I am sick and on deadline, so this is not a particularly good time to unpack this into a post, as my head feels like an in-play kickball and my throat feels like a factory where they work overtime to manufacture infection. But here we are. Let’s do this.

I saw IT.

I loved IT.

IT has, um, its problems, of course. Chief among them, to me, is the bit of power it robs from Bev’s character, and a lot of the power that it robs from Mike’s character — if you want a good unpacking of the latter, I recommend Zak Cheney Rice’s bit here.

(Note, some spoilers at that link.)

Just the same, it worked for me.

It worked for me hard. It was one of those movies I came out of and immediately wanted to go back in and see again. I wanted to run out, gesticulating wildly, showing it to anybody who would listen. I wanted to come home and show my wife and six-year-old son the movie — uhh, obviously that’s a bad idea! HERE TINY PERSON, LET US FIRMLY EMBED THE SEED OF UNBRIDLED CLOWNFEAR INTO YOUR MENTAL EARTH. I don’t mean this to be a rational thing, it’s just the thing I felt. I wanted to show it to babies. To old people. To dogs and birds.

I felt like I hadn’t seen a movie like it in a while.

I unpacked this a little on Twitter the other day, but for me it ties into something about the horror fiction I read in the 1980s, which was more comfortable coming down on the side of good versus evil — a worldview admittedly without nuance, but one that’s worked its way through myth and story since the a caveman painted his first Nazi Velociraptor on the wall of his grotto. (Shut your goddamn mouth, that happened.) I read works by folks like King, Koontz, and especially McCammon, and found there a worldview where good would eventually dispatch evil. That’s not to say this battle was pure, or without complexity — in a story like IT, the people are often human shitbags. The Evil Alien Horror Clown (aka Pennywise, aka Donald J. Trump) does not make them do evil, he simply encourages them to make those choices. And he’s there when they do, slurping it up like sinister consommé. One could argue that the majority of people in the town of Derry are, at best, complicit in the evil done there because they’re fucking lazy, and because it’s easier to keep on driving then it is to stop and save a kid who’s about to have his belly carved into by the town boy-monster. At worst, they’re active participants in the evil.

So, we’re not talking some shiny happy worldview here.

And yet, just the same, it’s a place where that evil can be defeated. It is a place where, moreover, it can be defeated by children — the unlikeliest of combatants, the scrappiest of heroes, the Gooniest of champions. Adults are hardened to fear, and children are like a tooth without enamel — they feel this negative shit keenly. But there they are. Friends till the end. The ones who stand by each other. The ones who delve into the Barren Kingdom of Graywater to battle the Doom Clown which may or may not be a giant spider who may or may not hate a giant turtle.

The worldview posits a lot of evil. And it further presents that evil being diminished or defeated by a very small group of the truly noble.

It is, in a sense, the D&D model. Buncha wacky fantasy assholes in a tavern decide to go on an adventure to find loot and slay evil dragons. It’s also Star Wars: a small group of good people — friends, really — who help bring down a massive monolithic force for oppression and terror.

And of course, Star Wars represented a pivot point away from more serious fare back into that mythic mode and away from morally complex (aka ethically clusterfucked) work in the Apocalypse Now mode. Jaws too had that — a simple-to-understand foe, a shark gone bad, and the rag-tag band of unlikely heroes who took down the SEA BEAST.

It’s a simple mode of storytelling. I suspect that in the late 70s and 80s it grew out of fears about the world — the Cold War and nuclear fear in particular — and allowed fiction to manifest those things in a form that we can, at least in a mythic scope, fight. That’s IT in a nutshell: here is human evil, here is a cycle of abuse, and it is encouraged by and manifested as a demonic sewer clown. You have summoned it and stood against it, now go beat its ass back into the muck.

IT in this way is different than the earlier King book (the first, actually), CARRIE — in that, the evil is also human, and Carrie’s unconscious psychic response to that is to become effectively more the monster than the monsters who bullied her.

I think part of why I’m responding so strongly now to STRANGER THINGS and to IT is not the nostalgia for the 1980s — the 80s were mostly a turd bucket. I mean, the 1980s gave us the Mannequin movies. But I have missed that more mythic, more simplistic story aspect of scrappy band against overwhelming evil. The 1990s saw a greater complexity and a return to the nuance and moral grays of the 1970s — and nothing wrong with that, as those were stories that well-served their times, too, I think. Certainly in the 1990s I read Poppy Brite and Clive Barker and liked Se7en and all that shit. Maybe it was my late-teen brain. Maybe it was that the tumult of the 80s softened and gave us some time to breathe, lending storytellers the room for rumination on what was really going on in the world. Now, though, I wonder if my return to more simplistic stories — escapist stories, arguably — has to do with the world around us. This epic shitshow, this constant parade of fear-bugling and rampant fuckwittery. I don’t respond well to Captain America being a Nazi, I respond to him punching a Nazi. I don’t want to play the vampire right now so much as I want to play the vampire hunter. I don’t want to find out that Ellen Ripley has sided with Weyland-Yutani in bringing the Xenomorph to Earth — I want to watch Ellen Ripley jump in a robotic autoloader and fling that Alien Queen out into the void of space. I don’t want every episode of Scooby-Doo to be about how the Gang had to lower themselves morally to the level of Old Man Withers just to win the day. I don’t want them to pull a mask off Shaggy and it’s really the fucking Devil underneath. I sometimes just want them to find the monster, unmask the bad guy, and solve the goddamn mystery, Scoob.

You can see why people are responding well to IT.

Shit has gone wrong. A lot of people don’t see that shit has gone wrong, or are sitting on their hands and shoulder-shrugging it off. But but but — evil can be thwarted by the truly just. We want to believe that right now in this time of history. We need to believe that, now just to wake the fuck up in the morning, just to get through the day and not collapse like a house of cards.

You may want different things. And further, I am aware of the possibility that leaning too hard into simplistic stories is how we get simplistic worldviews. Stories about the world and are not the same as the realities of that world; good and evil are not so clearly defined beyond the pages of a horror novel or off the screen. But in those pages, and on that screen, I find that fight empowering in a way. At least, I do right now. And it’s what I’m trying to write — Exeunt is (so far) 160,000 words of a small group of people making their way through a collapsing world, and trying to find nobility and truth and goodness within it. They’re trying to be good in a bad situation full of evil people.

Maybe that’s a sign of the times. Maybe it’s a hardening of my brain into a calcified walnut as I have now crossed the geriatric barrier into my 40s. Maybe it’s just that all of us have differently-shaped story-holes in our hearts, and some stories fit well into them and some stories don’t. And maybe those story-holes change, over time. A lot of hay has been made recently about how Hollywood is blaming Rotten Tomatoes for the worst summer movie season in decades — which is a whole lot like shitting the bed, then blaming your Mom for yelling at you for shitting the bed. Just the same, I do worry that our mode of critique is more about GOOD or BAD and less about what the story means, what it does, what it says, what it gets wrong and what it gets right. Sometimes a story everyone hates is a story you love. Sometimes a thing everyone loves is a story you can’t stand. And that has to be okay. We are who we are, and the stories to which we respond speak to us in a way that is more unique than broad-spectrum pop culture.

* * *

Having been desperate to rid herself of her psychic powers, Miriam now finds herself armed with the solution — a seemingly impossible one. But Miriam’s past is catching up to her, just as she’s trying to leave it behind. A copy-cat killer has caught the public’s attention. An old nemesis is back from the dead. And Louis, the ex she still loves, will commit an unforgivable  act if she doesn’t change the future. 

Miriam knows that only a great sacrifice is enough to counter fate. Can she save Louis, stop the killer, and survive? 

Hunted and haunted, Miriam is coming to a crossroads, and nothing is going to stand in her way, not even the Trespasser.

The 5th Miriam Black book — out January 23rd, 2018

Preorder Raptor & Wren: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

WELL, SOMEBODY WAS HUNGRY.

I encourage you to read the sordid tale of The Mantis And Two Ants, which begins with this tweet right here on my tweetypants timeline.

I also really like this photo:

I took off my shoe the other day and found a teeny little snail shell in it. So I put the snail shell on the edge of my sink and said, “I should take a photo of that shell because, hey, snail shells are cool.” When I returned, I saw that the shell was still a home for this little goober.

Then I ate him.

*crunch crunch crunch*

OKAY NO FINE I put him outside, sheesh.

Let’s see, what else is going on?

I’m sick, so that’s fun. CHILDREN ARE NEVER-ENDING PLAGUE FACTORIES, JUST SPEWING BACTERIA AND VIRUSES AND FUNGAL PATHOGENS INTO THE AIR, A CONSTANT MIASMA OF ILLNESS. My son’s been back at school one week and we’ve all got Ebola.

Invasive is still $3.99 for your digital devices.

I’ll be hanging out at B&N Bethlehem on 9/23 for their B-Fest book fest thing, which is kinda teen-oriented but not explicitly teen-oriented? I’ll be signing there at 4pm and then at 5pm will be doing a short writing workshop for teens.

Then, I’ll be hanging out at B&N Rittenhouse with the ever-charming and talented Fran Wilde for our annual FRANK AND CHANK SHOW, where she reads her beautiful prose and I read something about vulture barf and then she tells a knock-knock joke and we all eat cupcakes with my face on them. It’s weird but awesome. Also probably a Satanic ritual of some kind. Whatever, you need to go. That’s Fran’s Horizon Launch Party, on September 26th at 7pm. BE THERE OR BE FED TO THE BLOOD ENGINE.

And I think that’s it.

BYE.

*dissolves into a pile of fizzing bacteria*

Given my choice of mid-day horror film (IT, which was great), I ask that today’s flash fiction challenge be a simple one:

You have 1000 words to write a story about good versus evil. In whatever context you choose, in whatever genre you choose.

Do that, and do it well.

Post at your online space.

Due here by September 15th (Fri), noon EST.

Here, Mighty Michael Martinez talks about something I know that plagues all of us writers — at least all of us with brains in our heads, hearts in our chests, and eyes to see — which is, how the hell do we do it now? The world seems so desperately dipshitty, how do we manage? Here is his take on that very question:

* * *

Like pretty much every writer I know, 2017 has been exceptionally unkind to my focus and productivity. I’ll settle in for a good bout of word-slinging and, oh, I’ll just check Twitter for a second and – OH GOD WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING NOW.

*four hours of news roundups, angry tweets and nausea go by, followed by Firefly marathons and junk food*

I mean, I’ve even watched Phantom Menace again to distract me from it all.

And yet, deadlines beckon. The second book in my MAJESTIC-12 series, MJ-12: Shadows, is out there now, and book three ain’t gonna crawl out of my brainpan unaided. And I have a day job and a family that, by all reports, continues to enjoy my presence. Rage and sorrow is a massive time sink. Cold, man, but true.

So what to do?

Initially, just after the election, I figured I’d do the one thing I do tolerably well – write. I had this idea spring into my mind that was pretty much fully-formed and ready to go onto the page, a dystopic vision of a future with a foundation of the sort of crap we’re seeing in the headlines now, augmented with technology and capitalism run amok and…

I couldn’t write it. I started to, but I was so freakin’ angry and scared for my future and for my daughter’s future, I was paralyzed. Somewhere on my hard drive is about 10,000 words of background and draft that are gathering electron-dust.  I don’t know if I’ll ever go back to it, because I really would hate to be one of those writers who, decades later, folks go, “Man, was he ever prophetic.” I don’t want that world, not even as a warning or a cautionary tale, and certainly not as a visionary blueprint of socio-political horrors.

I learned something about myself as a writer: I can’t write from a place of rage. Can’t do it. I just get all ripped up inside and basically get word-constipation. Took weeks of staring at blank screens to get over it. And you know what, that’s OK? Some folks can pour the piss and vinegar right into the work, and I salute them. That ain’t me.

So after figuring that out, I started outlining the third MAJESTIC-12 book, which is coming out next year, because I’m under contract and, while the folks at Night Shade Books are lovely, I don’t want to test their forbearance too badly, you know?

I wish I had a super-concise, awesome answer to that whole question of how to write while everything goes sideways. I don’t. There’s been a lot of fits and starts, and my usual methodical, disciplined words-every-day process has been replaced by frenetic bursts of writing and weary-ass screen-staring. But it’s getting done.

And there are definitely aspects of this book series that mirror my values and ideals, as I think most of our writing does on some level. These books are set in the late 1940s, and I’ve tried to tackle the racism and sexism inherent in those years as honestly as I can. I’ve tried to talk about geopolitical power and the myriad ways the United States screwed up the world via ill-considered covert action.

Yes, MJ-12: Shadows is still a spy thriller with superpowers. It’s still fun. I want it to be fun. But it’s also me, and so I’m gonna tackle that stuff alongside the gadgets and high-powered abilities and wham-bam-kaplooie. To ignore the issues of the era is, to me, just disingenuous. It’s not rage-filled, capital-R Resistance, but it’s what works for me.

So my own answer is to get down to it and create the adventures that my readers seem to like from my work, all while making sure that the ideas behind it and the values I believe in are reflected therein – without overshadowing the story, of course, because ultimately, the story is paramount. That’s it. No silver bullet. Sorry.

Oh, and one more thing. I get that writing about spaceships or elves or super-spies or whatever may seem frivolous in times like these. I’ve been there, man. We should be out there donating, marching, calling representatives – spending our time better, right? And yeah, I’ve done those things as well, and I’d encourage y’all to do that too.

But writing really does matter. I had a reader reach out on social media recently just to tell me that reading one of my books was a welcome respite from all the craziness out there. And wow, let me tell you, that was something. I hadn’t really thought of my stuff that way, and it was incredibly awesome to hear that.

I wrote 2,000 really good words that day.

So yeah. It’s OK to be angry, scared and/or discouraged at the world – or your own personal stuff, for that matter, because life throws curveballs all the damn time. Do what you gotta do to get you through it. Watch crap movies or call your reps. Donate, cry, march, hide, scream. Take care of yourself. But know that when you get back to the keyboard, you have a chance to bring stories to life that can help people think about a better future, or get some solace from a rough present.

Saddle up, wordpeople.

* * *

Michael J. Martinez: Website | Twitter

MJ-12: Shadows: Amazon | B&N | Indiebound

Life sucks and then you die…

…a cyberpunk family drama from the ingenious author of Flex.

In the near future, the elderly have moved online and now live within the computer network. But that doesn’t stop them interfering in the lives of the living, whose sole real purpose now is to maintain the vast servers which support digital Heaven. For one orphan that just isn’t enough – he wants more for himself and his sister than a life slaving away for the dead. It turns out that he’s not the only one who wants to reset the world…

* * *

I think Tolkien is one of the most toxic influences on speculative fiction.  It’s not because of his dodgy racial overtones in making all the orcs dark, degenerate Elves, or the way he pounded Tom Bombadil’s godawful Vogon poetry into our eardrums.

It’s Tolkien’s maps.  And his fancy-shmancy languages.  And all his meticulous worldbuilding.

Not that I’m opposed to worldbuilding, mind you!  My novel The Uploaded is soaking in deep, crunchy cultures, because I take a single idea – so what happens 500 years after we perfect brain-uploading technologies and no one’s afraid of dying any more? – and follow that concept all the way down.

But Tolkien’s influence hangs over speculative fiction like its own cancerous Eye Of Sauron, leading thousands of wayward nerds to believe that you need a robust cartography program and a linguistic analyst before you can write your world-busting saga.  I have at least ten friends who clutch their painstakingly-imagined portfolio of Coherent Magic Systems and Plausible Alternate Biologies to their chest, believing on some level that if they accumulate enough worldbuilding details, the weight of their imagination will spontaneously cause a novel to form.

But no.  Let me tell you the first thing I learned in writing The Uploaded:

You Are Not Writing An RPG, So You’d Better Learn To Be Your Own GM

“So they’ve invented a digital Heaven,” I thought.  “Your brain’s uploaded at the moment of death, and saved to a game server where you live forever playing the most awesome MMORPGs in existence.

“How’s that change society?”

Bing! The worldbuilding centers of my brain lit up.  Because when you know as a stone-cold fact that there’s a palpable reward awaiting you when you pass on, life becomes kind of an inconvenience.  Everyone wants to be dead – especially when the dead have the votes, and the old crusty racists never die, and the living world becomes only useful as a means of keeping the game servers running.  Dead politicians would need to pass laws to prevent suicide, and living would become downright unfashionable, and people would come to hate tangible things because who wants to watch both your creation and your meat-body rot when you can craft digital items that will await you in your artificial paradise?

If I’d been writing a roleplaying supplement, all that shit would be awesome.   Some DM would get plotbunnied and generate their own adventure, and some players would devise compelling characters, and I wouldn’t have to be bothered with coming up with a story that utilized all these elements.

But I wasn’t.  I was writing a novel.  And while pure worldbuilding is fun for those of us with a what-if nature, you can get lost in generating artificial details.

Eventually, every story needs two things:

– At least one person readers will find interesting enough to follow them through 300+ pages of pure Novel, and:

– A reason to get that person out of the house and adventuring.

Thus far I had neither.  So where would I start?  Fortunately, I had a mentor who loved porn.

Neil Gaiman’s Porno Expertise Comes In Surprisingly Helpful

In 2008, I went to the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Workshop, and Neil Gaiman was one of my teachers.  And I talked to him about some half-baked idea I had for a story, and he brightened and said, “Oh!  It’s like porn!”

“Whaaaaaaa?” I said, boggled that Neil goddamned Gaiman was sharing his deep-seated lust for The Devil In Miss Jones with me.

“Or a musical,” he added quickly.  “You want an excuse plot.”

“Of course I do,” I murmured, but by then I was, unfortunately, still stuck on the porn.

“I mean, all the viewer wants in a porno is to get to the next sex scene,” he explained, not at all lasciviously.  “Just like all the viewer wants in a musical is to get to the next musical number.  Anything that gets in the way of that is going to annoy them.”

I was, by now, ablaze wondering exactly how many pornography novels Neil Gaiman had written, presumably clever Victorian pornos where gentlemen with monocles were studiously served by prim horseboys in strict adherence to classical mythology, under a pseudonym like “Melmoth The Rogerer” – but he seemed into this concept of “plot,” so I nodded.

“What you want,” he told me, “Is a plot that showcases as many of the weird elements of your world as possible.  Devise something that draws your characters through the most interesting parts of your landscape and then get out, quickly.”

“You mean climax quickly, of course!” I ejaculated.

“Get out,” he said, flinging his tea at me, and I have never heard from Mr. Gaiman or his erotic Gormenghast fanfic again.

Still, his advice rang back to me when I began looking at The Uploaded again – okay, I had a ton of weird subcultures in this world where death had been conquered – the suicidal LifeGuard squadrons who were tasked with keeping the living in line, the terrorist NeoChristians who violently rejected what they saw (not illegitimately) as a soul-destroying affront to God, the orphanages where kids were dumped after their parents nipped off to the Upterlife, the scientific enclaves where they maintained the servers.

So I needed a plot that would have someone herded through all of these locales, and then exit stage right.  Probably a rescue plot – a boy on a quest to murder his sister!  That’s an excuse if ever I’d heard one.  I’d knock this plot off before lunchtime and then return to scouring the net for Neil Gaiman’s porn.

But I was too clever, alas.  Because:

You Can’t Worldbuild Someone Into Feeling

Now, what drew me to this project was how every one of our normal emotions got inverted by the presence of an irrefutable (if artificial) afterlife.  Murdering a stranger becomes an act of charity when you know for sure that Heaven awaits your victim!  Chain-smoking tarry cigarettes becomes a clever move to bring you to death’s doorway!

That’s so cool, right?

No.  Because here’s the thing:

In the early drafts of The Uploaded – and The Uploaded had many, many drafts – I’d start out with something Very Clever, saying, “Ah ha, my lead character Amichai wants to murder his sister!”

The problem is that in this world, “Wanting to murder your sister” makes you, well, a murderer.  People thought Amichai was a dick, or wanted to know how evil his sister was that he’d been driven to plotting her death.

“But wait!” I’d cry.  “This world is different than ours!”  And I would dump a nice, steaming load of Infodump on my poor beta reader to explain that in this crazy world, murder was kindness and up was down and bell peppers actually taste good (don’t @ me), at which point my reader would check out.

Let me tell you something someone mercifully told me: If readers do not empathize with what your character wants by the end of your first page – and that’s the stubby little three-quarter page of text floating under the title – it will be remarkably difficult to sell your book.

Now read that again: not just understand what your character wants.  To empathize.  As in, to go, “Oh, I could want that too.”  You need to trigger a resonant emotion within 250 words or so.  It likely won’t be a deep emotion by that point, but that first “I get this person” has to be birthed on Page One.

You don’t get emotion by explaining things to people.  And as such, “Everything is inverted in The Uploaded!” became a liability.

So what do you do?

Find The Origin Of Your Character’s Greatest Ache

There’s a lot of ways to generate sympathy, and good writers should know as many of them as possible.  But here’s a classic:

Find the moment that hurt your character so bad they never recovered, and tell it.

For Amichai, I kept starting in the present, just before he broke into a hospital to kill his sister.  But that wasn’t where the average reader could emotionally hook in.

So I went back to where Amichai himself learned what the Upterlife was.  Back when he was nine years old, having watched his parents die of a new drug-resistant plague, being told that their anguished screams was just temporary meat-trauma, they’d get to paradise soon.

Then they died.

And they didn’t call.

And his sister was stuck trying to keep them in their apartment while Child Protective Services kept threatening to put them in the orphanages, and she was only twelve, and she kept telling him that Mom and Dad still loved him, but if they loved him then why were they spending all their time playing stupid Upterlife games, why did Mom and Dad get to go to this awesome place and leave my stressed, impoverished sister to struggle alone…

And then Mom and Dad called.

The opening chapters are here – but the point is that “finding the moment where someone discovers why their world is unfair” is a time-honored way of cutting to the bone.

And by the time we get to “Why is Amichai breaking into a hospital to murder his sister” in chapter two, well, that question’s been established.  The emotional line of “Why he cares” and “Why he’s upset” is clean.

Except there’s one final problem….

Know Which Tropes Are Offensive, And Do Your Best To Avoid Them

You know what people with disabilities are fucking sick of seeing?

The story that tells them they’d be better off dead and “happy” than alive and with a disability.

And man, do they get that one a lot.  Too many stories involve anguished, paralyzed people peacefully put to rest by their lovers because you couldn’t possibly want to keep breathing in a wheelchair, amiright?  Having dirt shoveled on your dead face is better than being blind, right?

So even in a world where everyone is measurably better off dead, where even the healthiest people long for the electronic grave, a plot like “Amichai wants to kill his plague-stricken sister” is gonna poke a few buttons.  Maybe volcanically.

Now, I know people with disabilities are sick of this storyline because I follow a lot of people with disabilities on Twitter.  Which is, honestly, the least you can do if you’re gonna write a book about people.  And so I wisely realized before feces impacted the fan that this plot needed to be retooled.

So things got switched around a bit.  Amichai has a bit of a grudge, which fomented when his fucking parents abandoned him – he hates the Upterlife.  He hates how everyone’s ignoring the wonders of our world to stare into a goddamned monitor.  And he hates how the dead only value the living for their muscle, not their brains.

Which, thankfully, made it easy to make Amichai’s quest not to murder his sister, but rather to help convince her that life was still living even if the dead didn’t value her.  (A quest that rapidly transforms into him uncovering and then interfering with a plot designed to brainwash the living, but spoilers, people.)

Furthermore: I had some of my friends with disabilities read the text to ensure that it didn’t kick them in the jimmies.  Then I paid a sensitivity reader – or, as I think of it, “A super-informed reader” – to check my goddamned privilege.

I’m not saying The Uploaded is perfect, of course, even if it features two wheelchair-enabled leads very prominently.  I’m gonna fuck it up somehow.  And even then, “people with disabilities” are not a hive brain and just because the four readers with disabilities I got to spot me were cool with it doesn’t mean that every single one will be.  Someone might get offended.

But I did as much due diligence as I was capable of.  I asked people.  I know the tropes.

That is, I feel, what you owe people when you write about, you know, their existence.

* * *

Ferrett Steinmetz’s debut urban fantasy trilogy FLEX (and THE FLUX and FIX) features a bureaucracy-obsessed magician who is in love with the DMV, a goth videogamemancer who tries not to go all Grand Theft Auto on people, and one of the weirder magic systems yet devised. His latest book THE UPLOADED, well, you just read about it, didn’t you?  He was nominated for the Nebula in 2012 and for the Compton Crook Award in 2015, for which he remains moderately stoked, and lives in Cleveland with his very clever wife, a small black dog of indeterminate origin, and a friendly ghost.

Ferrett Steinmetz: Twitter | Website

The Uploaded: Excerpt | Indiebound | Amazon | B&N | Powells

In which we have a holy crap gorgeous cover from Adam Doyle.

Miriam Black is back in her penultimate story.

Miriam Black, in lockstep with death, continues on her quest to control her own fate in The Raptor and the Wren, the brand-new fifth book in the Miriam Black series.

Having been desperate to rid herself of her psychic powers, Miriam now finds herself armed with the solution — a seemingly impossible one. But Miriam’s past is catching up to her, just as she’s trying to leave it behind. A copy-cat killer has caught the public’s attention. An old nemesis is back from the dead. And Louis, the ex she still loves, will commit an unforgivable  act if she doesn’t change the future. 

Miriam knows that only a great sacrifice is enough to counter fate. Can she save Louis, stop the killer, and survive? 

Hunted and haunted, Miriam is coming to a crossroads, and nothing is going to stand in her way, not even the Trespasser.

It’ll land on shelves January 23rd, 2018.

Vultures, the sixth and final book, will come out in 2019.

These last two books are, I hope, one helluva ride.

Preorder Raptor & Wren: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

Check out the other books in the series by clicking below: