My novel The Medusa Deep, sequel to The Midnight Games, is still scheduled for this fall – I’ve got my fingers crossed that Wolsak & Wynn will be able to issue it then! Like everything else, publishing has been slowed to a crawl by COVID-19 / aka the coronavirus. Since books seem to be all about text (they aren’t really), you might think publishing would be relatively immune, but books are really about bookstores, readings and launches, browsing shelves and listening to word-of-mouth, about holding an object in your hand that came to you from other persons that you talked to and interacted with, so the book trade has been hit hard.
The Medusa Deep, in continuing the story, transports the imaginative world of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Cthulhu Mythos” to present-day Hamilton, Ontario (this time, Nate also goes to the BC coast, and points beyond). It is also about an individual confronting not only the alien and strange, but the terrible power of crowds and misplaced faith, and the ways in which the need to survive becomes the need for power, and then somehow that need changes character, changes shape, and becomes something terribly evil. With this in mind, writing in this particular place and time, it is hard to create fiction that keeps pace with actual events.
Chainsaws: A History just came out in paperback, and Harbour was able to get me on the Hamilton TV station CHCH on March 11, just before everything really started to lock down (in the video I announce a signing at Epic Books, for example, that didn’t happen and may never happen). For my own reading, I am ordering a few books from my local indie booksellers, but as long as social movement is stopped, publishing is stopped too!
I’ve got to thank Harbour Publishing for the new edition, and for taking on Chainsaws in the first place. Harbour is also now distributing my novel Commander Zero, since its original publisher has ceased operations. For technical reasons they can’t include it in their catalogue, but if you contact them, they can provide the book!
