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Indiebound / Amazon / B&N / Robot Trading Company / Add on Goodreads

Miriam Black knows how you’re going to die.

All it takes is a touch — a little skin-to-skin action.

Now someone — some rich asshole from Florida — wants to pay her so he can find out how he’s going to die. But when she touches him, she receives a message sent back through time and written in blood: HELLO, MIRIAM. It’s a taunt, a warning, and the start of a dangerous and deadly game for everybody’s favorite carcinogenic psychic, Miriam Black.

What’s In This Book?

Birds. Blood. Bad language.

Also: sex.

Also: old enemies, new friends, other psychics, more mythology.

Also: Florida (aka “America’s Hot-Moist Land-Wang”)! Miriam’s mother! Drunkenness! Mayhem! Santa Claus! An engagement ring! Violent recriminations! Boats! Water! Ascerbic Wit!

Did I mention birds, blood, and bad language?

I did?

Excellent.

Why Should I Read This Book?

Because you read Blackbirds and/or Mockingbird and want the third in the series.

Because you haven’t read those and you wanna start with this one.

Because you like your fantasy dark. Because you like gritty with a side of grim, but you also like it served with a shotglass full of sunshine.

Because you like your characters capable but complex, active but maaaaybe a little unsound…

Because you want to hear what Miriam will say or do next.

Because I’ve never had more fun writing a book.

Because the ending, which I’ll apologize for in advance.

Because you want to support this site.

Because hot damn, what a cover.

Because I have all your pets hostage.

Book Launch in Brooklyn

January 8th.

Word Bookstore in Brooklyn, NY.

7:00PM.

Be there.

1000 Words of Miriam Black

Read Chapter 10 of the novel, right here.

What Others Are Saying

“Chuck Wendig writes a goddamn good book.” — Booked Podcast

“The plot is strong and weird and fits Miriam like a black leather glove with the fingers cut off. It turns and twists and dives – I sat up all night reading this damn book on my cell phone, for Pete’s sake. It’s well put together, nuanced, and in the end, satisfying–with no easy outs. Now, what interested me about The Cormorant was that everything I’ve just written is completely true and yet, it’s only about half of what’s really going on. The writing is a scary, wild, obscene crash of sound and yet there are elements and overtones of Shakespeare and Rimbaud and Dante hidden deep inside. Miriam Black is a solid taut block of arrogance, anger, and screaming rage – except that when you look back at what she’s actually done, you see a very different person. Someone who wants others to be happy, hates the death that washes around her, and never, ever stops fighting. (The descriptions of the muscular, desperate, physicality of her battles are worth the entire book alone). She isn’t a fake bad person nor a fake good person–she’s really both.” — Terry Irving (writing what is maybe one of my favoritest reviews of my books ever, because damn if he doesn’t get Miriam)

“Books that play around with time jumps and framing are also tough to pull off, but Chuck Wendig does it here perfectly, switching to flashbacks and other perspectives at the most appropriate moments, emphasizing the suspense when it is most required. Reading this one was like a roller coaster ride, except there are no dips, only highs and loop-de-loops. Between the outrageous things Miriam says and finding all about the creepy villain in this book, my butt alternated from being perched on the edge of my seat one moment to being laughed off the next.” — BiblioSanctum

“Miriam Black is back. Irreverent and sardonic as ever. I don’t know how Chuck Wendig manages to find that balance of brash irreverence without taking it too far, but he is a master… I loved Blackbirds and really liked Mockingbird, but this third one blew away my expectations, or rather maybe Miriam put them in their place with a good dose of foul language and bad assery. In other words, I absolutely loved it.” — Tenacious Reader

“Cormorant, as is usual for this series, delivers action and creeps in spades, but the dim light at the end of the long dark tunnel of Miriam’s life is now just a little bit brighter. Miriam’s story remains an undeniably addictive one, and I finished this in one sitting. Wendig’s writing is better than ever, and this series continues to surprise and terrify in equal measure.” – My Bookish Ways

“First and foremost, holy crap. If there is an author out there these days who is better than Chuck Wendig at taking you by the throat rather than the hand without so much as a how-do-you-do first, I haven’t encountered them. The Cormorant starts off not only strong, but fast and furious – and it stays that way from beginning to end.” — Over The Effing Rainbow

“This is one of the best urban fantasy series out there.” — Talk Supe

“The storytelling is excellent. It’s gripping. It’s compelling. It’s like a train wreck that you can’t tear your eyes away from. Did I mention that I loved this book?” — Lynn’s Book Blog

“I don’t suggest reading The Cormorant on public transport unless you don’t mind missing your stop.” — Amberkatze’s Book Blog

“Chuck Wendig structures this book brilliantly… you are still kept guessing all the way to the last page.” — Bite The Book

“Frankly, I find it one of the most compulsively readable series in any genre.” — Adventures Fantastic

“Miriam’s powers mean something to people, and she’s playing defense not only for herself, but for other people now. It’s a great shift for the series, and one that’s making it a little more essential from volume to volume.” — Fruitless Pursuits

“Wendig does it again with this furious installment in the Miriam Black series. Miriam is angry, bitter and conflicted as ever, but this time she doesn’t have Louis to help her. She’s on her own, after having left him behind. I really love Miriam. She’s the devil on my shoulder, the bad words in my head. She’s the voice that I hear the split second before I pause and say something that’s  more PC. Luckily, Miriam doesn’t have that problem and what she thinks pretty much comes out of her mouth. She’s hilarious, strong, edgy. She’s punch in the gut and then a drink of kool-aid.” — The Windy Pages

“I read The Cormorant in a single sitting, for me there is just something wonderfully addictive about Miriam’s acerbic personality; she can destroy people with a single utterance. Sometimes waspish, often harsh, her barbed comments are a constant delight (well, as long as you’re not on the receiving end of them). It’s nice to see that as this series has developed Miriam has evolved as a character along with it. Slowly but surely the author has revealed the different layers to her personality.” — The Eloquent Page

I started a Tonx Coffee subscription because —

Well, because Tonx Coffee roasts deliriously amazing coffee.

A wide variety. Delivered every two weeks.

Perfect for you folks who followed my Chemex advice from a few weeks ago.

Anyway, if you wanna check out Tonx, they gave me a referral link (and with full disclosure, I get some kinda awesome swag if these references take root — like, maybe a coffee mug, and also a magic pony that shits out mystical coffee beans), and that link is right here: CLICK THIS MYSTERIOUS LINK.

Seriously amazing coffee.

If not them, then try La Colombe. Because, whoa.

Holy crap, The Cormorant comes out tomorrow.

*vibrates*

Don’t worry, I’ll be jabbering about it plenty for the rest of the week.

(Though I remind: Blackbirds is still free. And Mockingbird is still like, just over a buck.)

For now, I thought I’d get ahead of a question folks ask me with some regularity:

“Where do you want me to buy your books?”

Or, the variant: “In what format do you want me to buy them?”

The genesis of this question is noble and charitable — the reader wants to support the writer with as much advantage going to the writer as possible. It’s a very wonderful thought.

But my answer is, as always:

I want you to buy the book in the way that you want to buy it.

Would I think it’s awesome if you bought the book from your local indie bookstore and kept the money in your local community? That’s always a win, sure. But I recognize that this isn’t always possible. And that books are sometimes cheaper at places like Amazon and who the hell am I to tell you how to spend your money? Maybe you’ll borrow the book from a friend. Or get it from a library. Or, heavens forfend, you’ll nab it off a piracy site.

And maybe you really want the paperback. Or maybe you really want the e-book.

Don’t worry about me. I’ll be all right. I love that you’re even thinking to ask this question. But I’m just geeked that you want to check out the book. And I make roughly the same amount per book no matter where you buy it or via what format. (This differs slightly with self-publishing; in that case, I make somewhat significantly more when I sell direct to the audience. Though there again, I encourage you to do what’s easiest and awesomest for you, not what’s best for me. It’s not your job as the reader to carry me. It’s my job as the writer to provide you with stories you find engaging and interesting and enlightening and hope that performing that act of story provision ultimately helps to feed me and my family and my raging porn-and-chocolate addiction.)

It’s a win for me if you check out my books and, equally awesome, tell others about them. Maybe that means face to face. Maybe that means writing a review at your chosen review receptacle.

So, very seriously, thank you for asking the question.

But please: follow your heart and your wallet on this one.

My novel, Blackbirds, is now free until December 31st.

Free. As in, costs you nothing.

EXCEPT YOUR UNDYING LOVE AND A WILLINGNESS TO KILL IN MY NAME.

Anyway.

You can nab the Kindle file here.

Or you can grab the ePub here.

You can find more information on the download from our Generous Clanking Masters at Angry Robot, whose Beneficent Programming is why this gift exists in the first place.

ALL HAIL THE ANGRY ROBOT.

You can also buy Mockingbird and Blue Blazes for ~$1.30 a pop (info here).

Finally, please consider pre-ordering the third in the Miriam Black series — The Cormorant! — where cantankerous psychic Miriam Black travels down to sunny Florida where she is paid to give a rich man a vision of his demise but instead discovers a message to her written backwards in time and scrawled in blood, a message that reads HELLO, MIRIAM…

Cross-posted from the Angry Robot Blog today, where a very special gift awaits.

We set up our Christmas tree the other day, and the way it worked was, my wife would hand me an ornament and me or the wolverine tornado (aka “toddler”) would place it on the tree, and she suddenly handed me an ornament that looked like a ring of antlers. And I said, “Didn’t Dad give this to us?” and she said, “No, we gave it to him the year that he died.” Oh, I thought, right, right.

My father died on December 22nd.

I don’t mean this year. Or even last year. This was six years back, so your condolences, while appreciated, are many moons beyond their required date.

Snow covered the ground. Ice in the trees. Blinky lights on all the houses and shiny bauble-hung trees in the windows.

And my father had prostate cancer. It had gone through him like raisins through a fruitcake and refused to be contained to the one place: the cancer had ambition, enough to kill him earlier than any of us expected, I think, even though we knew his life was suddenly on a short leash. We drove to see him on that day, the 22nd, just three days before Christmas, and while there on our visit his liver failed and his heart stopped and suddenly he was passing on to his happy hunting ground.

He died with my finger on his pulse. I felt it go. That’s a powerful and awful thing to feel—someone’s heartbeat suddenly slow, then stop.

A rum-pa-pum-pum, then—

Nothing.

I don’t bring this up to bring you down, but, you see, I think about death a lot. As a writer, death is part of my arsenal—it saturates my fiction the way the cancer got its claws in my father. I don’t know who said it, but someone far wiser than me said that all stories are about death and dying and I think that’s true, at least at the molecular level.

When Christmas rolls around, my death thoughts increase by at least an arbitrarily-made-up 46%.

This is, in part, because my father died around Christmas.

But that’s not all of it.

No, Christmas, it seems, is positively pendulous with death energy.

My father lost his father during Christmas, too—and so during that season he became more pensive and troubled, and many of the holidays were punctuated with that grim act of visiting my grandfather’s grave (a man I never met, a man who my father didn’t seem to like very much, and I’d watch him there looking at the grave trying to negotiate the repair of a relationship that could no longer be repaired, a feeling I am well-aware of now that my Dad has slipped away).

That’s the personal side, but you look past that, you can start to see death everywhere. Sure, sure, I know, Christmas is about birth, about the life of that guy whose name is right there in the holiday, but shit, that’s a ruse, isn’t it?

Christmas comes just as the seasons are turning. Just as the last leaves of life are falling off trees. Just as the ground goes cold and food becomes scarce and animals starve. Just as the white stuff starts to fall from the sky like ash—

And here I am tempted to make a dramatic overture about how it looks like the ash of my cremated father but the reality is, one’s cremated remains look a great deal more ‘kitty litter’ than ‘mortal ash.’ When the time comes to “spread ones ashes” it feels more like “flinging kitty litter” and you wonder if passersby might ask why you’re tossing aquarium gravel into the lake, you weirdo.

But I digress.

Christmas is death-flavored.

Christmas is the birth of a guy whose ending we know is to die brutally.

Christmas is when we chop down a perfectly good tree and stand its corpse in our living room to decorate like a clown before its needles turn brown and fall.

Christmas is when we kiss underneath the mistletoe, the poison that Loki uses to tip the arrow that he shoots into Balder’s eye to kill him.

Christmas is all the color leeching out of the landscape until the dark earth is peppered in white and gray, the forest like bones, the sky the color of a headstone.

Christmas is a stone’s throw from the shortest day and the longest night.

Christmas is when we lose our fathers. Or our mothers. Or when we remember those who came before and will no longer share in the meal, or the gifts, or the warmth of the fire meant to ward off cold nights.

It’s a bit theatrical, of course, to suggest that Christmas is death. Or that its jolly façade hides grim and sinister trappings.

But again, I’m a writer. It’s how I do.

More to the point, this is a good – if entirely shameless – time to mention that I have a book perfectly well-suited for all these aforementioned grim and sinister trappings. Because my favorite cantankerous psychic, Miriam Black, is back—a character born out of my own frustrations and fears about death, a character who now, in The Cormorant, takes a little vacation away from all the wintry Christmastime doldrums to head down to the Florida Keys where she is drawn into a trap. A trap where she expects to be paid handsomely to tell a man about his death but instead finds a message written to her in the man’s blood, a message from an unknown enemy that reads, Hello, Miriam…

Read the book and you should follow the bouncing Santa Hat.

Because no book starring Miriam Black is complete without her killing Santa Claus, am I right?

I think I am.

Please to enjoy the book.

And Merry Christmas, or whatever holiday you find warms your dry thatch of a heart in this dark, lifeless, death-soaked time.

[EDIT: Comments are now turned off. I’m having to wade through a rather epic middenheap of awful comments and toss most of them into the spam oubliette.]

This meme is going around Facebook.

And hey, by the way? Fuck this meme.

Listen, I get it. We have a toddler and having a child is challenging — way more than you think. You buy into this myth that somehow the physical control you possess over an infant — MOVE KID HERE, PLOP THEM HERE, DROP THEM IN THE SLEEP CUBE, STICK THEM ON THE HAMSTER WHEEL — is infinite. You assume that you will retain physical control over that child.

But it’s not long before you realize this is total horseshit. You can’t physically control them any more than you can restrain a chimpanzee by arm-wrestling him. A toddler is 30-40 pounds of flailing, slack-limbed weight. Shifting weight. Disproportionate weight. And the toddler may hit. Or bite. Or shriek. And you can’t stop them physically from doing that.

And so, you think: I can spank this kid. That will teach him to stop.

It sure might.

Just like if I want a woman to shut up, I might smack her across the mouth.

Just like if I don’t like what some guy is saying to me, maybe I punch him in the throat.

You wanna teach somebody to shut up? Start slapping, kicking, throwing punches.

Maybe swing a knife, point a gun.

You spank a kid, you hit a kid. I know, this meme would seem to harken to a simpler time, a har har har I warmed my kid’s butt and now he knows not to talk back to me time, a time when caveman ideals hid behind the smiling face of a smug, pipe-smoking 1950s father.

What I know is this: you spank your kid, you’re demonstrating that you’re a lazy, impatient, frustrated bully. You’re a brute who can’t handle his own child, who can’t actually teach anything or help your child understand the vagaries of life. Your intelligence level is equal only to the smacks you give, whether they’re to a kid’s ass or across his face or with a belt or a paint stirrer or a wooden spoon or whatever your weapon — because, that’s right, it’s a weapon.

My grandfather used to apparently beat the piss out of my father, and my father reportedly beat the piss out of my grandfather as a result. My Dad used the spanking thing once — one time, when I lied about putting a cat in the dryer when I was five (no, I wasn’t trying to kill the cat, it was winter and the dryer was warm and I thought the cat would like it, shut up). He spanked my ass and I never forgot it. I mean — I never forgot it. I don’t know that I remember much from being five-years-old, but I sure as hell remember that. Not in the good way. I don’t remember it in the, “Now I understand why lying is bad” way. But in the “I should be afraid of this guy” way. In the “I gotta get better at lying so I can avoid the paint stirrer,” a device that sat forever on our counter and was referenced time and time again as a reason for me to “behave.” I acted up and him reaching for that paint stirrer was all it took to cause me to settle the hell down.

It worked.

It worked to scare me. It worked to keep the peace. Damn right I behaved.

But it didn’t teach me anything. It didn’t make me a better person. It just made me scared.

And it made me real angry.

I’m not saying my father was a bad Dad. Frankly, I’m surprised he wasn’t meaner sometimes given the stories I heard of how my grandfather treated him. Abuse begets abuse. It’s kicked dogs all the way down. I loved my father and am still sad as hell that he passed just as we were becoming friends again. But we had a big gulf between us for a number of years and I can tell you at the very bottom of one of those deep dark chasms that separated us lurked that singular moment of him beating my ass — and then threatening to hit me again and again over the years.

Don’t hit your kids.

Don’t pass around a meme that encourages people to hit your kids.

Kids are smaller than you. They’re weaker. They’re a little cocktail shaker of emotions and hormones and unformed lessons. You’re supposed to be the rock they hold onto in tough times, not the rock you hit them with when they’re acting like all children do because they’re children.

People always say they can’t imagine hitting their own kids. I can imagine it. I can imagine hitting my son. What that’ll do to him. I can imagine the little mote of hate inside of him, that little ember of anger, the little seed of resentment planted — because here I am, a father supposed to offer him a hand up and instead I bring that hand against him.

It’s horrible. It gives me nausea just thinking about it.

So —

Cut that fucking meme out. Stop passing it around.

It isn’t funny.

It isn’t twee haw haw haw oh-what-a-simpler-time.

It’s called hitting children. And it ain’t cute. So cut that shit out.