Signed Hardcover Giveaway!

THE CUT comes out in only three weeks! If you are hoping to get your hands on a copy a little early but missed your chance at a paperback ARC from the GoodReads giveaways, then I have good news for you! I am giving away five signed hardcover copies of THE CUT, and each will come with a bookmark in the shape of a hotel do-not-disturb doorknob hanger!

Part of THE CUT takes place on a Lake Erie beach overlooked by an ominous power plant. I based that place on a real beach near where I grew up, a beach with a power plant looming over it, a beach where I once saw something in the water that inspired the first little writing idea that grew into this book. Now I want to know about your own local, eerie places! Your haunted bridges, your cursed trees, your abandoned amusement parks, your—I don’t know—your evil dog houses? Surprise me with your local creepy lore! And if you have (and feel comfortable sharing) any personal unsettling experiences in your nearby uncanny locations? Even better!

HOW TO ENTER THE GIVEAWAY
After reading the rest of this post, including the nitty-gritty below, head over to the contact page on this very website, here, and send me a message telling me about the most scary location near you, or your own personal story about that scary location if you have one you’d like to share. My five favorite stories will each win one signed hardcover copy of THE CUT, one bookmark in the shape of a do-not-disturb hotel doorknob sign, and the option to have their story included in the next regular issue of my newsletter, C.J. Dotson’s Dreadful Dispatch.

THE NITTY-GRITTY
- There is no fee or purchase of any kind necessary to enter this giveaway
- Entry into the giveaway does not guarantee a prize; only five entries will win
- This giveaway is open only to residents of the USA and Canada
- Entries must be sent through this website’s contact page, not through social media, e-mail, this post, etc.
- Entries must be submitted by the end of the day on April 1st, 2025
- Entries must include:
1. A 5,000-word-maximum recounting or story about a creepy place near you, in your own words (no plagiarism, no AI)
2. An email address at which I can contact you in case your story is one of the five winners
3. Indicate whether you would want your story, if it is a winner, to be featured in the next regular issue of my monthly newsletter, C.J. Dotson’s Dreadful Dispatch. If you like, you may also include a brief 300-word-maximum bio in case your story is one of the winners.

Please note that I will only be reaching out to and notifying the five winners—if you do not hear from me by the end of the day on April 2nd, 2025, then please consider that an indication that your story, however creepy and fun, was not one of the winners.

And that about wraps it up! I look forward to reading your unsettling tales and learning about your eerie locations!

THE CUT comes out 4/8/25 and is currently available for pre-order here.

A Known Place Made Strange by Darkness

I grew up in a neighborhood that had begun its transition from rural to suburban sometime just before my family moved in, a neighborhood that was fully suburban by the time I moved out on my own. I then spent my early adulthood until my mid-thirties living in cities.

Now I live by the woods. The forest presses right up to the back of my house. I like the quiet here, I like the way everything looks and feels and smells.

And I like the way it scares me a little bit at night, when I leave my house after dark for one reason or another. There’s no streetlights on the road where I live. When it’s dark here, it’s really dark. Especially under the trees, leaning over my house, watching my small self as I move around at night.

Fear of the woods and what lives in the woods is probably one of our oldest human fears. When I walk outside at night and get that little shiver of discomfort, I feel like it’s something I share with the people who have come before me, all the way back to the first of us. And I think that this fear, of a place unknown or of a known place made strange by darkness, is probably one of the roots of storytelling.

When I go out near the woods alone at night and know that I’m safe but feel that cool touch of unease on the back of my neck anyway, it makes me feel storytelling’s connection to fear, and it makes me feel my connection to storytelling in a living, breathing way.

Man, now I want spring to come faster, so I could go camping and tell stories around a fire.

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!

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)