Escape Hatch 060: UnCovered

Pre-Order King Sorrow; Another List??;Current Status

King Sorrow is Out This October

And here’s the cover.

It’s been a while, huh? By the time this one comes out, it will have been almost ten years since the last novel. Although I’d argue I didn’t exactly vanish—there were graphic novels, there were a couple of collections, there was some film and TV stuff—ten years is a long sabbatical from the day job. (It won’t be anywhere near as long before the next one—but more on that another day.)

I’m grateful to Today.com for making a big splash with the King Sorrow cover reveal. I did a brief Q&A with them about the book, so if you wanna learn a little more, head on over and check it out.

You can preorder today from all the usual suspects (there is nothing, nothing, my publisher likes more than a big heapin’ helpin’ of preorders). But also: as with all my other books, I’ve partnered up with my local, Water Street Books, to offer signed first editions to anyone who wants to place a preorder. I’ll even personalize (I won’t be doodling this time, though, sorry.) My thanks to anyone who jumps in and places an order. I do so hope you enjoy the novel. I gave it everything I had. It’s on sale 10/21, just in time for Halloween.

The TV That Made Me

When you have two-year-old twins, bedtime can be a challenge. I spend between fifteen minutes to an hour, every night, in the bedroom with my little fellows, to ease ‘em down into sleep. I sit in the dark in a rocking chair and I fix blankets when blankets aren’t lying just right and I get them milk if they need milk and other than that I mostly keep quiet, because a lot of chat would reactivate them when I want ‘em to settle in.

I don’t look at my phone or my e-reader. I just sit. Sometimes with a whiskey, sometimes with a Spindrift, mostly just with my thoughts. And the other night I got musing about television and found myself wondering which shows, over the last fifty years, meant the most to me.

And it turned out I didn’t have to muse long. It wasn’t a hard list to make. If you asked me my ten favorite novels or my ten favorite rock songs, I’d have to work at it. But this was as easy as looking out the window and describing what I saw in the front yard.

I examined my list for any common thread and only found one: with just a couple exceptions, these were shows I shared with someone who mattered to me. They became a part of my private language with someone in my life; it was, in some ways, not unlike taking a trip together, and so became part of our shared story.

I’ve put them in order of initial release, although obviously I didn’t come to either of the first two shows here until well after their premieres.

Doctor Who (1963 - present day; 26 seasons)

No, I didn’t see the classic episodes; I missed out on Tom Baker and Tom Baker’s scarf. Indeed, the show ran on Channel 56 in syndication but as a tween, I turned up my nose. It looked so cheap compared to Battlestar Galactica. His most famous foes had toilet plungers for faces.

But decades later I was a divorced guy who discovered the relaunch with my three now-adult boys and it became the happiest part of our week. I drove those boys to school listening to the Murray Gold music and, in a mad moment, had a Tardis installed in the wall of the den (they loved it for three weeks, but, sadly for them, it’s there forever now).

The Prisoner (1967-1968; 1 season)

My dad and I watched The Prisoner the summer before my senior year in high school; he snapped up a box set of the whole series as soon as it became available on VHS. There’s never really been a show anything like it, not in the almost 60 years since it was released… although Severance comes close. All that July, whenever one of us walked out of a room, we’d pause, look to the other, make a circle with thumb and index finger, throw a jaunty salute, and cry, “be seeing you!”

The X-Files (1993-2018; 11 seasons)

Damn, I had such a crush on Dana Scully (didn’t everyone?). You can imagine how confusing it was for me when Gillian Anderson played Margaret Thatcher.

Mulder and Scully are a classic fictional friendship: like Holmes-Watson and Aubrey-Maturin. I watched those first five seasons with my first wife. Later one of my boys watched them all when they were on the streaming services and then went as Mulder for Halloween. He looked it too! Mulder at 11-years-old!

The Sopranos (1999-2007; 6 seasons)

Another one that was important to my first wife and I—she grew up Irish-Italian in NY, not far from the city, and in a lot of ways she knew all of these people, even if the versions of them she knew weren’t gangsters. It’s hard to remember now what a shock it was, to build a show around such a charismatic but ruthless antihero… a reluctant chessplayer surrounded by guys who barely understood tic-tac-toe, battling for his territory, his life, and his sanity, one episode at a time.

Foyle’s War (2002 - 2015; 8 seasons)

I watched this with one of my older boys, the one who most loves crossword puzzles. Probably no one has ever written fair play mysteries better than Anthony Horowitz, and yes, I’m including Doyle and Christie in that assessment. Here Horowitz married some ingenious puzzles to a tremendously satisfying story about maintaining one’s decency in the face of war’s cruelties and war’s moral vagaries.

Breaking Bad (2008-2013; 5 seasons)

This is a bit of an odd-man out because it’s one of only two shows on this list I watched alone. Although my dad was as into it as me and we talked about it, by phone and email, after every episode; in that sense, I suppose it was shared.

Breaking Bad is somehow the inverse of the Sherlock Holmes stories; the question posed by every episode was not whodunnit, but how-can-he-get-away-with-it? And every episode he did: by cunning, ingenuity, chemistry, or sheer ruthlessness.

The Americans (2013 - 2018; 6 seasons)

The other program on this list I essentially watched alone (although, again, my dad and I must’ve written nearly a hundred emails to one another about it).

When Red Dawn came out, way back when (the original, not the remake), I asked my father what he thought would happen if Russia ever invaded America. And he said, “In three years, they’d be just like us. They’d wanna eat McDonald’s and watch football. Nothing would defeat communism faster.” To a degree, this show exists to examine that exact notion, and… doesn’t come to quite the same conclusion.

The Good Place (2016-2020; 4 seasons)

One of the first shows my wife Gillian and I shared together, and my God, sometimes we just about f#&% wept we laughed so hard. And the twist at the end of the final season—that’ll never be topped.

Check out show runner Michael Scher’s book, How To Be Perfect. It’s like a bonus secret fifth season of The Good Place.

The Mandalorian (2018-present day; 3 seasons)

Pedro Pascal and the creative team behind this show did something I would’ve thought impossible—they brought to TV something as fun, satisfying, and electrifying as the very first Star Wars movie. Adventure doesn’t come in a purer form. Gillian and I have been addicted since the first episode.

Slow Horses (2022-present day; 4 seasons)

And then there’s Slow Horses, probably the most exciting show on TV right now. The world depicted in Slow Horses has the geopolitical moral murk of a John Le Carré novel, and the big action set pieces of a Bond film… but a shabby, battered, malodorous spirit all its own, a spirit defined by Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb, surely his greatest role. When a new season drops, Gillian and I drop all our plans with it, and set everything aside to watch. It’s so great to be able to make this list and know that the best isn’t behind me yet… there’s still a lot of good stuff to hope for in the days ahead.

Status Update

Last year I wrote a teeny, tiny book that hasn’t been published yet, and might not be out for a while; at the moment I’m about three days from finishing a screenplay based on the same piece of work. It’d be wild if the movie and the book came out at the same time! Unlikely, though.

I mentioned it won’t be a ten year wait between novels next time. I think I’m two months off from finishing a new one. It’s my first short one in quite some time—about the same length as Horns or Heart-Shaped Box. I’d like to bang out a few novels between now and when I turn sixty and I can’t do it if they’re all 800 pages long.

There’s been good stuff to read (most recently, this remarkable horror-historical), good music to listen to (what a banger) and happy, peaceful times with Gillian and the twins. Walks in the snow, children’s books by the fire. Things seem pretty dark and bleak in the wider world; I guess the best anyone can hope for is peaceful, quiet domestic happiness. If you’ve got that, you can’t ask for much more. Wishing that for you. Happy reading and I’ll be back at you next month with more to say about King Sorrow.