We have just over a month ‘til Dead Country! I have a few celebratory events lined up. The first is digital: the fine folks at Mysterious Galaxy are hosting me in conversation with Amal El-Mohtar on March 7, launch day. Dial in from your couch, your zoom room, your hidden skull fortress or technodrome. Then, on March 9, if you happen to be in the Boston area, drop by Pandemonium Books & Games at 7pm, where I’ll be signing books and attempting to answer most any question posed. No guarantees that my answers will be correct, especially if you veer into the P=NP stuff, but I’ll do my best, as always, to entertain with a smattering of sincerity—or to be sincere, with a smattering of entertainment.
And perhaps a dash of dread.
We received a great (and starred!) review from Library Journal—“swift action sequences and chilling monsters create a tight novel that will engage readers” is one non-spoilery cutout quote, and you can read the rest here.
I’m gratified that the fine folks at Library Journal think Dead Country works for new readers. My hope is that someone who joins the series at this point will feel a bit like they’re making a new friend as as an adult. You meet someone “midway on our life’s journey” as the guy says. They have history behind them and so do you. You can think of that as a loss—why couldn’t we have met twenty years ago, and been friends all this time?—but this sort of encounter offers the joy of discovery. Here’s this whole new person! Not a companion explorer, the way childhood friends seem, but an entire universe in themselves.
There are only two stories, goes the writing saw: “someone comes to town” and “someone leaves town.” And they’re really the same story told from different points of view. I don’t believe that, really—any time someone tells me there’s only one way stories work, I rankle and incline to troublemake, and any time someone tells you that there’s only one way stories work you should ask yourself if they’re trying to sell you something, and what it might cost1. But it’s a fun thing to say. Dead Country is a “someone comes back to town” story. It’s a story about how you can leave the town and run all the way around the world and realize you’ve taken the town with you—and a story about how you can think you’ve left the town and gone out into the world, only when you come back you find the world was in the town all along. It’s a story about teaching and learning, about consequences and mistakes, how we make them and how we try to avoid passing them on. And it’s about monsters.
Once, at a Tibetan cultural fair, a man selling those triple-bladed diamond daggers called phurba (which you may also remember if you are so hashtag blessed as to recall that early-90s film adaptation of The Shadow) told me that it was “for pinning down demons. Mostly internal ones.” Mostly.
I wouldn’t say the demons in Dead Country are mostly internal. But some of them are. And some are external ones. And some are the kind we brew up for ourselves—or the kind we become.
(Of course, it’s a bit awkward to talk about metaphorical demons in a setting in which there are actual demons. The Craft-verse demons are pretty cuddly as demons go. They’re exceedingly sharp-edged though, so if you have a mind to cuddle one, and you want your blood to remain in its original container, you should do so carefully. But cuddling is an option. Especially if you don’t have blood to worry about, any more.)
At any rate: happy reading, and good luck with your demons. Mostly internal ones.
I hope.
In unrelated news: if you’re a science fiction, fantasy or horror writer looking to put the final polish on your work, I’d like to recommend two workshops to your attention, both of which are accepting applications now. Viable Paradise, the Martha’s Vineyard based workshop where I teach, is open to applications now. And if you or someone you love is a teenager who wants to write science fiction or fantasy, I strongly recommend applying to the Alpha workshop—I wish I’d known it existed when I was that age.
Even if advice like this is totally free, there’s still a cost: your own acceptance of the premise, that there’s only one way stories can work. Scaffolding may be helpful—but scaffolding obscures.
... This is extremely odd! I'm sorry if y'all received this twice--maybe I scheduled it to send earlier in the week and then forgot and scheduled it again? Or the draft was somehow duplicated? Regardless, my apologies!