Notes from Underground
“The audience knows the truth. The world is simple, miserable, solid all the way through. But if you can fool them, even for a second… then you can make them wonder.”
—The Prestige (2006)
Before we get to today’s big news, I want to take a moment to remind you to please, if you are so inclined, go cast your vote for Glowing in the Dark for Book of the Year (Nonfiction) at the Rondo Hatton Awards! Voting is open to everyone, and only goes until April 20, so help me get a Rondo bust of my very own!
For those who prefer my fiction writing, however, today’s post is for you!
Yesterday, Publishers Marketplace broke the news that Word Horde will be publishing my newest book later this year. Notes from Underground: The Hollow Earth Story Cycle is something that has been in the works for a long time, and it’s a departure for me.
Rather than a typical short story collection, Notes from Underground is, as the subtitle implies, a cycle of linked stories that all share certain elements of setting, theme, and mythos to create what the publisher calls “a linked story sequence of cosmic horror and masterful strangeness.”
The earliest of these stories was written as far back as 2015, and most have seen print in other places in the intervening years, including at Nightmare magazine and in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year, to name a few.
Even if you’ve read six of the seven stories contained in Notes from Underground in their original publications, however, there’s still a treat in store for you – a brand-new novelette that helps to tie the stories together, in which the exhumation of a magician’s grave reveals an empty coffin and sets his widow off on a quest of horrific discovery.
As the title suggests, the seven stories in Notes from Underground all deal – some more directly than others – with the Hollow Earth. It’s a subject that has always been fascinating to me, and I drew from many sources of Hollow Earth fiction and lore to create my own metaphysical take on the idea for this ambitious series of linked stories, which you’ll be hearing more about as the book draws closer to publication.
The result is something unlike anything I’ve ever done before, so I hope you will join me on this new excursion into the dark. Due out from Word Horde later this year!
