One of the pleasures of writing historical fiction is the chance to deploy a delicious forgotten word. You wanna be careful not to do too much of that kind of thing, or you’ll lose your reader—they’ll despair in the face of all the antique language and put the story down. But a little bit, sprinkled here and there, can provide just the right seasoning for a story set well beyond living memory. I dropped a great one into the next novel, Hunger: “gallimaufry,” a word for a stew made out of whatever you had lying around the pantry, a hodgepodge of random pearl onions, cabbage, and those last bits of lamb on the bone.
Speaking of Hunger, I’m whittling away at the fourth draft now, and we’re trundling ever-so-slowly through the publishing pipeline toward a 2027 release. We’ll get on that book-a-year schedule soon, I hope. The whole machinery of mainstream publishing has slowed down over the last decade, and if you aren’t already a book-a-year author, shifting to that kind of schedule takes a bit of managing. I don’t have much of anything coming out in the immediate future beyond a short story in Sherlock, out this November…
… though that ain’t exactly nothing. Quick little aside about “An Exercise in Murder,” my contribution to the Sherlock anthology. I was asked if I might want to write a story for them about 18 months ago and leapt at the chance. Because as it happened, I already had the whole story worked out on an index card in this little packet of undeveloped ideas I keep. The concept came to me all the way back in 2020, around the time I reread the first dozen or so Holmes and Watson mysteries. I remember thinking, as I made notes on it, that someday someone was going to ask me for a Sherlock Holmes story, and that when they did I’d be ready to go. And I was. I feel pretty good about this one.
With nothing much to promote and nothing much going on, the following newsletter is a bit of a late summer gallimaufry. Hope it makes a decent meal.
DETAIL OF A PHOTO BY NAILA RACHEL FOR THE NYTIMES
I was invited by The New York Times to fill out a ballot listing the ten most thrilling books of the 21st Century for this list of the 50 Best Thrillers of the last 25-odd years. Check it out if you’re looking for a page-turner. There’s a lot here to love.
In the end, I did contribute a ballot of my own… but I almost didn’t, and I didn’t make my ballot public, because I wasn’t quite happy with my own picks. I wanted someone at the NYTimes Book Review to tell me how they define a thriller before I started voting. I mean… someone’s gotta help me out here. Is The Martian a thriller? I thought it was pretty thrilling! But do we have to rule it out because, first and foremost, it’s a work of hard sci-fi? Is The Orphan Master’s Son a thriller—it features lots of action and espionage—or is it basically a political novel that uses surrealism and satire to examine modern North Korea? Do we allow works that include a supernatural element--consider The Shining Girls by Lauren Buekes--or does the supernatural element automatically shift a novel into a different genre bucket? "Thriller" is a genre, yes? Not just a feeling?
And if you say, yes, all of the above books qualify as thrillers... aren't we just redoing our list about the best novels of the 21st century? Because by their very nature, every really good book is thrilling in one way or another. Great novels are always fundamentally about peril. We know The Bourne Identity is a thriller because it's full of scenes of intense physical peril. But Atonement is (to my mind) the far more thrilling work, although the peril is entirely romantic and sexual. Small Things Like These is thrilling too... although the peril is social and spiritual. No peril, no story.
Yet… that’s obviously unsatisfying as well. "It made me happy to read this book," can't be the definition of a thriller--it's too broad! Isn't it? "I couldn't put it down"--that's not the definition of a thriller either. That describes love, not a genre. We can't say something is a thriller just because it thrills the heart to turn the pages, right? This is literally the definition of any book that speaks to us. Where’s the border line? Cause, man, I don’t know.
Do you? Go ahead and tell me all about it, I always read the comments.
PHOTOGRAPH BY CYRIL ZANNETTACCI FOR ROLLING STONE
Good piece here in Rolling Stone magazine about the legend, John Carpenter, and his second career as a songwriter and performing musician. He’s also just out with a new graphic novel, Cathedral (and an accompanying soundtrack—think of it as a 100 million dollar horror film on paper). Carpenter is famously gruff—he’s as laconic as Clint Eastwood’s man-with-no-name—but RS got him to talk about the red legacy he’s stamped on horror.
Anyway, they asked me for a comment on his work and I gave ‘em one and also mentioned something I’ve never talked about, which is that in my mind Heart-Shaped Box was always a John Carpenter film, with Kurt Russell in the lead as Judas Coyne. I grew up on Carpenter pictures and just naturally saw the story through the lens of his work and style. Hey, John, Warner Brothers has the rights and they’re just sitting on it—let ‘em know if you wanna do it!
Do you have a favorite Carpenter film and if it isn’t The Thing, how do you feel about being wrong? Let me know in the comments. Or share this newsletter on social media and let’s stir some shit.
Speaking of legends, I had a chance to interview Frank Miller late last month at the Royal Geographic Society in Kensington (pretty funny, me doing a talk at the Royal Geographic Society, considering my mother once told me I couldn’t find my own ass with two hands and a flashlight).
It was one of the best onstage events I’ve ever done with another writer: Frank was at his spiky, challenging, no-bullshit best. At one point, I asked him what was more important, “talent or endurance?” He replied, “what’s more important, the steering wheel or the transmission?”
He’s out now with another great goddamn book, Push The Wall, in which he looks back on his life in comics and film. It’s fascinating to read about the big breakthroughs (Daredevil: Born Again, The Dark Knight Returns, Sin City) but for my money it was even more interesting to hear him talk about the occasional creative disasters. In Push The Wall, Frank takes an attitude towards his misses that a lot of creative people could learn from. He doesn’t make excuses, doesn’t try and wriggle off the hook—he responds to almost every misstep by owning it completely and then investigating it with perfect curiosity. No whining, only fascination and a readiness to learn.
If you’re interested in what it takes to live the creative life to the fullest, Push The Wall has got you covered. And you can get even more hetted up for it by reading this excellent interview Frank did with the Hollywood Reporter the other day.
PHOTOGRAPH BY DIMITRI A MOTTL FOR WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
After talking about it for decades, I’m off this October to the former Soviet Bloc, to whip through Eastern Europe for a week-long book tour. It’s overdue—I have not forgotten a whole busload of readers came all the way from Poland to Berlin to see me on the Heart-Shaped Box tour, all of them wearing fan-made Heart-Shaped Box tee-shirts. Readers from Hungary and the Czech Republic routinely show up at my signings in Forbidden Planet London. That’s a long way to travel to see little ole me and it’s time to return the favor.
The details of the tour are still being fleshed out but I can share some preliminaries.
I’ll kick things off in that famous capital of Eastern Europe, London, on October 19th. While details are yet to come, I’ll be in conversation with a favorite writer of mine who also has a paperback out around the same time.
I’ll be in Warsaw on October 21st—more deets soon.
On October 22nd I’ll be in Krakow for the Krakow Book Festival.
Then, on the 23rd, I’m in Munich for the Hugendubel Bookstock Festival.
I’m off to Berlin for an event at the Otherland Bookstore on the 24th, and then—
—on the 25th I’ll be sharing the stage with my pal Thomas Olde Heuvelt at the Mord am Hellweg Crime Festival in Gelsenkirchen.
Thomas and I don’t get a break from each other: we’re be in conversation again the following night in Cologne as part of the Lit.Cologne Special.
(I see almost the entire German leg is detailed here on a German Stephen King fan site)
It’s Prague next for an evening event at the Edison Club Kino. We’re going to make the most of it when I’m in Prague on October 27th—the Edison Club Kino event is only a small part of a pretty busy day of meeting readers and doing promotion.
And the tour winds up in Budapest on the 28th and 29th with some events yet to be determined. With luck I’ll be back home in New Hampshire for the happiest night of the year, Halloween.
It really will be such a pleasure to say hello and thanks to my Eastern European readers, and tour a part of the world I’ve often wanted to see and never had a chance to visit. Catch you there.
Finally, for the next three days, Skelton Crew is running a Beach Read Blowout Sale on a whole heap of signed goodies and rarities, with all of my profits going to the Redfearn-Hill Charity Fund. From the 14th to the 16th, it’s 60% off on ALL signed books, comics, posters and broadsides… straight from my library to yours.
At the time of this writing, they’ve still got four signed, theatrical release Black Phone posters. They got most of the English-language titles, from Heart-Shaped Box to Strange Weather, and international editions galore: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Slovak, Swedish and Turkish. Did I mention comics? Rain, Locke & Key, The Cape, Thumbprint, Daphne Byrne… there’s a lot to pick from.
(And stay tuned for more to come—there’ll be at least 20 signed copies of the first issue of Plunge by late September)
Get yourself fixed up and remember that your money ultimately winds up in the hands of outfits like the HAVEN shelter for folks fleeing domestic violence, the Crossroads Shelter in Portsmouth, NH, for the homeless, and SELT, the Southeastern Land Trust which has worked tirelessly to protect green spaces and family farms in NH. I appreciate it and they do too.
Pretty big dish of gallimaufry, huh?
Not much else to say. I’m in Sevenoaks, Kent, aka the surface of the fucking sun; my wife and I spend our summers over here in the UK and this August it’s meltingly, sadistically hot. When I’m not cracking away at Hunger, I’m revising a screenplay—an adaptation and not of my own work. Not sure when you’ll be hearing the details on that. Oh, and I read a helluva great novel, maybe my favorite thing I’ve read all year, the ultra-vivid, gorgeously written, shamelessly tabloid-y A Violent Masterpiece by Jordan Harper. I already know I’m going to read it again. In fact, why don’t we close out with a quote from that one:
“We are America dreaming itself. We’re a fractal of fortunes and crimes, fortunes and crimes. We’re cars and guns and land grabs and tacos, money and movies and big tits and death, all served under a dirty sky—please rise for our national anthem, am I right?”
He’s right.
Catch you in September.
Joe Hill/14 August 2026
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