My newest horror collection, Aftermath of an Industrial Accident, came out today, at long last. It’s a book that took years to come together, and it had a bit of a rough birth, though I console myself that it wasn’t anywhere near as difficult a process as it was for my first horror collection, Unseaming.

Nonetheless, it’s here, it exists, and it is probably the most rounded representation of who I am as a writer of any book that I’ve produced.

Without further ado, here’s where you order it:

A wild twist is, for all the pre-production troubles Unseaming had, the timing of its release hit some kind of bull’s-eye. It remains the best-selling book of all the books I’ve produced (in fact it sold about 1,000 more copies through the 99 cent e-book special that started this weekend). Given the pandemic, the protests, the political turbulence, I suspect the opposite is true for Aftermath — a problem that also afflicts its sister-book, A Sinister Quartet. As a recent NPR review put it, “Horror isn’t many readers’ first choice during times like these.” But I don’t see waiting for a mystical “good time” for horror (Ha! Ha!) as a sensible option. Full steam ahead!

No, that’s not what makes this day bittersweet. The reason for that is because right now, in a different world, maybe one where our government took the advance of COVID-19 seriously soon enough (maybe!), Anita and I should be packing books and clothes and groceries to head to Boston for Readercon, stopped for a day along the way to pick up Nicole Kornher-Stace and maybe meet up with Laird Barron or Paula Arwen Owen if schedules allowed.

Then off to Readercon proper, where Nicole, Patty Templeton, Zig Zag Claybourne and I were going to do a group reading (a feat I still would like to pull off virtually, but I haven’t had the brainspace available to figure out how to arrange and promote it). C. S. E. Cooney and I would likely have done a reading for A Sinister Quartet (Jessica P. Wick and Amanda McGee, alas, likely weren’t going to make it). And Anita and I would have run a dealer’s table and thrown a big room party for these new books and hopefully showcased many of our older books too. After that, coordinating somehow with Nicole, Cooney and Carlos Hernandez, we were going to back to New York and join Matt Kressel and Ellen Datlow at the Wednesday Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading, which would double as the launch reading for Aftermath.

The KGB reading is still happening; more details on that tomorrow. And Claire, Amanda, Jess and I are are actually going to get to do a reading together, virtually, with Roanoke indie bookseller Book No Further: it’s free to sign up, please do, more details coming on that too.

But instead of spending thousands of dollars on travel, we’re going to be spending thousands of dollars on surgery. Anita has discussed this on her Facebook page; we’re actually in self-isolation right now before she gets surgery to remove a basal cell sarcoma from her face, and plastic reconstruction surgery afterward. It is sort of horribly fortuitous that all the time we originally blocked out for this book tour will be used for isolation and recovery instead. It’s not a life-threatening process but there is still a lot to worry about. I’ll be grateful for any good thoughts you can send Anita’s way.

These sort of things tend to make me feel like the making of art is a frivolous thing — and yet, it’s what we do, so we do it.

Danielle Tunstall’s cover art for Aftermath really does match my mood right now, in a way I didn’t plan. I still love it though!