I received an email from, erm, a reader —

I’m quoting the email in its entirety but stripping out a few identifying bits.

Be warned: this email is a real journey.

“And now you’re – you’re like any other piece-of-shit god-complex dickhead who got too full of himself to see the people around him as people.”

That is exactly how I thought of you when I finished Black River Orchard. Similar to Hillary calling people deplorables and suggesting they need to be deprogrammed as if they are cult members. The constant berating of people who don’t think like you was nauseating. I don’t think you could make your feelings about anyone outside of your political beliefs any more clear. You don’t see them as people, just your political enemy.

I was looking forward to reading this book as I love horror, but the only horror was how elitist you came across. Good for you, you’re sooooo progressive because you mentioned trans, ENBY, a lesbian couple, sex dungeon, BDSM, bigots, stolen land, religious nuts, and non-vaxers? My daughter and I have books that come with trigger warnings about monster cocks, so you’re not special.

Although I’m not a Trump-thumping Republican, I feel you would look down on me and not see me as a person because I’m rural and not educated enough to be impressed with all your keywords. My husband works in [REDACTED] and I work for a [REDACTED]. On a positive note, I also work in a fabulous [REDACTED] where I can find other works that are truly horror. I did enjoy the history lesson about apples. I happen to like Honeycrisp apples, especially from a semi-local orchard.

email from, obviously, a huge fan

I have not responded to this person, as yet, and likely won’t. I’m not sure what she hoped to achieve by writing this email, though I almost wish she’d write it as an actual review because, wow. Yeah.

The email did come in through the contact form on this website, so if the person who wrote this email is here, well, hi. Sorry I didn’t include more monster cocks in my book? I guess? I hope you and your daughter find all the wonderful apolitical monster cock books your hearts desire, but I come from a world where everyone gets their very own Sex Dungeon.

Or something.

Anyway, this is your reminder that all art is political and who gets to write the art and who is included in the art and who gets mad at the art — that’s all part of the politics of a piece. Like it or not. Thinking you can keep politics out of art is like thinking you can keep a fish alive out of water. It has to swim there even when it doesn’t realize it’s swimming there. Just because the fish doesn’t know what water is doesn’t mean the water doesn’t exist.

ANYWAY.

I casually appear in your mind to whisper, “Hey, I’m going out on the second leg of my book tour this week,” which means I’m gonna be at the following places on the following dates:

---

Friday, October 13th, 6:00 PM

Denver, CO

Tattered Cover Bookstore

Details here! Order from the store.

—

Sunday, October 15th, 4:00 PM

Helena, MT

Montana Book Company

Details here! Order from the store.

—

Monday, October 16th, 7:00PM

Portland, OR

Powells Bookstore, Cedar Crossing location

Event details here! Preorder from the store.

—

Wednesday, October 18th, 7:00PM

Seattle, WA

Elliott Bay Books

* In conversation with Sadie Hartmann

Event details here! Preorder from the store.

---

Also, there are some new Black River Orchard reviews out there:

Paste Magazine: “As with his previous horror novel, the towering Book of Accidents, Wendig lays out a beautifully structured narrative web of multiple points-of-view, time periods, and story threads, weaving a tapestry through inviting prose and memorable characters in which readers will get happily lost. In a narrative that spans 600 pages, Wendig builds a series of deeply personal stakes for a lineup of people who are all caught in the strange shadows of Harrow’s past, then shows us how they intertwine, like a tree with branches that are all feeding each other, all reaching for the same goal. And, like The Book of Accidents, Wendig shows patience in cultivating this tree, letting it evolve and shift with the seasons, pruning it just so, always making sure it’s primed for maximum beauty and maximum emotional punch.”

FanFiAddict: “Nothing short of a horrific saga, Black River Orchard is a story that embraces its terrifying weirdness with open arms. With a comprehensive backstory interwoven with the present narrative, Chuck Wendig has gifted us a gritty look into small-town persuasion and the horrors of falling to the masses. We are given many loveable (and hate-able) characters to empathize with and shake our fists at throughout the course of the plot without losing out on the action. A true example of balancing characterization and plot development, Black River Orchard will have me skipping the farmer’s market for the foreseeable future.”

Books Bones & Buffy: “Wendig’s story is complex and multilayered. In addition to the story playing out in the present, he delves into the past and shows the origins of the apple–at one time called the Harrowblack—and how it originally had ties to the indigenous Lenape. Over the years, the apple was lost, but Dan Paxton was able to revive it, which turned out to be a terrible idea. I also loved Wendig’s passion for his subject matter and his vivid descriptions of apples and their taste, texture and smell. I’ve always loved his writing, and it really shines in Black River Orchard.”

Nightmare Magazine, Adam-Troy Castro: “The story has plenty of ooga to float its booga. It’s all about a town beset by cursed apples, instantly addictive, that, as they become a delicacy, accentuate everything negative in the personalities of their consumers, rendering them selfish, evil, and ultimately murderous.”

The Southern Bookseller Review: “Black River Orchard hit me like a combination of Stephen King and really good Magnus Archives episode, in the best of ways. For my fellow booksellers, this book is a mix of Stephen King’s IT and Faust — like if Faust was an apple farmer, and then mix up layers of horror–there’s psychological horror of domestic abuse and being trapped, of seeing people change for the worse. There’s body horror. Hooo boy, there’s body horror. And on top of all of that, I learned about apples!”

Random Email: “I was looking forward to reading this book as I love horror, but the only horror was how elitist you came across. Good for you, you’re sooooo progressive because you mentioned trans, ENBY, a lesbian couple, sex dungeon, BDSM, bigots, stolen land, religious nuts, and non-vaxers? My daughter and I have books that come with trigger warnings about monster cocks, so you’re not special.” haha oh wait I already posted that one, sorry

---

As always, I politely note that me writing books is how I fund this here website, so if you dig that and dig my presence in this universe, checking out Black River Orchard from a bookstore or library is a good way to keep my soul tethered to the vacation resort that is my flesh. And if you have checked out the book, leaving a review at the usual receptacles (Amazon, Goodreads, Storygraph, TikTok) is a great way to keep the party going, too.

I note that for the next couple days, Bookshop.org is doing free shipping. You can buy Black River Orchard there, as a matter of fact. Or you can get a signed copy from Doylestown Bookshop or the four stores I’m visiting above.

I also note that the hardcovers for both Wayward and Book of Accidents appear to be on sale at AMZ, if you’re so inclined.

OKAY BYE

The city of San Siroco is sinking. The basement of Dr. Tamsin Rivers, the arrogant, selfish head of the research team assigned to find the source of the subsidence, is sinking faster.

As Tamsin grows obsessed with the distorting dimensions of the room at the bottom of the stairs, she finds a door that didn’t exist before – and one night, it opens to reveal an exact physical copy of her. This doppelgänger is sweet and biddable where Tamsin is calculating and cruel. It appears fully, terribly human, passing every test Tamsin can devise. But the longer the double exists, the more Tamsin begins to forget pieces of her life, to lose track of time, to grow terrified of the outside world.

With her employer becoming increasingly suspicious, Tamsin must try to hold herself together long enough to figure out what her double wants from her, and just where the mysterious door leads…

1. I don’t understand physics.

Here’s the hook for Last to Leave the Room: the city of San Siroco is sinking, and Dr. Tamsin River’s basement is sinking faster. It’s mysterious, it’s visceral, it’s unnerving – and, it turns out, it was wildly effective at showing me just how much I don’t understand physics.

An actually-sinking city would likely be caused by something like a gigantic sink hole. Sink holes, well, sink – the ground underneath a building collapses in on itself, and the building goes down with it. But for my mysterious, creepy vibes, I wanted the buildings to stay put. It’s the subway tunnels that are getting lower. The pipes and fiberoptics running below the city streets.

The floor of Tamsin’s basement.

At first, I tried to figure out a way it could work. But finding a plausible scientific explanation for the situation, while satisfying my newfound anxiety about my understanding of physics, would have actually run counter to the whole point of the book. Instead, I had to lean in; I had to make the problem I was facing the characters’ problem. It isn’t just that the city is sinking.

It’s stretching, and there’s no explanation for how. And that means there’s something much worse afoot.

2. Soylent gives you bad GI issues.

Tamsin is employed by a company called Myrica Dynamics, an ambiguous tech corporation that’s a little bit Amazon, a little bit Google, and a whole lot “companies you didn’t realize were all actually owned by the same shadowy conglomerate.” Tamsin herself works in a shady R&D department with a very roomy budget, and she lives a very tech-industry lifestyle; fancy ride-ordering app, fancy smart home, fancy meal-kit subscription… and a penchant for drinking meal replacement shakes anyway, because who has time for cooking? Especially when you’re trying to figure out why an exact physical copy of yourself has just walked out of a door in your basement that wasn’t there last week?

It turns out, though, that if you drink most of your meals, your intestines might take up arms against you. Soylent very notoriously gave a whole lot of people a whole lot of GI issues. Apparently, humans aren’t actually perfect inventors, and our convenient replacements for things like food don’t always behave the way we expect them to.

Hey, wait a minute. That sounds thematically relevant.

3. Prosthetic limb tech is super cool!

I don’t want to spoil anything, but there’s a character with a prosthetic limb or two (and there aren’t many characters, so I bet you can figure it out inside three guesses). Last to Leave the Room is set five minutes into the future, and with Myrica Dynamics backing the characters, I decided to press fast-forward on prosthesis technology a little. But I didn’t have to push too far! Researchers and specialty companies are already building arms that can be controlled via nerve impulses, and microprocessor knees that do the fancy work of figuring out how to help balance the load of a body.

But while all that’s nice, it’s a lot for every day. So I also looked into day to day life: modifications that character could make to their apartment for accessibility, how much they’d actually wear their prosthetic limb(s) around the house, what other options they’d have. I did a lot of reading first hand accounts and lurking on forums, and I hope that the life I’ve constructed for this character reads true.

And the overall upshot? Adaptive tech, which I first got a taste for while writing The Luminous Dead, continues to be incredibly neat. 

4. Situs inversus is also super cool… and creepy.

Bodies, human and otherwise, follow general patterns and layouts. But within those layouts, there’s a surprising amount of room for variation. The farther from your core they get, the more your veins and arteries get creative with their organization (to the point where there’s been some work on identifying suspects by the vein patterns in their hands and forearms). People can have extra “accessory” bones, or variants of musculature. In fact, part of the benefit of cadaver dissection in medical school is exposure to a real body, as opposed to the theoretical “average” body.

And did you know that about 1 in 10,000 people have their internal organs partially or entirely mirrored compared to standard human anatomy? Most of the time, it doesn’t cause any issues, and you wouldn’t even know you had it unless you had thoracic or abdominal surgery. (Occasionally it comes with some heart defects; you find out relatively quickly in that case.) I’d heard of situs inversus at some point in my past, probably around when I learned about fibrodysplasia ossifcans progressiva, which wormed its way into my last book. The idea stuck around, hovering in the background of my brain, until I started writing Last to Leave the Room and realized that a scientifically-minded person would, of course, want to know exactly how identical her doppelganger was to herself.

So give that bitch an ultrasound machine! She just might not like what she finds out about herself…

5. Sometimes you just have to give your main character’s hair its own arc.

Tamsin carefully controls everything in her life to create a certain effect. Her relationships, her reputation, her appearance. When we first meet her, she’s dressed exquisitely, her curly red hair is perfectly maintained, and she wears full-face make up and heels every day. This being a horror novel, she gets more than a little scuffed up before the final pages.

In the last phase of edits, my editor focused in on one specific detail: Tamsin’s hair. I’d made passing references to it getting a bit gross and tangled over the course of the plot, and my editor suggested I amp it up. Really track it, and, essentially, give Tamsin’s hair its own plot arc that moved in lockstep with Tamsin’s mental health (or lack thereof). What starts as distraction devolves into neglect and finally into chaos.

It’s a small detail, but tracking the state of Tamsin’s hair made me pay closer attention to Tamsin’s mind, and all the other little details of her environment. Her forgetting to take showers snowballing into forgetting salon appointments reinforced the less tangible aspects of her decline. Sometimes, it’s the small things that make the horror more real–and more terrible.

---

Caitlin Starling is the nationally bestselling author of The Death of Jane Lawrence (2021), Last to Leave the Room (2023), and the award-winning The Luminous Dead (2019). Her other works of genre-hopping horror and speculative fiction include Yellow Jessamine and a novella in the Vampire: The Masquerade collection, Walk Among Us. Her nonfiction has appeared in Nightmare, Uncanny, and Nightfire. Caitlin also works in narrative design, and has been paid to invent body parts. She’s always on the lookout for new ways to inflict insomnia.

---

Last to Leave the Room: Bookshop | B&N | Amazon | Macmillan

Caitlin Starling: Website | Instagram

I am home from the first leg of the Black River Orchard tour — the Northeastern leg, to be clear — and hot damn, it was a delight to meet so many of you. Thanks, all, for coming out, and to the bookstores — Doylestown Bookshop! PRINT! Porter Square! Books on the Square! Gibson’s! Northshire! Oblong! The End! — who hosted me and this weird little (not so little) apple-flavored horror book. Extra thanks to my conversation partners like Liberty Hardy, Aaron Mahnke, Clay McLeod Chapman, Owen King, and Delilah S. Dawson. And finally, shout-out to the orchards who provided apples for the events: North Star Orchard, Sweetster’s Apple Barrel, Orchard Ridge Farm, Shelburne, Steere, Gould Hill Farm, Sunset Orchard, and of course, Rose Hill Farm and Cidery.

It was honestly fucking awesome and you can find ongoing photos from the trip at my Instagram — including new heirloom apple reviews (gasp), which I’ll keep posting because as it turns out, I’ve got a shitload of new weird amazing apples to review. I ate an apple called “Nail Biter,” for fuck’s sake. I ate one with bloody-looking flesh. I ate an apple that tasted like Campari. It was a good time and I’ll be continuing those updates.

Also, a reminder that I’m going back out on tour next week — this time, to Denver, CO; Helena, MT; Portland, OR; and Seattle, WA. (Details on Appearances page.)

If you picked up the book, the best thing you can do is read it, yell about it, shake it at your friends foes and family members, and best of all, review it at one of the appropriate review receptacles like Amazon, Goodreads, TikTok, wherever your heart guides you.

If you’re still not sure, I think Alex Brown’s review might convince you.

And you can listen to me on the always wonderful Talking Scared.

Also, I saw a staircase in the woods!

Finally, CHANT THE CRABAPPLES CHANT, YOU FOOLS

OK BYE

*Steps up onto the stage of Chuck’s Terrible Minds blog while squinting at the spotlight. Chuck waves a green flag to get started*

*Thumbs up back at Chuck and takes a deep breath*

Salutations, everybody! Can y’all hear me? *Taps on mic* Yes? Right – let’s get this started:

The Pixel Project, a 501(c)3 anti-violence against women nonprofit, is proud to announce that our Read For Pixels campaign reached its 10^th annual Fall Edition in September 2023.

Read For Pixels has come a long way since September 2014 when Chuck himself, Joe Hill, Sarah J. Maas, and nine other award-winning bestselling SF/F, Horror, and YA authors helped us reach out to their readers and fandoms about violence against women (VAW) and raise funds to keep our anti-VAW work alive. A decade on with almost 300 author livestreams, 90+ AMAs, 20 fundraisers, and 1 Shirley Jackson Award- and Audie Award-nominated charity anthology under our belt, we are continuing to expand our archive of globally accessible resources about VAW for geeks, book lovers, fandoms, parents, teachers, and kids, as well as leveraging the power of genre fiction and storytelling to educate people about VAW. Authors, editors, publishers, and agents have also helped us raise approximately $10,000 per year by providing exclusive goodies as giveaways for readers, fans, and book collectors who donate to support our work.

You’re probably thinking: “Neat-O! I’ll go check it out. So why the guest post on Chuck’s blog?”

The short answer: “Because we need your help to reach our $10,000 goal for the 10^th anniversary of Read For Pixels to keep our work alive in this [insert expletive of your choice] year of 2023.”

Like many small grassroots-run nonprofits, our efforts to fight the good fight while grappling with the ongoing fallout from the pandemic and spiraling global inflation in 2023 is taking its toll. Women’s organizations have experienced decades of scarce funding for the overall women’s rights movement and women’s human rights are often one of the first casualties in turbulent times such as these. So, with our 10^th anniversary Read For Pixels fundraiser progressing in the same fits-and-starts pace that Crowley was railing against while being stuck on the M25 in his attempt to get to Tadfield Airbase to stop Armageddon in its tracks (it’s been just over a month and we’re stuck at $9,255, which is that darn so-near-yet-so-far 92% of the way to our first attempt at raising a modest $10,000 in a single fundraiser), you can imagine our growing concern. While we are 100% volunteer-staffed, we do have bills to pay so that we can keep our campaigns, programs, and services running.

Chuck, being the generous soul that he is, received our SOS and leaped into action by publishing this blog post to boost the signal for our fundraiser.

So here I am, right at the start of Domestic Violence Awareness Month 2023, presenting five great reasons why you should consider giving to our fundraiser to help get us to our $10,000 finish line by our extended deadline of October 31^st 2023:

Great Reason to Give Generously #1: Support accessible information for victims and survivors of VAW… while slaying your holiday gift list

One of the core services that The Pixel Project provides is bridging the information gap that victims and survivors encounter when trying to get help. Our daily helpline retweet session, which tweets out domestic violence and rape/sexual assault helplines for women in 205 countries worldwide from 8.00PM to midnight Eastern Time, 24/7, 365 days a year, is currently on ice thanks to Elon Musk’s ongoing destruction of The App Formerly Known As Twitter. While we transition this program to another platform, we continue to respond to individuals contacting us for help, doing the research legwork to provide them with information about specific victim assistance services in their part of the world, and incorporating this life-saving information in the books, videos, shows, and other awareness-raising tools we deploy.

THE WIN-WIN FACTOR: Donate to us and you can also tackle your holiday season gift list at the same time! From signed rare/limited/luxe editions to goodie bundles stuffed with books and swag to tuckerisations galore, we have treats for every donation level from luminaries such as Anne Bishop, Brandon Sanderson, C.S.E. Cooney, Dana Cameron, Juliet Marillier, Kendare Blake, P.C. Cast, Sebastien de Castell, and more. And while you’re savoring the joy of squaring away some of your holiday gifts early, also savor the fact that your donation will be going towards keeping our programs and initiatives that connect victims and survivors of VAW with the help that they need.

Great Reason to Give Generously #2: Support resources for educating folks about VAW… while getting help for your writing

We have built an ever-expanding archive of nearly 300 resource articles to date about everything from how to stop street harassment to lists of organizations tackling everything from child marriage to MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women). Additionally, our website has beginner-level primers about different types of VAW, including violence against trans women and obstetric violence and our Facebook page is an excellent just-in-time source for the latest headlines and articles about VAW.

THE WIN-WIN FACTOR: Whether you are a budding writer or experienced author who is considering making a donation, we have a stellar line-up of Read For Pixels author alumni offering critique bundles for WIPs (works-in-progress) and/or 1-to-1 video chats focused on the craft of writing and/or tips about the publishing industry. Participating authors include Alan Baxter (Horror), Jasper Fforde (Fantasy), Mary Robinette Kowal (Science Fiction and Fantasy), Meg Gardiner (Crime/Mystery), Sebastien de Castell (Fantasy), and Sylvain Neuvel (Science Fiction). Enjoy knowing that while you are getting expert help for your WIP or fixing a stubborn writing challenge, you’re also supporting the creation and growth of online resources for educating folks around the world about VAW.

Great Reason to Give Generously #3: Support online platforms for people to speak up about VAW… while having a chat with your favorite author

A key pillar of our activism and advocacy work is providing digital platforms that are safe spaces for people from different walks of life to speak up about VAW. Every October for the past 9 years, we have hosted the “People and Pets Say NO!” photo statement campaign via Facebook and Instagram for people and furbabies from all walks of life to step up publicly to call for an end to VAW during Domestic Violence Awareness Month. We also offer VAW survivors and dads who are male allies opportunities to speak up via blog interview initiatives such as the Survivor Stories blog interview series and the Voices of Dads Against VAW interview series.

THE WIN-WIN FACTOR: While your donation keeps our platforms available for folks to speak up about VAW, you can enjoy a chat with your favorite author in the name of supporting a good cause. For this fundraiser, Julie E. Czerneda (Science Fiction and Fantasy), Karen Odden (Historical Mystery), Kimberly Belle (Crime/Mystery), RJ Barker (Epic Fantasy), and Swati Teerdhala (YA Fantasy) are all happy to have a video chat with donors to natter about everything from writing and the publishing industry to Victorian crime history and geeky hobbies. These video chats are all open to individual donors, with some also open to groups (book clubs or library groups or even just a group of like-minded geeky friends/fans are welcome to pool together the donation to get one or more of these chat sessions). 

Great Reason to Give Generously #4: Help us boost the signal for anti-VAW activists and advocates worldwide… while gifting your geeky loved ones with terrific treats

A longstanding part of our work involves showcasing how anti-VAW advocates, activists, and organizations worldwide are changing the world for women and girls, as well as their ideas about what people can do to help stop VAW in their communities and countries. Our Inspirational Interviews series has been running for a decade and counting. We also run topical sessions with anti-VAW advocates and activists speaking about their work and educating people about VAW.

THE WIN-WIN FACTOR: If you have a geeky friend or family member and you see a Read For Pixels goodie offered by their favorite author available on our fundraising page, donate to snag that unique treat and delight them during the upcoming holiday season while supporting signal boosts for anti-VAW activists and advocates. BONUS: You’ll have an interesting story to tell them about where the gift came from. It might even be a great opener for chatting with them about VAW.

Great Reason to Give Generously #5: Support the right of women and girls to live a life without violence

Nearly 1 in 3 women and girls worldwide experience some form of violence in their lifetime. In terms of domestic violence alone, over 1 in 4 women under 50 have experienced physical or sexual violence from a male partner.

So donate to our fundraiser because you believe in supporting efforts to prevent, stop, and end VAW. Whether you can give us $10 or $1,000 to help us reach our $10,000 goal (or even zoom past it to a stretch goal), every cent counts.

(And when you donate to us, please also consider donating either cash or supplies to your local women’s shelter or rape crisis center. Like us, they need all the help they can get.)

It’s time to stop violence against women. Together.

---

Interested in checking out The Pixel Project’s anti-violence against women work? Visit us at https://www.thepixelproject.net/

Interested in checking out our Read For Pixels fundraiser and making a donation to help keep our work alive? Go here.

---

Regina Yau is the founder and president of The Pixel Project, a virtual volunteer-led global 501(c)3 nonprofit organization on a mission to raise awareness, funds and volunteer power for the cause to end violence against women at the intersection of social media, new technologies, and popular culture/the Arts. A Rhodes Scholar with a double Masters in Women’s Studies and Chinese Studies, she has a lifelong commitment to fighting for women’s rights. In addition to running The Pixel Project, Regina also teaches English to middle-schoolers and high-schoolers, writes stories about cheeky little fox spirits and terrorist chickens, and bakes far too many carb-and-sugar-loaded goodies.

And so we arrive at harvest time. The air has chilled. The trees are bursting with red fruit. The hinge of your jaw tightens with want as you can taste the apple even before you bite it, bringing with it not only juice and tartness but also, the promise of being better than everyone, of being the greatest version of yourself, perfect and special in every way, damn any who disagree, and damn any who will not dare to take a bite of this red-black apple.

Black River Orchard is out this week. (Next week in the UK.)

Let us get your procurement options out of the way, with special note that Your Local Bookstore is always the best, unless you wish for a book that I have mauled with both my signature and some crass personalization — in which case, you’re best getting from either Doylestown Bookshop or any of of the bookstores I will be visiting in the coming weeks. Finally, signed copies available also through The Signed Page!

Otherwise, your choices include but are not limited to:

Hardcover: Bookshop.org | B&N | BAM | Amazon | Powells

eBook: Amazon | Apple | Kobo

Audio: Kobo | Libro.fm | Apple | Audible

And more ways to buy here, at the PRH page for the book.

Also come see me on tour, and I’ll A your Qs and we’ll even eat weird apples together — and check out the Ruby Slipper apple merch.

---

About the Book

A small town is transformed when seven strange trees begin bearing magical apples in this masterpiece of horror from the bestselling author of Wanderers and The Book of Accidents.

“Chuck Wendig is one of my very favorite storytellers. Black River Orchard is a deep, dark, luscious tale that creeps up on you and doesn’t let go.”—Erin Morgenstern, author of The Night Circus

It’s autumn in the town of Harrow, but something besides the season is changing there.

Because in that town there is an orchard, and in that orchard, seven most unusual trees. And from those trees grows a new sort of apple: strange, beautiful, with skin so red it’s nearly black.

Take a bite of one of these apples, and you will desire only to devour another. And another. You will become stronger. More vital. More yourself, you will believe. But then your appetite for the apples and their peculiar gifts will keep growing—and become darker.

This is what happens when the townsfolk discover the secret of the orchard. Soon it seems that everyone is consumed by an obsession with the magic of the apples… and what’s the harm, if it is making them all happier, more confident, more powerful?

Even if something else is buried in the orchard besides the seeds of these extraordinary trees: a bloody history whose roots reach back to the very origins of the town.

But now the leaves are falling. The days grow darker. It’s harvest time, and the town will soon reap what it has sown.

---

“Wendig wows with this wildly unsettling horror tale… Wendig is brilliant at slowly raising the plot’s emotional temperature and making his characters, caught in a creeping nightmare, feel both real and empathetic. This masterful outing should continue to earn Wendig comparisons to Stephen King.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Wendig writes doorstoppers, but it’s safe to say there’s something for everyone here, from the creepy Eyes Wide Shut vibe (complete with sacrificial rituals) to the Stephen King–laced dichotomy between the world’s everyday cruelty and the truly grotesque carnage that follows. Both complex and compelling, a nightmare-inducing parable about our own wickedness.” —Kirkus Reviews

“An epic saga that is at once a propulsive horror novel and a parable, a thriller and a cautionary tale, Black River Orchard is the immensely talented Chuck Wendig at his finest.”—Lisa Unger, New York Times bestselling author of Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six

“A gripping story of love and legacies gone rotten, deeply rooted in the landscape and as twisty and gnarled as an ancient apple tree.”—T. Kingfisher, USA Today bestselling author of What Moves the Dead

“This will undoubtedly be heralded as one of the finest horror novels of the twenty-first century.”—Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

“Enchanting, exquisite and dark, Chuck Wendig masterfully weaves a new horrifying fairy tale in Black River Orchard.”—Cynthia Pelayo, Bram Stoker Award winner of Crime Scene

“Creepy and insidious, Black River Orchard whets your appetite and then turns you inside out.”—Hailey Piper, Bram Stoker Award–winning author of Queen of Teeth

“Black River Orchard should come with a warning label: You’ll never bite into another apple without remembering this dark, demented, and genuinely frightening novel.”—Jason Rekulak, author of Hidden Pictures

“Chuck Wendig’s Black River Orchard slithers and shines, its dangerous belly full of dark magic and accusations. I’ve been a fan of Wendig for years, and this is his best novel yet.”—Gabino Iglesias, Stoker Award-winning author of The Devil Takes You Home

“An essential for horror readers, and buy it for new horror readers—it will convert them instantly.”—V. Castro, author of The Haunting of Alejandra

“Plucks your heartstrings and preys on your fears at the same time . . . High-stakes horror meets peak emotional investment means Total. Reader. Devastation.”—Sadie Hartmann, author of 101 Horror Books to Read Before You’re Murdered

“A fresh and unexpected horror feat, expertly drawing from the ancient, endless wells of our greatest fears.”—Premee Mohamed, Nebula Award–winning author of Beneath the Rising

“A dark, frightening tale that will chill readers to the core.” —Booklist

“Insatiable, passionate, weird, and creepy, Wendig’s latest is perfect for those who appreciate the slow-burning horror tomes of Stephen King and Robert McCammon.” —Library Journal

---

What You Can Do?

I’m ringing this bell a lot, and I apologize — but while readers do not owe their authors anything beyond nabbing the story from a store or library, there are things you can do to help this book (and by proxy, me as an author) continue to exist in the world and not perish in a deep dark abyss of obscurity. Those things include:

• Tell people about the book! Word of mouth really, really, reaaaaaaally matters, and it is arguably the best and maybe even the only truly effective way for a book to reach its readership.
• Leave a review. Somewhere! Anywhere! Amazon, Goodreads, Storygraph, TikTok, Instagram, your blog, my heart, carved into an apple and thrown through the windows of your neighbors!
• Call your local library and ask if they’ll carry it.
• Come see me on tour. It helps, seriously. Bookstores wanna see you. I wanna see you. I want you to eat weird apples with me. It’s gonna be great. We’re forming a cult. There’s probably a creepy uhh I mean totally cool and not creepy van. Get in. Let’s ride to the orchard.
• Send me bags of apples and money! I mean, can’t hurt to ask.

---

Ten Things To Know About The Book

1. It’s best to go in with minimal spoilers. (This is admittedly my belief with all books, but this is one where I think the less you know, the more rewarding the total reading experience will be.)

2. Yes, it’s a big book, but damnit, it has short chapters. I work very hard to make these books as easy and addictive to read as possible. Not to say that always works, that’s on you to decide. But I do make every effort.

3. The audio is amazing. It has a wild array of narrators, including: Xe Sands, Brittany Pressley, Sean Patrick Hopkins, Cindy Kay, Kalani Queypo, Gabra Zackman & Victor Colomé

4. The cover is also amazing. US cover is designed by Regina Flath. Fuck yeah, Regina Flath. If there is a Regina Flath fanclub, I wish to join. Check out her Insta, and follow her there.

5. I don’t have any particular trigger/content warnings conjured (outside, well, this is a horror novel, so expect some of that horror up in there). Storygraph is always a good place to go to look for community-curated content warnings, where you can find or add them accordingly.

6. This seems like a “fall book,” and it is, in the sense it’s very apple- and harvest-focused, but the book itself (roughly) comprises a year of time, from harvest to harvest.

7. It takes place in Bucks County, PA, but also, not there, exactly. Readers of The Book of Accidents will pick up what I’m laying down.

8. Speaking of that, as always, I like to connect my stories in curious little ways, and you’ll find those Easter Eggs here, too. Readers of The Book of Accidents might even realize there are some hints in that book about this book written in all the way back then…

9. Lately I’ve taken to using the acknowledgments portion of my books as an afterword to talk about the book itself, and you’ll find that in this one, too.

10. Hey, at the very least, you’re gonna learn some shit about apples.

---

And that’s it. I can only yell so much about this book. I’m really happy with it. It’s the evil apples book that has lived in my heart for like, five years now, and it’s gonna be out in the world and from here, it’s yours. Yours to love or hate, yours to carry forward or kick into the dirt. I hope you love it. I hope my weird finds your weird and the intersection is this book. I hope its roots dig in. I hope it bears fruit.

I hope you’ll take a bite of my apple.

*eyebrow waggle*

Maybe I’ll see you out there in tour.

Enjoy the book.

When Barker Davis wanders into Hollow Hills one day, blood-soaked from head to toe, the town immediately blames the deranged toymaker living in the woods nearby. But arresting the toymaker leads to more questions than answers and the bloodbath is just beginning. Now, it’s up to Sinclair Redman to figure out what’s really causing the carnage before bodies pile too much higher.

---

When I first wrote String Them Up it was early 2022 and Murder Puppets weren’t really a big deal on the market. Billy, from Saw, seemed to be sidelined after Spiral. Annabelle was three movies deep, but seemed to be losing steam despite Annabelle Comes Home being surprisingly fun. Puppetmaster got a spinoff that nobody paid attention to. Really, only Chucky seemed to be getting much mileage through his TV Series and/or movie which was confusing. String Them Up got picked up by Crystal Lake Publishing (hooray!) and then scheduled for a release that was a year and a half out.

During that year and a half, suddenly, puppets hit the main stage again. Rachel Harrison’s Bad Dolls and Grady Hendrix’s How To Sell A Haunted House popped off. Megan (excuse me, M3gan) came to theaters. Hell, even gaming got in on the pint sized terrors with House Beneviendo DESTROYING ME in Resident Evil 8 and My Friendly Neighborhood rearing their twisted little heads. The floodgates opened all at once and it took me a while to understand why. But through revising and editing String Them Up, and embracing this new wave of glass-eyed murder dolls, I think I’ve learned Five Things Writing STRING THEM UP about why puppets are so damn scary…

Puppets can be scary because of the uncanny valley

I think the main reason that puppets freak people the hell out, is because it’s so easy to mistake something that’s so OBVIOUSLY not human for a human. Which sounds contradictory, but you know what I mean. It’s like AI “art,” right? At first glance, you might recognize what’s really happening. The painting of the spooky lady in the black dress looks good and spooky and you want to give props to the artist for evoking such a uniquely gothic mood. But then you see the fingers and they’re all jacked to hell. And then you see the way the foreground and the background all blend together because a computer couldn’t decide when a dress should stop and a shadow should begin. It’s frustrating. You feel duped. How stupid must you have been for ever thinking, even at a glance, that these ‘paint’ splashes made sense.

I think puppets parade around on the same chaos wagon.

When you see that mannequin anywhere other than a store window, you’re bound for an “Oh, hi Mark,” moment until you notice the blank, dead eyes. Looking directly at these things is so unnerving because they fooled you to start with. It makes you question your sanity in the most discomforting of ways. How could you have mistook a doll on the couch for a real child? Are you stupid? Or did your peripheral vision give you a glimpse through some veil that your regular senses aren’t attuned for? We can’t trust these damn things.

Then, add to this confusion the fact that, in our horror stories, the dolls start to move. When Pupkin attacks in How To Sell A Haunted House, it lends credence to a concept that’s always itched at the backs of our minds. We realize suddenly that those little looks that we originally dismissed, those little “mistakes” of perception, were actually the reality and now we can’t trust anything anymore.

Puppets can be scary because they are everywhere.

It’s the classic shot. The antagonist toy sitting in a pile of other stuffed animals, dolls, or what-have-yous. The main character walks past, unassuming. The demon doll’s head turns. Shit’s about to go down.

It’s a classic for a reason.

The dolls in our houses are so omnipresent and so innocent that we never pay them mind. Even when you KNOW that Chucky is out to get you, it’s so easy to just blow off the cute, fluffy, wooly, plastic comfort objects. It’s Toys R Us Camo for our antagonist. You go toy blind.

And what makes it worse is, if you have kids, then you know that there’s NO WAY to keep track of which toys are supposed to be where. You get used to the idea of them moving “on their own,” because your kids are constantly ping-ponging from room to room with them in tow and there’s no way to track your targets. There’s not even a way to tell the intruders from the regular toys. My kids have so many toys things scattered around the house from birthday parties and ‘borrowed from’ friends and grandparents and trips to the grocery store with mom that if a new, potentially violent, little friend makes its way into our house there’s going to be no way for me to know. Not until it’s too late, at least.

Puppets can be scary because life in plastic, it’s fantastic

How do you kill a toy? Do you take out its batteries?

Sure.

Maybe.

If it’s electronic.

But how many times has THAT worked against Chucky, huh?

Something eerie about puppets and dolls and the whole ‘animated play thing’ trope is just the dark second-act-realization that our characters have that they don’t know how to kill what’s already supposed to be inanimate. Evilized dolls inherently come along with a mystery of what evilized them. If it was a programming error (looking at you, M3GAN) then maybe you can destroy their processing chip. If they’re playing host to a demon, then maybe you resort to your run of the mill catholic cleansing ritual (bathtime, Annabelle). But until the characters deduce what’s making these little monsters tick, that unknowing and resulting inability to battle back can be a blissful well of terror to draw from.

Puppets can be scary because of projection

You know when you were a kid and you used to play with dolls, puppets, action figures, whatever? And you subconsciously projected a lot of your own interests, fears, and insecurities into those toys? Barbie is mad at Ken because Ken won’t let her have ice cream for breakfast? Mmhmm. Sounds familiar. It can be cute. Barbie is mad at Ken because somebody keeps hitting her on the playground and the teacher isn’t doing anything about it? Well, hold on, then… Down this dark spiral we go. Something that I think is under-utilized by the evil puppets in mainstream horror is the role of the puppet master. How the person playing with the dolls can reveal bits of themselves that even they themselves don’t want to address fully. Would my kid tell me he was having problems at school? Hopefully. But would Ken tell Barbie about it? Absolutely. Take the ownership away from it and things can be easier to talk about.

But let’s play this out in its most sadistic form. Let’s throw it back to an episode of Heroes from…what? 2008? There was a puppet master villain there. He kidnapped Hayden Panettierre and her mom. He controlled their limbs. He made their bodies do whatever he wanted, and what he wanted was gross. Predatory. They kept him mostly reigned in, because the show aimed for a PG-13 rating, but there’s clearly a darkness here that can be acknowledged, and I bet your imaginations are racing to the worst possible places right now. I know mine was.

So then when I was writing String Them Up I tried to find ways to marry all of this together. I wanted to get an absolute psychopath pulling the strings. I wanted the worst person possible channeling all their frustrations and worst thoughts into some creepy little vehicles for destruction. I think I managed it.

Puppets are FUN

And then here’s my last idea for why puppets are seeing the spotlight all of a sudden again. Ignoring all the pseudo-psychology that I’ve been rambling about. Ignoring how maybe an evil puppet master pulling the strings of mindless cronies might parallel some Cheeto-tinged socio-political happenings in our real world. PUPPETS ARE FUN.

There’s something entertainingly absurdist about watching Chucky’s tiny stumpy legs fluttering as he chases a victim down a hallway. It’s so ridiculous that you have to smile. Poltergeist Clown’s face is nightmare fuel, but tee-hee, those arms are so stretchy! My last, and probably biggest revelation while writing String Them Up was that this comedy could be, and needed to be, embraced. Horror doesn’t need to be doom and gloom for all two hour, two hundred pages, or twelve episodes. A little bit of levity in the right places, like with puppets, can go a long way towards making a story entertaining and memorable. So again, I tried to reflect that in String Them Up. I kept a lot of scenes that will, hopefully, keep you up at night. But I also embraced the nonsensical aspects of my subject matter. I love the way that the story turned out, with all of this thrown in a blender and pureed together like that one scene in Small Soldiers, and I hope you have some fun with the story too.

---

William Sterling is an independent author and host of the Killer Mediums podcast. His books tend to play in the realms of “popcorn flick horror” with high body counts and a soft spot for unexpected endings.

---

String Me Up: Amazon

William Sterling: Website | Instagram