Book Release Day!

THE STARS DID WANDER DARKLING is out & loitering on bookstore shelves near you

Beloved Machinists,

This thing, this book, this middle grade horror book that I’ve been planning and piecing together and writing and rewriting and editing and copyediting for the last three years is now a physical thing that you can hold in your hand. It’s gone beyond me; it’s achieved liftoff. It is a book. An honest to God physical book that can be purchased at bookstores and checked out from libraries.

In ways perhaps my other books have not been, this one is a love letter to my own childhood, to my childhood self who loved to be scared, who loved to be lost in a book that kept me in its clutches long after I’d put it down. It’s a love letter to the Oregon Coast, this adopted home of mine, and the spell that this mysterious and wild landscape had on my budding imagination as a kid. It’s about four kids, four industrious tweenagers, embarking on their last summer before their first year of high school begins, still straddling that distance between childhood and adulthood, when magic is still very much on the table. It’s about cosmic forces of evil and good, coming together to tussle over a long-buried thing. It’s about the changes that evil can wreak on a community, even if it’s buried.

But mostly it’s meant to be scary. My greatest hope is that a kid will pick it up, will be handed it by a well-meaning librarian or bookseller, and it will disrupt their sleep and give them unquiet dreams. And then they will finish it and will mull it as long as they need before handing the book to another kid. “Read this,” they’ll say, “It’ll scare you.”

In any case, it’s out there, it’s in the world. Go get a copy. Preferably from your local neighborhood indie bookstore, but, y’know, find your way. And come out to one of the launch events, should you be nearby:

Powell’s Books, Beaverton, OR – 9/13, 6 PM PT
https://bit.ly/3Q9nrUC

Copperfield’s Books, Petaluma, CA – 9/14, 7 PM PT
https://bit.ly/3KxOc42

Little Shop of Stories, Decatur, GA – 9/18, 3 PM ET
https://bit.ly/3q0zk4y

Books Are Magic, Brooklyn, NY – 9/19, 7 PM ET
https://bit.ly/3KymaFB

Brookline Booksmith, Brookline, MA – 9/20, 6 PM ET
https://bit.ly/3B1hTak

Also, this is a thing I didn’t know you could do: SHARE! If you wouldn’t mind hitting this button and sharing this post with a friend or a coworker or a loved one or whoever, that’d be fantastic: