Issue 68 • A Time Of Sorrow

King Sorrow flaps his leathery wings your way; a merry cruise on 'Salem's Yacht; Peter Remembered; my murder colored typewriter & his friends

The Hour of SORROW approaches

Here we are, only about a month out now from the release of my new book, King Sorrow, my first novel-length work in almost ten years (I promise it’ll be a much shorter wait for the next one). I have some stage fright, of course. I put everything I could into it, just about everything I know about writing suspenseful tales… but inevitably I can’t help worrying that I’ll fall over my own feet and face-plant. Still, the early word has been good. We are now up to five starred early reviews, which pretty well runs the table (no link for the starred Booklist review, I’m afraid). King Sorrow was also selected by LibraryReads as one of their October book picks. We had some more new blurbs (Tananarive Due! Alan Moore! Willy Vlautin!!) but I’ll leave ‘em for the dust jacket. I’m hopeful my big scaly beast of a book will land well with readers.

And when the book drops, I’ll be out on the road for a month-plus to support it. I’ve recently updated my joehillfiction domain to include an Appearances tab, which you can check anytime to see where I’ll be next. It’s mostly up-to-date—I still need to add the Canadian dates and there are two more British events to come.

If, however, you can’t bear to click out of this newsletter, I’ve also got some handsome tour cards listing my stops for you, right here:

US

UK

CANADA

Can’t make one of these events? You can still get a signed book. In the U.S. B-A-M has ‘em; so does B&N. U.K. buyers can lock down an autographed copy from Waterstones, and indie Sevenoaks Bookshop is offering a limited number of signed and personalized copies, and they ship throughout the Kingdom.

Sink Your Teeth In

In just a couple weeks, Vintage Books in the U.S. and Hodder in the U.K. are out with the 50th Anniversary of my dad’s vampire classic, “‘Salem’s Lot”. I was grateful to be asked to provide the book with a new introduction… and now that intro is out in a lightly trimmed down form in the New York Times Book Review. Hope you dig it.

Remembering Peter

I talked to Peter Straub for about an hour, maybe nine months before he died, and every time I think about it, it makes me feel good—I only wish there had been more, that we had hung more and talked more. Not to belabor the obvious but… Peter told great stories. And not just on the page. We talked about old paperbacks, and old vinyl, and England in the 1970s (where my dad and Peter became friends), and what my sister and I were like as kids. He dealt insights with the ease of a close-work magician dealing cards. The quality of his mind was extraordinary. He didn’t show off in conversations, but there was just no missing it, that vividness of thought.

He was a brilliant writer and a helluva lovely man and some writers are getting together for an almost-Halloween celebration of his life and work. I’m sorry I can’t be there but Kelly Link, Nat Cassidy, Dan Chaon, and Emma Straub will be.

You can snag tickets to see it live in Brooklyn on October 27th (7 - 8PM) or watch the livestream for free. All the info is right here.

The Murder-Colored Typewriter And His Friends

It’s no secret to regular readers of Escape Hatch that I’m in some kind of managed retreat from the 21st Century. I try to keep the median temperature in my office set to about 1976. I mostly skip streaming my music and opt for vinyl. I don’t bring the cell phone in the office, if I can help it. And I wrote all of The Fireman longhand in a bunch of massive ledgers.

But I don’t know if I can work that way and get a novel done every year. So, just in the last couple months, I’ve shifted over to writing my first drafts on the typewriter instead of the computer. It’s the happy spot halfway between scrawling a story on parchment with a raven’s feather and using some bloated piece of word processing software.

If you even want to call working on the typewriter “writing” at all. In the time since I’ve shifted over, I’ve hardly felt like I was writing at all. It’s more like driving nails—or squeezing the trigger on a nail-gun. The steel keys on my Olivetti go chomp-chomp-chomp and eat up the page and a while later I’ve got another 1600 words. No going back to fix things. No second thoughts.

I’ve got a whole stack of functioning typewriters, and I thought I’d rotate them between pieces, see how it goes. I’ve got a frail Selectric III (with a fancy-pants innovation: Correct-Tape!), a robust olive-colored Selectric II, and the one I’m using currently, my blood-red Olivetti, a 60-year-old manual. So far it seems like there might still be some good words left in this antique. Whether I refer here to the machine or the man sitting behind it, I leave you to decide.

Parting Shots

The Stack:

Look what I found at Big Dig Records in Cambridge, where I spent way too much money—it was like Aladdin’s Cave in there. (This will make more sense to people who read the last issue of Escape Hatch):

Thirsty? Help yourself to a cold one—REAL cold…

Which reminds me, “King Sorrow” isn’t the only thing out next month… The Black Phone 2 hits just a couple days before the book lands and has a nerve-shredding new trailer. It had a preview showing at Fantastic Fest in Austin and the first reviews are gold.

And with that, Substack says I’m close to the acceptable limit for emails, so I’m outta here. Next Escape Hatch opens its rusty steel door in about four weeks and I hope you’re there for it. There’ll be lots to talk about. — Joe Hill, Exeter, NH, September, 2025