I Can’t Wait For…Infernal Bargains by C.S.E. Cooney & Carlos Hernandez

Can’t-Wait Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted over at Wishful Endings to spotlight and discuss the books we’re excited about but haven’t yet read. Most of the time they’re books that have yet to be released, but not always. It’s based on the Waiting on Wednesday meme, which was originally hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine. 

This week my Can’t-Wait-For Book is Infernal Bargains by C.S.E. Cooney & Carlos Hernandez!

Infernal Bargains: Stories and Poems from the Deck of Destiny by C.S.E. Cooney, Carlos Hernandez
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Horror, Sci Fi
Published on: 3rd December 2024
Goodreads

What do a post-human starship captain, an actress of the macabre, a post-singularity revolutionary, and an exiled shapeshifter have in common? They are stories and poems that would never have been written without the “Deck of Destiny”: the grim yet playful centerpiece of the Negocios Infernales roleplaying game. But the Deck has a second vocation—to inspire artists, via its ghoulish wisdom and bloody sense of humor, to create. The designers of Negocios Infernales, award-winning writers C. S. E. Cooney and Carlos Hernandez, have created new works based upon the Deck of Destiny, with all its fanged philosophies and macabre musings on display. Every story and poem of Infernal Bargains began by pulling one or more cards from the Deck and resulted in the satirical, sordid, somber, spirited, and very, very sanguine works you will find herein. Taken together, they compose the haunted menagerie that populates these two writers' deepest unconscious fears and desires—and, perhaps, your own.

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If you have hung around here for any length of time whatsoever, you know it goes without saying that anything Cooney writes, I will pounce on – and a collection she’s written with her seriously wonderful husband?!

THIS IS THE YULE GIFT TO END ALL YULE GIFTS!

It also has a very cool origin story: the authors created the Deck of Destiny as part of their aliens+Spanish Inquisition roleplaying game Negocios Infernales (which you can read all about at their Kickstarter page, and preorder here!), and they’ve demonstrated in a few of their Infernal Salons that the deck is fantastic at creating prompts for creative writing. Infernal Bargains is what you get when the authors themselves start writing based on those prompts!

This will be my first time reading anything by Hernandez, and I’m very excited about that. (And about 95% sure that my next stop will be preordering the ridiculously awesome-sounding game!) But I’m even more excited by how this set-up CLEARLY allows both Cooney and Hernandez to lean into their weird, extravagant imaginations – I can’t wait to see what they’ve written with this deck as their inspiration!

The post I Can’t Wait For…Infernal Bargains by C.S.E. Cooney & Carlos Hernandez appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.