s one of the few who remained in Ouray, Colorado, after everything went to hell — and has decided to willfully fall off the wagon and find a way to make a cocktail he once loved, the whiskey sour. His quest to make a drink will take him beyond the borders of Ouray and into the world fallen under the shadow of the now-gone White Mask disease. But, he won’t do it alone — Shepherd Marcy Reyes lends him the courage and pluck of the golden retriever known as Gumball to help him stay alive and stay sane in the process. But Harry’s journey holds a greater, more secret purpose — he has questions that remain unanswered about what the rogue AI called Black Swan did to them all, and he intends to have those answers, even if they change him, and perhaps the world, forever.
(The audio is forthcoming!)
Thing the Thirdth:
Welcome to NEW DEMONS, an anthology on Kickstarter edited by Joe and Keith Lansdale (!) and Patrick McDonough — featuring stories from such holy shit authors like Robin Hobb, Joe Hill, Owen King, SA Cosby, Grady Hendrix, Christopher Golden, Alma Katsu, Brian Keene, Josh Malerman, Linda Addison, Cherie Priest, Gabino Iglesias, Chuck Palahniuk, some other stupid Chuck guy named oh I don’t know, CHUCK WENDIG, which I think is me? And goddamnit, that’s just silly that they let me in with such a fine crowd of people. Is there no bouncer at the door? (The authors listed above is only a taste, by the way. There are so many more authors. Click the link to see who else is in this thing, because your jaw won’t merely drop, it’ll dangle from your face like a porch swing.)
It’s a Kickstarter, so it needs your backing, and I hope you’ll consider doing so. Again, you can check it out riiiiiiight here.
Thing The Fourth (Be With You):
Sorry, did I say three things?
Four things.
Four things.
You, me, April 6th, 2pm, Exeter Library here in Berks County, PA.
I’ll be there, talking, signing books, and maybe doing a jig or two. No promises on the jigs. Unless you get me drunk. Then a jig is guaranteed.
I recently finished this book — the one pictured above, hovering slightly over a single Hellraiser Lament Configuration pillow. It is The Butcher of the Forest, by Premee Mohamed. It is easily one of my most favorite things I’ve read this year. And of last year. And of the years prior. It is excellent. Then I also recall that another of her novellas, The Annual Migration of Clouds, is also excellent, and one of my favorite things. (And it has a followup coming??) And I also read her novel, Beneath the Rising, which was also really fucking good, and I think it is at this point I must declare my allegiance to Premee Mohamed. I am ride or die for her.
I note this because I also want you to be ride or die for her, not simply because I want her to be able to write more books that I selfishly get to read, but also because, hey, I like you. You deserve good things. And her books are good things, ipso facto, you deserve her books. Am I using ipso facto right? I have no idea. And I’m not going to check.
Now, understand, I have not read everything she’s written. I failed to finish her series through no fault of hers but rather because I am a slow reader and have a lot of books to read, and reading a series just sucker-punches the time right out of me. She has a new novel out, Siege of Burning Grass, that I have not read but unsurprisingly everyone says it is truly great, and then there’s And What Can We Offer You Tonight, which also sounds amazing, and — I mean, what I’m saying is, I still have more to read, and I have ordered these books posthaste. Because I deserve good things, too.
And you may want me to convince you further, and I know I’m going to have to use my words to do so, and yet, I’m having a hard time doing that without it just being just a bunch of bleats of delight accompanied by various frantic gesticulations — still, hey, lemme try.
It is rare to find an author who operates in a near-perfect balance. Storytelling and writing requires a lot of balancing, and very few of us get it all right. And that’s okay! Stories do not require perfect balance and can in fact be purposefully out of balance in a way that is really successful. Still, just the same, when you find it, when you find a story that just feels like it’s really operating at that level, it’s a thing of wonder. And here she’s done it more than once, somehow, like a weird miracle.
What does balanced mean? Well, for one, she knows how to tell small, personal, intimate stories amid big, complex worlds and ideas without losing the impact of either. The prose, too, runs an exquisite thread of poetry through the needle eye of clarity — poetic writing can kind of drift into estoterica, and clarity can sometimes hit like a brick, but again, rare is the writer that does both at the exact same time, and I find that’s what she’s doing. Her work is also a little bit funny, a lot sad, considerably tragic, yet also, somehow hopeful at the same time, and reads both like a warm hug and a cold kick to the face. There’s tension and adventure and she knows how to worldbuild like a champion, gently folding it all into the text like the most delicate of egg-whites — none of the airyness or detail lost, no rough club-like beats here. Nothing is overmixed and overexplained. Nothing is underbaked and underexplained. This is Goldilocks-level storytelling. Everything feels just right.
Like, right now, if I had to tell you my top five novellas, Butcher of the Forest and Annual Migration of Clouds would be in that list. (Other recent novellas from other authors that might go in that list: Bloom by Delilah Dawson, When Among Crows by Veronica Roth, and jeez, just spin the wheel and pick any one of Eric LaRocca’s. Wait, is P. Djeli Clark’s Ring Shout a novella, too? Shit this list is getting hard. Whatever, there are no rules, that’s also an amazing one, so go get it. God, novellas are really having a moment, aren’t they? Also just got ML Rio’s Graveyard Shift on deck and am excited as hell for that. I will shut up now.) Point is, I just think you need to go out and get these books and trust me when I say, they are excellent in a way that stories rarely are, and somehow she just keeps getting better, which honestly isn’t even fair. I mean, what are the rest of us supposed to do? Also get better?
(Ugh, fine, we’ll try.)
I tell you all this because it’s sometimes important to share THE BOOK LOVE and I’m quite certain I don’t do it often enough. So I’m doing it now. Go to your bookstore, or online book merchant, or library, and seek all the work of Premee Mohamed immediately ASAFP please and thank you.
And now, a guest post from awesome pal and excellent author Kevin Hearne —
Those of you who are already familiar with my work know that I really enjoy digging into mythologies and extrapolating how the figures from a given tradition might behave today. And you also know that, wherever possible, I like to depict them as “first editions”—the oldest known imagery, which often changes throughout the centuries. For example, when I wrote “The Naughtiest Cherub” (which you can find in First Dangle and Other Stories), I giggled at depicting Lucifer as a Biblically accurate cherub: a sphere made of eyes and wings. None of that horns-and-hooves business—those depictions were largely dreamt up by fervid European fanatics in the medieval period. The original Lucifer probably smelled like burnt feathers instead of sulfur.
So that’s why I was so tickled to have a crack at giving the sirens back their wings in Candle & Crow, my forthcoming release that you can preorder now. They’re on the cover and I wanna talk about it! Let’s take a look at the cover and blurb copy and give you a preorder link, then I’ll gush about the sirens below:
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Iron Druid Chronicles comes the final book in the “action-packed, enchantingly fun” (Booklist) Ink & Sigil series, as an ink-slinging wizard pursues the answer to a very personal mystery: Who cast a pair of curses on his head?
Al MacBharrais has a most unusual job: He’s a practitioner of ink-and-sigil magic, tasked with keeping order among the gods and monsters that dwell hidden in the human world. But there’s one supernatural mystery he’s never been able to solve: Years ago, someone cast twin curses on him that killed off his apprentices and drove away loved ones who heard him speak, leaving him bereft and isolated.
But he’s not quite alone: As Al works to solve this mystery, his friends draw him into their own eccentric dramas. Buck Foi the hobgoblin has been pondering his own legacy—and has a plan for a daring shenanigan that will make him the most celebrated hobgoblin of all. Nadia, goth queen and battle seer, is creating her own cult around a god who loves whisky and cheese.
And the Morrigan, a former Irish death goddess, has decided she wants not only to live as an ordinary woman but also to face the most perilous challenge of the mortal world: online dating.
Meanwhile, Al crosses paths with old friends and new—including some beloved Druids and their very good dogs—in his globe-trotting quest to solve the mystery of his curses. But he’s pulled in so many different directions by his colleagues, a suspicious detective, and the whims of destructive gods that Al begins to wonder: Will he ever find time to write his own happy ending?
So! The sirens. There are two major versions of them, and the latter-day depiction of them as something akin to mermaids has taken hold in popular imagination, much like the depiction of Lucifer as a humanoid with pointy parts won over his original form as a ball of feathers and eyes. There was a TV show called Siren from 2018-2020 that was all about mermaids with Rad Scream Powers. There are innumerable other modern references that treat the sirens like sexy fish women flipping their tails and other assets at passing sailors. But the original sirens were bird women, as attested by many vases and sculptures from ancient Greece, and as attested by none other than scholar Emily Wilson, translator of The Odyssey and The Iliad, who speaks of their origins in this nifty article here, which includes some nice images. One of those images in particular is how I first encountered the sirens as a wee lad: The painting by John William Waterhouse, Odysseus and the Sirens, illustrating his harrowing episode with the sirens while tied to the mast and his crew had their ears stuffed up.
Waterhouse did a fantastic job in every particular except the number of sirens. In the ancient stories about them, there are usually only two or three of them, and they’re not breeding lil’ bebe sirens. Homer—the earliest source around 750 BCE—listed two. There’s a nice breakdown of the numbers of sirens and their names in old stories on the Wikipedia page. The seven sirens Waterhouse has in his painting certainly do wonders in terms of composition and sheer tension, but that number is an outlier.
Homer’s story makes it pretty clear that they’re offering Odysseus knowledge of the past and perhaps the future—that’s the super tempting thing that makes him want to hear more. And based on that, the sirens in my series are infallible prophets. In the Iron Druid Chronicles, they correctly (if somewhat cryptically) predict the onset of Ragnarok. And since Candle & Crow is part of the Iron Druid universe, the sirens remain close to omniscient regarding certain events, but they’re absolutely disinclined to help anybody out with their knowledge. That bit about wishing men to die is all too real.
So we have this fantastic cover art by Sarah J. Coleman (@Inkymole on social media) who depicts two sirens with the torsos of women but the lower bodies of untidy turkeys—a phrase I used in my art wish list. I don’t want to spoil anything, but the sirens are absolutely pivotal to the plot of Candle & Crow, and they’re just one of the fantastic figures from mythology that appear. The candle in question is related to Sumerian myth, and the crow, of course, is one folks will recognize from pagan Irish tradition. (Some gnarly dudes from pagan Scottish myth appear too, and they’re uniquely Scottish and so far as I know have no parallels in the other mythologies of the world.)
Delighted also to see Al’s cane at the bottom of the cover (underneath the crow’s wings) and if you look at the runic figures sketched inside the letters that form CROW, those are taken directly from a sarcophagus found in the Glasgow necropolis. It’s a cover that rewards a nice close look and I hope you’ll have fun exploring it up close as I did.
This book not only wraps things up for Al, Buck, and Nadia, but also for Atticus, Granuaile, and Owen from the Iron Druid Chronicles. I will continue shorter stories in the world—in fact, I’m writing a new Oberon short story every month this year for paid subscribers to my newsletter—but this will be the last novel in the universe. So please preorder if you’re already on board, and if not, the Iron Druid Chronicles begins with Hounded and Ink & Sigil begins with the eponymous Ink & Sigil. It’s all full of fantastic creatures from myth and ornery gods and very good dogs. Happy reading!
I am, as the kids say, chuffed to learn that Black River Orchard is a Bram Stoker Award nominee. (Do the kids say chuffed? Maybe it’s the Brits. Do the Brits say it? Do British children say it? Shit, I have no idea.) Point is, the book is amid some serious holy-shit company — Tananarive Due! Stephen Graham Jones! Victor LaValle! Grady Hendrix! — and so please believe me that it is an honor to be nominated amongst such rock stars. So, I’m geeked by this, and thanks to all of you out there who supported the book and helped make it… well, grow some deep roots and bear its weird fruit.
If you haven’t checked it out — well, hope you do so soon, and if you have checked it out, let me remind you that reviews are a vital necessity for any and all books and authors, so I’d sure appreciate it.
And read all the books nominated, willya? It’s a good batch in all the categories. A lucky, lucky year for horror.
So, it looks like Invasive is $1.99 for your various e-reader doohickeys, if you’re so inclined. You get a creepy thriller with sinister billionaires and scary ants and, as Kirkus put it in a starred review, “Will Graham and Clarice Starling rolled into one and pitched on the knife’s edge of a scenario that makes Jurassic Park look like a carnival ride.”
Curiously, this book was really the one that lead to Wanderers — and was literally connected to it, once upon a time!
Also, at some point, when enough time has elapsed, I will share with you the absolutely batshit story of when this book got optioned for TV and what happened to the project after that. (It is no longer under option, but hopefully someone out there sees the potential in Hannah Stander as a killer character to form a TV show around.)
I’d love to write Hannah again some day, too, so fingers crossed.
Anyway. So that’s out there.
You’ll also find that my cornpunk trilogy (YA Star Wars by way of John Steinbeck, featuring sinister corn, rich people living in sky cities, class warfare, weird plant-to-human illnesses, etc.) is also on sale, every book at Amazon for $1.99. Only there, at Amazon.
Also, Canines & Cocktails is out, though Amazon has totally borked some stuff and all we have up there right now is the POD paperback — other sites have e-books and will have audio. I’ll send up a signal flare when it’s all available and looking good.
