Issue 67 • Dragon Incoming

A Book Trailer; Back to the Lot; Let's See Where These Breadcrumbs Lead; Still Haunted; the Quest

Signed, Sealed, and Delivered

King Sorrow has a boilin’ hot book trailer.

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I heard from my editor a few days ago that the book just went to press. No going back now. I hope you have a blast with it. If you want to despoil your copy of the book with my signature, here are just some of the places U.S. buyers can get autographed copies:

Water Street Books (where you can also get your hardcover personalized, but probably not doodled—I don’t think I can do that this time, I’ll never get everything signed)

Barnes & Noble

Books-a-Million (BAM if you’re nasty)

You can also come on out and get a signed copy at one of my events. I’m doing a mess of them. Here’s my U.S. tour.

U.K. readers, don’t despair. Booksellers all over the nation will have signed copies: check it out here to find a retailer near you. And I’m doing a whole run of U.K. appearances. My publisher has a list of all the events here along with handy links to confirm your attendance.

(In Canada and feeling left out? I haven’t forgotten you!)

My Dad’s Lot in Life

It’s been fifty years of ‘Salem’s Lot—

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—and I was delighted and honored to be asked to write an introduction for the 50th anniversary edition. The above is the U.K. edition, but don’t fret, there’s a new U.S. edition forthcoming as well. Come on back to the Lot this fall. Or if it’s your first time, even better! I hear they love new blood there.

A Wild Thing

While we’re talking about my Dad, he’s got a new collaboration out in just a little while—with the late, great, often imitated but impossible to duplicate Maurice Sendak—and I had something to say about it on IG (whole lotta Instagram in this newsletter, huh?)

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Still Haunted

King Sorrow gets most of the attention—fair enough—but that’s not my only 2025 release; there’s also the 20th Anniversary Edition of 20th Century Ghosts, with a new afterword that reflects on some of what happened to these stories in the decades since they first appeared. You can still order a signed and personalized copy from Water Street Books in Exeter, NH. Note that although this book is officially out tomorrow (August 19th), it’ll probably be the end of the month before Water Street can ship any autographed books. Don’t blame them—I can’t get into the shop to start scribbling my name until the last days of August.

The Quest

I heard a story about the late Charles Brown, the long-time editor of Locus Magazine. Mr. Brown was a collector and his shelves sagged with elderly first printings of books like Bradbury’s The October Country and Heinlein’s Red Planet. Then one day, in the early 21st century, he gave it up. Just stopped. A friend asked him why he didn’t want to collect anymore and Brown replied that you could find anything you wanted online in an instant—and so there was no thrill of the quest anymore. No jolt of excitement at coming across a mint edition of The Space Merchants or a half-forgotten John D. MacDonald story published in a magazine of sports stories. The hunt had been taken away from him.

There’s something deeply melancholy in that little anecdote, isn’t there? It makes me think of the leopards in zoos. They may have comfort and ease in the few fenced-in acres in which they spend the entirety of their lives. The glistening piles of meat left out for them is, no-doubt, top-grade grass-fed beef. The leopards are allowed perfect peace and satisfaction. All that was taken from them was their central reason for being—to launch themselves at an impala and drag it down to the savannah floor with their paws. To run and leap and scramble up into the trees to patiently scout for prey. They aren’t really leopards at all anymore. They’re housecats.

In a conversation about AI recently, I said to someone that I’m not a technophobe. I’m not afraid of the latest developments in tech—I’m insulted and annoyed by them, but not freaked out. The more the tech broligarchy tries to spoon feed us our own lives, the less I like it, and the less I’m inclined to play along. Check it out: these guys want to take the steering wheels out of their self-driving cars. What a perfect metaphor for the whole Silicon Valley ethos. You can have all the convenience you like, you just have to let them steer the course of your life. It’s not hard to imagine that driving will be like handwriting soon, an archaic skill as out-of-date as spearfishing. Maybe learning to play an instrument will be archaic soon too—why spend ten thousand hours learning to play an acoustic guitar, working at it until your fingers bleed, when you can type a prompt into a piece of software and hear your computer simulate an acoustic guitar for you?

Well. Set it aside. I don’t think I need to waste keystrokes defending the pleasure of developing a skill or the satisfactions of mastery. That’s not exactly where I wanted to go with this. I wanted to tell you instead about Bob Seger and Smokin’ O.P.s.

My dad had that record—we were talking about it back in June and he admitted he played the spots off it—and I got in the mood to hear it myself. I checked out Apple Music and drew a blank. Turns out its never been digitally rereleased. Well, that was all right. I probably do a little more than half my listening on vinyl these days. I got ready to do a search for [Seger Smokin’ O.P'.S vinyl record buy] and then stuck in place, my fingers hovering over the keyboard. And changed my mind.¹

Over the next week I worked up a list of around 10 albums I wanted on vinyl and resolved never to search for them online. A few days back I got to London and went for a wander among the vintage record stores between Regent Street and Wardour Street (there’s about half a dozen). I didn’t find a single thing I was looking for—not Smokin’ O.P.s, not Back in ‘72, not Loud’N’Proud by Nazareth, not Generation Terrorist by Manic Street Preachers. I didn’t walk away frustrated, though; I went home with a happy glow of satisfaction, feeling pleasantly daydreamy. I spent a couple hours picking through old records and while I didn’t find what I wanted, I found some things I didn’t know I wanted: The Best of Taste, Van Morrison His Band and the Street Choir. When you can get exactly the thing you’re looking for, exactly when you want it, you miss out on discovering the equally great things you weren’t looking for. And the hunt—the Quest—has its own particular offline, low-key, intimate delights. It has purpose and it has randomness and it involves a bit of roaming in the dusty, janky, noisy chaos of the actual world. I think all three things are worth having: the roaming and the randomness and the purpose most of all.

Till September

And that’s as good a place to sign off as any—I’ve got some roaming to do and I already feel a sense of purpose, because my next cup of tea isn’t going to make itself. I hope your summer had some happy randomess in it and some good reading too. (Just finished Coffin Moon by Keith Rosson—insanely good—and am now into Darker Days by Thomas Olde Huevelt—awesome) I’ll be meandering back into your in-box in a few weeks. It isn’t long now until both King Sorrow and The Black Phone 2 come out (within just days of one another). I’m sure we’ll have plenty to talk about before fall falls at last.

Joe Hill, Sevenoaks, Kent, August 2025

1. Shortly before I clicked send on this newsletter, a friend noted that in fact Smokin’ O.P.s is available through the Apple Music library, although not under that name. But I’m not sure that meaningfully changes my larger point; my inability to instantly find the thing I wanted sent me down a far more interesting path. And, no, I haven’t listened to the digital release yet. Maybe eventually I’ll weaken and throw it on. We’ll see.