SATA

• You Can Do It, Magic Skeleton!: Monster Motivations to Move Your Butt and Get You to Do the Thing Universe (New York, NY), 2021
• Dust & Grim Little, Brown and Company (New York, NY), 2021
• Wanderers: A Novel Del Rey (New York, Ny), 2019
• The Book of Accidents: A Novel Del Rey (New York, NY), 2021
• Wayward Del Rey Books (New York, NY), 2022
• Vultures SAGA Press (New York, NY), 2019
• Putting the Science in Fiction: Expert Advice for Writing with Authenticity in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Other Genres Writer's Digest Books (Cincinnati, OH), 2018

1. Wayward LCCN 2022006633 Type of material Book Personal name Wendig, Chuck, author. Main title Wayward / Chuck Wendig. Edition First Edition. Published/Produced New York : Del Rey Books, [2022] Projected pub date 2208 Description 1 online resource ISBN 9780593158784 (Ebook) (Hardback) Item not available at the Library. Why not? 2. Dust & Grim LCCN 2020053070 Type of material Book Personal name Wendig, Chuck, author. Main title Dust & Grim / Chuck Wendig ; illustrated by Jensine Eckwall. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Little, Brown and Company, 2021. Description 368 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm ISBN 9780316706230 (hardcover) (ebook) (ebook other) CALL NUMBER PZ7.W469133 Dus 2021 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 3. The book of accidents : a novel LCCN 2020044477 Type of material Book Personal name Wendig, Chuck, author. Main title The book of accidents : a novel / Chuck Wendig. Edition First Edition. Published/Produced New York : Del Rey, 2021. Projected pub date 2107 Description 1 online resource ISBN 9780399182143 (ebook) (hardcover) Item not available at the Library. Why not? 4. You can do it, magic skeleton! : monster motivations to move your butt and get you to do the thing LCCN 2020946448 Type of material Book Personal name Wendig, Chuck, author. Main title You can do it, magic skeleton! : monster motivations to move your butt and get you to do the thing / Chuck Wendig, Natalie Metzger. Edition 1st ed.. Published/Produced New York : Universe Publishing, 2021. Projected pub date 2103 Description pages cm ISBN 9780789337023 (hardcover) Item not available at the Library. Why not? 5. Wanderers : a novel LCCN 2019003080 Type of material Book Personal name Wendig, Chuck, author. Main title Wanderers : a novel / Chuck Wendig. Edition First Edition. Published/Produced New York : Del Rey, [2019] Description xii, 782 pages ; 25 cm ISBN 9780399182105 (Hardback) 9781984820792 (paperback international edition) (Ebook) CALL NUMBER PS3623.E534 W36 2019 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 6. Vultures LCCN 2018024534 Type of material Book Personal name Wendig, Chuck, author. Main title Vultures / Chuck Wendig. Edition First Saga Press hardcover edition. Published/Produced London ; New York : SAGA Press, 2019. Projected pub date 1901 Description 1 online resource. ISBN 9781481448796 () Item not available at the Library. Why not? 7. Putting the science in fiction : expert advice for writing with authenticity in science fiction, fantasy, & other genres LCCN 2020277044 Type of material Book Main title Putting the science in fiction : expert advice for writing with authenticity in science fiction, fantasy, & other genres / edited by Dan Koboldt ; foreword by Chuck Wendig ; [edited by Amy Jones]. Edition First edition. Published/Produced Cincinnati, Ohio : Writer's Digest Books, [2018] ©2018 Description vi, 265 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm ISBN 9781440353383 (paperback) 1440353387 (paperback) CALL NUMBER PN3377.5.S3 P88 2018 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Terribleminds - https://terribleminds.com/

  Chuck Wendig is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of Star Wars: Aftermath, as well as the Miriam Black thrillers, the Atlanta Burns books, Zer0es/Invasive, Wanderers, and the upcoming Book of Accidents (July 2021). He’s also worked in a variety of other formats, including comics, games, film, and television. A finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and the cowriter of the Emmy-nominated digital narrative Collapsus, he is also known for his books about writing. He lives in Pennsyltucky with his family. His agent is Stacia Decker, with Dunow, Carlson and Lerner.

  Terribleminds is his blog. Here he rambles on about writing, parenthood, food, pop culture, and other such shenanigans. It is NSFW and NSFL.

  Blog may contain affiliate links.

• Fantastic Fiction -

  Chuck Wendig

  Chuck Wendig is a novelist, screenwriter, and game designer. He's the author of BLACKBIRDS, DOUBLE DEAD and DINOCALYPSE NOW, and is co-writer of the short film PANDEMIC, the feature film HiM, and the Emmy-nominated digital narrative COLLAPSUS. He lives in Pennsylvania with wife, taco terrier, and tiny human.

  Genres: Urban Fantasy, Science Fiction, Young Adult Fantasy, Horror, Children's Fiction, Fantasy

  New Books
  October 2022
  (paperback)

  Dust & GrimNovember 2022
  (hardback)

  Wayward
  (Wanderers, book 2)
  Series
  Double Dead
  1. Double Dead (2011)
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  Miriam Black
  1. Blackbirds (2012)
  2. Mockingbird (2012)
  3. Cormorant (2013)
  4. Thunderbird (2017)
  5. The Raptor & the Wren (2018)
  6. Vultures (2019)
  thumbthumbthumbthumb
  thumbthumb

  Mookie Pearl
  1. The Blue Blazes (2013)
  2. The Hellsblood Bride (2015)
  3. Red Devils Rise (2015)
  thumbthumbno image available

  Heartland Trilogy
  1. Under the Empyrean Sky (2013)
  2. Blightborn (2014)
  3. The Harvest (2015)
  thumbthumbthumb

  Atlanta Burns
  1. Atlanta Burns (2015)
  2. The Hunt (2016)
  thumbthumb

  Zer0es
  1. Zer0es (2015)
  2. Invasive (2016)
  thumbthumb

  Wanderers
  1. Wanderers (2019)
  2. Wayward (2022)
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  Novels
  Zeroes (2016)
  The Book of Accidents (2021)
  Dust & Grim (2021)
  thumbthumbthumb

  Collections
  Irregular Creatures (2011)
  Three Slices (2015) (with Delilah S Dawson and Kevin Hearne)
  Death & Honey (2019) (with Lila Bowen and Kevin Hearne)
  thumbthumbthumb

  Graphic Novels
  Sorry, we're not listing graphic novels by this author

  Novellas
  The Wind Has Teeth Tonight (2014)
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  Series contributed to
  Dinocalypse
  1. Dinocalypse Now (2012)
  2. Beyond Dinocalypse (2013)
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  Spirit of the Century Presents
  1. Dinocalypse Now (2012)
  2. Beyond Dinocalypse (2013)
  thumbthumb

  Gods and Monsters
  1. Unclean Spirits (2013)
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  Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens
  1. Aftermath (2015)
  2. Aftermath: Life Debt (2016)
  3. Aftermath: Empire's End (2017)
  thumbthumbthumb

  Anthologies edited
  Don't Read This Book (2012)

• Shondaland - https://www.shondaland.com/inspire/books/a37070945/chuck-wendig-book-of-accidents/

  Chuck Wendig Finally Got to Write His Haunted-House Book
  Wendig talks to Shondaland about his novel “The Book of Accidents” and what he’s working on next.

  By Scott Neumyer
  JUL 20, 2021
  chuck wendigSHONDALAND/AMBER HAWKINS
  To say that New York Times and USA Today best-selling author Chuck Wendig is prolific would be a massive understatement. Since 2015 alone, Wendig has had more than 25 books published across various genres spanning fiction, nonfiction, young adult, sci-fi, comics, Star Wars, horror, and likely about 10 more areas that I’m missing here. Oh, and he has also consistently written lengthy posts on his blog Terribleminds for more than 20 years, dispensing writing advice to his ever-growing fan base. Lin-Manuel Miranda may have saddled Alexander Hamilton with the distinction of writing like he’s “running out of time,” but if there’s anyone doing the same in the present-day literary world, it’s Chuck Wendig. Not only does he write like he’s running out of time, but he’s often writing about characters who are running out of time. The man simply cannot be stopped, and his readers continue to devour his work like bloodthirsty vampires.

  I also grew up in a haunted house, and I’ve been wanting to tell that story for a long time too.

  Wendig’s latest stand-alone novel, The Book of Accidents, may be his very best yet. It is an admittedly personal story about a former Philadelphia police officer who moves with his family to rural Pennsylvania, where he must not only come to grips with living in his childhood home (where good memories are hard to come by), but also reckon with the specter — both literally and figuratively — of his dead father and withstand a barrage of various other spooky things swirling around him.

  The Book of Accidents is a big book that hits on so many aspects of the horror genre — there are touches of everything from the supernatural and gothic to the slasher and serial-killer subgenres — but does so in a way that never feels clunky or overwrought. Instead, Wendig is at the top of his game, weaving strikingly taut prose into a well-constructed narrative that will feel right at home to longtime horror fans. With echoes of the legendary Shirley Jackson and Stephen King’s early work, The Book of Accidents is not only the best horror novel of 2021 so far, but it is also easily one of the best horror novels in recent years.

  Shondaland caught up with Wendig via Zoom to chat about his new novel, the upcoming follow-up to his best-selling, critically acclaimed book Wanderers, standing up for what’s right, finally getting to write his haunted-house book, and so much more.

  SCOTT NEUMYER: Why this book, why this story, and why now?

  CHUCK WENDIG: Well, that’s one of those really tricky questions. I have tried to write this book many other times in my life. I tried to write it once about 20 years ago. And before I had any novels ever published. And once about 10 years ago. I actually reread the one I wrote 20 years ago, and that was a very different book at that point. The pieces were kind of there — the bullying, abuse, and coal mine — and there was some stuff that was kind of present. The one I wrote about 10 years ago, I stopped at about 70,000 words, and it was unrecognizable. I felt like I was reading a book that had been written by an entirely different human being than me. It’s funny because sometimes you write a book and you give up on it, and it’s good that you give up on it because it just wasn’t the right book. But sometimes the book is the right book, but you’re the wrong writer at that time, and I feel like I was the right writer to write the book now. In part because I have a son and a family of my own.

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  I’ve now moved back to the area where I grew up. So, I have some of that going for me. Plus, you just sort of gain wisdom. And then with the era in which we currently live, not just the pandemic, but all the stuff that preceded it with the political situation and rise of white supremacy, you start to feel like there’s something there about the sort of the recursiveness of pain and the cycles of abuse and trauma that lead people to these tragic situations and terrible ways to be. I think that’s an interesting place to start for a story, so that’s kind of where the book comes from. But then I also grew up in a haunted house, and I’ve been wanting to tell that story for a long time too. So it’s all kind of packed into this.

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  SN: One of the things that struck me out of the gate was your use of the real and the unreal, the imagined and the corporeal. You mention a real-life mining accident, yet the serial killer referenced in the book is a creation of your own. In chapter 11, you actually write, “But as with all things, it wasn’t the spooky stories that got to Nate. It was the real life ones because routinely real life stories were far worse than the imagined ones. The spooky stories were an escape from the truth.” Can you tell me a little bit more about the decisions you made in the area of reality versus fiction?

  CW: Well, I don’t know. That’s the simple answer. I think there are certain aspects of reality that are worth dealing with and worth injecting into the piece because, at the end of the day, horror is doing a really cool thing. Fantasy and science fiction too, but horror really for me. It’s trying to take us a few steps removed from real life to grapple with what’s going on and how we are. But at the same time, I don’t want it to go missing that there’s this stuff actually happening in real life that comes also out of some of the stuff I’m talking about. I think it’s important to just drive home this idea that it begins somewhere. It’s all real somehow. And horror is that context for me that we’re taking these real ideas, then we’re transitioning them into a spooky space where we can grapple with them contextually. We can sort of meet them face to face. Horror, in particular, is often compared (and specifically in my books) with that old idea of sorcerers summoning demons into the summoning circle, and that’s where they’re kept. That’s where they’re safe. That’s a place where you can fight them. And horror for me is very much about finding a safe place to fight those demons. But that also means referencing real stuff.

  SN: You’re one of the most outspoken authors I know when it comes to social justice. After you parted ways with Marvel Comics in 2018 over your tweets, you never stopped. You never wavered. You never changed your stance. You never stopped speaking up for what was right. The last sentence of your tweet from that Twitter thread was “I have a dire fear this is going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.” Do you think that’s how it’s played out over the last three years?

  CW: We definitely did get worse, in terms of both politically and just with sort of the temperature of the country. And you’re starting to just see these battles continue to unfold, whether it’s about critical race theory or about who can tell what story. I do think it’s gotten worse. I’m not sure if it’s still getting worse. I don’t know. It’s hard to see where we’re at right now because some things do feel better. But at the same time, there’s the fear that the river that we were seeing has now just gone underground, and it’s sort of eroding more from beneath us.

  SN: Kirkus calls The Book of Accidents “weirdly comforting,” and I totally agree with it. There is definitely a bit of a comfort-food feel to this book, especially for a lifelong horror fan. It feels like early Stephen King to me. It feels like Shirley Jackson to me. It feels right at home. What do you suspect contributes to that? Is it the nostalgia throughout the book?

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  CW: I’ve seen that a few times now and heard it in other interviews or from people who say they feel like they are comforted by it. It’s something that is essentially pretty dark. There is some pretty grisly stuff going on in the book, and there are some pretty gnarly themes that wound up in there, but I do think first there’s that aspect that it’s revisiting a kind of horror that feels like it’s been gone for a while, even if it hasn’t. I think every book I’ve written (outside of maybe the Star Wars books) have been horror in some aspects, some more directly than others. Even the Miriam Black books are, to me, horror novels or horror crime novels. They were never branded that way because horror was anathema. It was a no-no. You couldn’t call things horror. The ’80s was that sort of perfect time for horror, and it feels like those were tough, weird times where we were grappling with a lot of culture-war stuff and left/right, red/blue kind of stuff. I feel like we’re there again now, and I feel like there’s a resurgence of horror. The book I wrote isn’t trying to ape any one thing, but I was definitely fed all those books, horror and paperbacks. I think it’s natural that that’s the kind of book, then, that comes out of me. And I’m not trying to be postmodern or self-referential, or trying to dissect and bypass the genre. I just want to break down the heart of it. I wanted to write a horror novel with a big, epic scope but also sort of an intimate scope.

  But then I also think the comfort-food aspect of it maybe comes from the fact that this isn’t a cynical book. I certainly didn’t write it in that way. I didn’t want to write a cynical book. It’s dark, and it’s upsetting, and there’s a lot of bad stuff in it. It’s a horror novel, I think, from snout to tail, but at the same time I don’t feel like it’s particularly grim or dark. I don’t feel like it’s overtly trying to make a nihilistic statement about humanity. It’s grappling with tough stuff, but it’s coming out on the side of love and family at the same time. Someone described it as an earnest book. I mean, that was a goal. I wasn’t trying to write something that was like winking at you or where I was stabbing you in the back as I went in for a hug. I read Stephen King, and I love Steven Spielberg. He’s in there too. Americana. Small town.

  SN: It feels like an Amblin movie.

  CW: Yeah, a dark, twisted Amblin movie.

  SN: This book touches on so many different aspects of the horror genre. There’s mystery, suspense, supernatural, gothic, and more. Yet it doesn’t feel at all like a “let’s throw the kitchen sink in there too” novel. It feels very planned and orchestrated. Which makes me think that you’re a hardcore outliner. Are you? Or do you write more by the seat of your pants?

  CW: I have long been a “pantser” by heart and a plotter by necessity, but I have learned over the last few years that I don’t know how to write a book. I thought I knew how to write a book — Wanderers divested me of the notion that I know what I’m doing. And Wanderers, for as big and unruly a book as that is (it’s about 800 pages), I did not outline that book. And Wanderers was curious because it was fairly together by the first draft. I mean, there were things that changed, but it was nothing dramatic. It was like, this beginning needs a change and a few things throughout the middle. But otherwise it was mostly just like tweaking language and tightening it up. But The Book of Accidents is definitely a book that was made in the edit. It’s not that the overall cut of the story was radically different. The pieces were there, the beginning of the pieces, but it was ambitious and odd and a lot of pieces, and we needed to make sure that all of those pieces were braided together, for as unusual as they may be, into a correct tapestry and not something that was hideous to look at.

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  SN: You’ve written both fiction and nonfiction. What’s next?

  CW: The next book I have out is a middle-grade book, a humor/horror novel called Dust & Grim, about a girl who inherits a funeral home for monsters. And then I just finished up the sequel to Wanderers called Wayward — another 270,000-word monster. It’s very mean. It’s a weirder book than Wanderers, and a lot of [it is] dealing with the aftermath of that very strange, apocalyptic book.

  This content is imported from Instagram. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

  SN: You are a mental-health advocate and somebody who’s been writing about his own mental health for more than a decade, and your other new book, You Can Do Anything, Magic Skeleton, is like the panacea that I needed over the past year.

  CW: I’ve heard cool stories of therapists using it in their therapy sessions.

  SN: What a perfectly timed book. Was it your and illustrator Natalie Metzger’s intention for it to be a kind of soothing balm for people traumatized by everything going on lately?

  CW: Yeah, I wrote them randomly, all these weird little “monster motivations,” with no intent to do anything with them. It was just over the last four years ... You know, Twitter, for as much of a nightmare realm as it is and can be, it was also sort of a place of togetherness. You could feel like, “Well, we’re all on this sinking boat together. We might as well check in. We’re all doing it.” And those little motivations were ways to do that. And then when a publisher, Rizzoli, wanted to put them together in a book, I knew who needed to draw them. I didn’t want them to be particularly disturbing. Her work is cartoonishly horrifying, wonderful, and cutesy. Yes, it was the most adorable, horrific stuff you’ve ever seen. So, Natalie was the most natural fit, and I’m glad she was able to do it.

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  SN: We both suffer from anxiety, so what do you do for self-care?

  CW: I go look at birds. I take pictures of bugs. Anxiety, in particular, is like horses out of a barn. So, for me, I’ve got to wrangle those horses back in and call them and quiet them. So, sometimes it’s just simply about removing myself from screens outside of the screen that’s on the camera and the lens that goes beyond it. I can just look at things, and if there’s a bird out there, I try to figure out what it is with the sounds. It gives you a sense of togetherness with the world in which you live.

  SN: I feel like you and Jeff VanderMeer need to write a book together about birds and bugs. Seems like you’d be kindred spirits.

  CW: Yeah, I’d do it. He’s so weird and wonderful too, and such a great advocate for rewilding your property. Getting to see his journey is so cool.

  SN: The Book of Accidents feels very cinematic to me. Perfect for a movie or limited series. Has Hollywood come calling yet?

  CW: Not yet. No. I’ve heard there’s been a few bubbles, but nothing has popped yet. I don’t know what people would do with it. I think there’s a part of me that thinks that a film would be interesting because I think it is definitely filmable, but also a limited series could make it interesting. I don’t know. I’m open. Call me, Hollywood!

  SN: I feel like Mike Flanagan would be the perfect person to adapt it.

  CW: That would be the absolutely perfect person to make it. Doctor Sleep is a movie that I think elevated the material even more. I completely adore that.

  SN: What is the best advice you’ve ever received?

  CW: My father and I had a fraught relationship, and The Book of Accidents is, in many ways, a very personal book. It took him a long time to get on board with me being a writer, and it sort of revealed itself that he was okay with it later on almost by accident. But very early on, he was like, “Well, if you want to do something, you just have to be prepared to treat it like work.” And it was useful for me at that time. I mean, I think in a creative career, you also have to embrace this sort of gnarly heart stuff too. But at the end of the day, I know there’s a lot of people who get mired in the art stuff. That sort of the tangle of wondering if the muse is coming. And you’ve got to just do it. The hardest thing to get started is to literally do it. Later, after you’ve learned how to do it, you get to all the bigger-thinking stuff in the unruly creative tangle, but on the ground level, you have to know how to just put one word after the other and make them into a thing. And at the end of the day, unless you do that, there’s nothing. None of it matters.

  I’ll tell you the other piece of advice that comes from my son. When he was 5 years old, for Halloween we were walking up on a porch, and it was one of those scary Halloween houses. Like they were endeavoring to make it as spooky and high-level Halloween horror as they could. The homeowner was there, and she looked like the scariest Blair Witch. Not like the funny-hat witch, but like turn you around to the tree and, you know, rip the skin off your back or something terrible. And he didn’t care, and he marched right up to her, and what he said stays with me to this day. It’s such a fearless, weird thing. He said, “Poop yourselves, witches and skeletons.” That was what he said. That is how he took the power from them. Just give me the candy. It was such a baller move.

  This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

  Scott Neumyer is a writer from central New Jersey whose work has been published byThe New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, ESPN, GQ, Esquire, Parade magazine, and many other publications. You can follow him on Twitter @scottneumyer.

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• Writing Routines - https://www.writingroutines.com/chuck-wendig-interview/

  Bestselling Novelist Chuck Wendig On Finding His Voice, Productivity In Writing, and The Multi-Headed Beast Called “Writer’s Block”

  Who: Chuck Wendig

  Claim To Fame: Chuck Wendig is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of The Star Wars Aftermath trilogy, starting with Journey to The Force Awakens, as well as the Miriam Black thrillers, the Atlanta Burns books, Zeroes, Invasive, and latest modern epic, Wanderers. He’s also worked in a variety of other formats, including comics, games, film, and television. A finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and the cowriter of the Emmy-nominated digital narrative Collapsus, he is also known for his books about writing, and his blog Terribleminds.

  Where To Find Chuck: His Website, Amazon, Twitter

  Praise For Chuck: [On Aftermath: Life Debt] “[Chuck] Wendig once again strikes gold, offering a sweeping narrative with plenty of insight into both the state of the galaxy at large and beloved characters both new and old.” — Alternative Nation

  When and where do you like to write? Are you the same-thing-every-day kind of writer or can you write anytime, anywhere?
  Once upon a time (where “a time” is defined as roughly “two months ago”) I wrote in a writing shed. Not like, where you keep lawnmowers – it was a nice shed with electricity and HVAC and what not. But I have since moved and have no shed, so currently I’m writing in a (*shudder*) room in my house like some kind of criminal.

  But! I will have a shed again. Already the sinister plans have begun. Thinking of installing some kind of LASER this time.

  As for time – mornings are good for me, usually.

  Do you have any pre-writing rituals or habits before you sit down to write?
  Coffee. Breakfast for the family. Feed the dogs. But mostly coffee.

  What do you do when the writing isn’t coming easy? Do you struggle at all with that dreaded enemy of writing: writer’s block?
  Writer’s block is a many-headed beast, and sometimes, it is an illusory beast, too – you think it’s writer’s block but really it’s depression or anxiety. You can solve writer’s block, proper writer’s block, in all kinds of writerly ways (write through it! fix some first act problems! skip it and come back!) but you cannot address anxiety or depression that way, and in fact, doing so will only make them worse. So it’s vital to know when what you’re dealing with is writing-related, or headspace-related.

  When did your aspirations to become a writer begin? At what age did you start writing in hopes of making a living out of it?
  Fairly young age. Eighth grade or so. As for making a living, I wrote my first novel when I was 18, and wrote five more that would never see the light of day. None of them made me anything, but all were written with the goal of becoming a novelist. Which has since happened, thanks to the goat I sacrificed. Ha ha, I mean, “since I got good at it.”

  Writers have to be master prioritizers — juggling all sorts of projects and deadlines at the same time. That’s certainly the case for you. Do you have any methods for managing tasks and time to stay productive and not let overwhelm sneak in?
  Only real trick is to do the writing first. Whatever needs to be written, do that part up front, and do all the other crap after.

  You have a really unique style as a writer. There’s nothing you write that doesn’t feel like Chuck Wendig wrote it. Was it always that way or do you feel like you’ve become more yourself as you’ve gone on?
  I…don’t really know? For those first several books I was mostly struggling to make myself sound like other writers or to fit preconceived styles/genres. Once I was shut of that notion, I feel like I found my voice – which is to say, it was there all along, and I stopped trying to escape it.

  How do you judge a productive writing day or an unproductive day? What’s the sign of a good day for you?
  That’s very hard to say, because productivity in writing can be in any direction. Sometimes a day of thinking very hard about the book and solving its mysteries in your head are better than a day beating yourself against the word count. But at the end of the day, too, the only thing that actually matters is when you carve those words out of the nothingness, when you make it so.

  What books or writers have most influenced the way you think and the way you write?
  That’s a tall order answer. Everything from Robert McCammon to Robin Hobb to Shirley Jackson to Douglas Adams to Christopher Moore to Stephen King to Lloyd Alexaner to, etc.etc.

  What is your advice to aspiring writers?
  Stop aspiring. Start doing. Then you’re a writer.

• Amazon -

  Chuck Wendig is the New York Times bestselling author of Star Wars: Aftermath, as well as the Miriam Black thrillers, the Atlanta Burns books, and the Heartland YA series, alongside other works across comics, games, film, and more. A finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and the cowriter of the Emmy-nominated digital narrative Collapsus, he is also known for his popular blog, terribleminds.com, and his books about writing. He lives in Pennsylvania with his family.

• Wikipedia -

  Chuck Wendig
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Jump to navigationJump to search
  Chuck Wendig
  Wendig at WonderCon 2017
  Wendig at WonderCon 2017
  Born Charles David Wendig
  April 22, 1976 (age 45)
  New Hope, Pennsylvania, U.S.
  Occupation
  Authorscreenwriterblogger
  Language English
  Alma mater Queens University of Charlotte
  Genre
  Urban fantasyscience fiction
  Spouse Michelle Kane ​(m. 2009)​
  Children 1
  Website
  terribleminds.com
  Charles David Wendig (born April 22, 1976)[1] is an American author, comic book writer, screenwriter, and blogger. He is best known for his online blog Terribleminds, for his 2015 Star Wars novel trilogy Aftermath, the first book of which debuted at #4 on The New York Times Best Seller list and #4 on USA Today's best seller list, for which series he created the character of marshal Cobb Vanth. Wendig has additionally written comics for Dark Circle Comics, Dynamite Entertainment, Marvel Comics, and VS Comics.

  He was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2013.

  Contents
  1 Early life
  2 Career
  2.1 Game writing
  2.2 Screenwriting
  2.3 Early novels
  2.4 Miriam Black and Mookie Pearl
  2.5 Atlanta Burns and The Heartland trilogy
  2.6 Star Wars
  2.7 Zer0es
  2.8 Comics
  2.9 Blog and writing advice
  3 Personal life
  4 Bibliography
  4.1 Young adult fiction
  4.1.1 Atlanta Burns series
  4.1.2 The Heartland trilogy
  4.2 Fiction
  4.2.1 Miriam Black series
  4.2.2 Mookie Pearl series
  4.2.3 Zer0es series
  4.2.4 Standalone Novels
  4.3 Tie-in fiction
  4.3.1 Dinocalypse trilogy
  4.3.2 Gods and Monsters series
  4.3.3 Star Wars: Aftermath trilogy
  4.3.4 Tomes of the Dead series
  4.4 Short fiction
  4.4.1 Collections
  4.4.2 As Editor
  4.5 Comics
  4.5.1 Dark Circle Comics/Archie Comics
  4.5.2 Dynamite Entertainment
  4.5.3 Marvel Comics
  4.5.4 VS Comics
  4.6 Non-fiction
  5 Filmography
  6 Reception
  7 References
  8 External links
  Early life
  Wendig grew up in New Hope, Pennsylvania. He studied English and religion at Queens University of Charlotte and graduated in 1998. After working various odd jobs and publishing early works under the name C.D. Wendig and C. David Wendig, he became a full-time freelance author writing under the name Chuck Wendig.[1]

  Career
  Game writing
  Before writing fiction professionally, Wendig worked as a freelance RPG writer for over a decade. Wendig has contributed over two million words to the pen-and-paper roleplaying game industry.[2] He has worked as a writer and developer for roleplaying games, contributing to many White Wolf projects from 2002 to 2011, including Hunter: The Vigil (2008).[1]

  Wendig is part of the advisory board of Storium, an online storytelling game by Protagonist Labs that launched a successful Kickstarter campaign and raised over $250,000.[3][4]

  Screenwriting
  Wendig co-wrote the Emmy-nominated interactive transmedia project Collapsus with Lance Weiler.[1]

  Along with writing partner Weiler, Wendig was selected for the 2010 Sundance Screenwriter's Lab for their feature film HiM.[5] HiM is being produced by Ted Hope, Christine Vachon, and Anne Carey.[6] His short film, Pandemic 41.410806, -75.654259, co-written and directed by Weiler, was selected for the 2011 Sundance Short Film Program.[7] At one point, Wendig and Weiler were also developing television pilot for TNT with Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, but the network decided to pass.[6][8]

  He also contributed to David Cronenberg's transmedia production Body/Mind/Change, in which Weiler served as Creative Director.[9]

  Early novels
  Wendig's first short story collection, Irregular Creatures, was published in January 2011.[10]

  In November 2011 followed Wendig's debut novel, Double Dead, published by Abaddon Books as part of its shared-world series Tomes of the Dead.[11] Bad Blood, a sequel novella, was published in May 2012.[12] The books were later collected as The Complete Double Dead, released in February 2016.[13]

  Wendig participated in the Evil Hat Productions Kickstarter, which raised money for a trilogy of novels penned by Wendig based on the Spirit of the Century RPG game.[14][15] After a successful campaign, he went on to release Dinocalypse Now in 2012 and Beyond Dinocalypse in 2013. Though slated to write the third (and final) volume of the Dinocalypse trilogy, Dinocalypse Forever, Wendig was unable finish the novel due to other commitments and was replaced by novelist Carrie Harris.[16]

  For Abaddon, he also penned Unclean Spirits, out in May 2013, the first installment of the Gods and Monsters series.[17]

  Miriam Black and Mookie Pearl
  The first novel in Wendig's Miriam Black series, Blackbirds, features a girl who can see the death of anyone she touches. It was published in April 2012 by Angry Robot Books.[18] It was followed by a sequel, Mockingbird, in August 2012. Also from Angry Robot, Wendig released The Blue Blazes in May 2013, the first novel in a new urban fantasy series following Mookie Pearl.[19] The third book in the Miriam Black series, The Cormorant, was published in December 2013.

  The Miriam Black books were optioned as a television series by Starz in 2014, to be developed by John Shiban, writer and producer of Breaking Bad and The X-Files, with a writers' room already set up.[20][21] Wendig announced on his blog in November 2015 that Starz was no longer developing the adaptation.[22]

  In October 2014, Saga Press bought six books in Wendig's Miriam Black series, including the first three novels, previously published by Angry Robot Books.[23] The first three books, Blackbirds, Mockingbird, and The Cormorant were re-published with new covers in 2015. Thunderbird, book four, followed in 2017, with The Raptor & The Wren and Vultures, books five and six, published in 2018 and 2019 respectively.[22]

  In October 2015, Wendig re-released The Blue Blazes, as well as self-publishing a sequel, The Hellsblood Bride, after contract disputes with previous publisher Angry Robot.[24][25] He has stated that a third book, possibly titled A Sky Born Black or The Skyborn Bane might someday be published, should the first two books do well or be picked up by a publisher. However, Wendig said the first two books stand alone and a third book is not necessary to conclude the story.

  Atlanta Burns and The Heartland trilogy
  Shotgun Gravy, a young adult novella following Atlanta Burns, described as "Veronica Mars on Adderall," was self-published by Wendig in 2011.[26] Wendig ran a successful Kickstarter campaign during February 2012 to publish Bait Dog, a follow-up novel to Shotgun Gravy, raising $6,800, more than twice the goal.[27] Bait Dog was self-published in 2012, and was later acquired along with Shotgun Gravy by Amazon Skyscape, and republished as Atlanta Burns in January 2015.[28] The second book in the Atlanta Burns series, The Hunt, was published in February 2016.[29]

  In July 2013, Skyscape launched Wendig's new young adult dystopian "cornpunk" trilogy, starting with Under the Empyrean Sky.[30] It was followed by a sequel in July 2014, called Blightborn.[31] The Heartland trilogy concluded in July 2015 with The Harvest.[32]

  Star Wars
  It was announced in March 2015 that Wendig would write the flagship Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens novel, titled Star Wars: Aftermath, to be published in September 2015. The book was the first in a trilogy of new canonical Star Wars novels published by Del Rey, bridging the gap between Return of the Jedi and the new Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens.[33] It was followed by Aftermath: Life Debt (2016) and Aftermath: Empire's End (2017).[34][35] Wendig's involvement with the books came after asking to write a Star Wars licensed novel on Twitter on September 4, 2014. He was approached by LucasBooks in New York Comic Con later that year, after seeing his tweet and reading his novel Under the Empyrean Sky.[36][37] Aftermath was published exactly a year later, on September 4, 2015, and debuted at #4 on both The New York Times Best Seller list and the USA Today's best seller list. Aftermath was subject to controversy for its inclusion of a gay man as a lead character.[38][39][40]

  During the 2018 New York Comic Convention in early October 2018, Wendig announced that he would be writing a five-issue story arc with Marvel Comics entitled Shadow of Vader, which was set to begin in November 2018. The series would have explored the legacy of Darth Vader on the galaxy.[41] Wendig was also slated to write an unannounced Star Wars book. On October 12, it was reported that Marvel had fired Wendig for unknown reasons. It was presumed the firing was the result of Wendig's social media posts.[42][43][44][45] His firing resulted in the Shadow of Vader story arc being pulled from Marvel Comics' schedule.[46]

  Zer0es
  August 2015 saw the publication of Zer0es, a cyber-thriller from HarperVoyager.[47] Invasive, a novel set in the same world as Zer0es that takes place after the events of the book, was published in 2016.[48]

  Comics
  In 2015, Archie Comics announced a new comic series written by Wendig and Adam Christopher, featuring a new version of their superhero The Shield.[49][50]

  Wendig was chosen in October 2015 as the writer of new Marvel ongoing comic book series Hyperion, based on the version of the character that appeared in Jonathan Hickman's run on Avengers, alongside artist Nik Virella.[51][52]

  During the ComicsPRO 2016 annual meeting, Marvel Comics announced a five-issue comic book adaptation of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, written by Wendig and illustrated by Luke Ross, launching in June 2016.[53]

  Blog and writing advice
  Wendig has run his blog Terribleminds since 2000, where he dispenses regular writing advice. Much of his writing advice has been collected in his self-published e-books or his book The Kickass Writer, published in 2013 by Writer's Digest Books.

  Personal life
  As of 2021, Chuck Wendig lives in Pennsylvania with his family and writes for his blog terribleminds.com.[54]

  Bibliography
  Young adult fiction
  Atlanta Burns series
  Atlanta Burns (2015)
  The Hunt (2016)
  Atlanta Burns was previously self-published in two volumes, the novella Shotgun Gravy (2011), and the follow-up novel Bait Dog (2012).[28]

  The Heartland trilogy
  Under the Empyrean Sky (2013)
  Blightborn (2014)
  The Harvest (2015)
  A short story titled "The Wind Has Teeth Tonight" was released in 2014 and takes place between the first and second book.

  Fiction
  Miriam Black series
  Blackbirds (2012)
  Mockingbird (2012)
  The Cormorant (2013)
  Thunderbird (2017)
  The Raptor & The Wren (2018)
  Vultures (2019)
  A bridging novelette titled "Interlude: Swallow" was released in 2015 in the anthology Three Slices, featuring work by Wendig, Delilah S. Dawson, and Kevin Hearne. It takes place between the third and fourth book.[55]

  Mookie Pearl series
  The Blue Blazes (2013)
  The Hellsblood Bride (2015)
  Zer0es series
  Zer0es (2015)
  Invasive (2016)
  Standalone Novels
  Wanderers (2019)
  The Book of Accidents (2021)
  Tie-in fiction
  Dinocalypse trilogy
  Dinocalypse Now (2012)
  Beyond Dinocalypse (2013)
  Gods and Monsters series
  Unclean Spirits (2013)
  Star Wars: Aftermath trilogy
  Aftermath (2015)
  Aftermath: Life Debt (2016)
  Aftermath: Empire's End (2017)
  The Aftermath trilogy explores the events between the films Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, introducing the character of Cobb Vanth.[56]

  Tomes of the Dead series
  Double Dead (2011)
  Bad Blood (2012) (novella)
  Collected as The Complete Double Dead in February 2016 by Abaddon Books.[13]

  Short fiction
  "Bourbon Street Lullaby", Not One of Us #18, ed. John M. Benson (1997, as C.D. Wendig)
  "Roachboy", Whispers from the Shattered Forum #5, ed. Cullen Bunn (2000, as C. David Wendig)
  "Squirrely Skin", Vermin, ed. David A. Rose (2009)
  "The Moko-Jumbie Girl", Beauty Has Her Way, ed. Jennifer Brozek (2011)
  "The Toll", Human Tales, ed. Jennifer Brozek (2011)
  "Riding The Thunderbird", Tales of the Far West, ed. Gareth-Michael Skarka (2012)
  "I Want to Be a Lioness", Help Fund My Robot Army!!! and Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, ed. John Joseph Adams (2014)
  "The Wind Has Teeth Tonight" (2014)
  "The Forever Endeavor", serialized over 12 parts in Fireside Magazine, ed. Brian J. White (2014)
  "Big Man", Dangerous Games, ed. Jonathan Oliver (2014)
  "Queen of the Supermarket", Trouble in the Heartland, ed. Joe Clifford (2014)
  "Interlude: Swallow", Three Slices (2015)
  Collections
  Irregular Creatures (2011)
  As Editor
  Don't Read This Book (2012)
  Comics
  Dark Circle Comics/Archie Comics
  The Shield vol. 5 #1-#4 (with Adam Christopher and Drew Johnson, October 2015-October 2016)[57][58]
  Dynamite Entertainment
  The Sovereigns #0 (with Ray Fawkes, Kyle Higgins, and Aubrey Sitterson, April 2017)
  Magnus #1-#2 (with Kyle Higgins, June 2017-July 2017)
  Turok #1-#4 (with Aubrey Sitterson, August 2017-December 2017)
  Marvel Comics
  Hyperion #1-#6 (with Nik Virella, March 2016-August 2016)
  Star Wars: The Force Awakens Adaptation #1-#6 (with Luke Ross, individual issues published June–November, 2016, published in hardcover December 13, 2016, and in paperback November 21, 2017)
  VS Comics
  "Shackletoon’s Hooch" (with Gavin Mitchell, in VS Comics #9, one-shot, 2013)
  Non-fiction
  Confessions of a Freelance Penmonkey (2011)
  250 Things You Should Know About Writing (2011)
  Revenge of the Penmonkey (2011)
  500 Ways To Be a Better Writer (2011)
  500 More Ways To Be a Better Writer (2012)
  500 Ways To Tell a Better Story (2012)
  The Kickass Writer: 1001 Ways to Write Great Fiction, Get Published, and Earn Your Audience (2013)
  500 Ways To Write Harder (2014)
  30 Days In The Word Mines (2014)
  Damn Fine Story (2017)
  Filmography
  Year Title Credit Notes
  2010 Collapsus Written by Short, co-written with Lance Weiler
  2011 Pandemic 41.410806, -75.654259 Short, co-written with Lance Weiler, Official Selection 2011 Sundance Film Festival
  2013 Small Small Thing Additional narration written by Documentary, co-written with Jessica Vale
  Reception
  Aftermath debuted at #4 on The New York Times Best Seller list,[59] and #4 on USA Today's best seller list.[60][61]

  Wendig was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2013.

  Year Award Category Work Result Ref.
  2011 International Digital Emmy Award Best Digital Fiction Project Collapsus Nominated [62]
  2012 Goodreads Choice Awards Best Horror Blackbirds [63]
  2013 John W. Campbell Award Best New Writer --
  2015 Goodreads Choice Awards Best Science Fiction Star Wars: Aftermath [64]

• Publishers Weekly - https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-authors/article/87627-q-a-with-chuck-wendig.html

  QUOTED: "They come from that idea of found family and grappling with who you are in this world. When I grew up, my friends and I had a fair amount of aspirations to certain things and to grow up a certain way. I thought it was interesting to make kids have to deal with that early, as opposed to having that vision of what you’re going to be in adulthood and then trying to get there now and be that person now."
  "I don’t want to write a book that’s in any way preachy, or that is lesson- or lecture-driven. I really want them to have a book that gives them a fun adventure and a spooky good time. If that also translates to some other greater meaning, whether they see themselves in the characters or whether they find something to think about in how we talk about death and dying ... then that’s good by me."

  Q & A with Chuck Wendig
  By Mary M. Jones | Oct 14, 2021
  Comments Click Here

  Bestselling author Chuck Wendig is prolific not only in a variety of formats—from comics to film to novels—but also for a variety of age ranges and genres. His latest novel, a debut middle grade, titled Dust & Grim, follows Molly, a 13-year-old orphan, as she struggles with getting to know her older brother and finding a place to belong in the mortuary business—one focused on honoring the funeral traditions of non-human cultures—that is her mother’s legacy, now run by her brother and a partner, Vivian. Wendig spoke with PW about what it was like to write for a younger audience, as well as the challenges presented by the pandemic.

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  You’ve written a multitude of books in different age ranges, but this is your first middle grade. What made you decide to write for a younger audience?

  I have a son, which is an impetus for a lot of people. As he was coming into this middle-grade age range, he would occasionally pick up some of my adult books. He picked up my first novel Blackbirds and he’s like, “Oh, this looks cool,” while looking at the cover. “When can I read this?” I’m like, “When you're about 37.” I thought I should write some things that are suitable to his age range. For the last couple of years, we’ve been reading a lot of middle grade novels, so I felt it was time to do that. I had a story to tell in that space. So hopefully he’s excited to read it—it’s the first time, I think, he’s seeing a book of mine before it comes out.

  Has he read Dust & Grim yet?

  No, he hasn’t. He’s waiting for the final copies because the editions I have don’t have all of the wonderful Jensine Eckwall art. So, he wants it when all the art is complete. I was like, “Fair enough. I totally support that.” The art improves the book a thousand-fold.

  Given your experience writing for such a wide variety of age ranges, what was writing a middle grade like?

  Not that different. It sounds strange, but I am always interested in, whether we’re talking genre to genre or format to format or age range to age range, that stories have common bones. Just like a human and a dolphin look very different on the outside, but if you actually examine their skeletons, there’s a lot of bones that are in common. The shape of the skeleton is different, but we all have this skeletal structure to us. For me, it’s tapping into that skeletal structure and then just making sure that it reads well for kids. I also don’t think that means talking down to them—it means a certain level of adjusting your language, but I think kids can grapple with all kinds of weighty, fun issues, just like adults can. With my son, not only do we read a lot of middle grade, but we watch a lot of cartoons, and kids’ cartoons these days are not afraid of grappling with some of the big, squirrely ideas. We’re watching Craig of the Creek and it’s dealing with growing up and imagination and how kids in social structures work. It’s pretty fascinating stuff. I just tap into all of that.

  Did you have many challenges when working with that skeleton?

  Length is the challenge. My last few books have been huge: Wanderers was I think 280,000 words, and you cannot write a 280,000-word middle grade. No one is going to buy that book. How do I keep this slim, to a 60,000-word book? Then when I turned it into a 60,000-word book, my editor [Deirdre Jones] actually wanted it to be a little longer.

  Dust & Grim features protagonists who are mature for their age dealing with what we consider more adult situations like grief, emancipation, running a business. How did the characters develop, especially in those situations? Where did they come from?

  They come from that idea of found family and grappling with who you are in this world. When I grew up, my friends and I had a fair amount of aspirations to certain things and to grow up a certain way. I thought it was interesting to make kids have to deal with that early, as opposed to having that vision of what you’re going to be in adulthood and then trying to get there now and be that person now. I remember being a kid and wanting to do art and write and being like, well, why isn’t the thing I’m doing right now as good as the stuff I’m reading and seeing? Of course, obviously because you don’t sit in front of a piano and just play a concerto, you have to actually learn how to do it. The kid brain is not always good at drawing that connection and building those bridges. I thought it was fun to throw kids into those situations. Plus, a lot of the middle grade story modes are about that bridge between childhood to adulthood and navigating it, walking across it, having one foot in both worlds, seeing who you were and what you will become.

  Molly is written as an independent single-minded and imaginative young woman, while Dustin is much more grounded and mature. What were your inspirations for the two of them?

  I really like the “order in chaos” dichotomy. When you get to write those two different types of characters, they play off each other really well. It just keeps it interesting and fun. When you do that, you create opportunities for yourself to be both funny and engaging in the interplay between people who don’t even know each other to start. Having that kind of back and forth between these characters who are learning to meet each other, to see how one sort of represents order and one represents chaos, then also how they switch places a little bit as the book goes on, is a fun thing to do. For me, writing characters is often about fun first. Are they fun to write and fun to read? That, I think, gets you a good half of the way there. [Dustin] is sort of that pastiche of a way-too-tucked-in character, but I didn’t want him to be cliched, so buttoned up, that he didn’t have things that were his own, like a colorful side to his personality. I wanted him to be that type of character who manages this monstrous mortuary, but at the same time, has bigger dreams. But how do you keep moving beyond the fence that you build for yourself at the beginning?

  It was Dustin who brought up the idea of the mortuary being responsible for helping continue the cultures and traditions and rituals of death. Where did that come from?

  It’s an act of world building to say “what is the purpose of this.” Death, bereavement and all the services that go around that, are usually given into the individual culture—the things we're going to say about that person, even down to the obituary, or how they want to be processed in life to death. I think, with monsters, it just kind of extrapolates that open in a really weird, fun way. And it gets to reflect that real-world side of grief and death and dying in a playful, interesting, exciting way.

  Two of the book’s more prominent themes are the quest for found family and interactions with diverse populations and cultures. What do you hope your readers take away from this?

  It sounds strange, but I try not to hope they take anything specific away from it. I don’t want to write a book that’s in any way preachy, or that is lesson- or lecture-driven. I really want them to have a book that gives them a fun adventure and a spooky good time. If that also translates to some other greater meaning, whether they see themselves in the characters or whether they find something to think about in how we talk about death and dying and what we think about when we think about quote unquote monsters or labeling something a monster, then that’s good by me. But I don’t ever want to tell them what they should get out of it. The storyteller’s job is to find that empathic bridge between both the writer and the characters and then, by proxy, the readers and the characters.

  What is your writing routine like? And did the pandemic change it?

  Yeah, the pandemic blew it out of the water. Once upon a time I was a butt-in-chair, 2,000 words a day guy. It wasn’'t even the pandemic that really changed it. It was my novel, Wanderers. I really didn’'t write that in the same way that I wrote every other book - —it was much more erratic. I would write every day, but what I would accomplish could be anywhere from 250 words to 3000 words a day;, it was just an up and down process. Dust & Grim was a little pokier and slower. It’'s not a dense, chewy book, but because it'’s only a 60-–70,000-word novel, I don'’t have to go on for pages about the Spanish flu or how viruses work. But the pandemic definitely, after that fact, changed how I write and it’'s been definitely way more erratic. The nice thing is, when I was working on Dust & Grim, I only edited it during the pandemic. The pandemic was very good for my editing brain, not as great for my writing brain. My writing brain has caught back up and is churning and burning again. But editing was a really useful task for me during a lockdown, in the squirrely nature of this time of history.

  Dust & Grim by Chuck Wendig, illus. by Jensine Eckwall. Little, Brown, $16.99 Oct. 19 ISBN 978-0-316-70623-0

• Lightspeed - https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/guide-to-star-wars-canon/

  Interview: Chuck Wendig and Alexandra Bracken (Guide to the New Star Wars Canon)
  by THE GEEK’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY

  PUBLISHED IN MAR. 2016 (ISSUE 70) | 11076 WORDS

  Star Wars tie-in authors Chuck Wendig and Alexandra Bracken discuss some of the books set in the new Star Wars canon that help pave the way for Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens.

  This interview first appeared on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by David Barr Kirtley and produced by John Joseph Adams. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the interview or other episodes.

  David: Today on the show we’ll be discussing some of the books in the new Star Wars canon. I’m joined by two guests: First up, we’ve got Chuck Wendig. As a game designer, he’s contributed over two million words of material to the game industry, and he blogs about writing and pop culture at Terribleminds.com. He also co-wrote the short film Pandemic, and his recent books include Mockingbird and Zer0es. His new Star Wars novel, Aftermath, is the first book in the new Star Wars canon to be set between Return of the Jedi and the upcoming film Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens. Chuck, welcome to the show.

  Chuck: Hey, thanks for having me.

  David: Also joining us today is Alexandra Bracken. She’s a New York Times best-selling author who wrote her first published book, Brightly Woven, as a student at the College of William and Mary. She’s also the author of the Darkest Minds series of near future thrillers, which have been optioned for film by 20th Century Fox. Her new novel, Star Wars: A New Hope: The Princess, The Scoundrel, and the Farm Boy presents a fresh retelling of the original Star Wars film. Alex, welcome to the show.

  Alex: Hi, thanks for having me.

  David: Let’s start out and have you guys talk a bit about your background as Star Wars fans. Alex, I want to start with you because I know you have an interesting story about that.

  Alex: I do. I have actually grown up with Star Wars in a very real way. My dad, right up until he passed away a couple of years ago, was a Star Wars collector. Pretty much from the time I was in first grade, so about age five on through the many decades. So, every weekend it just became kind of a routine of going to the toy store. He was on a first name basis with the store managers at Toys“R”Us. We got to go into the back room to find the new toys that were coming out every week. And this was The Power of the Force era in the ’90s, I should specify. But we were also going to a whole bunch of antique stores and shows trying to find a lot of the older ceramics, the older carded figures, twelve-inch figures, everything. He ended up with an incredible collection, and an especially incredible poster collection, I think. I’ve been going to Star Wars conventions, I mean, pretty much from the time I was . . . I guess 1996 was my first Star Wars convention, and I’ve only missed one Celebration, and it was the one that happened right after he passed away, so I think it was Celebration Six. All I wanted to read growing up were Star Wars expanded universe books, and it’s just been a wonderful thing to come back to Star Wars after losing my dad and kind of reconnect to the story and the characters I love so much.

  David: Right, so when you’re a serious Star Wars collector like that, were there any particular items that he was particularly proud of owning, or that you were always on the lookout for?

  Alex: He ended up being really, really proud of his poster collection because he started expanding into a lot of the foreign posters, and if you’ve ever looked at them, the film posters for Poland are especially really cool and kind of odd. I mean, he just thought they were wacky and wonderful. He was really proud of the fact that he has what’s I guess kind of colloquially known as the “Mylar Poster,” which is a really rare poster that took him forever to find. But he had sort of the mainstays by the end. He had classic cape Jawa, which is unique, I guess, for those of you who are not in the collecting world, because it was a very limited run of the original Jawa figure that had a plastic, kind of vinyl cape instead of the cloth cape, and they ended up changing it, I heard because it was a choking hazard, but I think it was also because Kenner felt bad about it being a smaller figure and having like a cheap material instead of a nice cloth, so I don’t know which one is true, to be completely honest. But he had Blue Snaggletooth . . . really everything, and he would constantly be going to all of the different shows. He went to the Celebrations basically to go around and meet all of the vendors. He was constantly trading up and having figures graded. Literally anyone we brought over to the house was drawn upstairs into his office/collection room, and they could not escape until they got like a nice tour and walk around. He loved that.

  David: Well, Chuck, how about you? Can you compete with that? What was your Star Wars background as a fan like?

  Chuck: Oh my god, I can’t compete with that. I want that background. I want that. That’s awesome. I’ve been sort of pickling and brining in the Star Wars universe for my whole life. Not quite to that degree in terms of the parents thing, but my sister actually did take me to my first Star Wars film when I was four, and it was Empire Strikes Back at a drive-in theater, and her boyfriend took her, and her boyfriend also brought his little brother, and she brought her little brother, me, and we watched the movie. I’m not sure what they were doing up front, but we kept our eyes very clearly on the movie. So, that, to me, was my first moment in the Star Wars universe, and then from there, I kind of became my own little collector, even as a kid, because you couldn’t just come home and go to iTunes and pull up the movie. You couldn’t just watch it again. You had to sort of recreate that stuff in your own head. So toys and the costumes and stuff was a part of my childhood in terms of recreating those memories, so Star Wars has always kind of been there. It’s how I learned how to tell stories. It’s one of the things that brought me together with friends, and it brought me together with family, and now my own four-year-old son is getting into Star Wars just at the time there’s a new movie coming out, so it’s kind of this lovely generational thing. And it’s a thing that actually feeds into the book. Aftermath makes a lot of effort to talk about the generational component of Star Wars and the generational component of there being these multiple wars and these multiple iterations of what’s going on in the story worlds.

  David: Yeah, Alex was talking about these Star Wars Celebrations and conventions and things, did you ever get drawn into that world?

  Chuck: No, I’ve actually never been. I would like to hopefully go this next year to Celebration, that would be awesome.

  David: Alex, tell us a little bit more about these conventions and things. Do you have any memorable experiences from attending them?

  Alex: Oh my gosh, okay, so I feel like I have a very random memory from each one. So, the first convention I went to was in Arizona. It was put on by a toy store that was then called Empire Toys and is now called Toy Anxiety, which is owned by a man named Ron Lewis, who we jokingly refer to as Uncle Ron because he was the main supplier of Star Wars vintage toys to my dad by the end. He just became a close family friend. The store, and I think like Steve Sansweet was involved with arranging this mini-convention. I dressed up as speeder bike Princess Leia from Endor, and I also made a matching diorama, and I did not win the costume contest, but I won the diorama contest, which is still a point of pride, I’m not going to lie. And that was really memorable because it was the first time I got to have face time with a lot of the stars. So, Kenny Baker was there, Peter Mayhew was there, just, like, so many of these actors who were willing to sit and chat with you and wanted to take photos with you, and that was my first real experience with any sort of convention.

  Celebration One was in Denver, and it was at sort of a . . . I’m trying to remember, I think it was the aerospace museum, maybe, I can’t remember the exact name, but that one is memorable because it was so cold and it rained the entire time that all of the outdoor booths basically flooded. All of the vendors were complaining about damaged merchandise. They also had all of the Phantom Menace books on sale early, so you basically knew the entire plot of the movie by the time that you were done with the show.

  Then Celebration Two and Three were in Indianapolis, and I really remember being freezing cold at those shows because of the line to get into the Celebration store to get all of the exclusive merchandise, which as a collector, my dad wanted. You would have to wait outside and line up in the morning, and you would spend like an hour or two in the freezing cold. It was, like, April in Indianapolis, and I grew up in Arizona, so anything under fifty degrees is really, really cold for me. And I remember Carrie Fisher came to I think Celebration Three, maybe, and I have this very random memory of her being on the stage for her interview and someone asked, “Oh, what’s in your drink?” And she was like, “It’s a little bit of Coke and a little bit of Diet Coke and that way I can always be a little naughty.” Which is very typically Carrie Fisher.

  People are so patient at these conventions because you’re waiting in line for everything, but everyone is deliriously happy to be there. It’s one of my favorite things to do, to go to these shows. And I was at Celebration Seven this year in Anaheim, and it was amazing to be back and to see the new decorations mixed in with the old decorations, and sit in on a lot of panels, and it felt similar to Celebration Two and Three, where you were getting so much excitement about the new films that were coming out, and you were getting kind of fed juicy little tidbits. So, Chuck, I really hope you can go next year. I’m sure they would love to have you.

  Chuck: It would be awesome. It would be really cool. Everything I see out of it is just such immense fan love, and I’m like, “Ahh.”

  David: Sound like you should wear all your Hoth clothes because it sounds like it’s always cold at these things.

  Alex: I think the next one is in Orlando, and I think it’s the second time it’s been there. I think Celebration Five was there. They did something special where they opened up Disney World to the Celebration attendees, and they were kind of retiring the old Star Tours ride, so you got to ride the old ride one last time before they switched it over. So, that was really cool. They are so much fun. Like I said, everyone is so happy and just into it, and you make so many line friends, and you kind of make line allies, so that you’re not necessarily stuck in a long line all day. You can kind of take turns. It’s great. I could not recommend it enough. Even as casual Star Wars fans, everyone should go.

  David: Okay, like I said, the main topic for today is we’re going to be talking about the new Star Wars canon, and so Chuck, for people that are a little bit out of the loop, can you just explain what the deal is with this whole new Star Wars canon?

  Chuck: Sure. Obviously, anybody who does not live under a rock knows that there is a new Star Wars movie coming out. I’m pretty sure my dog knows that there’s a new Star Wars movie coming out. So, with that in mind, the new Star Wars film generates a new plotline and it takes the post-Return of the Jedi storyline into its own direction, so you’ve got these new stories coming out of that, both starting with Aftermath and then continuing on with various novels and games like Uprising, and I think Battlefront will even touch on a little bit of it. It starts building a bridge, essentially, to Episode VII.

  David: Right, and so how did you get involved in this whole deal?

  Chuck: Uh, I tweeted about it, which is not really a way I recommend anyone get jobs normally, but it is actually how I got the job. In a puzzling array of numerical magic, I guess some sort of numerological force was going on. On September fourth last year, I tweeted that I wanted to write a Star Wars novel.

  Alex: I remember that.

  Chuck: Yeah, it was weird, and I was like, “I shake the internet to make a wish fall out, and to see if I can . . .” I was kidding. I didn’t really have any time to write a Star Wars novel, and people behind the scenes started to kind of make that happen. They started to conspire, including like Gary Whitta, who was one of the writers on Rogue One, the anthology film, and Jason Fry, another Star Wars novelist. These people kind of suddenly made that happen for me. It was at New York Comic Con that I met Shelly Shapiro, and she said, “Well, I read one of your novels.” And I said, “Well, it was nice to meet you. I’m sorry I won’t be writing Star Wars.” And she said, “No, no, I read Under the Empyrean Sky.” And I then wiped my brow and said, “Oh, you read the Star Wars-y ones. That’s very good that you didn’t read any of the other ones that are very not Star Wars-y.” And she said it felt like a very good fit, and that my voice would work there, so next thing I know, I was writing a Star Wars novel. I didn’t really know at the time I was going to be writing a very big Star Wars novel, that had not been explained to me, or described to me, so that was pretty exciting once I found out what I was doing.

  David: Actually, speaking of Gary Whitta, he was a guest on the show a couple of episodes back.

  Chuck: He’s awesome.

  David: He’s a really, really fun guy. Yeah.

  Chuck: Working on Rebels now, as I understand it.

  David: He couldn’t say anything about Rogue One.

  Chuck: No, no, because he would literally be beheaded by a lightsaber.

  Alex: Yeah, it’s like Pentagon levels of secrecy over at Lucasfilm.

  Chuck: Right now there’s probably a red dot on my forehead. Just in case.

  David: At least you guys can talk about these books now because they’re out. It must be a relief to finally be able to say things about them.

  Chuck: Yeah, it is.

  David: Alex, how did you get tapped for this assignment?

  Alex: So, I have kind of an interesting way that I came to the project. I guess I should start by explaining that my editor knew that I had this whole Star Wars background because I had been I think a little bit late on a deadline because of a Star Wars convention, so she knew, and knew about my dad and all of that. We have a big convention in publishing ever year in New York called BEA, which is Book Expo America, and the publishers usually have a kind of dinner, and they are presenting authors and titles to booksellers and news people and the whole media crowd.

  At this dinner, they were introducing the Tony DiTerlizzi picture book using the Ralph McQuarrie art called The Adventures of Luke Skywalker, and they were kind of talking a little bit about their plans for their publishing program for Star Wars because Disney had recently acquired Star Wars at that point. I kind of turned and looked at her and must have had this maniacal look on my face because she was like, “No, you do not have time to write a Star Wars book right now. You owe me two other books. Like, no.”

  So, I actually am sort of like, I guess, a little bit of a pinch hitter, maybe, because originally R. J. Palacio, who’s the author of the wonderful middle-grade book Wonder, was scheduled to write the adaptation of A New Hope, and she had to back out because I think her schedule is absolutely bonkers. I got a call one day from my agent, out of the blue, and she was like, “I am shocked and delighted on your behalf, like do you want to do this project?” I had this very immediate, visceral, panicked moment of almost saying no, like, “I can’t possibly write Star Wars. I love it so much. I could never do it justice.” And obviously my love for it won out in the end. I had the best time writing this, and it was a challenge for me because it was basically the first time I had written a true middle-grade novel, and middle-grade is just a term we use in the industry to describe books that are kind of written for the eight- to twelve-year-old crowd.

  David: I understand that you have a background as a Star Wars fan fiction writer, did that play any role?

  Alex: No, my Star Wars fan fiction is kind of . . . I don’t want to say it’s my secret shame, because I’m neither ashamed of it, and it’s obviously not a secret anymore, but I don’t like to go into specifics about it because it’s all still on the internet. I lost my password to FanFiction.net, so I’m terrified someone is going to figure out which story I actually wrote, but I wrote most of this between the ages of, like, twelve and sixteen, so you can imagine the quality level, but I made up for it, I think, in passion. But I definitely started out as a Star Wars fan fiction writer.

  David: I know that there was already a novelization of the first movie by Alan Dean Foster. Could you say a bit about how yours is different and why they wanted to do this new version?

  Alex: Yeah, of course. So my understanding, the way that this project was pitched to me, was that Lucasfilm and Disney Publishing Worldwide felt like a lot of the kids today, who were born decades after the original trilogy came out, are entering the series through Rebels, and through The Clone Wars animated series, and even through the prequels, so I think they felt that, with the reintroduction of the original three characters of Han, Luke, and Leia in the new films, they kind of wanted to go back and have a retelling series of the original trilogy, and we were pretty much given permission to go at it and have fun with it and approach it from any direction we liked.

  So, all three of the novelizations are so different from each other, and they reflect kind of our personal style and our priorities as story tellers, so we’re not really messing with the story itself, but we’re finding different ways of retelling it, and in different formats. So, for instance, my retelling is just the straight plot of A New Hope all the way through, but it’s divided between the tight third-person point of view of Leia, who opens the book, and then it switches over to Han in the middle section, pretty much from the Cantina scene all the way until Obi-Wan’s death, and then it ends with Luke. So, the challenges of that were figuring out the priorities of each character and really kind of zooming in on their characterization and mining different elements of their personality, especially with Leia, because she gets so little screen time in the film, and she’s not quite as developed as Luke’s arc or even Han’s arc in the story.

  I pitched this to my editor as basically being the Star Wars Breakfast Club, so the title is sort of like a nod to that, and the idea of playing with the simple labels that the characters give themselves and others try to pin on them. So, Leia is really dealing with the fact that she gets dismissed as a pretty princess, sort of like the Kate Middleton effect, where she’s a young senator, and she’s hungry for change, and she gets kind of brushed aside by the HoloNet reporters and their senators, and they’re basically more interested in what she’s wearing. And Han is really focused on the idea of him struggling with wanting to have something to believe in, but also holding firm to his own personal code of ethics.

  And Luke was really fun too because Luke is a little bit of a blank slate, so I really focused in on something that was actually sparked by something I read in Brian Daley’s radio adaptation of A New Hope. I think that came out in the early ’80s, maybe? About the idea that Luke was basically raised in poverty and didn’t necessarily have the same opportunities as his friend Biggs did, and sort of casting Luke in that light as someone who is sort of making his own destiny.

  David: You mentioned drawing from the radio play. Did you draw from anything else? Like the Foster novel or any other Expanded Universe kind of stuff?

  Alex: When I was first talking to my editor, Mike Siglain, he basically said the two scripts, the two sources that we consider canon, and if not, we will tell you when we review the manuscript. The two safe sources to pull from are the radio adaptation and the Star Wars script. So, everything else, he was like, “In theory, as long as it doesn’t contradict something that will happen in the movies later on down the road or something that is sort of established in the films, you can really have fun with it, and you can do the off-camera scenes, and you can kind of play a little bit with their backstory, but not a ton.”

  So, with the radio drama, I had the privilege of being able to adapt directly from it, and as someone who grew up reading the expanded universe, I was constantly trying to find ways to slip in little tidbits from the Expanded Universe, sort of as a little mini-rebellion. I guess I should start calling it Legends. I need to get in the habit of calling it that. So, certain elements of Leia’s backstory, I think Expanded Universe fans will recognize.

  The only thing that I really was not allowed to include was the traditional backstory of how Han met Chewie, which I guess I did not realize had never actually been depicted in a book series, but it had been sort of generally accepted as to how he met Chewie and set Chewie free and all of that business, and that was really the only clue that I had that they were eventually going to make a Han Solo film, a young Han Solo film, was because they were like, “Nope, nothing about Han’s past. Nothing at all.”

  David: Chuck, do you want to talk about this, too? In terms of how much of the idea of the book were you given and what were your constraints in writing it and what were you allowed to play with and make up on your own?

  Chuck: The constraints were actually negative constraints, where they came to me and said, “These are the things you can’t do. These are the characters you can’t use.” Obviously we don’t have much of the big three, the holy trinity, in the book, and just as Alexandra said about certain things of no backstory, we had similar restrictions there under things we couldn’t talk about, and then with those negative restrictions in place, then it was a case of, well pitch a story. And so I pitched them a big novel, a big sprawling sort of novel for this thing, and the original idea was we were going to do something that was explicitly World War Z-flavored, that was going to be allowing us to look through various lenses and various interludes across this unfolding war. But to me, the value also in a Star Wars story is to actually still have a Star Wars story, to have that adventure, the swashbuckling, the fun, and have sort of that central theme of a small group of characters being able to change the galaxy. So, I wanted that as well. That’s actually the central A plot, then we do these things where we dip into these interludes that allow you to visit various quadrants and corners inside the galaxy, which sometimes lets us play with preexisting characters who have popped up before. It sometimes lets us look at new characters and lets us look at . . . how are the bounty hunters reacting to this, how is the criminal underworld dealing with this, what’s going on on Tatooine, what’s going on with this character and that character? And so pretty much what I pitched ended up being the book that people got, so I’m pretty excited to have people read it.

  David: So when you say World War Z-flavored, you mean in terms of the structure of the story? Not in terms of there being zombies in it?

  Chuck: In terms of the structure of the story. No, the zombie Star Wars book is done. I didn’t do that one. But in terms of the structure, in terms of that sort of dipping in and out of . . . creating a larger quilt of a narrative.

  David: Did they tell you anything about what was going to happen in The Force Awakens so that you would kind of direct the story a little bit in that direction, or was that kind of a black box?

  Chuck: A lot of verboten. I know kind of how we get there. That’s sort of what I know. But a lot of the details for the actual movie are going to be pretty new and exciting for me, too, which is great, actually, because one of the things going into this job . . . I was vaguely worried, like, in an excited way, but worried, because I’ve been avoiding spoilers so religiously and then to suddenly be like, “Well, here’s the whole story.” I felt like I was going to be suddenly spoiled by my own job. But I wasn’t, actually. The movie remains a big question mark for me. I know certain things on a few little tidbits here and there. And I know very much how we sort of get to that point in the galaxy, but I don’t know what happens actually in the film.

  David: Was there anything in the book where you pitched it and they said, “No, that contradicts something that you don’t know about yet.”

  Chuck: Yes, there were a few things, which I obviously can’t say, but I included a few things and a few characters I liked. They were like, “This is not an option,” and for reasons I don’t know. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with The Force Awakens. It may. But it’s also because this is like a big, organic garden, right? We’re all planting seeds, and certain things may pop up in other properties that they don’t necessarily want to share yet, so I don’t know that it’s necessarily something that happens in The Force Awakens, but it may be something that’s planned further down the line, or something that someone is already working on.

  David: Alex, do you want to say anything about working with . . . you mentioned that other people wrote The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi retellings. Did you guys talk at all as you were working to make it consistent at all?

  Alex: I mean, I came on to the project so late that I think those two books were already done by the time I’d started it, and my editor, Mike, was very specific about not letting me read the other adaptations because they wanted them to have their own flavor, and I think it ended up working out wonderfully because they do all somehow still sort of work together, so my story is really an in-depth intro to these three main characters and setting up the galaxy, and then you move on to Adam Gidwitz’s Empire retelling called So You Want to Be a Jedi. And it utilizes the second person, so you are Luke Skywalker in this story, and it draws the reader, I think, more firmly into the galaxy. And then Tom Angleberger, who some people might know as the author of the Origami Yoda series, he wrote the Return of the Jedi adaptation, which is called Beware the Power of the Dark Side. And he has such an encyclopedic knowledge of the Star Wars universe that he’s utilized footnotes to cram as much information as possible into it. Mine is sort of an intro, Adam’s draws you more firmly in, and Tom gives you everything you ever want to know about the universe.

  David: Is there anything, Alex, in these books that is a really significant addition, or that casts things in a different light than people might have thought from just watching the movies?

  Alex: I think it’s true for Tom’s book more than Adam’s book, because Tom really felt like he needed to rehabilitate the Ewoks and the image of the Ewoks, so he made the very valid point that at the end of The Return of the Jedi, what are they feasting on? You just see all of these empty Stormtrooper armors, and they’re the apex predator of Endor. So he sets them up as fierce warriors. It’s really fun.

  Chuck: Greg Rucka’s new comic, Shattered Empire, has a little tiny bit to that, too. One of the rebels asks, “What are we eating? It’s delicious.”

  Alex: Things you don’t think about when you’re watching the cute bears dancing around. And then in my book, I felt like, so as I was saying before, I personally felt a little precious about Star Wars in terms of wanting to stay as true to canon as possible, or at least the canon that I had grown up with, so I utilized the radio drama to fill in a lot of the off-camera scenes that we don’t see in the film.

  Like when they first arrive at the rebel base at the end, at Yavin 4, and getting the Han/Rebel commander interaction. And when Leia sees the Death Star for the first time. But, a lot of these I couldn’t directly adapt because it was written in the ’80s, so certain technology they were talking about, like data tapes, I was like, “I don’t know what that is. Is that like something you made up? Is that like an ’80s sort of technological thing that I missed as a child of the ’90s?” If there was something I really disagreed with, I kind of recast some of the radio drama scenes in a different light, but I did get to insert a lot of my own imaginings. For instance, I really felt strongly that Leia would have tried to escaped on her own at least once, so I got to write a Leia escape attempt.

  A lot of my work, though, was fleshing out the emotional arcs, and kind of finally addressing some of those “Oh really?” moments, as I call them. My favorite example is after they get away from the Death Star, you see Leia consoling Luke, like “Oh, I’m so sorry this old man you knew for six hours died. Meanwhile, my whole planet and all of my family and my entire future just got completely blown up.” So, kind of like addressing that in a more sensitive manner, let’s say. And having Luke be more self-aware in moments like that.

  David: It’s funny you mentioned the tapes, because that’s one of the big things of science fiction from the pre-digital era, is that computers used magnetic tape, and so science fiction writers imagined in the future we’ll have really advanced tape.

  Alex: I was like, “Data tape, what is this?” It was like the Death Star plans were on data tape. So, I’m like, maybe I’ll switch this to disc?

  Chuck: It’s one of the things I like about certain retreads of that era of science fiction, like in Alien: Isolation, the video game, kind of plays as a sequel to Alien, it carries this ’70s aesthetic very well, so it’s sort of interesting. They don’t assume that it has evolved any.

  David: Chuck, why don’t you tell us just about the plot of Aftermath? What kind of characters and world did you invent for the book?

  Chuck: Sure. The book begins with everybody’s favorite pilot who doesn’t get too much screen time in the films, Wedge Antilles. He’s basically trying to suss out the supply lines for the Empire. The Empire is failing, but they still are capable of doing attacks on the fledgling New Republic, and so they’re trying to find these supply lines. But he susses out something far worse than supply lines, in that he discovers a secret meeting of Imperials on this planet, this backwater outer rim planet, this jungle world of Akiva, and there he discovers that these Imperials are a secret cabal looking to figure out how exactly the Empire moves forward, what will the shape of the Empire be, will that have an emperor, how do they survive, or do they surrender? And he stumbles into that and gets captured and has to be rescued by a ragtag group of really, like, miscreants who sort of dial up that broken group of heroes you get from A New Hope. You have a pilot who’s got PTSD, you’ve got a bounty hunter, you’ve got a washed up AWOL Imperial loyalty officer, you have the pilot’s son who has built this maniac bodyguard droid from an old battle droid, so he calls him Mr. Bones, and this group of miscreants have to come together and both save Wedge and interrupt this meeting and discover the truth of what’s going on behind the scenes.

  David: The battle droid character is Mr. Bones, right? Do you want to talk about why did you decide to use one of the battle droids in your story?

  Chuck: Sure. First of all, one of the values of going forward in this new universe in this canon is that it allows us to acknowledge that the prequels and all of the surrounding worldbuilding around the prequels, like the TV show The Clone Wars, and also Rebels, which comes after, existed. It’s something you don’t necessarily see in the old EU because you couldn’t. It wasn’t the fault of the EU, but those things simply didn’t exist yet. So, to be able to refer back to certain things and certain artifacts that exist is cool.

  And then, on the other hand, the battle droids were sort of terrible. Like, they were the most inept fighting force in all of Star Wars history. I mean, stormtroopers are notorious for literally not being able to hit anything, but the battle droids were even worse, but there’s something aesthetically fascinating about the battle droids, they sort of look like a human skeleton with a vulture skull on top. There’s something really cool there. So, I thought, well, okay, here’s a kid, he’s a little bit of a prodigy, and he’s capable of putting parts together very well, and so he engineers this battle droid who everyone will completely underestimate given the nature of battle droids, and he literally decorates the thing in actual bones, and half its head is missing, and there’s, like, a red reticule up there. Its face is sharpened to a point. So, he’s got this sort of terrifying murder droid who’s helping him out because he’s ultimately a black market kid. For as much as he’s a fifteen-year-old kid, he’s firmly ensconced in the criminal underworld of this planet, and so he needs this maniac battle droid to protect him. So it seems to be a character who is very popular with people.

  David: I agree with you that the battle droids look really cool. I think you said that you had a battle droid toy before the movies came out, and you just imagined how awesome it was going to be.

  Chuck: I did, yeah. They have their little flying jet thing, and I was like, yeah, this is going to be awesome. And then it was like, “Roger, Roger.” Oh boy, they’re basically just cheese to be cut in half by lightsabers. It’s constantly just bwoh, bwoh and dropped in half.

  David: Right, so when you’re making up these new characters, do you think about what makes a character feel like it’s a Star Wars character? Just what makes a character feel like a Star Wars character when you’re inventing these all-new characters?

  Chuck: Yeah, and that’s a curious thing, because you want to capture that pulp adventure vibe of the movies and the TV show, but obviously the novel allows you to have the . . . I mean, the form of the novel allows you to experience the internal dimensions. You want to get into some of the meatier character bits without losing the adventure and fun intrinsic to Star Wars. Like, obviously war is a big part of this book, and you want to be serious about treating war, and there’s parts of it that do that, obviously looking at PTSD, and examining the political stage across the entire galaxy, but one of the things that people might say was the mistaken part of the prequels was that they focused overmuch on the political side of things. When you start reading a crawl that’s about trade federations, you’re like, “Well, that’s going to be exciting for my son.” The goal is to balance a little bit of that, keep the adventure and the fun part of the characters, and then also give a little bit about what’s the true nature of the galaxy? What does war do to these characters?

  David: You mentioned how is your son going to react, and my understanding is that Aftermath is the first “adult” book in the new canon. I was just wondering: Did you write it differently than if it were aimed at fourteen-year-olds or something? Was that something in your mind as you were writing it?

  Chuck: It’s hard to say, because a lot of the most mature writing I have read exists in the young adult space. Young adult does not shy from dealing with big stuff, and Star Wars is notoriously accessible; even when it’s in an “adult” film, it’s accessible to kids. I’m not trying to write some vulgar pornfest here. It’s a Star Wars novel. It’s an all-ages book. But it’s adult in the sense that it does deal with these things like war. It does deal with post-traumatic stress. It does deal with family issues, generational issues, issues that I don’t think kids will necessarily shy away from or not understand, but it’s issues that also speak to, I think, people of my generation and even beyond it. It features characters who are older. It doesn’t always necessarily feature characters who are all kids or all young bucks trying to make their way in the galaxy.

  David: Alex had mentioned that she had this secret program to try and sneak in as many EU things as she could. Did you have any sort of agenda along those lines?

  Chuck: No, no real agenda. The EU for me, my reading of the EU kind of stopped probably with Stackpole. I obviously loved the Zahn books and the Stackpole books are great. Some of that feeds into it a little bit, so there’s some references there to those, but—and part of this was a direction given at the fore of writing this book—trying to keep it very explicitly in what we have already seen in terms of the current canon, meaning the films, the television shows, trying to keep it in that realm. I mainlined all of The Clone Wars. I had seen some of it before, but I hadn’t seen the entire the end to end, including the new Netflix-specific episodes, so I sort of digested all that in my brain, and I was already a fan of Rebels. So bringing Rebels into that, too, that was where my agenda was, connecting it to those things.

  David: It’s funny, you mention that the battle droids seem a little silly, and it seems like such a big part of being a Star Wars fan is hating certain things about Star Wars, and I just wonder, now that you have this responsibility of carrying this forward, do you feel like you’re constrained at all in criticizing aspects of Star Wars? What are the dynamics of that?

  Chuck: No, I don’t. I think engaging in the critical conversation is important, especially as creators, to figure out what we want to do either differently or what we want to highlight. To be clear, I don’t think hate is any good part of fandom, and there’s no part of Star Wars that I hate. I love kind of all of it. Even the stuff that I think is maybe a misstep is stuff that still exists in my head and I still play with it in its own way, as if it’s all toys in my sandbox. I think there is an aspect to fandom that sometimes goes beyond critical conversation and into that kind of grrr component of it. And I don’t think that’s necessarily healthy, and I think fandom is more about positivity and being a fountain and not a drain, so to speak.

  David: Alex, do you want to talk about that at all? Has this changed at all how you talk about Star Wars?

  Alex: I have always loved it so much that I’ve always hesitated to be critical of it openly. Because, I mean, I have certain gripes, especially with the prequels in terms of the story telling, but I can always find something that I actually like about the prequel films. We were talking about earlier, the battle droids, how cool they looked before we knew that they were just lightsaber fodder. Like, the designs and the costuming in the prequel films are amazing, as is the music, of course. And there are certainly specific scenes and moments within each of the films that are really cool.

  Chuck: The worldbuilding in those prequels is amazing. It’s almost a deeper worldbuilding. Sorry to interrupt.

  Alex: Yeah, so I think there’s maybe one character I could do without in the prequel films. He who must not be named. But, I mean, I feel very protective of Star Wars, and I think a lot of people who genuinely love it also feel protective of Star Wars, and that’s a very natural thing, because you’ve invested so much time and energy and love into it.

  My reading on the fandom is that everyone is excited about the new film, but some people are more cautiously excited about it because they felt maybe burned in the past, and I know people who are not necessarily thrilled that the EU was sort of being brushed aside when they had invested, again, so much time and energy and love into these books and comics and video games. I think we’re in a really exciting time, and I feel very optimistic about it in terms of just how many new stories we’re going to get.

  I’m really excited, especially, about the different anthology films that are branching off. All of these side stories that we’re going to get. Like, how cool to see how the Death Star plans were stolen. That is something I have never even thought to imagine, but it must have been really dramatic and like really, really dangerous. I like that we’re going to be playing with tones. You know the Han Solo movies are going to have a slightly different tone than, say, Rogue One, so I think it’s an exciting time. I can be critical of Star Wars, but I think, as a Star Wars author, I now feel doubly protective of it. I don’t know if that’s the best mind space to be.

  David: Alex, speaking of the fandom and stuff, what sort of responses have you gotten from Star Wars fans to your new book?

  Alex: Well, initially, I don’t think they were advertised as being for eight- to twelve-year-olds. So I think that people thought we were genuinely rewriting those original movies and were not particularly happy about it, and then once it sort of was explained, “Oh, these are really for young readers as a fun, different way of introducing them to this material,” I think people ended up really digging them, and we’ve gotten great responses from educators and librarians who want to bring them into schools.

  I just did the Decatur Book Festival, and I had this little boy who was dressed in a stormtrooper costume, and his mom had done up his stroller to look like an AT-AT, basically. It was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. I just sat there and watched his mom read it to him and how he was riveted by it. I was like, “Oh, that’s exactly what I wanted, because that’s how I felt as a kid when I watched Star Wars.” I’m looking forward to it. The book comes out on the twenty-second and we’re talking a little bit earlier than that, so I’m very curious to see how the books are received, especially since the three of them are so different from one another.

  David: And Chuck, your book is really, as we said, the first one venturing into the post-Jedi space in this new canon. I would imagine you must be getting a lot of the brunt of those who were really attached to the EU focused on you. What’s that been like?

  Chuck: It’s been interesting. For the most part, it’s been amazing. Fans by and large are an awesome group of people. They are full of love and vigor and excitement and just a massive amount of enthusiasm for everything that we’re doing, and that’s great. We actually launched the book midnight at Dragon Con, and I was also at the Decatur Book Fest.

  So, all weekend, I just had people coming up to me, and they were in the middle of reading the book, and they would be like, “Oh, I’m so excited about this part.” And then they would ask me all of these questions: “Who is this person?” “Is this who I think it is?” And then they would run away. I was constantly surrounded by a fog of people just like, “What about this?” It was awesome.

  That being said, at the same time that that was happening, literally the moment the book landed at midnight on Amazon, it immediately began to collect a cascading waterfall of one-star reviews. And the reviews cover a wide variety, but there’s a lot of themes present. I don’t know what this is exactly. I haven’t really gotten my hands around it. I don’t know if we’re looking at a Venn diagram of EU fans who are upset that it’s gone. There is some talk that there are some groups organizing “raids” on the book to do these reviews. And there are also groups of people who are upset that I included homosexual characters in the book, one of them being one of the protagonists of the book.

  And there’s also that component of the Gamergate/Sad Puppies who kind of, again, related maybe to the other two . . . and it sort of speaks to kind of an issue with certain aspects of fandom, and actually certain aspects of politics and culture in general, that there is kind of this weaponized nostalgia for things, that we assume everything was better back then and nothing can be new, and everything has to be a certain way. Sometimes that purity that you think you want is occasionally related to more toxic ideas, again sort of the anti-homosexuality thing. I’ve gotten some interesting emails too after all of this. So, that campaign seems to be continuing at Amazon, and they’ve gotten a little more venomous at times. But, you know, again, I don’t think that’s actually a dominant mode of fan. I don’t think that’s the dominant reader who’s reading this book, but I do think there is something a little more organized going on there.

  Alex: Yeah, Chuck, I’m sorry you’re dealing with that. It just strikes me, as an outsider who didn’t realize that was actually happening, it just seems like such a vocal minority.

  Chuck: I think it is a vocal minority. I think that’s usually how it is.

  Alex: Spoiling other people’s fun.

  Chuck: I know, right? But it’s all right. I think the book became a bestseller this week.

  Alex: Yeah, congratulations, both USA Today and The New York Times.

  Chuck: Yeah, and both like . . . I wrote that tweet on September fourth, it published on September fourth, so I’ve got the number four on both, so the “fours” is truly with me on that one.

  Alex: Oh my god, that’s awesome.

  David: I think I only read about maybe ten or so of the EU Star Wars novels, so I don’t know, but have there been gay characters in the Star Wars universe before?

  Chuck: Yeah, first of all, I think the first time you actually see it really is in KOTOR, Knights of the Old Republic, the video game from Bioware, but I know there was a Moff in one of Paul Kemp’s books who was a lesbian. I’m not sure if there’s anything beyond that.

  Alex: I’m not sure either. I’m trying to wrack my brain here.

  Chuck: I don’t think any protagonists.

  Alex: Certainly not a character that’s front and center, I would say.

  David: You mentioned there’s been all of this hostility, and I didn’t actually get a chance to read your post, but I understand that you made a post in response to this, but do you want to talk about responding to this sort of stuff? And what’s the most constructive way to do that?

  Chuck: It’s tricky because writers generally shouldn’t engage with bad reviews, and I specifically agree with that in terms of engaging with specific bad reviews. But, there did seem to be something a little larger going on here, so I thought I’d address the larger thing.

  In general, people who have criticisms against the book are obviously welcome to do that, because no book is going to be loved by everybody, and that would be weird to write that book. I have a very explicit style, and I carry that style to the book, so much so that I do think it’s very intrinsically a Star Wars novel, but it can feel, I think, like a Chuck Wendig Star Wars novel, and I think that’s not something unusual going forward in terms of Star Wars. They’re hiring filmmakers who have very strong visual fingerprints: Gareth Edwards, Rian Johnson, even J. J. Abrams, these are characters whose films you can identify both visually and thematically when you watch them, and I think that will carry into the universe.

  So, to sort of the general criticism, I have nothing to say except I’m sorry, and I hope you like it. But in terms of the criticism that’s either something driven by these raids by small fan groups who are so strident about bringing back Legends that they are angry at the new material, I don’t think that’s valuable, and I don’t think it’s valuable to their cause, which ultimately I agree with. I think the Legends were . . . I didn’t read super deep, but I think they were a great line of books, and I am sympathetic to them losing storylines. Because, I mean, it’s not that the books don’t still exist. One of the things you can say in response to them wanting these books is, “Well, your book still exists. No one came and stole them from your bookshelf and burned them.” So, they’re still there so you can enjoy them. In fact, a lot of these books are still being printed and published by the publisher, but their point, and it’s a fair point, is, “Well, we were investing in a big storyline, and that storyline kind of just stopped. It didn’t conclude to any satisfaction.” So, I’m sympathetic to that.

  Ultimately, if your mission there is to then take that love for the EU and turn it into hate for something else, I don’t think that’s really a valuable way to be a fan, and I certainly don’t think that’s fandom. It’s certainly, in the Star Wars metaphor, you’ve kind of gone to the Dark Side on that one: anger, and fear, and hate, and all that good stuff.

  And then the larger message is obviously for people who don’t want to see homosexual characters or any sort of LGBT representation inside a galaxy far, far away is very strange. That they’re comfortable with aliens and lasers and lightsabers, but they can’t really stomach that weird thing. Like, someone on my blog today left a comment where they’re like, “Well, I’m not a homophobe, but,” and of course any time they say the “but” you’re like, well, okay, here it comes, so let’s buckle down for that. He said, “I don’t read Star Wars to read about the real world, so why do you have to have this political intrusion of homosexual characters.” It’s such a puzzling thing because that assumes that straight characters are such a default that they couldn’t possibly be political. It’s just, “Well, that’s just how everything is. That’s the default. That’s normal. And so I don’t have to feel weird about normal.” But that’s a very toxic idea, and it’s troubling to me. So, for me, my message there was, “You are actually the Empire. Congratulations, if you think that Luke Skywalker is sitting around in those films being like, ‘Ugh, god, there’s a gay guy next to me,’ then maybe you really have miswatched those films and maybe you misunderstand kind of the awesomeness of the Light Side and the awesomeness of the Jedi. And what maybe these films are trying to get us to think about.”

  David: It seems so strange to me, too, because the inception of Star Wars, as I understand it, is that Lucas wanted to talk about the Vietnam War, so it’s not as if . . . It’s like, “Hey, you’re getting politics into my Star Wars where it doesn’t belong.” I mean, that’s the whole . . .

  Chuck: Right, science fiction is notoriously political. Even when it’s not overtly political, it has a great value and advantage to be forward-facing. Star Trek has been very political and very progressive in many ways. I think it’s puzzling to me that there is a sudden urge, sort of represented, too, by that Sad Puppies/Hugo Award controversy, of people who look back to a time of science fiction that actually maybe never existed. Or at least not in as big of a way as they think. They kind of want rocket ships and ray guns, they say, and then it’s like, they kind of don’t really want writers who are women, and they don’t want characters who hearken to political ideas, and they don’t want “agenda”-driven fiction, which is very strange to me when you don’t want that in your science fiction.

  David: Yeah, Alex, do you want to add anything here? Just in terms of the passing of the EU and peoples’ feelings about it as a Star Wars fan?

  Alex: I remember when they announced the films, and my initial reaction was sort of, “Wow, really?” And also because I felt like I was now going to have to eat a ton of crow because I had spent the last however many years telling people they will never make a seven, eight, and nine because now they have all of this material. It still centered upon the holy trinity of Han, Luke, and Leia. Those actors are so much older now, and Harrison Ford supposedly hates Han Solo, and they would never do it. I just had made the assumption that they would adapt from the material that exists out there, and it somehow never occurred to me that all of a sudden all of these characters that I felt very attached to would suddenly . . . they wouldn’t be gone, like you were saying, Chuck, but they wouldn’t be considered the solid truth, I guess?

  Chuck: The real.

  Alex: The real. I felt like with the Legends, formerly known as the Expanded Universe, we lost a lot of really strong female characters that were multi-dimensional. When you think about it, in the original trilogy, you really only had, what? Three female named characters: Mon Mothma, Aunt Beru, and Leia. I don’t think any of the other female characters actually have stated names, let alone personalities, really, which is sad.

  I think that’s maybe why Zahn created Mara Jade, because he felt like there was a need for a really good, juicy female character that wasn’t just a type. So, I was really sad about losing Mara and I was sad about losing Jaina Solo, but it seems like a lot of these new characters are strong females, so I feel like hopeful and not so sad about it anymore, I guess. I’ve definitely fully gotten on this train going forward, so I do really understand where people are coming from and being upset, but I don’t know that everyone is necessarily making their unhappiness known in a productive way, as you were saying Chuck.

  David: So, we’re pretty much out of time. Alex, do you want to tell us, do you think you’ll write any more Star Wars books?

  Alex: I’m hoping to. I would be very happy to. I have to tell you, when I wrote this one, I was so nervous about sitting down at the computer every single day that I actually wrote it out by hand and then transferred it over to the computer because somehow that felt like less pressure, so now that I’ve gotten through that mental and emotional hurdle of worrying that it wouldn’t be good enough or it wouldn’t do the story justice, I’m ready to go and write something else, so if they had me back, I would love to. Again, as I was saying, I would really like to expand on Leia’s past a little bit more as a senator, or maybe explore Padme a little bit more. There’s a lot of fun areas to play. I really feel like we’re in an era of possibility with Star Wars, so if they’ll have me back, I would love to.

  David: And, Chuck, you have some more Star Wars books on the agenda.

  Chuck: Sure, Aftermath is [part of] a trilogy, so this is just the first book, and I’m writing all three of them.

  David: Is there anything you can tell us about the other books?

  Chuck: They will be book-shaped and filled with words.

  Alex: No spoilers.

  Chuck: I know, no spoilers.

  David: The lightsaber would come and chop your head off, I guess, if you say anything, right?

  Chuck: Yeah, my head would roll.

  Alex: And then try to read the books.

  David: Great, I think we’re going to wrap things up there. We’ve been speaking with Chuck Wendig and Alexandra Bracken. Guys, thank you so much for joining us.

  Alex: Thank you.

  Chuck: Thank you.

• Syfy Wire - https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/wanderers-chuck-wendig-coronavirus-pandemic

  MARCH 17, 2020, 4:12 PM ET
  ‘WANDERERS’ AUTHOR CHUCK WENDIG IS ALSO FREAKED OUT BY HIS NOVEL’S SIMILARITIES TO CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC
  By Josh Weiss
  Washing hands sign
  Credit: JASON REDMOND/AFP via Getty Images

  The coronavirus pandemic has totally upended the world as we know it. Movie theaters have closed their doors, film and television productions are indefinitely delayed, and everyone is partaking in "social distancing" by staying home. In these trying times, we can focus on the negative aspects or come together as a species in order to save our collective hide.

  To get a better handle on the current situation in which we find ourselves, SYFY WIRE turned to Chuck Wendig, the prolific writer behind 2019's Wanderers. Published last summer, the novel is about a strange affliction that causes hordes of people to sleepwalk across America. Violence, terror, and the collapse of society follow, but are we headed in that direction with the spread of COVID-19?

  "I think what’s also useful to see — and this is something that Wanderers works hard to put out there — is that you also see a lot of community-building, and love, and caring," Wendig tells us. "In zombie movies, we’re often made to understand that the zombies are themselves kind of an environmental problem, and the 'true monster' is other people. And yet, in reality we see time and time again that people are out there to help each other. That, and hoard toilet paper, apparently. Are people pooping a lot in a crisis? Maybe they are."

  Wanderers Chuck Wendig front cover
  Credit: Random House

  In other words, a bloodthirsty, alt-right insurgency isn't springing up around all the panic and threatening to overthrow the government and kill sick people as we see in Wanderers. Now that we're on the subject, though, Wendig's optimistic view of humanity pretty much hits a roadblock when it comes to the topic of how our government is handling the situation.

  "Firing the pandemic response team in 2018, gutting the CDC, putting forward anti-science initiatives, and then further weakening the populace and dinging away at our healthcare system while simultaneously slicing away at the social safety net? It’s like girdling a tree and then acting surprised that it died," he says. "I’ve seen a lot of hopeful leadership at the state and local level — though not every state and local level, mind you, which is part of the problem with having rudderless federal leadership."

  While the fallout from the coronavirus crisis is unprecedented, we must remember that there have been plenty of health scares in the past. The only difference is they didn't drive us into self-quarantine. According to Wendig, it was only a matter of time until a really nasty illness came along.

  "We’ve seen plenty of emergent threats just in my lifetime alone, whether we’re talking HIV, H1N1, SARS, MERS, Ebola, and so forth," he explains. "The models always suggest the possibility of a pandemic, and so it’s not really me foreseeing it, but rather, basic scientific sense that one of these was coming around the bend at some point."

  Chuck Wendig - Photo by Edwin Tse
  Credit: Edwin Tse, Courtesy of Penguin Random House

  Speaking of models predicting future pandemics, the author is a little shocked at how similar his novel — or prophetic text, if you prefer — is to real-world events.

  "It’s definitely getting a little weird," Wendig continues. "There are a lot of little touchstones that the book introduced that we’re watching play out in the news — all the way down to an artificial intelligence predicting it before people did. In my book, Black Swan, and in reality, Blue Dot. Which, eek, even the names are uncomfortably close to one another."

  As the situation develops, Wendig admits that he's not opposed to revisiting the pandemic/epidemic sub-genre in a future project that would examine "the after-effects" of a global outbreak. Like we said earlier, not everything needs to be sullen about where we currently find ourselves.

  If you're feeling a bit blue or helpless, Chuck has some tips for maintaining your personal well-being:

  "Stay aware of the news, but don’t drown in it. Look away from social media. Exercise. Meditate. Go look at birds. Birds don’t give a sh**. They’re out there having a great time, spring has sprung, they’re singing and tootling and flitting about. Their version of tweeting is probably healthier than ours."

  And hey, why not check out our Wanderers interview with Mr. Wendig while you're at it?

  For our expanding list of virus-related genre delays and cancellations, click here. And for extensive information on how to keep you and your loved ones safe, check out the CDC’s coronavirus website.

  Matthew Jackson and Caitlin Busch contributed to this story.

• Lit Reactor - https://litreactor.com/interviews/interview-fuck-those-other-chuck-wendigs

  Interview: "Fuck those other Chuck Wendigs"
  INTERVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS AUGUST 4, 2021
  IN: CHUCK WENDIG HORROR INTERVIEW

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  Interview: "Fuck those other Chuck Wendigs"
  He's a bestselling author. He's a guy on Twitter. He lives under your bed. Chuck Wendig is many things, and the fact that he has a great sense of humor makes it easy to joke about those things. But besides being a superb storyteller with an outstanding new novel, Wendig is one of the good ones; a man who blurbs a ton of books, shares his knowledge about publishing with upcoming writers, and keeps readers happy. I recently read The Book of Accidents, and wanted to know more about the process behind it, so I sent Wendig some questions. He's what he had to say.

  Interviews are weird, but you have a new book out, The Book of Accidents, so tell us: What's Chuck Wendig's biggest fear when putting a book out into the world?

  I guess that nobody will care? I always say that writing is an exhortation against not just loneliness but being truly alone—it’s a yawp into the void that you hope will be answered. Like echolation, an echo out, an echo back. You pull a story out of your own messy weird heart and you put it on a plate and you do this as an act of faith. Faith that someone else out there is like you. That they want a bite of your heart, that they want to listen to your song. So I guess the fear is that nobody will care, and that the storyteller—me, in this case—is well and truly alone. I don’t think it’s true. But one worries.

  On a more serious note, I loved The Book of Accidents. It packs a lot of elements as well as a few emotional punches and a hell of a crazy, immersive story. What was your process like while putting it together? Did you ever think the magic stuff was pulling you away from horror?

  It’s not wish-fulfillment. It’s fairy-tale-teeth-on-a-platter, body-on-an-altar horror.
  Thank you! I feel like the magic in the book is… fraught, and complicated, and is more than it appears (or, perhaps, less than it appears). And as a thread of the book’s supernatural fabric, I think it still serves to create and highlight horror rather than diminish it. Because the magic in this place costs something. It extracts a price. It’s not wish-fulfillment. It’s fairy-tale-teeth-on-a-platter, body-on-an-altar horror.

  I love when an author can drop a scathing critique without sounding preachy, and you do that a few times in The Book of Accidents. Did that emerge in the character development stage or was it an idea you had from the start and found intelligent ways to make happen within the narrative?

  Oh! Haha, I’m not even sure what the hell I scathingly critiqued. For the most part I don’t ever want a book to feel or sound preachy, but I also am comfortable with a story being a product of the author. Meaning, all the STUFF that goes on inside me (anxieties and anger and their opposites, too) is okay if it goes in the book, as long as it feels like an organic part of that narrative and not, say, a manifesto.

  You've published many books, but each one is special. The Book of Accidents seems like the book that makes you a horror star, even more so than Wanderers did. What appeals to you about the genre?

  It’s funny, because most of my books are ostensibly horror. Miriam Black can see how you’re going to die by touching you, and the books are grim and gory and full of scares. Zeroes has body-hacking horror; Invasive has ants that literally leaf-cut your skin off your body. Wanderers is about the end of the world. But, horror has been kind of anathema, and it’s only writers like Stephen Graham Jones or Paul Tremblay or Ursula Vernon or Grady Hendrix who have, I think, really helped drag it back to… I don’t want to say respectfulness, because it’s always been a damn fine genre. But Big Publishing has weird ideas about things, often wrong ideas. And it needed to be reminded of that. So I’m glad I get to join the party, finally, and put the actual label on the book.

  As for what appeals to me about horror? I find horror quite comforting. I think it’s an excellent place to contextualize our fears and worries, to let our anxieties do Thunderdome battle in the arena of the book. I liken it to a sorcerer summoning demons into a summoning circle—a safe place, a prison, by which to ask them questions and force them to yield. Horror novels are that summoning circle.

  What are two other Chuck Wendigs doing in parallel dimensions? What do they do for a living?

  I like to imagine photographer and chef, but they’re both probably like, middle managers or some nasty shit. Fuck those other Chuck Wendigs.

  You have a solid online presence and your use of social media is great, but the hate is always there. How do you cope with that? What would you tell upcoming writers about dealing with negativity online?

  At a certain level, quite honestly, it gets very hard. I can give a talk here about well, you gotta toughen up, care bear, and shore up your filters and curate your own experience, and all that can be true to some degree, but the reality is, you’re hanging your heart on a hook and hoping everyone is going to be nice to it, and many are not going to be nice to it. Sometimes they don’t mean to be cruel, but just as many definitely, definitely do. Some just wanna hit it with a bat, pinata-style. And as you get bigger with a bigger audience, I find that people begin to view you less like a human being and more like an idea, or an object, and in that dehumanization, cruelty gets more casual.

  And it kinda sucks. For me, it’s mostly about trying to remain positive and see the good side of things and not let the bad stuff wash away all the sand on your beach. But I also have begun to question the value of social media for writers, and if we’re giving away too much of ourselves there, too much of our hearts and minds. I think if the negativity is too much, it’s okay to get away from social media, whether in brief or in total. You don’t need to pickle yourself in other people’s bile.

  Speaking of dark things...mines. Man, I've been reading about the lives of miners. Long days. No light. Constant danger. Black lung. What was it about mines that made you work them into The Book of Accidents? What was the research for that like?

  FUCKING MINES. My grandfather was a coal miner (I’d always been told he died of black lung, but the truth was that he died of bowel cancer – and I think the family always said black lung because it sounds cooler and tougher rather than, “his ass went bad and killed him.”). So, I’ve always found it somewhat haunting, the idea of going down into the dark. And I’ve gone down into some mines—some really deep ones, too, silver mines out west, oof—and they’re pretty much horror-fed spaces.

  I remember the title for this book came from seeing an actual mining book of accidents somewhere—I feel like maybe it was at a coal mine museum in upstate PA?—and it struck me how all these accidents (cave-ins, gas pockets, lost limbs) were technically accidents but also, weren’t. You throw a bunch of desperate men down into the dark with little support and meager light and shit’s bound to get bad. There are accidents and then there are “accidents.” Which, I suppose, is part of the point of the book.

  And on that research note...what other research did you need in order to create alternate dimensions without doing the overly elaborate sci-fi math/physics montage?

  Really, not much? This not being really very sci-fi, it’s easy to imagine separate worlds as part of horror, as part of the fear factor: a series of other worlds, off-kilter from this one, each increasingly strange, where the YOUs of that place are failures or abusers? Where they are victims or monsters? It’s pretty fucked up.

  We talked about mines, so we have to talk about serial killers. Why in this novel? Did you read about serial killers before writing? What is it about serial killer lore that makes us pay attention despite being disgusted by what they do?

  I love horror and there’s a natural extension there to being interested in true crime – and part of the serial killer stuff in the book is based on an actual murder that happened close to my house when I was a Wee Baby of, I think, a year or two old. A girl was disemboweled and left on Buckingham Mountain where I lived and it’s still an unsolved case (though everyone is pretty sure her uncle did it). It was grisly and left a big fingerprint on the area in which I grew up. It’s less that I think in this case the killer is interesting and more it’s just… the desperate desire to understand how this sort of thing can even happen. It feels so raw, so ragged, so terrible you just wanna understand it.

  And also you look at some serial killers and you see—though clearly what they did was never, ever justified—these are monsters who were often created by other monsters. Abuse and molestation and such. Monsters begetting monsters begetting monsters. Which, again, is a core component of the book, I guess. Cycles of abuse and trauma. Can they be broken? That’s what the book asks and tries to answer.

  The last question is always "What are you working on now?" but I will let folks find that out on social media. Instead, I'll ask you two easy questions:

  1- Give us the top three reasons why folks should X out of this page and go grab a copy of The Books of Accidents:

  1. Opens with a George Carlin quote, c’mon.
  2. Because you’re not supposed to write prologues anymore and in response I put TWO prologues in the book ah-ah-ah (says The Count from Sesame Street).
  3. I think this book puts people through the wringer but I also think it makes them feel better, afterward, and in this day and age, that’s not nothing.

  2- Care to share five books you've read recently that you think readers should check out?

  1. Four Lost Cities by Annalee Newitz
  2. Mine by Delilah S. Dawson
  3. The Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed
  4. The All-Consuming World by Cassandra Khaw
  5. Road of Bones by Christopher Golden

  Get The Book of Accidents at Bookshop or Amazon

• Grimdark - https://www.grimdarkmagazine.com/an-interview-with-chuck-wendig/

  AN INTERVIEW WITH CHUCK WENDIG
  INTERVIEWSJULY 16, 2021BY ELIZABETH TABLER

  Chuck Wendig is a New York Times and USA Today best-selling author, both non-fiction and novels. His recent books include Wanderers, which is a Locus, Bram Stokers, and Goodreads award Nominee. As well as the series Miriam Black, Force Awakens, the Invasive Duology. You can find him on his blog Terribleminds or his Twitter account @wendig, where he might be talking about writing, birds, apples, or sandwiches, depending on the season.

  Chuck was kind enough to chat with me about his writing and his upcoming horror novel, The Book of Accidents.

  Wanderers by Chuck Wendig[GdM] Reading your stories, I have noticed that you don’t do a lot of worldbuilding. You establish a setting and go, or maybe jump right in as you did with Wanderers because [gestures around] the scene is pretty much already set. Is that a conscious choice or how the words flow out of you creatively?

  [CW] Worldbuilding is something I love very much, coming from a roleplaying game background (both playing and writing) but it also can be an anchor that drags a story down—I do as much worldbuilding as is ideally needed to get to the next section of the book. It’s a bridge, in many ways. Not to say you can’t or shouldn’t build other pieces of glorious architecture. Every book is different, and I don’t think every story needs to be mercilessly screaming WELL THIS MUST SERVE A POINT OR YOU WILL BURN IT DOWN. But for my mileage I do prefer to focus more on the characters, and through them, worldbuilding is revealed.

  [GdM] As someone who is deathly afraid of ants, I read Invasive because apparently, I enjoy creeping myself the hell out. One of the first lines of my review was “Chuck Wendig, you are a maniac.” Why ants?

  [CW] Ants are awesome and weird, that’s why. Like bees, they are eusocial, and have behaviors that are both individual and group-based—I’ve always been interested in them. In fiction form they also make a nice metaphorical stand-in for anxiety.

  [GdM] Wanderers is an epic story. When you sat down to write it, did you have any idea the depth of scope it was going to cover? Or did you always know that it was going to be a huge story?

  [CW] I knew it was huge, but mayyyyyybe not 280,000 words huge.

  [GdM] What kind of research did you do for Wanderers? While we did not have a great sleepwalking plague of 2020, there are certain similarities between the governmental response in the face of a health crisis and how things played out in your novel. Wanderers was remarkably prescient. Especially the Black Swan AI versus Blue Dot AI.

  [CW] I’m a lazy writer, and much of the research for the book was not done for the book, but was rather just stuff I read that I found interesting. A lot of the prescient stuff wasn’t particularly insightful or prophetic on my part—it’s not like we didn’t know pandemics could happen or that white supremacy was a problem. But the Black Swan / Blue Dot thing was hahaha yeah, that was a little freaky.

  The Book of Accidents by Chuck Wendig[GdM] Tell me a bit about your newest book, The Book of Accidents. It seems like a complicated horror story to sum up with a small blurb. A lot is going on. Off the top of my head, I can think of a few of the different horror types in it: Lovecraftian, paranormal, post-apocalyptic, psychological, and serial killers, all as part of the narrative. As the author, how would you describe it to prospective horror readers?

  [CW] A lot is going on, indeed. It starts simple, as a family moving to a haunted house that was once the home of the father, a home of abuse and trauma. And from there, it certainly goes places. I like to focus on the family aspect: What happens when your family is at the center of great evil? How do they survive? How do they help each other? They are haunted by not only apparent specters, but also by generational trauma and cycles of abuse, and how do you break that circuit? How do you exorcise that kind of evil?

  [GdM] One of the central parts of the story is the dynamics of family and the effect family can have on someone for good or evil. The story rang with authenticity, especially the scenes depicting familial violence. What kind of research did you do to portray the characters so accurately?

  [CW] No real research there—I have my own family and grew up in a haunted house, so I had enough idea ammunition for this. It’s a very personal book.

  [GdM] When you were writing The Book of Accidents and wading into the kind of horror and darkness described in the story while writing during a pandemic with the horror and darkness in the real world, how did you shake it off?

  [CW] I wrote this before the pandemic, actually (though edited it during). We originally were going to release this book in October of 2020, but before the pandemic the publisher (wisely) opted to move the date—not, in fact, because of prophesying the pandemic but because there was going to be a huge, tumultuous election at that time and it would be hard to get traction with media attention for a book. And then, as it turned out, there was TOTALLY a global pandemic so I’m pretty glad we didn’t release then. (We are still of course in that pandemic, but it’s certainly an easier, calmer time.)

  [GdM] How do you separate yourself when writing such complex themes during such a difficult time like 2020?

  [CW] I don’t really separate myself? I’m writing a book for a reason and that reason is personal, so I don’t try to give myself great distance from the work. Especially in first drafts.

  [GdM] Talking about horror stories in general, I found The Book of Accidents dark but not bleak. It treads the line bringing you to the brink of despair only to have a small glimmer of hope to grab on to in the distance. Do you find that to be an essential aspect while writing horror in general?

  [CW] That’s usually my aim—dark, but not bleak. There’s enough despair in this era, and I’m not interested in adding to it. Just the same, I feel like horror fiction helps us contextualize real-world horror. I often compare it to how a sorcerer creates a summoning circle in which to conjure demons: that circle is a safe place to fight those monsters, and that’s horror fiction to me. It’s a safe place to fight monsters.

  [GdM] Finally, I would love to know what you’re reading and what books you are excited about in 2021?

  [CW] I just read Christopher Golden’s Road of Bones and it’s fucking legit, stellar “adventure horror” that just fires up my readerly happiness. Always excited for new Stephen Graham Jones. New Caitlin Starling, too. Kiersten White’s debut with Del Rey. Delilah Dawson’s The Violence. C’mon. This is a great time to be a horror reader.

QUOTED: "playing to strengths demonstrated in his many comics and tales for older audiences."

Wendig, Chuck DUST & GRIM Little, Brown (Children's None) $16.99 10, 5 ISBN: 978-0-316-70623-0

Chills and thrills ensue when long-separated siblings find themselves custodians of a very special funeral home and cemetery.

Returning to the old mansion deep in the Pennsylvania woods from which her fun-loving if ne’er-do-well dad had spirited her years before, newly orphaned 13-year-old Molly Grim is bummed by the cold reception she gets from her likewise parentless, tightly wound 18-year-old brother, Dustin Ashe, but stoked to discover that she’s inherited a half interest in Mothstead, a final resting place for monsters—or “nonstandard citizens,” to use the less pejorative term. Sparks fly at first, but in battling their uncle Gordo, who turns out to be even more demonic than his everyday persona as a slovenly accident attorney would suggest, the two ultimately discover that they’re good for one another. Playing to strengths demonstrated in his many comics and tales for older audiences, not only is Wendig a dab hand at concocting extremely creepy critters, but here he also pulls together a secondary cast of quarrelsome but supportive allies for the beleaguered teens, featuring a (generally) low-key vampire, a mercurial fox spirit (“Cat software loaded onto dog hardware,” as one observer puts it), and other slyly tweaked supernatural grown-ups. Most of the cast presents White; one supporting character is Black, and one is cued as Latinx.

Nothing like shared brushes with horrible, agonizing death to draw seemingly incompatible characters together, right? (Fantasy. 9-13)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Wendig, Chuck: DUST & GRIM." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2021, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A671782900/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3cd154c6. Accessed 17 Mar. 2022.

QUOTED: "Wendig's easy writing style is a perfect vehicle for the humor and rapidly paced shenanigans that propel the narrative."

Dust & Grim. By Chuck Wendig. Oct. 2021. 384p. Little, Brown, $16.99 (9780316706230). Gr. 5-8.

Wendig charges onto the middle-grade scene with a monstrously fun tale of family and funerary arts. When recently orphaned Molly--13, emancipated, and devoted to cosplay--arrives at her brother Dustin's large house/funeral home demanding a share of their mother's inheritance, the 18-year-old is understandably bewildered. Charged by her Uncle Gordo to snoop around, Molly quickly determines that Dustin is hiding something, and her investigations lead her to a walled area in a copse of trees where supernatural forces are clearly in play. Unfortunately, she sets devastation in motion by letting her uncle into that area, exposing unsettling truths about him and finally learning the true nature of the family business: it's a funeral home for monsters. Wendig's easy writing style is a perfect vehicle for the humor and rapidly paced shenanigans that propel the narrative. The introduction of monsters shifts the story slightly toward horror, though Molly quickly learns that friends can be found among these beings, too. Molly is a particular delight, both in her passion for costuming and in the uncertainty she feels about being herself, which is explored throughout her adventures. Her relationship with Dustin also gains importance as the story progresses, offering a grounding through-line of family's (non-monetary) value. A sure pick for those enamored by Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book (2008) and Tahereh Mafis Whichwood (2017).--Julia Smith

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 American Library Association
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Smith, Julia. "Dust & Grim." Booklist, vol. 117, no. 22, Aug. 2021, p. 70. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A689976880/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f5ceb0d9. Accessed 17 Mar. 2022.

The Book of Accidents. By Chuck Wendig. July 2021. 544p. Del Rey, $28.99 (9780399182136); e-book, $13.99 (9780399182143).

Wendig, whose last novel, Wanderers (2019), is on its way to becoming a classic of preapocalyptic fiction, now tells a tale that also threatens to become a classic, this time of literary horror. Nate, Maddie, and their young son have moved into the house in the country where Nate grew up. It's not exactly a joyous homecoming: Nate's late father was abusive (although Nate keeps most of that part of his life to himself). But he and Maddie hope the change in setting, from urban to rural, will be good for their son, Oliver, who has been having problems at school and in social situations. Soon, however, the darkness approaches: Nate has visions of his father, and Maddie has her own visions. And Oliver? Let's just say that his natural tendency toward empathy goes into overdrive. It seems encouraging, at first, that Oliver is able to make a new friend, but when Wendig starts revealing the truth about that friend, we think: Uh-oh, this isn't going to end well. Wendig has fashioned a horror story that feels at once old-fashioned and cutting-edge, masterfully taking a familiar scenario and shaking it up to devastating effect. More proof, if proof were still needed, that Wendig is a force to be reckoned with across genres.--David Pitt

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 American Library Association
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Pitt, David. "The Book of Accidents." Booklist, vol. 117, no. 19-20, 1 June 2021, p. 49. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A666230198/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=de970bad. Accessed 17 Mar. 2022.

QUOTED: "a grade-A, weirdly comforting, and familiar stew of domestic drama, slasher horror, and primeval evil."

Wendig, Chuck THE BOOK OF ACCIDENTS Del Rey (Fiction None) $28.99 7, 20 ISBN: 978-0-399-18213-6

A family that's banished itself to the woods of rural Pennsylvania finds more than they bargained for when supernatural forces decide they would make quite a snack.

Prolific and delightfully profane, Wendig pulled off a good trick last time with his sprawling, inventive, and prescient apocalypse chronicle, Wanderers (2019). This is another doorstopper, but here he returns to macabre horror reminiscent of his supernatural Miriam Black novels, injected with a juicy dose of Stephen King–like energy. An eerie opening introduces Edmund Walker Reese, a serial killer strapped into Pennsylvania’s electric chair circa 1990 for murdering four girls—a killer who disappears the second the switch is flipped. In the present day, former Philly cop Nate Graves is stewing over the death of his abusive father, who's left him a home in the woods. Maddie, Nate’s artist wife, thinks it’s perfect for her work, not to mention a natural refuge for their hypersensitive son, Oliver, who's imbued with not only a preternatural empathy for others, but also a gift for lending the pained some solace. At Nate's new job as a Fish and Game officer, his partner, Axel Figeroa, always has one eye open for trouble because of their proximity to Ramble Rocks, where Reese committed his dirty deeds, as does the Graves' neighbor Jed Homackie, a whiskey-drinking peacenik with secrets of his own. As happens, things get weird. Nate starts seeing his dead father around every corner. Maddie experiences fugue states that aren’t simpatico with her newfound predilection for chainsaw sculpture. Oliver gets the worst of it, finding himself caught between a couple of vicious bullies and a newfound frenemy, Jake, who quickly emerges as someone­­­­—or something—far darker than he appears. The characters are eccentric and likable even if their plight isn’t quite unpredictable, and the book will be catnip to horror fans, complete with meddling kids, doppelgangers, dimensional fissures, demons, and ghosts; it's a prototypical edge-of-your-seat plunge into real terror.

A grade-A, weirdly comforting, and familiar stew of domestic drama, slasher horror, and primeval evil.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Wendig, Chuck: THE BOOK OF ACCIDENTS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2021, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A661545860/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=aa67cbfe. Accessed 17 Mar. 2022.

Wanderers

By Chuck Wendig

It's not easy to write the end of the world. In precise and deliberate prose, you can explain why and how your fictional world is ending, but writing something that really conjures the end--with the many cogs in the machine of civilization that have to break down, and the consequences of the failure of each one--is much harder, particularly if you'd like to do it with heart and thrills and something resembling a thesis statement about the human condition. Very few authors can pull it off, and even fewer can master it. With Wanderers (Del Rey $28.99, 9780399182105, audio/eBook available), Chuck Wendig has mastered it.

The story begins with a young girl walking out of her house one morning with no shoes or supplies. Her sister tries to stop her, then her father, then EMTs and police, but still she walks. She is the beginning of an apparent epidemic of "sleepwalkers" that form a flock who walk--expressionlessly and painlessly--across the United States. In the midst of this mysterious outbreak come a series of characters--a disgraced CDC official, a woman who built the world's most sophisticated artificial intelligence, a rock star, a preacher on the verge of crisis and the young girl's older sister--who all have roles to play in unraveling the mystery of what's to come. The walkers, you see, are just the beginning, and what follows is an American epic with the soul of the nation--and the world--at stake.

Wendig tells this story through several points of view, mixing not just different geographic and emotional perspectives but also different spiritual, political and psychological worldviews, each one as real as the last, each gripping in its way. His ability to juggle so many fully realized characters is impressive, but even more so is the astonishing power Wanderers commands in conveying what it would actually feel like if this happened in the America we live in now, complicated by deep ideological divides, disinformation and the constant chatter of social media. All of these elements work together, often in surprising ways, to create a sense of terrifying plausibility and compelling verisimilitude.

The true success of Wanderers, though, is not just in its ability to show us the grim scenarios that could play out across a divided nation; it's in its heart. Whether he's writing about rage or faith or the faintest glimmer of light, Wendig brings a sincerity and emotional weight to his prose. That's why the scariest parts of Wanderers work, but it's also why the most hopeful ones do, too.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 BookPage
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Jackson, Matthew. "Wanderers." BookPage, July 2019, p. 20. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A592040316/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b9a01960. Accessed 17 Mar. 2022.

QUOTED: "Wendig is clearly wrestling with some of the demons of our time, resulting in a story that is ambitious, bold, and worthy of attention."

Wendig, Chuck WANDERERS Del Rey (Adult Fiction) $28.99 7, 2 ISBN: 978-0-399-18210-5

What if the only way to save humanity was to lose almost everyone?

This was kind of inevitable: Wendig (Vultures, 2019, etc.) wrestles with a magnum opus that grapples with culture, science, faith, and our collective anxiety while delivering an epic equal to Steven King's The Stand (1978). While it's not advertised as an entry in Wendig's horrifying Future Proof universe that includes Zer0es (2015) and Invasive (2016), it's the spiritual next step in the author's deconstruction of not only our culture, but the awful things that we--humanity--are capable of delivering with our current technology and terrible will. The setup is vividly cinematic: After a comet passes near Earth, a sleeping sickness takes hold, causing victims to start wandering in the same direction, barring those who spontaneously, um, explode. Simultaneously, a government-built, wickedly terrifying AI called Black Swan tells its minders that a disgraced scientist named Benji Ray might be the key to solving the mystery illness. Wendig breaks out a huge cast that includes Benji's boss, Sadie Emeka; a rock star who's a nod to King's Springsteen-esque Larry Underwood; a pair of sisters--one of whom is part of the "herd" of sleepwalkers and one who identifies as a "shepherd" tending to the sick; and Matthew Bird, who leads the faithful at God's Light Church and who struggles with a world in which technology itself can become either God or the devil incarnate. Anyone who's touched on Wendig's oeuvre, let alone his lively social media presence, knows he's a full-voiced political creature who's less concerned with left and right than the chasm between right and wrong, and that impulse is fully on display here. Parsing the plot isn't really critical--Wendig has stretched his considerable talents beyond the hyperkinetic horror that is his wheelhouse to deliver a story about survival that's not just about you and me, but all of us, together.

Wendig is clearly wrestling with some of the demons of our time, resulting in a story that is ambitious, bold, and worthy of attention.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Wendig, Chuck: WANDERERS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A583840595/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d3cfc84d. Accessed 17 Mar. 2022.

Wendig, Chuck VULTURES Saga/Simon & Schuster (Adult Fiction) $27.99 1, 22 ISBN: 978-1-4814-4877-2

The long, strange journey of the cursed girl Miriam Black finally comes to an end.

Wendig (The Raptor and the Wren, 2018, etc.) has been writing about his punk-rock angel of death for nearly a decade now, and he's chosen this sixth book to finally tie up the loose ends. Miriam, who's cursed with the ability to see how and when anyone she touches will die, has been through so much already, and Wendig isn't letting her go easily. As the book opens, she's pregnant with the daughter of her now-gone lover, augmented by a new paranormal healing ability, and traveling with her recent paramour, Gabby, all while being chased by the supernatural shape-shifter she calls The Trespasser. She's recruited by FBI agent David Guerrero, who's assembled a team with gifts similar to Miriam's in pursuit of a serial killer code-named "Starfucker" for targeting young actors in Hollywood. That's the gist of it, but Wendig throws in everything but the kitchen sink here, including the return of several villains and an old ally, the elusive Wren. Come for the medium who thinks he's Rasputin reincarnated; stay for the series' new big bad, The Ghost of All-Dead. The story is as propulsive as ever, with Miriam's new abilities giving Wendig a devious way to torture his much-loved fate-breaker--as always, Miriam is acidly profane, and the story is graphic both sexually and in terms of sheer bloody and visceral violence. It's certainly not the best entry point for the series--that would be the hard-charging opener, Blackbirds (2015). But readers who have shared the journey of this hard-drinking, hard-living runaway and want to see if she finally gets free of her demonic conundrum will have as much of a blast as ever.

Gruesome and bathed in ebony-black humor, this is a much-deserved conclusion for one of horror's most imaginative heroines.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Wendig, Chuck: VULTURES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A573768914/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c8a5e3df. Accessed 17 Mar. 2022.

Wendig, Chuck THE RAPTOR AND THE WREN Saga/Simon & Schuster (Adult Fiction) $27.99 1, 23 ISBN: 978-1-4814-4874-1

Miriam Black, the angel of death, the fate-breaker, the punk-rock death-whisperer, returns home to face the music.

It's possible for an author writing a series to get lackadaisical about the ingredients: characters who stay the same, doing what they do in a familiar setting. The ever more transgressive Wendig (Thunderbird, 2017, etc.) is not that guy. In this fifth book about Black, a harder-than-nails young woman cursed with an unforgivable gift, Wendig not only portrays the authentic arc of a troubled character, but also shows that our sins can indeed come back to haunt us, with permanent, unfixable consequences. Here, Miriam, who can see the circumstances of anyone's death by a touch, has had it. She's retreated to her dead mother's house to drink, smoke, and do a little breaking and entering with an elderly neighbor. She's haunted by The Trespasser, an otherworldly doppelganger who warns, "The river is rising," whatever that means, psycho. Plus, a copycat killer who resembles Miriam is replicating all the murders Miriam has committed over the years. Former FBI Agent Thomas Richard Grodsky, now writing a book about serial killers, is trying to help but is kind of useless. Later, Miriam gets help from ex-lover Louis Darling, whose violent murder of his new bride, Samantha, still lies in the future, predicted by Miriam. She also bears the burden of finding Lauren Martin, the Wren, similarly cursed, while avoiding getting her head cut off by Harriet Adams, a machete-wielding undead thing who's proving to be quite persistent, despite a bullet to the brain. It's possible to jump into the series here, but readers will get more satisfaction starting with Blackbirds (2012) and enjoying the entire sordid tale. Miriam is that rarest of gifts in any genre, the bloodied, beat-up antihero who does actually change over time.

Another profane, gruesome, and blackly funny entry in a great series, with an ending to die for.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Wendig, Chuck: THE RAPTOR AND THE WREN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A527248236/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ec98cf3e. Accessed 17 Mar. 2022.

Thunderbird: A Miriam Black Novel

Chuck Wendig. Saga, $27.99 (336p) ISBN 9781-4814-4871-0

In Wendig's explosive, long-awaited fourth book to feature Miriam Black (after 2013's The Cormorant), Miriam hunts for a woman called Mary Scissors, who might be able to rid her of the power that has ruined her life: when Miriam touches someone, she sees when and how they will die. Miriam has been to hell and back more times than she can count. She wants to live her life in peace, and her grim gift just won't let her. When she happens upon a woman traveling with a young boy, Miriam sees the woman's shooting death in a vision; to prevent the murder, she kills the shooter. This act leads her to a doomsday group called the Coming Storm that will do anything to get their hands on the boy. Exhausted and haunted by an entity she calls the Trespasser, Miriam, along with her scarred, vulnerable friend Gabby, must find the boy before it's too late for them all. This gritty, full-throttle series is what urban fantasy is all about, with bitter humor rounding out lyrical writing. It's easy to root for this mouthy, rude, insensitive, but innately good young woman, and her story hits the reader like a double shot of rotgut. (Mar.)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
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"Thunderbird: A Miriam Black Novel." Publishers Weekly, vol. 264, no. 3, 16 Jan. 2017, p. 45. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A478405274/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=57740ef6. Accessed 17 Mar. 2022.

"Wendig, Chuck: DUST & GRIM." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2021, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A671782900/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3cd154c6. Accessed 17 Mar. 2022. Smith, Julia. "Dust & Grim." Booklist, vol. 117, no. 22, Aug. 2021, p. 70. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A689976880/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f5ceb0d9. Accessed 17 Mar. 2022. Pitt, David. "The Book of Accidents." Booklist, vol. 117, no. 19-20, 1 June 2021, p. 49. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A666230198/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=de970bad. Accessed 17 Mar. 2022. "Wendig, Chuck: THE BOOK OF ACCIDENTS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2021, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A661545860/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=aa67cbfe. Accessed 17 Mar. 2022. Jackson, Matthew. "Wanderers." BookPage, July 2019, p. 20. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A592040316/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b9a01960. Accessed 17 Mar. 2022. "Wendig, Chuck: WANDERERS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A583840595/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d3cfc84d. Accessed 17 Mar. 2022. "Wendig, Chuck: VULTURES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A573768914/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c8a5e3df. Accessed 17 Mar. 2022. "Wendig, Chuck: THE RAPTOR AND THE WREN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A527248236/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ec98cf3e. Accessed 17 Mar. 2022. "Thunderbird: A Miriam Black Novel." Publishers Weekly, vol. 264, no. 3, 16 Jan. 2017, p. 45. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A478405274/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=57740ef6. Accessed 17 Mar. 2022.

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