Issue 65•Fangs for Reading

The Black Phone is ringing again; Boys will be Boys; The Other Book This Year; It Won't Be A Happy Ending; Sit and set a while

Double Feature

The trailer dropped for the Black Phone 2 last week. You maybe already saw it but it’s so nice why not watch it twice?

Black Phone 2 is out in October. Pretty crazy to think I was paid just $35 for the short story when it was published in 2004. I was paid a bit more—perhaps $150—for “Abraham’s Boys” right around the same time. And this year we get to see that one on the big screen too, in the form of Natasha Kermani’s faithful and feverishly frightening adaptation. And the trailer just dropped about… oh, thirty seconds ago. Check it out:

20 Years—Still Haunted

King Sorrow lands in October… but I’ve actually got another book out this year, dropping in August. Over on Instagram I did a little video to say a few things about the 20th Anniversary Edition of 20th Century Ghosts.

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If you've got an interest in a signed, personalized copy, you can order one through my faithful partners at Water Street Books in Exeter, NH. Just one note: for scheduling reasons, I won’t be able to sign Water Street’s copies until a few days after the new edition of Ghosts reaches stores. The book is due out on August 19th, but it’s likely Water Street won’t be able to ship any earlier than August 25th. Thanks in advance for being patient with ‘em—the slight delay is my fault, not theirs.

The End is Nigh

This is pretty cool. Author Benjamin Percy is releasing a monthly tabloid that tells the story of humanity’s last days in newspaper form. This idea reminds me of how much I enjoyed D.C.’s Wednesday Comics, which published a bunch of ongoing strips, presented in broadsheet form, in the style of the comics pages from the 1940s.

I wanted to do Escape Hatch as a physical, not digital newsletter, but couldn’t quite overcome my own inertia… and a monthly print newsletter is no simple thing to manage these days, although my Dad, and I think George R R Martin each had one back in the 80s. We were told our digital ponderings would last forever, but time suggests quite the opposite: nothing digital really lasts, it just becomes part of the white noise of our modern information overload. But I’ve still got my printed copies of Wednesday Comics and I’m gonna have Percy’s End Times, too. What about you?

How to Set

In my last newsletter I wrote a few things about living in a state of hurry—about how much there is to do, how much needs doing, and how little time there is to do it all. I sometimes talk about the tractor: I’m running as hard as I can to stay ahead of it, always conscious of the risk of stumbling and being chewed up by the blades.

But there’s another important part of the week… maybe the most important part of the week. Now and then it’s crucial to set for a while. This is an action often confused with sitting for a while but they’re not the same. Clay has to set before it hardens into its final form. Cement has to set before you’ve got a sidewalk. When the sun sets, you need to be still for a moment—look up from your work, your phone, your anxieties—or you’ll miss the sky at its most breathtaking.

Before the smartphone, people used to set all the time. The way you set, you park yourself in a chair in the garden—a wooden glider is ideal—with a cold drink in one hand. And then you don’t do anything. Maybe you get the sun on your face. The children rampage about, calling to one another and pursuing each other, swept up in their private three-year-old missions. There are chores that need doing but it’s not the time to do them. There might be a transistor radio caching a classic rock station: Boston, Hendrix, Journey, an ad for a car dealership, an ad for affordable flights to Orlando, a traffic report, Tom Petty, Wings. Nowadays you’d use your phone and a bluetooth speaker to put on a favorite playlist and without even realizing it, you’re not setting anymore. Because you can’t pick up the phone without falling back under its sway. You’ll start looking at the news and what they’re saying about the news on TikTok and then you’ve blown it, your attention captured by an algorithm (again).

It isn’t easy to set these days, not at first. We hardly know what to do without something in our hand to distract us. It feels wrong to just do nothing. It would be better if we were consciously meditating, because then at least we’d be able to tell people about our meditation practice later; we’d know we were spending the time on self-improvement; we could post about our good habits on Threads. But this isn’t meditation. We’re going to set and nothing is going to be improved. You aren’t here to focus on the breath. Where did you get this idea you needed to spend every moment improving yourself anyway?

You just… set. And think about getting the car into the shop to renew the inspection sticker; about the car you owned when you were twenty; about the time your friend drank so many mojitos he threw up in the backseat before he could get the window down; about the pina coladas you and your wife had by the pool in Austin when you were there for her work thing and how good she looked in that one-piece; about “the pina colada song,” boy, was that the most annoying Jimmy Buffet tune ever?; but wait, WAS it Jimmy Buffet? Wasn’t it someone else? But never mind; now you’re thinking about the Jimmy Buffet cameo in Jurassic World; people dump on those films, but what the hell, what do you want out of a movie if you don’t want two hours of people running for their lives from prehistoric creatures?; Chris Pratt was in those films and you remember watching him in Parks & Recreation with your mom when she was on oxygen and your eyes sting but it’s a good thought all the same; God, your Mom had a great laugh, right to the end.

And finally an hour has passed and you’ve set… set what? Set your heels maybe, so the incoming tide of obligations, of social media noise, of urgent desperate online distractions, doesn’t knock you down when you finally face them again. You’ve re-set your inner clock to ‘now’. You drank a beer or a Coke or a Spindrift and you set for a while and got it all back: your personhood. You got it back from distraction and from the false logic of our times, that every moment must be productive, accounted for, defensible. You got it back from the algorithm, from Musk and Zuckerberg and Gates. Maybe it’s time to put hot dogs on the grill, although that does seem like a lot of work. Another cold drink would be nice. Maybe someone will bring you one. Hey, you could get lucky.

Well, it was fun catching up with you, but I’m off to set for a bit. Here’s wishing you a few minutes today to get nothing done; to meet no one’s expectations; to cross nothing off the to-do list; to forget where you left your phone; to hide like the purloined letter in plain sight, the message written inside you for you and you alone to read.

— Joe Hill, June 10, 2025