Archives (page 41 of 457)

August 17, 2021 / 15 Comments

Emily Wenstrom: Why We Need ADHD Representation in Fiction

A guest post from Emily Wenstrom about ADHD representation in fiction — please read, and then check out her new novel, Departures.

***

When I first got my ADHD diagnosis in high school, I had no choice but to be loud about it. This all came about in the first place because years of good academics and a reputation as the quiet, low-maintenance girl in the back of the room let my symptoms go by unnoticed for years, until my grades took an abrupt nosedive as the different structure and higher challenges of high school caught up with me.

Even with my Section 504 in hand, multiple teachers actively resisted granting me rights as simple as an extra copy of the text book.

I didn’t have ADHD, I played too many sports. I didn’t have ADHD, I didn’t belong in advanced math. I didn’t have ADHD, I just needed to be more responsible.

I could rant for a while on this, but the point is, there was pushback to the point of animosity, based on stereotypes about what ADHD is and what it should look like. I guess I didn’t look like that, to these teachers.

But a universal truth about high school is that it ends, thank goodness. I educated myself about my symptoms and associated weaknesses, and eventually found ways to address them enough to go unnoticed.

And for a very long time after that, I took advantage of my option to be very quiet about my ADHD (to be clear, this ability to choose to go unnoticed is privilege in action–not all ADHD-ers or other neurodiverse folks have this option). I didn’t want the baggage that came with the label. Especially in my career, I didn’t want to give anyone the ammunition to read into a typo or request for a deadline extension – I would be perfect all the time (at least to the external observer), and they would never have to know. The cost of the baggage associated with ADHD just felt too high.

Because just like my high school teachers, what so many people fail to understand about ADHD, is that this different type of brain wiring can come with strengths just as much as it does weaknesses.

I can hop on my soapbox and shout this until I’m blue in the face … but I think better representation in fiction could be a lot more powerful.

Representation in Fiction Meets a Basic Human Need

From POC to LGBTQIA to physical disabilities and neurodivergence of all kinds, combinations thereof, and beyond, representation matters.

As Psych Today explains, feeling seen is a basic human need we all share. This includes consideration of our needs and requests, equitable access and treatment, and representation, too. Seeing ourselves represented in stories is one wonderful and important way to accomplish this. Conversely, the failure of inclusion is also powerful—and damaging.

As a child, I gravitated toward characters who shared my symptoms long before I even knew what they were symptoms of. I sought out catharsis else where in characters who I felt shared my symptoms, like Anne Shirley and Meg Murry.

Seeing these dynamic, multidimensional, heroic characters who shared my struggles (and, most importantly, overcame them) filled me with hope and shifted my self-perception. If these characters could overcome these struggles, maybe I could too. If these characters shared my flaws but were still worthy of love and support and being rooted for, maybe I was too.

ADHD Representation in Fiction

There is a notable lack of ADHD representation in fiction. There are a number of books for children with ADHD written specifically to this audience to help them understand their diagnosis and cope with symptoms. These have value, but when it comes to mainstream stories about more than ADHD 101, it’s a struggle to find more than a few examples.

Go ahead and try to look up a list of ADHD characters—most will in fact offer characters who were retroactively diagnosed by the list writer, rather than the author, because that’s the best we can do. Did you know Emma Woodhouse had ADHD? Sherlock Holmes?

In fact, I was so accustomed to not seeing neurodiverse representation in stories, it took exposure to better role models to realize what was missing. Authors like Corinne Duyvis who has long pushed for better representation of neurodiversity and disability, and Rick Riordan, who originally wrote the Percy Jackson series to create a hero his own son, who has ADHD and dyslexia, would relate to.

It’s easy with ADHD and other learning disorders to feel reduced to a list of symptoms. This is where characters in stories really shine: they are multidimensional. They have both good traits and flaws—even the heroes. A story with an ADHD character shows strengths in addition to weaknesses and creates something much more human and whole.

Really, Riordan said it best:

“I thought about Haley’s struggle with ADHD and dyslexia. I imagined the faces of all the students I’d taught who had these same conditions. I felt the need to honor them, to let them know that being different wasn’t a bad thing. Intelligence wasn’t always measurable with a piece of paper and a number two pencil. Talent didn’t come in only one flavor.”

Representation is for All of Us

The benefits of representation aren’t just for those who finally get to see themselves included. For those outside the group gaining inclusion, representation also helps us build empathy, connection and a better understanding of those different from us. We gain perspective, experience and a more complex and accurate view of the world.

When it comes to ADHD, there’s a lot of baggage. People expect constant hyperactivity, assume only little boys to have it, or even think it’s fake. But ADHD is a lot more complex than this. It can manifest as “checking out” from what’s going on around you, hyperfocus, Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria, difficulty regulating emotions, and a myriad of other forms or combinations, depending on the person and the situation. The more we can show that it looks different in different people—different characters—the more we can bust apart stereotypes and see value and complexity in neurodiversity, rather than limitation.

There are many types of representation needed more in fiction, and this is just one type – certainly not trying to imply it’s any more important any others, and indeed some other representation needs feel especially urgent these days.

Regardless, representation enriches all of us.

I’ve slowly started being louder about my ADHD again (if you couldn’t tell), across all areas of my life, including what I write. My most recent novel even put an ADHD character front and center, and made it central to the plot, my own small effort toward adding to what’s needed, with hopefully more to come. And I have to tell you, it feels good not to be the quiet girl hiding in the back anymore.

***

About Departures:

She’s planned her celebration for weeks, and other than leaving her sister Gracelyn behind, she’s ready. The Directorate says this is how it should be, and she trusts them, as all its citizens do. So tonight she dresses up, she has a party, and she dances. Then she goes to sleep for the last time … except, the next morning, Evalee wakes up.

Gracelyn is a model Directorate citizen with a prodigious future ahead. If she could only stop thinking about the shuffling from Evalee’s room on her departure morning. Even wondering if something went wrong is treasonous enough to ruin her. If she pulls at the thread, the entire careful life the Directorate set for her could unravel into chaos.

Swept away by rebels, Evalee must navigate a future she didn’t count on in a new, untidy world. As the Directorate’s lies are stripped away, she becomes determined to break Gracelyn free from its grasp—before Gracelyn’s search for the truth proves her to be more unruly than she’s worth to the Directorate.

Buy Departures Now: Amazon

August 10, 2021 / 2 Comments

Kevin Hearne: Five Things I Learned Writing Paper & Blood

There’s only one Al MacBharrais: Though other Scotsmen may have dramatic mustaches and a taste for fancy cocktails, Al also has a unique talent. He’s a master of ink and sigil magic. In his gifted hands, paper and pen can work wondrous spells.

\But Al isn’t quite alone: He is part of a global network of sigil agents who use their powers to protect the world from mischievous gods and strange monsters. So when a fellow agent disappears under sinister circumstances in Australia, Al leaves behind the cozy pubs and cafes of Glasgow and travels to the Dandenong Ranges in Victoria to solve the mystery.

The trail to his colleague begins to pile up with bodies at alarming speed, so Al is grateful his friends have come to help—especially Nadia, his accountant who moonlights as a pit fighter.

Together with a whisky-loving hobgoblin known as Buck Foi and the ancient Druid Atticus O’Sullivan, along with his dogs, Oberon and Starbuck, Al and Nadia will face down the wildest wonders Australia—and the supernatural world—can throw at them, and confront a legendary monster not seen in centuries.

It’s better in person

When researching a setting for a novel, Google Maps is nice in a pinch, but never better than actually being there. But if you’re writing during a pandemic, it’s super difficult to research any settings beyond your front doorstep. Especially if those settings are in Australia, which would be a honkin’ long (and miraculous) walk from Canada.

I had planned a trip to Australia in April of 2020 to make sure I could describe everything accurately in Paper & Blood, because there’s a different climate and ecosystem, independently evolved plant and animal life, and a charming accent to soak up. But air travel pretty much shut down at that time for reasons we all know, and my research trip got canceled like a gift subscription to Cauliflower Monthly.

Luckily, I was able to rely on the next best thing: Awesome Aussies helping me out. Two authors, Amie Kaufman and Nicole Hayes, were kind enough to take both still photos and videos of the areas I was interested in, and their literal legwork helped immensely.

Nicole did some driving around Glen Waverley for me, a neighbourhood outside of Melbourne, and that helped me with a crucial chapter involving wizard vans.

Amie took some friends on an actual hike in the bush for me, heading out to the Dandenong Ranges where the majority of the novel’s action takes place, and her videos were simply invaluable. I owe so many details of the area to her. She also walked through Fitzroy Gardens (in Melbourne) and up Clarendon Street for me, following the path Al and Buck take in Chapter 3.

Could I have written the book without those contributions, and relied on the Internet? Sure. But it wouldn’t have been the same book.

Always ask the locals how stuff works

Australians have organized themselves to meet the challenging (and frequent) dangers they face. The Victoria SES (State Emergency Service) is quite a bit different from emergency services I’m used to in the US and Canada: Here one usually calls 911 and the appropriate police, fire, or ambulance service gets dispatched, and if it’s anything medical in the US, yeah, you’re gonna be billed for it later. But the SES holds underneath its umbrella an association of volunteers who get trained to assist in certain roles, and they are called to local areas to help find missing hikers, or perhaps provide aid in the aftermath of a natural disaster like fires or floods. The SES, therefore, in all their orange-jumpsuited glory, would have been called in to help search for missing people in the bush of the Dandenong Ranges, along with uniformed police. I would not have known that (and therefore presented an unrealistic situation) if I hadn’t spoken with Amie about it.

Australian slang is fun as heck

In very general terms, you can shorten a noun, slap an o or a y on the end of it, and call it good. Thus football becomes “footy,” and a bottle shop (which is what they call liquor stores) is a “bottle-o.” My favorite, however, is “unco,” the shortened version of uncoordinated, usually used to describe someone (or one’s self) with low dexterity, as in “I’m too unco to hop on a skateboard without fear of death, mate.” I feel unco pretty much all the time, so I was delighted to find the perfect word for my daily existence.

Spelling doesnae matter in some cases

Scots slang continues to enchant me, and it has no settled orthography—in other words, however you decide to spell something, you’re not wrong. One of my favorite Scots words for a fight is “stooshie,” which can also be spelled “stushie” (or any other way that gets the phonetics across). It’s an adorably cute word for folks crunching fists into the teeth of other folks. But proper place names in Scotland do not necessarily follow the rule of spell-it-how-it-sounds-and-go-about-your-day. “Milngavie,” for example, is pronounced with just two syllables, like “mil-guy,” and absolutely no attention is paid to the n and the v in the middle there. For this reason, I included a pronunciation guide in an Author’s Note at the beginning of the book. It’s not required reading, but it might make the reading go a bit easier when I use terms or spellings that are outside standard usage.

I didn’t try to replicate Scots exhaustively because it might have been exhausting to read, but I wanted to use enough to get the flavor of the language across, and I owe heaping piles of thanks to Stu West for that, a Glaswegian who now lives in Canada.

A vastly entertaining side effect of becoming familiar with Scots language is that I’ve been really enjoying Scottish noir mysteries, because when Stuart MacBride writes “You look like someone left a jobbie in your corn flakes,” I know what he’s talking about.

Making good choices

This book was written from March to August of 2020, during a time when we were huddled in our homes and actually thought the pandemic might be over in a few weeks, which turned into a few months, and…haha, yeah, we’re still in it, because almost every time an elected leader had a chance to make a choice in the interest of public health, they made a choice in the interest of business or politics instead. It got me thinking about how the choices we make can have dire consequences, and we can run from them sometimes, but dang if they don’t catch up to us eventually. So Paper & Blood is full of people thinking about their past decisions and how they want to shape their future with new choices. One, in particular, is a figure last seen in The Iron Druid Chronicles. I don’t want to spoil anything, but how this figure tries to reinvent who they are by making new (perhaps better?) choices was one of the key delights in writing this book. And, by the way—you don’t have to have read the Iron Druid Chronicles, or even Ink & Sigil, to enjoy this book. There’s a handy recap of Ink & Sigil in the beginning, and everything else is pretty self-explanatory. So I hope you decided to give it a read and are happy with your choice.

***

Kevin Hearne is the New York Times bestselling author of the Iron Druid Chronicles, the Ink & Sigil series, the Seven Kennings trilogy, and co-author of the Tales of Pell with Delilah S. Dawson. He loves dogs, trees, and nature photography, and often quests for street tacos. When not writing novels, he writes snail mail with a fountain pen and plans road trips he can’t possibly take right now.

Kevin Hearne: Website | Twitter | Instagram

Paper & Blood: Indiebound | Barnes & Noble | Kobo | Chapters/Indigo | Amazon

August 10, 2021 / 6 Comments

Dust & Grim, Book of Accidents, And Where I Will Pop Up

Here, hold still while I duct tape this CRUCIAL WENDIG UPDATE to your face. Don’t worry, it’s reversed so you can read it, sheesh. So pushy.

Anyway, hey, hi, hello. Some quick updates for your FACE, as noted:

This Thursday, the 12th, I’ll be joining the Peculiar Book Club, hosted by Brandy Schillace — it should be a hoot, we will talk about the bridge between Science and Science-Fiction. Sign up here and join us, won’t you?

Next Weds, the 18th, I have the distinct pleasure of joining Grady Hendrix for a moderated chat brought to you by PRH and a mighty host of library co-sponsors. Eventbrite link here. It’s cheap as free! And who doesn’t like free? Terrorists, that’s who.

I’m at the Writers’ Ink podcast this week.

“FUCK THOSE OTHER CHUCK WENDIGS.” Er, what I mean is, did you read my interview with Gabino Iglesias? At LitReactor? Well, why the hell not? DO YOU HATE FUN. Go read it. I’ll wait here. Also, though I don’t think it’s publicly available as yet, the Most Excellent Mister Iglesias reviewed The Book of Accidents at Locus, and here is a portion of that wonderful takeaway:

“The Book of Accidents is about a family fighting something much bigger than them while also struggling with their personal demons. It’s a wildly entertaining narrative about entropy, death, and the most horrible things humanity can do, which balances things out by showing the power of love, family, and friendship. Wendig is already a house- hold name, but he’s not resting of his laurels, and this one might just be his best book yet.”

Toronto Star also reviewed TBOA:

“Wendig somehow keeps this dizzying circle of subplots and characters in flight without dropping a ball, ensuring that you can put off all those projects you promised to finish this summer.”

Sci-Fi Bulletin reviewed it thusly:

“Wendig has a knack of powering through narrative in a way that you feel as if you’re going to miss out if you did put the book down…”

Today is also your two-month notice that Dust & Grim is coming out into the world.

You can pre-order here. But if you want a signed and personalized copy, you can always buy from Doylestown Bookshop. They can also do signed/personalized copies of any of my books, provided said books are available and in-print.

But, you might say, whyyyy do I want to buy this book? Uhh, I dunno, because you like MONSTERS and CEMETERIES and STORIES OF SINISTER INHERITANCE and something called a FLORG. But don’t take my word for it, as Levar Burton might say:

Because the book has received two starred reviews so far!

Kirkus:

“Chills and thrills ensue when long-separated siblings find themselves custodians of a very special funeral home and cemetery.”

Booklist:

A reminder that the cover art and interior art of D&G is by the inimitable Jensine Eckwall.

As always, writers die in the deepest and moistest abyss of obscurity if we don’t have the support from readers, so please do check out these books and if you like them — or any book by any author! — please yell and scream and deposit a review somewhere from your review cloaca (pretty sure that’s how that works, hashtag science) and tell your friends and family and pets and any stray passersby.

OKAY THANK YOU BYE

August 2, 2021 / 12 Comments

The Book Of Accidents: The First Two Weeks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

USA Today

Publishers Weekly

PNBA (Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association)

ABA (National Indie Bestseller list)

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

What else?

Financial Times says:

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

I appeared on WFMZ to talk about the book.

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

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

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

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

Aaaaand. Yeah. Yeah!

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

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

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

NOW, I NAP.

July 27, 2021 / 0 Comments

Reddit AMA, Starred Dust & Grim, And More

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

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

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

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

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

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

THAT IS ALL

*ejects*

July 23, 2021 / 13 Comments

The Book Of Accidents: An Ask, And An Update

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

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

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

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

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

But, who knows?

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

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

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

To re-up, your procurement options include:

Indiebound | Bookshop | The Strand | Powells

Audible | Libro.fm

So, there we go.

A quick news-scented update mist for you —

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

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

Tor.com posted a great review by Martin Cahill:

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

And the Daily Mail reviewed it thusly:

“…what a ride.”

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

Let’s see, what else?

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

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

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