Issue 73 • Fall In Love (Again)

Rodriguez slays; who's laughing now?; some upcoming appearances; you gotta love it

Happy world-ending-blizzard day to all who celebrate. Just remember, if a lady goes by on a sled pulled by wolves, don’t take any Turkish Delight from her, that stuff is super disappointing. Here’s a new issue of Escape Hatch for you.

The Savage Pencil of Rodriguez

By Crom! Get a load of this!

Around the time I graduated high school, my brother and I had assembled a comic book collection that occupied eight long boxes. I matriculated from college five years later, with a degree in English and a minor in Swamp Thing. It was 1995 and the collection had doubled in size. Like a lot of collectors, though, Owen and I were highly particular about what went in—and what never would. We both of us far preferred tales of the uncanny over the more conventional superhero stuff. When we did go for superhero tales, it tended to be stuff like Daredevil: Born Again or Batman: Year One, comics that had more in common with Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder crime novels than Superman. (I don’t think it’s a coincidence those two titles were both written by the Spillane/Hammett acolyte Frank Miller)

With that in mind, you won’t be surprised to hear that Conan the Barbarian was an absolute favorite: to this day we have the first hundred issues in the box. Although I liked the black-and-white magazine size Conan even better, because they were permitted to be so much gorier. Plus sometimes there were bare boobies.

I can’t tell you how much it delights and thrills me that my Locke & Key hermano Gabriel Rodriguez brought the best pencils in comics to Titan’s new Conan title… working from Locke & Key editor Chris Ryall’s masterful, epic, 48-page script. Fans of brawny fantasy gotta have it, while Locke & Key fans can’t afford to miss it. For me the writing-artist team of Roy Thomas and John Buscema defined the classic Conan tales; Chris Ryall is the Roy Thomas of this century, and Gabe has always has been an artist of the Buscema school. Go get it—it’s available now. This is the kind of thing that reminds a comic fan of why they read these things in the first place.

Comic Relief

Here’s a look at the opening of a three-part interview I did with Glen Cadigan for Comic Book Creator, where I talked about my life in the funny book field. Comic Book Creator is pretttty niche and can be a little tricky to find (it is, to comics, roughly what Locus is to SF&F, and if you understand that reference, congrats, now you know what I mean when I say this is niche). If you’re interested, though, hit your local comic store and order a copy, they’ll get you one. I believe the cut off order date is March 4th.

Fresh Meat

Generally when there’s not a new book to sell, it’s best to lie low and keep toiling away at the next one. I tend to absent myself from personal appearances as much as I can between releases.

That said, I’m showing my face to the public a couple of times this March.

One of the very best books I read in 2025 was Christopher Buehlman’s Between Two Fires, an epic fantasy about a fallen knight hacking his way across a demon-infested Europe in the latter days of the black plague. It’s a novel in the form of several timeless weird tales, written with beauty and wit, and I was beyond honored when I was asked if I’d write an introduction for its (re)publication¹. Chris and I are going to have a chance to sit down and talk about this book when he visits The Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline, at an event hosted by Brookline Booksmith. I gotta laugh about that—this is also where I did my last event. We tied up the King Sorrow tour at the Coolidge Corner Theater. Chris is signing after, I am not (this event is about his work, not mine). I hope to see you there.

And then: I always love dropping into the Barnes & Noble Union Square in NYC and couldn’t say no when they asked me to join the B&N Union Square Book Festival on March 21st. I’ll be sitting in on the “Fresh Meat” panel, investigating the state of horror fiction here in the 2020s, and in conversation with fright freaks Olivie Blake, Clay McLeod, M.L. Rio, and moderator Andrew Joseph White. I’ll be signing along with the rest of the gang after the panel. Should be a lot of fun. Get your tix here.

This Essay Doesn’t Myth

We’re hopelessly metaphorical creatures, who find meaning by tying together patterns of resemblance that might as well be spells. That knows there are some struggles where the stakes really are overwhelming, and good and evil in something like their pure forms really do pivot on human choices.

Good piece in The Guardian by Francis Spufford, in which he explains why we need that thing with the dragons. His new novel, Nonesuch, is out momentarily, and is an absolute marvel. You’re going to be seeing it on a lot of 2026 best-of lists.

Fall in Love (Again)

The children brought home the stomach bug that was going around the school and shared it with me in much the same way they share their construction paper artwork and coloring pages. It only grazed them, but it walloped me and laid me low for most of a week—an amazing thing all on its own. First time in my life I’ve ever had a stomach bug that lasted longer than 72 hours.

Finally, I was well enough to creep back to work. I picked up where I left off in the fifth revision of this screenplay that’s been part of my life for over a year. I was down to the last 20% but found the material wooden and lifeless. Imagine the worst small town community play you’ve ever sat through. One actress keeps forgetting her lines and blinking back tears of embarrassment. Another actor appears to have misplaced his hearing aid and shouts out every line of dialogue so he can be heard in the street. Now and then the backdrop falls over to reveal the ropes, ladders, fuse boxes, and a member of the crew sipping from a Styrofoam cup of coffee. The whole script all seemed bewilderingly ruined.

I have been here before and the only thing I could think to do was to try and fall in love again. I went back to the beginning and began to read… but really I began to search: for happiness, for moments that made me love my characters again and love the situation in which they found themselves. I turned off the red light, flashing in the back of mind, warning that the deadline was coming up fast. It only took an hour to remember how much I liked the story all along, and in the course of making little edits, and zipping through all those early scenes, I suddenly knew how to bring the final act back to life.

I’m talking about writing but really it seems to me this is a line of thought that’s helpful whenever you’re stuck. I’m not sure it’s useful advice, though, because there’s nothing intellectual about it, no strategy to follow here, no bullet points to implement. It’s not a thing you can think through, it’s a thing you have to feel, and I’m not sure our emotions take advice. Yours may not. Sometimes mine seem to, but I think ten years ago (before I got together with Gillian… hmm…) I would’ve been immune to this notion.

In the last few years, I have found when I’m frustrated and irritable, when I feel like lashing out, the best thing I can do for myself is fall in love again. I had it the other night. One of the twins was awake, crying and miserable, because he needed a bandaid for his foot. I was tired, just beginning to recover from that norovirus, and wanted more than anything to be back to sleep. But I wasn’t curt; I didn’t snap. I tried to fall in love and found I could—it was easy. The poor little fellow sticking out his pink, undamaged foot and having a pitiful little wail, how could you not be in love? I got him a Paw Patrol band-aid and we stuck it on the injury he apparently suffered in a dream and then I sat on the floor by his bed and held his hand until he fell asleep. And instead of feeling angry about being awake in the middle of the night, I felt—I dunno—like I lucked into this lovely little pocket in time. All I had to do was notice it.

When I’m angry about what I see on the internet, I tell myself to stop and look around and find what’s beautiful. The way steam curls from a fresh cup of tea. The way the light looks in the snowy branches outside. If Gillian and I are in a difficult moment, I find it very easy to look at her, to listen to her, and be in love again: with her deep well of feeling, with the way she faces down problems, with the way she looks after others. We were a week without water, melting snow to flush the toilets (hey, another glamorous chapter in the life of the big-shot writer). You can resent that kind of situation or you can fall in love with the adventure of it—a week of Little House on the Prairie. My wife and I were laughing our asses off while we threw shovelful after shovelful of snow into the bathtub.

Some stuff just sucks. Gillian had cancer. If they were another year finding it, she might be dead now. Losing someone you love—your mom, your best friend, an old teacher—is wrenching and painful. Many current world events are genuinely stressful to read about! I’m not arguing for the power of positive thinking, a philosophy I regard as inept at best, morally repugnant at worst. Nor am I suggesting you should just cheer the hell up when you’re feeling like the world has kicked you in the stomach. This is—what do the meditation people say?—something like a practice, a thing you can try out when you’re feeling stuck somehow. And as is the way with anything a person practices regularly, you can get the hang of it after a while. It’s not just a more contented way to absorb a setback or address a challenge; it’s a lot more effective than kicking a chair. Easier on your toes too.

Let Me Up, I’ve Had Enough

I’m all blabbed out. Mostly all blabbed out. Okay, here are my early 2026 recommendations:

The Show: Knight of The Seven Kingdoms

The Book: Richard Morgan’s upcoming No Man’s Land

The Film: Weapons, which was so brilliant it made me kind of hate my own work a little

The Album: Prizefighter - Mumford & Sons

I’ve got the next novel on line two, calling to tell me it’s time to stop screwing around with my newsletter and get back to work. We’ve come through most of a pitiless February with our morale intact… I hope you’re hanging in there too and you’ve got a good book to escape from the grim prison of the moment. Everyone needs an Escape Hatch. It’s worth remembering Tolkien’s sentiment, that the only people who inveigh against escape are jailers. Be well and I’ll be crowding into your in-box at some point in March.

Joe Hill, Exeter, NH, 23 February 2026

1. Quick explainer: Between Two Fires was first published over a decade ago and did… fine. Some nice reviews, some decent sales. Then it dropped out of sight and eventually its publisher let the rights revert to Chris Buehlman, who did his own self-pub edition. Fast-forward to mid-2024 and BookTok discovered Between Two Fires, and suddenly the thing blew up—that’s when it became clear this was not just a good novel, but a great one. At that point a new mainstream publication became pretty much inevitable. It’s fun when something like that happens, y’know?