THE CUT is now available to request on NetGalley!

The title kind of says it all, doesn’t it? My debut horror novel THE CUT is now available to request on NetGalley!

You can find it at https://www.netgalley.com/catalog/book/446259 right now!

If you’re unfamiliar with NetGalley, it’s a website where publishers make eARCs (electronic Advanced Reader Copies) of soon-to-be-published books available for request so that people can read the book early and post their reviews online. Reviewer accounts are free to make, then you request a book, and if the publisher approves your request you get access to the eARC. The more books you read and review the higher your rate of approval. It’s a great website.
And I’m not just saying that because I think you should make an account and request THE CUT. (But you should make an account and request THE CUT, and I hope you dig it!)

THE CUT Cover Reveal!

Here’s the incredible cover for THE CUT!

The jacket designer is Olga Grlic and she did an incredible job. I simply cannot get enough of staring at this cover!

Goodness in Horror

I was reading Stephen King’s The Shining as a teenager when I had the realization that good horror needs to be able to evoke the whole spectrum of human emotions, not just fear, to really…uh…shine. The moment when Jack wrests control of himself back from the hotel just long enough to tell his son to run, and Danny doesn’t, that part is what did it for me. I still feel a little tug in my heart just thinking about that scene (especially now that I’m a parent).

It was also King who first made me pause and consider the important place goodness holds in horror. I’m thinking specifically of Irv Manders in Firestarter. He sees a man and a young girl hitchhiking and it rings a little alarm for him, so he pulls over to talk and feel out the situation. He’s still not sure, so he offers them a lift and then invites them home for lunch so that he can gauge the nature of the situation without having to get any authorities involved unless he finds that he has to. He offers support when he learns that Andy is not harming Charlie, and he stands up to the government agents when they come onto his land to take these two strangers away.

The most important thing, in my opinion, is that Irv Manders does this without pretention, without any notions of his own heroism, without needing or even really seeming to want to be thanked. Irv Manders is one of the humble, normal, good people that speckle Stephen King’s work.

I think it’s so important to see this kind of goodness—everyday goodness, unspectacular and mostly quiet and there, in normal people who are just living their lives. Reminding people that this goodness exists in our fellows is important in any media, but I think it matters a little more in horror. In the bad and frightening times, that’s when it’s easiest to forget that this human capacity for goodness exists, and also when we most need to remember it.

Another kind of goodness I want to talk about in relation to horror content alongside the everyday goodness is the kind to aspire to. I only watched Twin Peaks for the first time about a year and a half ago, and it captured my heart immediately. There are a lot of reasons for that—it’s an absolutely brilliant show on so many levels—but one of the biggest reasons, for me, was the aspirational goodness of Special Agent Dale Cooper of the FBI.

Coop is not perfect, and he has made immoral decisions in his past—decisions which he knows were mistakes and learned from. Imperfect or not, though, Cooper is good, and in spite of his job he sees the goodness in the people around him first, and in seeing their goodness he inspires greater goodness.

I legitimately believe that if everybody watched Twin Peaks and then went about their lives asking themselves What Would Dale Cooper Do, the world would be a markedly better place.

It doesn’t matter that to some degree, in the end, he lost. He couldn’t fix the world, but he made it better by being a force for goodness in it. If Irv Manders and characters like him serve to remind us that the people around us all have the capacity to be good, Dale Cooper inspires us to find that capacity within ourselves and empower it.

I was recently talking about goodness in fiction with a new friend, and they pointed out an aspect of this that I overlooked, and which I feel chagrined to have overlooked, and this is the hard-won goodness. The goodness that does not come naturally to someone, for whatever reason, but that they find and work to nurture within themselves. And, again, the ability to find this kind of goodness in the midst of the worst times is incredibly important.

Now maybe it’s just because I’m preoccupied with the first three movies in this franchise and re-watch them once every year or two (and maybe it’s because I only recently finished that re-watching), but the first person who comes to mind for me when I’m thinking of a character who is not easily inclined to be good but who, after facing adversity and trauma, finds a core of it within herself, is Gale Weathers from the Scream franchise.

Gale is selfish and self-obsessed. She pursues the truth about a wrongful conviction not because it’s the right thing to do but because she’s pretty sure she can use it to make herself more famous. But when push comes to shove, Gale goes into danger and saves other people’s lives at great risk to her own safety.

And then, yes, she backslides. She lets the selfishness win again. She profits off of the tragedy and she alienates the people who had begun to care for her. That is, in my opinion, part of what is compelling about the goodness in her. Gale Weathers has to work hard to maintain that goodness. It doesn’t come easily to her. But it’s worth working hard for—even when she fails and has to start again, it’s worth it. Seeing her character development over the first three movies is one of my favorite parts of that franchise.

(I did not expect, when I started writing a monthly newsletter, that I would wind up comparing Stephen King and Twin Peaks with the Scream movies, but here we are.)

These three characters are so different. The way they are good, the route it takes for them to get to goodness, their goals and their impacts on the world around them, are so different. But they, and characters like them, and what they remind us of—especially in difficult times—are so important. Finding ways to portray goodness in horror is, I think, vital.

This blog post has been an excerpt from the May 2024 issue of my newsletter, C.J. Dotson’s Dreadful Dispatch. If you dig it, check the rest of that issue out here!

5 Stars for Ghost Station

In my perpetual hunt for haunted spaceships I was excited last year to find Dead Silence, S.A. Barnes’s space horror debut. If you haven’t read that one and you love horror and sci-fi, I definitely recommend it. After having read Dead Silence I went straight to twitter to look up the author and was delighted to see that she’s got another space horror book, Ghost Station.

I received an ARC of Ghost Station from Tor Publishing through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review of the book.

The book follows Ophelia Bray, daughter of an extremely wealthy and powerful family who run a company called Pinnacle. Her relationship with every last one of her family members except her sister is not just strained but extremely antagonistic, and that antagonism paired with her family’s Lords of Capitalism Assholery are a large part of what drove Ophelia to seek out a profession as a psychiatrist and to find a job working for her family’s company’s competitor, Montrose. But it’s Ophelia’s struggle with her own feelings of guilt that truly drive most of her decisions, including prompting her to take a very remote assignment for her company; the book opens with Ophelia preparing to enter cold sleep for a long interstellar trip out to accompany a corporate Reclamation and Exploration (R&E) team staking a claim for Montrose, on a far-flung planet once inhabited by now-extinct sentient life, while her family makes one final attempt to convince her not to go.

Her official reason for accompanying the R&E team is to act as an on-site psychiatrist in an effort to help reduce the risk of psychological problems arising from the stress, isolation, and long periods of cold sleep that their jobs entail, especially as this team has recently suffered the loss of a team member—a loss Ophelia suspects is more complicated than the team lets on.

The team themselves clearly don’t want Ophelia there, with reactions to her presence ranging from cool and aloof to openly hostile, with the exception of one team member who is portrayed as more vulnerable but also younger, less mature, and more naïve. It is with this inauspicious start that Ophelia finds herself descending with a mostly-hostile, secretive team to a poorly-understood, inhospitable alien planet, where things take a turn from bad to worse.

From the jump, the threading together of Ophelia’s openly acknowledged motivations and the secrets she keeps about her past is deftly handled. It’s immediately clear that there are some things that Ophelia not only refuses to talk about with others but also does her best to refuse engaging with in her own mind. The hints laid throughout the text early in the book give shape to those secrets without explicitly defining them, in a way that keeps interest without becoming annoying. The character interactions are well-written, varied, and keep the tension high even in between the scares. Clues are trickled out in a mix of obvious moments and more subtle hints that makes it easy for the reader to second-guess the situation in a way that feels intriguing and natural rather than obfuscating, and because of that it is easy too for the reader to understand oversights on the characters’ parts. All the pieces are woven throughout the narrative so that when it’s time to wrap the story up it feels neither painfully obvious nor contrived, and very satisfying.

The whole book was a fun, enjoyable, unsettling read, but there are two aspects in which I feel Barnes really excels.

First, throughout the book there is a growing sense of unease, dread, and even disgust. The team’s natural inclination to pranks, and their expectation of being pranked in turn, make it so easy for Ophelia and for the reader to feel wrong-footed throughout the first half of the book. Is this something to be concerned about, or is it the R&E team playing a joke? Is this something uncanny, or was it the previous team indulging in some malicious mischief? The book puts your guard up or gets your guard down by turns, so that the thing you can really expect is that whatever you’re looking at isn’t quite what it seems. It’s hard to pull off an unreliable narrator who the reader wants to believe in even if they can’t believe them, but Ophelia is just that. The book didn’t have the literary equivalent of jump-scares, but it didn’t need them, relying instead on an ever-increasing dread and paranoia that was deftly handled.

Second, the underlying theme of guilt—both earned and unearned, both resolved and unresolved—was powerfully woven. From guilt that was wrongly put on Ophelia’s shoulders by others, to undeserved guilt she assigns to herself, to the guilt she actually owns, Ophelia has a lot to face. The themes of guilt and accountability would be powerful enough if Ophelia only had to resolve her unearned feelings of guilt over situations that were out of her control, or if she only had to reckon with her actual complicity in situations which she could have changed but chose not to. But Barnes crafted a story in which Ophelia had to both forgive herself and let go of guilt that was not hers and accept and resolve guilt that she did have a part in. Doing both at once could have wound up clunky, but Barnes wove them together deftly in a way that caused each aspect of the guilt theme to highlight and strengthen the other, and resolved it satisfyingly. I was very impressed.

The only thing about the book that I wish had been different is more of a me-problem than anything else—my memory is so poor, and Barnes introduced a whole handful of corporate acronyms pretty quickly, which left me flipping back through pages to figure out what people were talking about more than once.

I’ll wrap it up by saying that I loved the way the resolution of the story felt tidy and well-resolved but still left enough threads open that I can sit here and hope for a sequel without feeling frustrated by the end of the book. Whether S.A. Barnes does write a direct sequel to this book or not, I absolutely hope that she gives me more of the space horror I crave.

This review has been an excerpt from the March 2024 issue of my newsletter, C.J. Dotson’s Dreadful Dispatch. If you enjoyed it, check out the full issue here.

5 out of 5 Stars for THE HOLLOW PLACES by T. Kingfisher

Any mild spoilers within this review that I can’t really avoid will be italicized so that readers may skip those sections if they want to.

Following her divorce, Kara (called “Carrot” by the two most sympathetic side charactersl) moves into a spare room her Uncle Earl has fixed up for her in his home—which happens to also be a tourist attraction called the Glory to God Museum of Natural Wonders, Curiosities, and Taxidermy, mostly called the Wonder Museum, where Kara repays his hospitality by helping him run the museum and catalogue the wacky and sometimes tacky “exhibits” in his eclectic collection, a never-ending task in a place with no formal organization and a constant in-flow of donated “oddities” from Uncle Earl’s friends from afar.

When Uncle Earl needs to stay with his own sister, Kara’s mother, to take it easy following a knee surgery, Kara stays at the Wonder Museum to cover for his absence and continue her inventory of the objects within. She’s not long on her own before someone knocks a hole in a wall and Kara finds, on the other side, an impossible concrete hallway. Enlisting the help of Simon, the barista who works at the coffee shop next door (in the same building, also owned by Uncle Earl, who lets his tenants pay their rent in free coffee), Kara investigates the strange hallway.

What they find is another world, one which does not look horrifying at first but turns out to be deeply uncanny and terribly dangerous. Kara and Simon explore a little, but a terrible discovery sends them running, lost, into the strange world. They must learn what the perils are in that place, figure out how to avoid them, and find their way home before they fall prey to what hunts in that other place—and they must make sure if they do get home that they don’t lead anything back to our world.

First of all, this premise is like catnip for me. I love holes in things that are not supposed to have holes in them. I love the idea of going through one of those holes and finding someplace I’ve never been and never would have been (in the really real world that would be, what, some ductwork above the drop-ceiling in a school or if I ever get really lucky maybe a secret room, though I’ve never gotten that lucky yet). And getting to go to another world where the rules are different than they are here has been a favorite daydream of mine ever since I first read any of the Narnia books. From very early in this book I knew that this is the kind of horror scenario I would 100% fall for, which made it very fun.

One of horror’s eternal questions is “why doesn’t the main character just leave,” and I think that the character of Uncle Earl answers this question so nicely for Kara in The Hollow Places; he is sweet and kind but not without flaws, in a way that feels genuine and lets the reader really feel Kara’s motivation in making sure that whatever is happening to her can’t also happen to him. 

I also love the way that Kara’s divorce is presented in the book—her ex-husband is obnoxious but not some monster, the divorce was an upheaval but not riddled with drama. It struck me as a very realistic depiction of what many divorces must feel like. Painful, yes, but not horrifying in and of itself, and awkward in the often-overlooked way that painful things are often also awkward. It was a great setup and it was carried through the book really well, of diminishing importance to Kara as the events of the novel unfolded.

The sense of adventure in this book was really enjoyable (for the reader, I mean—it was clearly not an enjoyable adventure for Kara and Simon). There were parts, near the beginning, when I knew that I would have been reading with a touch of envy if I had somehow missed that this is a horror novel.

The characters were engaging and realistic. The ones who were meant to be likable were very likable and the ones who were meant to be unlikable were very unlikable, but never in a way that felt over-the-top or cringeworthy. Simon was so fun, and although Uncle Earl didn’t get a ton of page-time I love him. Kara was a relatable main character who I sympathized with throughout the book without feeling like she was an author insert or reader insert character. I also liked that the tension and adventure in this book were balanced with a thread of humor that felt very grounded in the kind of jokes and comedy I encounter on the daily on social media; it was a specific and realistic kind of humor that added so much to Kara’s voice on the page.

There were only a couple of places where I felt the narrative fell a little flat for me.

The first is that though the tension and the pacing were perfect and there’s no question why the characters were terrified, most of the book didn’t make me feel frightened. Tense, yes! Engaged, interested, eager to see what happens next, yes! But mostly not afraid.

The second is that the revelation of the catalyst that led to the events of the book felt obvious to me. This is something I feel is worth noting in case others find this aspect of the book unsurprising as well, when I think it was meant to be something more mysterious. It’s not, however, something I would really hold against the book or the author—I often see things coming like this. 

For me, the strongest part of the entire book was the climactic scene (a little spoilery content coming) when Kara has figured out what caused the opening to another world in the Wonder Museum because it brings some aspects of that other world to ours, and the exhibits in the museum are all that allow her to survive, and the reason she works out for that during the final scenes in the book, was so well done. The tension of that climactic scene was the best in the whole book, the descriptions and visuals were so eerie and unsettling, and the main character’s best guess at an explanation at the end was so touching it actually choked me up a little bit.

Finally, I really enjoyed how the story was resolved—aside from being touching it also had just the right balance between explaining things and leaving some mystery, and it ended with the same thread of humor that ran through the whole story, without making that humor the focal point of the falling action of the book.
The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher was a really enjoyable read and I definitely recommend it. If you had any different interpretations of the book, or want to discuss any points, please feel free to leave a comment!

This review has been an excerpt from my monthly newsletter, C.J. Dotson’s Dreadful Dispatch. You can find the rest of this issue of the newsletter here, complete with a writing update and some horror chat as well as my review of Evil Dead Rise, and some pictures of my pets. If you like what you read, subscribe!

Two-Book Deal Announcement

It’s been over three weeks since I’ve been allowed to publicly announce my two-book publishing deal with St. Martin’s Press and a week since I started trying to write this blog post, because sometimes I’m not sure how to talk about success (and also because I’m busy and doing any kind of writing that’s not my books or my short stories feels like it’s not good enough).

In 2020 I wrote my haunted house novel, These Familiar Walls. I had only dipped a toe into writing horror shorts for a few months before that. I’d always written sci-fi and fantasy (though I did lean toward the dark in those stories). I’ve always loved to read and watch horror, and when I was a kid on the bus I used to make up scary stories to tell other kids, but I had never written a horror book before that one. When I entered it into Pitch Wars in the late summer/early autumn of 2020, I didn’t tell anyone other than my family that I was giving that a try.

A few days after the mentee picks were announced, I posted this tweet:

In early 2021 my entry did alright in the showcase, and then These Familiar Walls did not get an agent. When the 2021 Pitch Wars hype started up (and we didn’t know, then, that this would be the last time), I had already drafted my next book and was seeking beta readers for it, and I had no qualms about writing a blog post aimed at future Pitch Wars hopefuls to talk about what it’s like to not be one of the big, instant successes from Pitch Wars.

I never posted on Twitter when I got full requests for any of the three books I queried between early 2021 and late 2022—I rarely gave it a second thought when I saw someone else post their full requests, but thinking about posting my own felt like bragging, it’s one of those double-standards I inflict on myself. I did post on Twitter when I signed with my agent, but I had no idea what to post in my blog. Which I straight-up admitted in the post I did eventually write.

I didn’t post, either, when I went on sub. I did make a twitter post (and even pinned it) when I was allowed to announce my book deal, but here I am more than three weeks later still trying to figure out how to talk about that in my blog.

Failing and trying and persevering feels simple. You get a rejection and you process your feelings and then you knuckle down and keep going and going. It’s not pleasant but it’s not complicated.

Succeeding feels complicated.

Is that fucked up? It feels like it might be, but I think probably it’s pretty normal.

One of the reasons succeeding feels complicated is that the publishing industry gives you a lot more “no” than “yes.” So when you finally get all the “yeses” lined up just right for something like an actual book deal to happen, it’s almost hard to believe in it. And there’s almost a feeling of guilt—there are incredible books out there by incredible authors who don’t have an agent, that aren’t published, and it’s not because they’re not as good as the books that are published because they are (and a lot of them are better).

The importance of luck in publishing can also complicate feelings about success. I want to say “I worked hard to get here” which is true but so have a lot of people who are not here yet. I want to say “It was lucky my book landed in the right editor’s inbox at the right time” which is true but doesn’t mention my agent and his know-how and downplays the, well, the hard work I did to get here.

I worked hard to get here. My agent knows his stuff and is great. And I was lucky. All of it.

As I’m sitting here now, drafting this blog, I’m realizing that maybe a “luck” blog deserves its own whole post.

But for now this is supposed to be my big blog of celebration about my book deal and instead I’m meandering through the post talking about how weird it feels.

My books are more focused than my blog posts, promise.

Anyway, here, because this was supposed to be the point of the whole blog post originally: I have a two-book deal from St. Martin’s Press!

In my debut horror novel, The Cut, there's something in the water at L'Arpin Hotel, but pregnant domestic abuse survivor Sadie can't prove it. Guests disappear, her boss gaslights her, and monsters slither in the gloom. Until she and her toddler daughter get back on their feet after escaping her ex-fiancé, they're stuck here...unless they vanish, too.

In the second horror novel, These Familiar Walls, Amber inherits her childhood home after an old friend resurfaces and murders her parents decades after their falling out. When she moves her family into the house, lockdown stress and bitter memories haunt her—along with a hateful, smoldering presence that lurks in the mirrors and whispers from the shadows. Now Amber must resolve her part in a lifetime of tragedy, or lose the life she's contrived for herself.

Check back on the blog for updates about things like my forthcoming newsletter, novel release dates, cover reveals, preorder information, ARCs, and maybe some giveaways and other fun stuff!

Phew, there we go, that shouldn’t have felt so hard.

Anyway, I started this post talking in part about how writing stuff that’s not my fiction feels like I’m dropping the ball somehow, and I’ll end it by saying that in spite of that feeling I’m going to be putting together a newsletter pretty soon. I’ll post again when I’ve got that going.

Have a good weekend, friends!

I'm Now Represented by Chris Bucci!

I’m sitting here trying to think of how to write this blog post and I’m totally blanking. I’ve started it probably four times. Five if you count this time.

Do I talk about how many novels I wrote before I wrote the one I finally started querying? Do I talk about the novels I queried first, the ones that didn’t help me get a literary agent? Do I talk about how proud I was of the first one, and how I felt like the second was the best I could manage at that time but didn’t live up to the first one? How that made me feel like I might lose my touch? Do I talk about my query stats? Across all the books I’ve queried or just the one that ended with an offer of representation? Do I copy what I did on Twitter and name all the people I want to thank for being my friends and my support network and my first readers and occasionally my scolders and, again, always, forever, my friends?

Chances are if you’re reading my blog, you’re a writer. So you probably already know this, but for the people who might stumble in here who aren’t writers (hi, mom), once an agent makes an offer of representation it’s standard to ask for two weeks before you answer that offer so that you can nudge other agents to give them the chance to finish reading your book and decide whether to counter-offer or not. My offer came just before Thanksgiving, so my nudge period had an extra week tacked on in consideration of the holiday.

That means I’ve had three weeks to plan what I’d say here, and I didn’t even think of it until just now.

I’m so proud and so lucky to get to make any kind of announcement like this:
I’m now represented by Chris Bucci at Aevitas Creative Management! Talking with him on the phone about my Lake Erie hotel horror-suspense novel, The Cut, was amazing—everything he said about my work, both from an artistic standpoint and from a business standpoint, drove home that he is absolutely the best agent to work with to get my books out there. I’m thrilled to be working on revisions he suggested, and I’m so excited for everything that comes next.

(Also it feels very strange to not be obsessively checking my inbox anymore)

Take a Break!

My last blog post was in January of this year and it was about recognizing that sometimes I need to give myself time to rest. But apparently the lesson didn’t stick, so I need to be a little more clear and a little more firm with myself. Consider this blog post more of a reminder to myself than anything else.

Take a break sometimes.

When life stress is hitting you over and over, sometimes writing through it can help you cope. Sometimes it does not. Sometimes trying to make yourself write while the stress waves are washing over you adds to the stress instead of letting you escape from it.

Take a break.

If you are sick and you need rest, waking up at 5 am for your morning writing time is not going to work out. You’re going to sit on the couch with tissues up your nose, breathing through your mouth and wincing every time you swallow when you sip your coffee, and you’re going to be thinking about feeling all gunky, and you’re not going to write any good words. Or any words at all. And you’re prolonging how long you’ll be sick for by not resting, perpetuating the shitty writing cycle.

Take a break.

It’s the school year, the viruses are coming. All of them, one after the other. If the kids are sick and you’re running yourself into the ground taking care of a pukey seven-year-old and a feverish three-year-old, trying to figure out what food they can keep down and trying to balance that against what food they’ll actually eat, your focus is where it needs to be. Writing probably won’t work. And you’ll be up three times in the night to empty a puke bowl or change some messy bedding, so waking up early to squeeze the words out before sunrise is probably also not going to work.

Take a break.

By the time you feel the burnout coming, the bad news is that it’s actually probably already here. It’s too late. You’re not going to make that project work no matter how much you love the idea.

Take a break.

If you’re finally having a really good time and you don’t want to think about stopping to do some work, or going to bed at a reasonable hour so that you can get up early enough to write, for god’s sake let yourself finally have a really good time.

Take a break.

It’s not going to kill you to go easy on yourself sometimes. It’s not going to kill your words. You won’t come back to writing after a break and realize that you’ve forgotten how to put a story together.

Take a break.

I’ve been stressed out for a couple of months (thanks, interstate move and minor family disasters) and I’ve also been sick for over two weeks (thanks, back-to-school germs) and I finally just gave in for a few days and slept through my alarm and took naps during the day and didn’t try to do anything, and today I’m feeling better than I have in ages. I got more writing done today than I have in any single day in months, sent more queries, and am at this very moment wrapping up writing my first blog post since just after the new year. (I also got more cleaning and chores done yesterday than I have in a couple of weeks.) I’m not back to 100%, but I feel like myself again.

Because I took a break.