Escape Hatch 064: High Jeopardy

Best American SF&F; Who's Got The Shivers?; Pop Culture Jeopardy; The Black Phone gets a hot standalone edition

Usher-ing in the Year’s Best

I was pleased and honored to learn that Nnedi Okorafor selected my story “Ushers” for the 2025 edition of The Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy (in a curious bit of trivia, I was the guest editor for the inaugural edition exactly a decade ago). I’m in good company: this is an absolutely stacked line-up. There’s lots more information about this year’s Best American at series editor John Joseph Adams website.

Brr… anyone else got the Shivers?

Sure seems like I’ve been in NYC a lot lately. I only just got back from an event celebrating the launch of Joe Abercrombie’s newest novel, The Devils, in front of a packed crowd at the Union Square Barnes & Noble. But I’ll be in town again on June 14th, to honor David Cronenberg at a 50th anniversary screening of Shivers, his classic 1975 shocker. I’ll be there for the film and after the lights come up, I’ll be conducting a Q&A with David Cronenberg himself. What a thrill… Cronenberg’s particularly disturbing filmography has figured prominently in my imagination for decades.

The Locke Kids are in Jeopardy Once Again

Over the course of 36 issues of Locke & Key, Tyler, Kinsey, and Bode made choices that placed them in all kinds of jeopardy… but this once they find themselves in some jeopardy they can feel good about. Namely an episode of Pop Culture Jeopardy. Here’s the question where they got name checked, and here’s the team that provided the correct answer (photos courtesy of the most excellent horror writer Jason Rekulak). Pretty cool.

Pick Up The Phone

Feast your eyes on this stunning limited edition of my short story “The Black Phone,” lovingly crafted by the team at Suntup Press. Reiko Murakami provided the haunting, ashen illustrations and C. Robert Cargill—who co-wrote the script for the film—delivered a new afterword. Over on Threads I was saying the paper quality alone gives me the tingles. If you have a yen to put this one on your shelf, go on over and grab yourself a copy from Suntup before they’re all gone.

Getting Personal with my U.K. Readers

My thanks to the wonderful Sevenoaks Bookshop for partnering up with me to offer signed and dedicated copies of King Sorrow to U.K. readers. They can ship to you anywhere in Britain. I’ll have to sign all of ‘em in a single day, so for that reason we’re limiting this to just 250 orders.

Out of Time

I had ideas for a couple different essays I wanted to work up for this issue of Escape Hatch. I wanted to write about the second season of Andor, one of the best scripted shows I’ve watched since The Americans. I also wanted to write about the difference between fiction that explores political ideas and fiction that explores moral quandaries—it seems to me in our hyper-politicized times, people often mistake one for the other. Now that I think about it, maybe the Andor essay and the essay about political thinking vs. moral thinking were actually the same essay. I dunno. I never got that far—I suddenly looked at all the work piled up on my desk and in my in-box and realized I didn’t have the bandwidth.

So it goes. As I’ve said in other newsletters, I decided at some point that I wanted to try my hand at being a book-a-year writer. And as I’ve gone along, I’ve come to believe that’s something I can probably do—but a lot of pulling it off is about recognizing that I only have time to do the things I need to do, not the things I might wish I could do. I can live my daydream of being a book-a-year guy, but only if I set aside some other daydreams. I can work on the novel today, or I can write a fun little essay for my newsletter, but I can’t do both. I can preserve my PWGA health care by writing a screenplay a year, but that means accepting I can’t also do an ongoing comic. If I’m going to read to my twins in the evening, I’m going to have to give up some of the time I might’ve spent reading to myself. These are trade-offs I don’t just accept; I feel good about them, grateful that I’m in a position to make those kinds of choices at all. A day is short, a week is a vanishingly small period of time and—what’s the old saying? It’s always later than you think. Even when I’m sitting still at my desk, I’m in a desperate footrace against the clock to get in one more paragraph, one more line. It may look like not much is happening, but really I’m sprinting madly for my life.

Here’s wishing you the best in your own footrace; peaceful days and easy nights, as I think the cowboy said. Talk again in June?

— Joe Hill, 19 May 2025