Miner Threat
a cover reveal + preorders are now open for The Barre Incidents!
I’m excited to be working with Malarkey again. I feel like a broken record when I say I really enjoy working with Alan, but it’s true. So that’s why I say it. He’s a very chill person. He’s a pro in the sense that he’s incredibly good at this, but he also invites input, trusts people’s vision, and makes his books great, inside and out.
The reason I’m here saying this is: My next book, The Barre Incidents, is up for preorder through Malarkey Books starting today, and we are dropping the cover (done by the amazing Matthew Revert). Right. Now!
It’s not fun to say “I got the idea for my next book when I was online looking for ideas for a book.” But that’s how The Barre Incidents came to me. I found a world-famous granite quarry that supplies the monuments for a world-famous cemetery, and they’re just down the road from each other.
The quarry workers and artisans who carved the monuments would commission or carve their own monument ahead of time, and most of them ended up down the road in that cemetery when they left us. Each individual person’s feelings about death had to have all kinds of shapes and colors, but all the same, they had that solid eternal goal in common.
So, what’s the (speculative) Horror angle?
The Barre Incidents asks the question: What if the granite was magic, and the dead miners woke up and went back to work? And what if an impossibly old creature from a realm deep in the earth knew about this and decided to cash in on that free labor?
This book channels some of my favorite stuff: The book The Mothman Prophecies by John Keel (one of the most terrifying books I’ve read), the songs “Zombie Queen” and “Darkness at the Heart of my Love” by the band Ghost, and the Barney Hill UFO story.
This book’s origin story may not have been a firecrackers-everywhere crowd-pleaser, but it was endlessly fun to write. I loved spending time with Kara Lenker and watching her become more and more real. If you liked the main character in Fleabag, you might like Kara. If you like Cosmic Horror with slow-burn Romance and Dark Fantasy, you might like The Barre Incidents. If you also like towns full of weird happenings like Point Pleasant, West Virginia, then you might like The Barre Incidents.