Dead Country drops next month!
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—I’m not picky. 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 any of 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.
It’s gratifying to see 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 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 a lot of 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 can seem, but an entire universe.
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 in my heart of hearts—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 to come back and 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 who was selling those triple-bladed daggers called phurba told me that they were 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.
(It is, of course, 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 are, however, exceedingly sharp-edged, 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 and with awareness of the risks. But cuddling is an option. Especially if you don’t have blood to worry about, any more.)
Happy reading. And good luck with your demons. Mostly internal ones.
I hope.
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.
Yay Dead Country!
I am VERY sad that I will miss ALL of these events as I am leaving town for a week on March 6th to help take care of mom (nothing serious, everyone is fine). But I will see you at another event soon, I hope! And I can't wait to read Dead Country!
Your note about meeting people midway on life's journey reminded me of those moments in the Very Long RPGs when you meet a companion when you're like level 50 (or level 1/2 of MAX), and the companion is pretty leveled up. I used to be kind of frustrated by those -- I already have my party, thankyouverymuch -- but have been learning to appreciate the experience of adding someone fully fleshed out and Powerful in the literal middle of things.