Take the PLUNGE
Plunge -- the last of the first wave Hill House books -- is fresh out in hardcover, available at your neighborhood bookstore, local comic shop, and all the other usual suspects. I'm hella lucky to have been able to work with Stuart Immonen and David Stewart on this book. Stuart's sinewy, cinematic art and Dave's sinister, aquatic colors bind together to deliver one delicious visual shock after another. I tried my hardest to write to their level.
Plunge is the story of a ghost ship, missing for forty years, that begins sending a distress signal from an atoll in the Bering Strait. A salvage team, headed up by the Carpenter Brothers, cross into Russian waters to recover the ship and the ship's dead... only to discover the crew of Derleth is still, impossibly alive, and possessed of dreadful new powers. I think of it as horror comfort food for us 80s horror geeks who fell so hard for Aliens and John Carpenter's The Thing. I hope you'll give it a try. We sure had fun working on it.
I'll tell you summin' about autographed books: they make a lovely, thoughtful gift, and they're easy to wrap. It's been a habit of mine, for the last few years, to offer signed stuff through my local, Water Street Books, in Exeter, New Hampshire. They've got all of it, from the latest (Plunge) to the oldest and moldiest (hey, do I know how to market my stuff, or what?).
As you already know, we're living in stressed out times. And that's no metaphor: distribution and shipping networks are stressed to the max. In the past, Water Street Books has been able to promise you'll get your book by Christmas (and they deliver pretty much everywhere, including internationally). This year, all they can do is swear they'll give it their best shot. The sooner you order, the more likely they'll be able to get you your goodies by CharlieManxMas.
I spent a lot of 2019 and 2020 as a full-time comic book writer... mostly because I wanted to see if I could do it. If I could carry multiple titles all at once, and deliver month after month, like some of my buds: Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, those guys. It was exciting, bracing, and a little scary.
My three Hill House stories (Basketful of Heads, Plunge, and the uncollected Sea Dogs) made up the majority of that work, but there were also a couple Locke & Key tales... and then there was Dying is Easy. That one has flown a bit under the radar, perhaps because it's so different from the rest of what's in my catalogue. If Plunge is a throwback to 80s horror, Dying is Easy is a callout to the bonkers action-comedies of that era (think Beverly Hills Cop and Die-Hard). But it's also a fair play mystery, meaning the reader gets all the same clues the detective gets, and can theoretically solve the case alongside him. Did I pull it off? You'll have to check it out and decide for yourself. I hope you will.
As a writer, I'm always on the hunt for a lead character who is a little bit of a mystery himself, someone with a past, with regrets, with stuff to work out. Syd "Shit-Talk" Homes -- the ex-cop and failing stand-up comic who stars in this book -- had all of that, which made him interesting company. Who knows... he might turn up again one of these days. Maybe sooner than you'd think.
In other news on the merch front, Skelton Crew has introduced some amazing key pendants. You can get 'em at the Skelton Crew website.
And I think that's it from me, man! This time of year, people are cramming your in-box with their promotional crapola, me included -- the least I can do is not wear out your time and patience.
That said, this is the first of these newsletters I've written since... August?! How did that happen? I'll make it up to you with another in a few weeks, with some end of the year book/tv/film recommendations. Although you don't have to wait for the next issue of Escape Hatch to find out what I'm into these days. I've got an account on Vero Social that I pretty much only use to share what I'm into at the moment. I guess sometimes there are also corgi pictures. See you there?
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