Two Cryptids for the Price of One
Hello!
I’m excited to let you know that the comic with my short story “The Demon in the Pines,” illustrated by the amazing Peter Krause, will be published this November, in the third issue of the Project: Cryptid miniseries. Here’s the solicitation copy from my beloved publishers at AHOY Comics:
PROJECT CRYPTID #3 (OF 6) (MR)
SEP231347
(W) Bryce Ingman, Paul Constant (A/CA) Peter Krause
What lurks in the dark recesses of the Pacific Northwest? Bryce Ingman (the Ringo-nominated My Bad) brings us the Loveland Frogman, who is ready and willing to help when he can. Paul Constant (Snelson, Planet of the Nerds) brings us the Gumerboo, who is willing to help in a very different kind of way. Both stories are beautifully illustrated by Peter Krause (also My Bad). Variant cover by Mattie Lubchansky (The Nib, Boys Weekend).
In Shops: Nov 15, 2023
SRP: $3.99
The book will be published with two different covers, both of which you can see in the gallery below:
So if you’d like a physical copy of this comic, I suggest going to your local comic book shop in the next couple of weeks and saying “Hi, I’d like to reserve a copy of Project: Cryptid #3 from Ahoy Comics, please.” They’ll take care of the rest, and the book will be there waiting for you on November 15th. You can also buy single digital issues on the amazing app Omnibus, which is an independently owned digital comic shop that I’ve been enjoying lately.
I’ve Been Writing
For the Seattle Times, I interviewed the authors of a new book called This Is Wildfire. It explores the history of wildfires and wildfire prevention, and offers lots of policy and personal solutions for managing wildfires in the future. We’ve had some wildfire smoke here in Seattle recently, and this book was a great resource for helping me stay sane during that time.
A year ago, two longtime friends decided to open a bookstore in Bothell as their grand retirement project. At Wanderlust Book Lounge, they’ve been learning ever since. This was a delightful piece to research and do interviews for, and I especially loved hearing that to celebrate their first full year of hosting mystery and sci-fi book clubs, the two book clubs will be joining together into one super book-group to discuss a sci-fi thriller.
I’ve Been Reading
It seems like a lot of new novels that I’ve read lately have followed a similar structure: They’re broken up into three or four linked novella-length stories, often told from different perspectives and taking place across different time periods than the other stories in the book. I can understand the appeal of this trend—it allows you to obtain a larger view of a narrative—but it also stops a story’s momentum dead and requires the reader to get interested in a new story all over again. I wish these books were marketed as “linked novellas,” because they sure don’t read like novels and I’m starting to resent the bait-and-switch of it all. This month, I encountered two examples of this trend: Lucky Dogs, Helen Schulman’s #metoo novel, and Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle followup, Crook Manifesto. Of the two, Whitehead’s collection of novellas feels more thematically and narratively satisfying. But both times, I felt a little bummed out that the novel I was reading turned out to be something different than advertised.
Seattle author Nisi Shawl’s middle-grade novel Speculation is about a Black girl who finds a magical pair of glasses that allows her to see ghosts. Those ghosts reveal her family history of slavery, sacrifice, and a generational curse. This is a fantastic book that teaches children about some heavy subjects in an accessible, not-too-scary way.
I encountered Vincent LoBrutto’s biography of Stanley Kubrick in a used bookstore and decided to indulge my early-20s obsession with the director. As a biography, Stanley Kubrick isn’t that satisfying. It starts out with an account of Kubrick’s life and his beginnings as an artist, but once he begins making movies, his personal life is more or less set aside and the book just becomes a series of long chapters describing the making of each of his films. It would be more appropriately titled Kubrick: A Filmography. Plus, the copy I bought was published just before Kubrick began work on his final film, Eyes Wide Shut, so it’s frustratingly incomplete—but that’s part of the risk of buying used books, right?
Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring is very much a debut novel—it’s a little too ambitious and doesn’t quite earn all that confidence. This is dystopian fiction about wealth inequality and what we lose when we give up our faith and our stories, and it’s easy to understand how this book immediately launched Hopkinson’s career into the sci-fi stratosphere.
Box Brown’s The He-Man Effect is a non-fiction polemic about the loosening of regulations that allowed toymakers to market their products directly to kids in the 1980s, in the form of popular TV cartoons. Brown’s take is a hot one—he argues that toy companies essentially colonized the imagination of a whole generation of American kids, stunting our creativity. By the end of the book, I kind of got on board with his claims.
Kate Flannery’s memoir Strip Tees is about her time working at American Apparel in the porn-chic early 2000s. It’s an interesting time capsule of a deeply problematic period, when Vice magazine and American Apparel CEO Dov Charney seemed to be successfully combating years of feminist progress. The book essentially follows the same structure as any cult survivor’s memoir, and it’s pretty predictable—but it’s an interesting look back at a time that now feels like ancient history, and the ending of this one was absolutely brilliant.
There’s a line from Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones that has haunted me since I read the book the year it was published. I can’t seem to find the exact quote now that Google has officially stopped trying to be a useful search engine, but the gist is this: The narrator, who is dead and in heaven, talks about things on earth that don’t matter. She mentions offhandedly that when you have a full view of eternity, it turns out that reading books isn’t nearly as important as we think it is while we’re living. That is a line that shook me to my core, because books are an essential part of my existence. What if I’m dragging my eyes over ink on wood pulp for nothing? This anti-book thinking is kind of the thesis statement of Patrick DeWitt’s new novel, The Librarianist. The protagonist of the book is a retired librarian in Portland, Oregon who has dedicated his life to books and reading. And at the beginning of the book, it seems increasingly obvious that all his devotion has amounted to nothing. Nobody cares about literature, and books haven’t made him into a better human being. All those decades of reading haven’t done much of anything to help him, or anyone else. As a young bookseller, being introduced to that idea in The Lovely Bones was horrifying. As a middle-aged man who’s worked in and around books for decades, I felt ready to explore the idea a little more, and DeWitt’s novel was the perfect vehicle for that exploration.
Seattle-Area People Are Making Literature
I got a few responses to my last email’s fretting over the lack of young upstarts in Seattle’s literary scene, and so I thought I’d share them with the rest of the class:
Philip recommended Asterism, which is a Seattle-located “online bookstore and wholesale portal designed, built, and run by independent publishers.” It looks like an interesting small-press answer to Bookshop.org, and you’re someone who likes to seek out independent and small press titles, you might want to give it a whirl.
Demersal Publishing is a local “short-run paperback publishing house specializing in literary fiction” that just published their first book—poet Robert Lashley’s debut novel, I Never Dreamed You’d Leave in Summer. Robert is one of my all-time favorite Washington poets—he’s got a newsletter of his own, too—and I’m really excited to dig into this novel.
One publisher that I forgot to mention last time but should have is The 3rd Thing, a new-ish poetry publisher out of Olympia that is bringing new and exciting poetry into bookstores.
And Bryan wrote, “I co-produce and co-host the Foolish Oracle Variety show at Bulldog News, a kind of arts/news variety show. Myself and some other involved are from the literary and/or theater community. We are the first Saturday of the Month, and we're a morning show, starting at 11 am!” He also notes “The Unpoetry Series is also at Bulldog, 2nd Sat of the month. Eric Acosta runs that, it's at night and skews younger, in terms of who's involved (from what I've seen).”
So there you go: People are making things and sending them out into the world. I’ll keep my ear to the ground and I’ll share what I find in future editions here, as well.
The Boys of Summer
Some of you exclusively come back here very month to see photos of my greyhounds, so here’s what you’ve been clamoring for:
No human I know loves summer as much as these two love summer. Which I guess makes sense, considering that they’re short haired, skinny greyhounds that raced in Florida before they retired and moved to Seattle. Obie (in the bee kerchief) is a big fan of long summer walks before the day gets too hot, and Wally (in the green floral print) likes to go outside and lie in the sun multiple times a day. They don’t know that fall is coming, and I just don’t have the heart to tell them.
This has been a long one—I hope I didn’t test your patience, and that you’re enjoying the summer with all the gusto of a retired racing greyhound.
See you next month,
Paul