About Tillinghast: A dark and utterly original literary horror debut, following a priest whose bloodthirsty life has extended far longer than any mere human’s—and is upended when a stranger comes to town. Out now.

On the 17th of March 1892, a woman named Mercy Brown, who had been dead for exactly three months, was exhumed from her grave in the small town of Exeter, Rhode Island. A team of local villagers, accompanied by a medical doctor and a newspaper reporter were there to watch as her heart and liver were removed from her body and burned on a fire nearby. The ashes were carefully collected and mixed with water, and her brother Edwin drank the resulting concoction. Mercy wasn’t the first. Nearly one hundred people were exhumed from their graves across New England, especially Rhode Island, throughout the nineteenth century.

Why did they do this? Depending on who you ask, you might get one of two answers.

Answer one is that it happened because Mercy Brown had died of tuberculosis, or consumption, as it was then known. In the wake of the industrial revolution, populations in New England became more concentrated, and these higher density communities provided the ideal conditions for TB to spread. With no effective treatments until the 1940s, contracting the illness meant certain death. In response, local communities developed the belief that TB was spreading through families and towns because those who had already died were somehow sapping the energy of the sick. Perhaps, then, neutralising the dead might halt the disease. Mercy might be harming Edwin, and by destroying her body and giving him pieces of it to consume, he might be cured.

Answer two is that it happened because Mercy Brown was a vampire.

What do you picture when you read the word ‘vampire’? An alluring, Eastern European aristocrat who never drinks… wine? A Louisiana-dwelling, blond Frenchman? A sparkling, perpetual seventeen-year-old?

What, if anything, do these figures have in common with Mercy Brown? On the face of it, not much. The New Englanders who exhumed the bodies of their dead relatives to prevent the spread of tuberculosis never used the word ‘vampire’ themselves – it was projected onto them by newspaper reports which brought the story of Mercy Brown to a national and international audience, one of whom, it seems, was the Irish writer Bram Stoker, who would publish Dracula five years later.

The first seeds of my novel, Tillinghast, came from research into the New England vampire panic, as the exhumations are now known, but it was also shaped by vampires in mythology, fiction and film. There are plenty of fascinating links between what really happened in Rhode Island and the vampires of page and screen. These links are diaphanous and suggestive, and made a great place to play – with the historical record, with readers’ expectations, with the vampire tradition in general. The New England vampire panic and the mythological, fictional vampire can illuminate one another, but they can also stand in opposition. Examining four key characteristics of the vampire, the vampire as outsider, as seducer, as revenant and as parasite, will show these points of union and opposition, and help explain why the story of Mercy Brown holds such enduring fascination.

The Outsider

Vampires are outsiders, in space and in time. Their artificially lengthened lifespans leave them cut off from their own chronological context, adrift in an infinite present. Very often, too, they’re geographical outsiders. Dracula emerges from deepest, darkest Eastern Europe, Lestat is an old world traveller to America. The vampire is non-human and foreign. He’s outside the house and needs an invitation to enter. Once he’s in, he spreads death and corruption.

At the time of the exhumations, Rhode Islanders were in a sense outsiders to their New England neighbours. Founded by a religious refugee from Massachusetts, Rhode Island retained a secretive permissiveness which allowed many of its inhabitants to avoid affiliation with church congregations, which could be systems of surveillance as well as religious communities. Rhode Island was a place for outsiders and a place where you could keep secrets – fertile ground for vampire myths.

To the writers and readers of newspaper reports such as that which appeared in the Providence Journal two days after Mercy Brown’s exhumation, the people of Exeter were outsiders too, cut off from the genteel enlightenment of larger cities. The Journal describes, in frenzied all caps, the “BODIES OF DEAD RELATIVES TAKEN FROM THEIR GRAVES” with the aim of “Testing a Horrible Superstition”, something their readers, of course, would never do. Intriguingly, Dr Michael E. Bell points out that international responses to the exhumations seemed to regard them as a typically American problem: taking a step back makes the Rhode Islanders look a lot less foreign, a lot more integrated into US society. Perhaps they’re not as outside as we’d like them to be.

What’s worse than a vampire lurking outside the door, begging to be invited in? A vampire who’s already inside the house. A vampire who looks like your mother, your sister. Worst of all, a vampire who looks like you.

The Seducer

Vampires are sexy. They can be beautiful and charming when they want to, and their sex appeal can be an excellent tool for hunting their prey. Vampirism is an eloquent stand-in for sexual desire, especially in a conservative context: an alluring, often male figure is in thrall to a barely-contained appetite, the fulfilment of which will result in the destruction of his partner. To me, this sounds a lot like some of the abstinence-forward sexual education I was offered in my early teens.

But what does this have to do with the New England vampires? Surely there’s nothing sexy about a tuberculosis epidemic? As Alicea Hibbard and Annette Lopez Rosa explain in their article, ‘Tuberculosis and the Fatal Beauty of Romanticism’, “the characteristic consumptive appearance of TB victims was the predominant European beauty standard. Suffering from the disease’s effects was seen not only as a beautiful and dramatic way to die, but also an aspirational way to live.” The bright eyes, pale skin, livid cheeks and lips and delicate frame of the TB sufferer were considered beautiful, and it was thought that consumption favoured victims of a romantic or artistic disposition. The disease sought out sexy people and made them sexier as they died.

The idea of a sexy illness sounds weird, but the description of the consumptive body is very close to the heroin chic aesthetic of the 1990s. Echoes of that style are returning right now as changing fashion and rising use of GLP-1 receptor antagonist drugs bring extremely thin body types back into fashion. It’s also worth noting that unlike fictional vampires, who tend to be male, the ‘vampires’ of New England tended to be female – women spent more time in the enclosed spaces of the home, and more time caring for ill family members, leaving them disproportionately vulnerable to contracting disease themselves.

The delicate, vulnerable, suffering woman is a sexualised trope familiar to everyone. Through direct replication and revisionist subversion, it’s still nearly ubiquitous in horror and thriller media today. And if the delicate, suffering woman can double up as the aggressor, the antagonist; if she can die sweetly on a chaise longue and then reappear to sap the life from more victims, all the better. This fetish-figure twines together the historical record and the vampire as cultural artefact. It seems certain to have driven public interest in Mercy Brown’s story back in the 1890s, and the enduring appeal of the story today.

The Revenant

Vampires are undead. Their bodies don’t decay, often they don’t even change.

Human bodies, of course, change constantly, After they die, they alter in ways that are disturbing, even counter-intuitive. The unusual experience of witnessing advanced human decomposition during the exhumations probably contributed to the practices that made up the New England vampire panic. Corpses bloated with decomposition gasses could be mistaken for revenants who had been consuming something. The fluids in the cavities of a decomposing body might be mistaken for fresh blood. Colour changes in the skin could be surprising and frightening.

In between the moment of death and the point at which decomposition is largely complete and only skeletal remains are left is a period of great risk, when the lines between human and non-human, living and dead seem threateningly porous. Decomposition takes a familiar body and makes it unrecognisable, full of uncanny movement and alteration. Victim becomes monster, ailing consumptive becomes vampire.

This fear isn’t one we’ve left behind with the nineteenth-century New Englanders. In the contemporary US, rates of embalming are extremely high, and have only begun to decline recently as cremation becomes more and more popular. Both embalming and cremation stave off the dangerous period of decay, either by temporarily preventing it or by skipping through it to the skeletal phase. They’re technological responses to the threat of a beloved body turning on us. Even now, we prefer people alive or dead. When they’re somewhere in between, horror ensues.

The Parasite

Vampires drink blood. This is a pretty big moral problem, and if the vampire is to appear as anything but a villain, it requires a work-around, such as the animal-blood-only diet of the vampires in Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series.

When working on Tillinghast, I knew that this point of conflict – a vampire who knows right from wrong, prefers to do the right thing but nevertheless kills victims – was one I didn’t want to resolve or work around. The further I got into writing the book and the better I got to know my main character, the more it seemed that his moral impasse was not only the key to understanding him, but a difficulty that a lot of real people shared, very much including me.

I know that my day-to-day comfort and flourishing is supported by the suffering and even the deaths of other people. Unlike Tillinghast, I don’t have to dispatch them myself, but like him, I have a sense of justice, a desire to do the right thing, and a complete inability to solve this problem in a way that might absolve me of my culpability. Being able to keep on going in circumstances like this is, I think, a far more universal human struggle than it first appears.

I think this is the point at which the New England vampires diverge definitively from their fictional counterparts. I do not think that the people involved in the New England vampire panic acted selfishly, and I don’t even really think that they hurt anyone. In the case of Mercy Brown, the record shows that her father, George Brown, was reluctant to agree to the exhumation, and did not believe that exhuming her would be effective. Dr Metcalfe, who attended the burials, didn’t think it was a good idea either. So why did they go through with it? They did it in order to protect their community, through essentially the only method available to them. The results, however brutal and grotesque they might seem, were the fruits of their selflessness and bravery.

Sometimes it feels that the New England ‘vampires’ have become lost in the fictional and mythological mist that surrounds them, but they are there if you look closely enough. If you take a trip to the Chestnut Hill Baptist Church in Exeter, Rhode Island and walk around the back of the church, you’ll find the headstone of Mercy L. Brown, daughter of Geroge and Mary Brown, who died aged 19. It stands in the shade of a tree, near the graves of her family members. Mercy died in the winter, and the cold preserved her. In some tellings, it was so cold she couldn’t be buried, and instead her body was stored in the crypt, which you’ll find off to your right as you look at the headstone, waiting for the ground to thaw enough for digging.

Something terrible did happen to her, but it wasn’t supernatural. It was nothing worse than what happens to all of us, sooner or later. And that, surely, is a truth too terrible to contemplate. That’s the kind of thing you’d have to do something about. You’d have to find a way to extract the vampire from yourself, your sister, your mother. You’d have to find a way to send her out into the night, where she can’t get at you anymore, where she can beg and beg all she wants, but you’ll never let her back inside.

If you’d like to find out more, I recommend Dr Michael E. Bell’s books Food for the Dead and The Vampire’s Grasp.

The post What is a Vampire Anyway? The New England Vampire Panic appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

Acclaimed Calgary author Ben Berman Ghan joins Iranian-Canadian author Hollay Ghadery to talk about the speculative fiction renaissance in Canada and beyond, because what are borders anyway? And doesn’t speculative fiction so often blur and dismantle them? Most recently, Ben has authored The Library Cosmic (Wolsak & Wynn) , a fascinating collection of stories to follow up on Ghan’s debut novel The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits. From golems minding libraries that span millennia, to ghosts pursuing each other across deserts, to robots piecing together texts from lovers in a far future world, these are epic stories, sure to delight readers looking for magic, wonder, and compelling story telling.

Hollay’s fourth book and debut novel, The Unravelling of Ou (Palimpsest Press), tells the story of Minoo—a woman exiled from Iran to Canada after a teenage pregnancy. The story features first-person narration by the protagonist’s sock puppet. This approach provides a unique lens for the examination of female shame, neurodivergent experience, and the courage required to break free from internalized oppression.

Hollay realizes her initials spell HAG and as a middle age woman, is enthusiastically leaning into the dark whimsy they conjure—especially for this conversation on speculation fiction.

Hollay Ahktar Ghadery (HAG): I for one never start writing fiction thinking it’s going to be speculative. That’s something that happens because of how I want or need to approach an issue or perhaps there’s something about our world that doesn’t feel like it’s adequately equipped to explore how I experience life. For instance, with my novel, The Unravelling of Ou , I had no intention of having any speculative element to it, and perhaps some people would read the book as completely based in reality. But the fact of the matter remains  that I see my sock puppet narrator as a separate entity, or at least as a distinct symbiotic entity. I needed to slip the confines of restrictive heteronormative, patriarchal, and Neurotypical, thinking to access what I felt was a lived reality for my character Minoo. Enter the sock puppet. Enter speculative fiction.

What about you? Is speculative fiction something you set out to write deliberately?

Ben Berman Ghan (BBG): I am enmeshed in genre, in the study of it, the reading of it, its culture and production and creation. So yes, I go into a new story already thinking about where it sits, what my work is playing into or subverting, what I am in conversation with. Most often, I get described as a science fiction writer. This makes sense to me, though there is very little science in my stories. Increasingly I have turned towards horror, and the gothic, and the weird. It isn’t everyone’s approach, I know, but I think of literature as a really, really slow conversation across the decades, and it matters to me to know what is being said in a conversation I yearn to contribute to. I wrote most of the stories in The Library Cosmic between 2021-2023, and then spent years editing. But the stories in this book were looking towards were speculative just as often as not. Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire, and Jack Kirby’s Eternals, and Jeff VanderMeer’s Dead Astronauts are on my mind somewhere in these pages, but so is Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, and so is Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century. Genre has a wonderful capacity for metaphor, don’t you think? If a writer feels despairing, or lonely, their character may find themselves the only living person on a desolate, empty planet. If a writer is feeling hopeful, twinkling stars can appear in the sky, and magic can be real.

HAG: Absolutely! And speaking of metaphor, the way that you opened your novel, The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits, is indelibly imprinted on my brain; the image of an angel kneeling in a garden on the moon. It’s gorgeous and haunting. I was delighted to see you flex the same muscle in your short fiction collection, The Library Cosmic. Your work is airy but also intense and it’s a heady mixture. Tell me about the process of entering these worlds that you created and staying in them—especially staying in them because I found it exhilarating, but also consuming to stay in the world of my novel.

BBG: All-consuming seems like a good description! But I’m really only happy when I’m enmeshed in a story. The times between writing, the times between having a good idea to pursue and chew on, these are probably the times when I’m my most unpleasant, my most frustrating. I like being in these worlds. I usually just kind of fall into them. I don’t think about worldbuilding when I first start crafting a story, to be honest. Imagery and character and feeling come naturally, and then the world around it logically follows. The worlds in The Library Cosmic follow something of a stranger series of moods than the novel that came before, perhaps, caught between the extremes of hope and nihilism that I spent a lot of the pandemic in. Once I’ve fallen into the world of a story and I have the characters and the moods and the images, then I take lots of notes, I build things out and build things up. It is important that you, the writer, knows how everything works and how every little thing ends up where it is, even if you aren’t going to tell your readers, or at least, I think so. Really the biggest problem with my need to fall into a story, is that it is always the next story no satisfaction from the last thing done, no lingering intoxication. I am always chasing that next high, the act is the thing, I suppose. Is it like that for you?

HAG: Oh definitely. I always say I’m going to take a break after a book and then I never do. I need that next bump. I haven’t even quite finished a collection of essays I have due to publishers in the next few weeks, or the poetry collection I received a grant for after that, and I’m thinking about my next novel, which will definitely be speculative. But I never set out to write speculative fiction, unlike you. As this next story started developing in my brain, before I wrote anything down, I realized that if I wanted to investigate the themes I wanted to explore, the only way I could do that— the only way I could explode the systems and conventions and pick through the mechanism—would be to slip the (false) consensus of reality. I feel like it’s not just me who is increasingly drawn to speculative fiction, though. There is a speculative renaissance, and I’m noticing many Canadian writers have tapped into it. I’ve already circled why I think literary artists, like myself, might be drawn to this genre right now, but I’d love to hear your thoughts. And why do you think Canadian writers in particular seem increasingly drawn to spec fiction? If you agree with me at all about this part.

BBG: In terms of if/why more “literary” writers are drawn towards speculative fiction, I’m not sure how much I have to say about it. I was always drawn to this. I have always loved it. It is good more people have caught on, but I can’t say why, because I didn’t have the revelation with them! I don’t enjoy the term “literary” fiction to be honest, it is so restrictive, yet so vague. What makes something literary? There is artful and beautiful writing in literary spaces, there is terrible writing in literary spaces. There’s artful and beautiful writing in speculative lit scenes, and terrible writing in these scenes.

However, what I can say more about is I am encouraged by how much speculative fiction Canadian publishers have put out in recent years!! Just recently, Geoffrey D. Morrison’s The Coffin of Honey over at Coach House Books, Whitney French’s Syncopation: A Novel in Verse at Wolsak & Wynn, and A.D. Sui’s Our Infinite but Inevitable Ends which is forthcoming with ECW. All beautiful works, all very spec, very genre. It is good to see how much less closed off genre writing is from “literary” writing. I get very frustrated when people from one “camp” refuse to read the other and vice versa. Maybe that’s what feels different, really. Not the writers, but the readers. Readers seem far more open to finishing the new Sally Rooney or Rachel Cusk, and then picking up the new Jeff VanderMeer or Stephen Graham Jones or the new Isaac Fellman (look at me sneaking in my faves all throughout this answer hehehehe) from the same shelf, and not really thinking about how the genre lines may divide these books! If anything, I’m sure that has helped open up more writers to exploring different kinds of writing in their own work. I’m hesitant to say this is a uniquely Canadian affair either. It has happened here, it has happened all over. “Literary realism” as we think of it today, isn’t really that old or well defined a genre. “Literary” as fully separate and serious and altogether apart from the fantastic It is a microscopic blip in the history of art.

HAG: As someone who works in publishing, I’m definitely seeing speculative fiction more in Canadian books and I’m noticing—talking to other Canadian writers—that more writers are thinking about venturing into speculative realms more often, which perhaps has something to do with what you’ve touched on about genre lines being blurred and noticing readers aren’t fussy about genre divides.

Based on conversations I’ve had and I’m still having, I’m aware of writers who have always been drawn to speculative fiction, but who have stayed away from writing it because they felt there might not be taken seriously or there’s no serious market for it. These writers seem more ready to write it themselves, and I agree: it may be due to the heartening agility of readers. Of course, you are right that possibly it’s not just in Canada, but that’s where my career focus is and that’s where I’m noticing the change.

I feel like Canadians can sometimes have an inferiority complex—and this isn’t just related to art, but I’m most interested in how this plays out the way we talk about our culture. My interest is not born in any sense of nationalism either. Rather, I’m fascinated by the way people relate to and communicate about the spaces and places they are from. Speculative fiction is an infinitely exciting prism through which I can interrogate this preoccupation.

[To Ben: if you feel like I’m getting off topic here or straying too far, feel free to redirect and I’ll edit. I’m so jacked up on antihistamines right now. I’m not sure I’m even thinking straight.]

[To Hollay: This makes sense to me! I’m just gonna have to think about my answer. And oh no! I hope you feel better soon]

[[we should keep this exchange in the interview]]

[To Ben: Considering my new allergies I thought to be the result of human made climate change and this is a discussion about speculative fiction, it seems fitting to try to leave it in. I’m on my first day without Claritin, though my doctor assures me taking it every day even with my SSRI is perfectly safe, but these days nothing feels perfectly safe, you know?]

BBG: I’m not really interested in “CanLit” the way some people talk about it, as an ongoing project, as something nationalist and unique. I am interested in literatures in Canada, and what work people are contributing and what work is flourishing here. It is hard for me to think of speculative literature as something that adheres to a national writing scene. When I think of the magazine culture of spec, and the reading culture of spec, part of my hope and my delight is that Canadian speculative writing can find a place not in a “national” writing scene but in a writing scene without borders. One that, like speculative fiction itself, allows us to step into a bigger and more wondrous world. Something that’s been so interesting looking at our moment of Canadian speculative fiction is, like you said, the way writers are communicating with spaces and places. There’s something prickly and interesting seeing the specific way authors are transforming spaces like Toronto, or Montreal, or Vancouver, or Calgary through these works. I think the way I turn Montreal into a space for eco-cultists in Church of the Hot Pink Jesus, or the way that Andrew Sullivan can turn Toronto into a horrible sludgy hell in The Marigold, or the way Larissa Lai can transform Vancouver into the city of Tiger Flu, or the way Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves rips through Ontario. That I think, is one of the big strengths of speculative fiction in Canada, in the capacity to consider place, and how our positionalities may be affected by place.

HAG: Love this answer. I think it’s a perfect way to wrap up this conversation, but first, want to shout out some speculative books we’ve loved? I’m going to keep mine to Canadian and Indigenous authors, but you can, of course, recommend anyone you’d like.

• As the Earth Dreams: Black Canadian Speculative Stories, edited by Terese Mason Pierre (House of Anansi).
• Call Me Stan & Stand On Guard by K.R. Wilson (Guernica Editions)
• Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction, edited by Joshua Whitehead (Arsenal Pulp Press)
• The Cross series (there are four of them!) by Peter Darbyshire (Wolsak & Wynn)
• The Monster in the Mirror by KJ Aiello (ECW Press)
• Countess by Suzan Palumbo (ECW Press)
• Gitwaałtk by Crystal AJ Smith (Gordon Hill Press / The Porcupine’s Quill)
• Breathing is How Some People Stay Alive by Alison Gadsby (Guernica Editions)
• The Haunting of Modesto O’Brien by Brit Griffin (Latitude 46 Publishing)
• The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits and The Library Cosmic by Ben Berman Ghan (Wolsak & Wynn)
• NMLCT (poems) by Paul Vermeersch (ECW Press)

BBG: Omg I think you’ve actually stolen a lot of the Canadian ones I wanted to say!! So I will just throw in a few more here both Canadian and otherwise. Boy, I do love books. Unfortunately, I’ve already mentioned a whole bunch throughout our interview, so apologies for some repeats here!

• The Marigold by Andrew Sullivan (ECW Press)
• The Coffin of Honey by Geoffrey D Morrison (Coach House Books)
• The Annual Migration of Clouds (and its two sequels!) by Premee Mohamed (ECW Press)
•  Syncopation: A Novel in Verse by Whitney French (Wolsak & Wynn)
• Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera (Tor Publishing)
• The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones (Simon & Schuster)
• The Practice, The Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar (Tor books)

Ben Berman Ghan is the author of The Library Cosmic (Buckrider books 2026), The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits (Buckrider Books 2024), and more. His work has appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, Strange Horizons Magazine, and The Ancillary Review of Books. Ben is a PhD Candidate at the University of Calgary, and lives in Calgary with his partner and his cats, and is the co-editor in chief of Paper Bill Press. Find him at www.inkstainedwreck.ca

Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. Her acclaimed memoir Fuse (Guernica Editions 2021) won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. She is the author of Rebellion Box (Radiant Press, 2023), and her short fiction collection Widow Fantasies (Gordon Hill Press, 2024) was a finalist for the Toronto Book Awards. She is a host on The New Books Network and HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM, and serves as Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com

The post Authors In Conversation: Hollay Ghadery and Ben Berman Ghan appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

About Hunt The Ever Wild: A gothic standalone combining the gaslamp fantasy of C. L. Polk’s Witchmark with the slow-burn rivals-to-lovers romance of Isa Agajanian’s Modern Divination and the whimsy of Howl’s Moving Castle. Released June 23rd 2026.

I believe in impossible things. I kind of have to. After all, belief is the first step in making the impossible…possible.

Obviously, this helps me as a fantasy writer. Letting go of rationality and realism (while maintaining a healthy dose of skepticism and a pinch of logic) allows me to imagine the wildest possibilities, from strange creatures, to the chaotic magic of an untamed forest, to the power of love and the human spirit.

I credit my education for nurturing this ability. Growing up a queer, sensitive, and creative kid in a rural, working class town, I did not have many opportunities to feel valued for these qualities. I didn’t have the language to describe them, even to myself. I was withdrawn and awkward, depressed and suicidal. College let me leave my small town, meet people nothing like me and more like me than I could have ever imagined. It rewarded me for pursuing my interests and indulging my drive toward inquiry and analysis. I felt valued for my talents, and met faculty who recognized my skill and encouraged it. I would never have found that without going to college.

I would never have been able to afford college without student loans.

And now, it feels like I will never escape the shadow that debt has cast over my life.

In my debut gothic fantasy, Hunt the Ever Wild, aspiring artist Sylas Cassirer has always dreamed of a better life than his humble beginnings allowed him. A life in which he can meaningfully use his talent, drive, and intellect instead of feeling them waste away while he waits tables to pay rent. A life in which he has time for rest, for making art, for companionship with like-minded souls.

In pursuit of those dreams, he wins a contest held by the king. As the winner, he receives tuition to the only academy that teaches magic—an education Sy could never otherwise have afforded. The only catch is that, once he receives his wizarding license, he must work for the king until the cost of his education is paid back—with interest.

This seems like a fair trade to a nineteen-year-old barely making ends meet. Wizards in this world (called spellscribes) are well paid and highly regarded, much like doctors in ours. Magic is extremely technical and prone to mistakes, so training is complex, difficult, and expensive. Students typically come from noble families—and, typically, nobles are the only ones who can afford their services. Through intricate spells written in the spellscribe’s own blood, magic can heal the body and alter its appearance. It’s an understandably highly sought after skill, especially among a decadent elite.

But ten years later, at the start of the novel, Sy continues to live on the knife’s edge of poverty with no end in sight. Despite being excellent at what he does, he can never earn enough to cover living expenses and make a dent in his ever-increasing debt. He is physically and emotionally drained and has less time and energy than ever before. He despises the king, whose life is prolonged by magic and who is viciously cruel, and himself for doing the king’s bidding.

Then, the king proposes yet another contest: find a way to grant him eternal life. The prize is enough to finally eliminate Sy’s debt. All he has to do is survive a magical, possibly sentient forest, catch a phoenix (which may or may not be a legend), and craft an impossible, untested spell before another wizard finds it—or him—first.

In a way, Hunt the Ever Wild is my own phoenix. While writing the novel, I placed all my hopes, effort, and focus into my dream of becoming a published author. Even with two degrees, I couldn’t find a “real” job, and I wanted to be paid enough to live by doing the work I’m good at doing. It’s what we all deserve. It’s what universities promise their students.

What we’re not told, but soon learn through experience, is that a college degree is not the key to success. It’s a very expensive lottery ticket. Some of us win the lottery and score a high-paying job. Many of us, especially those of us born into circumstances which make student loans necessary in the first place, don’t.

So some of us take another gamble on highly competitive fields, where few if any ever earn a comfortable living and work is always tenuous (arts, athletics, performance). Some of us end up working whatever job we can find, no matter how ill-suited, just so we can eat and pay our bills. And some of us do hard, necessary work we’ve gladly trained to do, yet still barely manage to get by.

But that’s just life under capitalism—survival of the fittest, dog eat dog, may the best man win. Suck it up. Place your bets.

I believe we can do better.

And despite everything, I still believe in the promise of education. Because of my degrees, I’m now teaching and tutoring college writing, and while I still barely earn enough to live, I love it even more than I thought I would. I wouldn’t be here, wouldn’t be who I am, without my education, and I cherish that.

I shouldn’t have had to go into debt to find happiness, but I did. And, in an impossible way, it helped me create something beautiful: this book.

Truth be told, I don’t know if I’ll ever repay my debt. I don’t know how to justify telling my students a college degree is worthwhile financial investment, even though I’ll never stop believing learning can be a beautiful investment in our individual and collective humanity. But when I read my students’ vulnerable, compassionate, and hopeful writing, I know one thing for sure: they deserve any future they can imagine, and we owe it to them to help set their wildest beliefs free.

Sy’s education can’t save him from capitalism or the king; but deep in the forest, it comes to aid him in unexpected ways. His efforts in learning give him the skills to do the extraordinary—maybe even the impossible. In the end, though, it is his ability to believe in the impossible, to pursue it against all odds, that can save him.

And that doesn’t cost a penny.

The post How Student Debt Helped Inspire My Gothic Fantasy Debut appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

About White Rabbit: A haunting novel in which a girl grapples with her father’s sudden departure and her new companion—the ghost of Sylvia Plath—in a crumbling seaside house that holds more secrets than memories.​ Releases July 14th 2026.

We know their names. We devour their works. We might know which city they wrote in, where they were born, where they died. Classical, canonical authors—Hemingway, Shakespeare, Dickinson, Fitzgerald—become like old friends when we first meet them in sticky high school classrooms and their words teach us something new about how we perceive the world.  

I was fourteen years old when I began to read Plath’s poetry, sixteen the first time I picked up The Grapes of Wrath and fell in love with Steinbeck’s dusty roads. When I decided to write the ghost of Sylvia Plath as a character in White Rabbit, I often felt her presence sitting beside me in the shared spaces—libraries, coffeehouses, parks. I’m not the first to write a passed author into a work of fiction. In fact, numerous passed authors have appeared in media for decades, their legacy living on through new interpretations and representations.

Here are five works that include passed authors in some capacity. And they are all such a delight to encounter!

THE HOURS by Michael Cunningham

It’s hard for me to think of another novel that sat with me for as long as Michael Cunningham’s The Hours did. As a reader, I move from book to book like I’m in a bulk candy shop—taking a sample here and then a side-step later, reaching for another. But The Hours was a book I wanted to savor because the work—a reimagining of a day in the life of a modern-day Mrs. Dalloway, Mrs. Brown, and Virginia Woolf herself—is magnificent. Meeting Cunningham’s fictionalized version of Woolf is both like seeing an old friend in print and being first introduced to her genius at the same time. Though the book is hymn to Woolf and her work, the sections that feature Woolf as a character read like stream-of-consciousness. This not only mimics Woolf’s own writing style but also gives readers an in-depth insight into her mind, creating an intimate and detailed portrait of a prolific writer.

FINDING NEVERLAND 

Okay, I’ll admit it: when this movie came out in the theaters in 2004, I went and saw it five times. I was fourteen years old and fascinated by the fictionalized portrayal of J.M. Barrie and his brilliant mind. There are scenes in this film that feel magical even without leaving real-life London in the early 1900s, scenes where we quite literally step into Barrie’s imagination to learn more about the power of storytelling. It is a film that made me want to be a writer, and one where I felt J.M. Barrie was taking my hand and showing me how.

MATRIX by Lauren Groff

Matrix by Lauren Groff is a masterpiece of character. The novel follows the life of 12^th century poet Marie de France through beautiful and lyrical prose. What is fascinating about this novel is that so much is unknown about the life of Marie, leaving Groff to rely heavily on Marie’s own writings as the sole avenue for creating character. I really love this approach to fictionalizing a passed author. I, too, when writing the ghost of Sylvia Plath in White Rabbit, spent countless hours reading not only Plath’s poetry but also her letters and journals. Though the ghost of Sylvia Plath doesn’t speak, I had her voice constantly in my head as I recreated her on the page. In Matrix, Groff had a sketch of who Marie was and, from that, she created a woman who was a complex, fully realized and powerful female figure in literature.

MIDNIGHTS IN PARIS

Oh, to step into the shoes of Gil Pender, the protagonist of Woody Allen’s Midnights in Paris who, while walking the streets of Paris after midnight, stumbles upon the great writers of the past. Not only does Gil suddenly find himself in a historic restaurant with Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitgerald, but he also goes on to meet Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein, the latter of whom reads Gil’s unpublished manuscript. While I love the film’s quirky charm, what I appreciate most is how place becomes a catalyst for the past and present to intersect. It is only in Paris, after midnight, when Gil, an aspiring writer from the early 2000s, is able to travel back to the streets of Paris in the 1920s and meet the cast of passed authors. Similarly, in White Rabbit, it is in the childhood home of Sylvia Plath where Penelope happens upon her ghost.

HAMNET by Maggie O’Farrell

What a massive undertaking to reinvent William Shakespeare, arguably the most well-known writer of all time, and create a fictionalized version that not only feels authentic but also reveals something new about the man to readers. Which is exactly what Maggie O’Farrell does in her novel Hamnet. Whether you’ve read the book or seen the film (both are fantastic!), meeting Shakespeare as a young man reveals a side of him that only O’Farrell could uncover. And perhaps that is why I’m so drawn to this story. We meet Shakespeare not as a writer, but as a young man: a lover, a husband, a father. From O’Farrell’s recreation, I found myself understanding the writer in new ways and reaching for that old, dog-eared copy of Hamlet, suddenly desperate to read it one more time.

The post Familiar Faces: 5 Mixed Media Works that Reinvent Past Authors appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

About Every Version of You: For fans of The Love of My Afterlife and The Seven Year Slip, Reese’s Book Club LitUp Fellow Natalie Messier’s heartfelt contemporary romance debut follows a woman who gets a second chance at a formative time in her adult life—this time to win the “one that got away.” Releases on July 7th 2026. 

Like many women (most women, perhaps?) I’ve expended a lot of energy trying to make myself as likeable as I can, whittling myself down into the most palatable version of myself. So when I encounter a story where the main character simply hasn’t bothered to do the same, I’m intrigued. As a woman, there’s a million ways to do things wrong and seemingly no way to do things right, so it’s refreshing to see a woman who refuses to play the game.

Or, perhaps, she plays the game wrong. She makes a mess. She works so hard to be likeable that in her attempts, she loops back around and becomes insufferable. She tries to do the right thing, only to make everything worse. Women who care too much what people think, or women who don’t care at all—give me all the messy women. Without further ado, please find some of my favorite messy female leads in books, movies, and TV shows.

Buffy and Faith in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Nothing says messy quite like a vampire slayer falling for a vampire—and Buffy does it twice! To be fair, some mess is to be expected—is earned, even—when you have the weight of the world on your shoulders. But when I say I love messy women, I mean messy, so I’d be remiss not to mention my favorite Buffy character: Faith. Even though Buffy errs on occasion, she always tries to follow the right path and do good. Faith messes up way more, on a bigger scale, and she does so unrepentantly. She looks out for herself, and though she comes back around, she ends up on the side of evil—lured there by a father figure who preyed on all her insecurities and desire for familial love. And you know what, I loved her through it all.

Evangeline Jenner in Devil in Winter

It’s undeniable that Lisa Kleypas writes some of the best MMCs in romance—and her heroines are just as compelling, entertaining, and easy to root for! I have a particular soft spot for all of the ladies in her Wallflowers series. Each one messy in their own way, it was hard to pick who to include on this list. From Lillian’s bold and brash demeanor, to Daisy’s fanciful imagination. I love Annabelle and the way she determinedly schemes to catch a husband—but I’d argue that Evie is the messiest. I mean, propositioning a marriage of convenience to the man who kidnapped one of your closest friends…I never would have guessed Evie would have it in her earlier in the series, and that to me makes her one of the historical queens of mess.

Eleanor Shellstrop in The Good Place

I’ll just say it: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a fictional character who loves shrimp as much as Eleanor Shellstrop. I don’t know why I think that adds a tally in her “mess” column, but it does. I won’t ever forget how hard I laughed the first time I saw the pilot episode when Eleanor tells Chidi she doesn’t belong in the Good Place. In life, Eleanor was selfish, callous, and uncaring—but in death, she gets a second chance. Does she nail this second chance right off the bat? She wouldn’t be messy if she did. But Eleanor, like many women on this list, embodies what is to me one of the most important things about messy women—they deserve love too.

Solange Pereira in The Wedding Crasher

I’m a huge fan of Mia Sosa. Her FMCs are strong, sassy, and thoroughly entertaining. Solange in The Wedding Crasher is a perfect example of the fact that sometimes, mess can come well-intentioned. Was she right to crash Dean’s wedding? Absolutely, but that doesn’t make it not messy. Not that I minded, since it led to one of my favorite, messiest tropes—fake dating. I eat it up every time.

Isabel Conklin in The Summer I Turned Pretty

Falling for two brothers is peak messiness as far as romance FMCs go (special shout-out to Percy in Every Summer After for doing the same!), but Belly is such a lovable character. She’s coming of age, she’s torn between two boys who both give mixed signals and have histories with her. And you know what, everything that happened in these books and show was messy of Conrad and Jeremiah too, so I for the record am Team Belly all the way.

Nicole Speyer in The Best Worst Thing

I’m almost hesitant to call Nicole in The Best Worst Thing messy because everything she does is completely justified. Showing up unannounced on the doorstep of her former coworker who she had a will-they-won’t-they thing going on with years ago? Well, why not, considering she walked in on her husband sleeping with their dog walker. Nicole’s story and romance with Logan is undeniably messy, but she does the best with the circumstances she’s given. Still, she’s so undeniably human, and I think she’s earned her place on this list.

Julie in The Worst Person in the World

Julie might be the messiest woman on this list. She’s lost, listless, struggling in her career and in her romantic life. The other day, my partner asked if I remembered the scene where she and Eivind really want to cheat on their partners but are determined not to, so they push the boundaries of what “cheating” is. And you know what, personally, I think they cross that line pretty early on! But watch it and decide for yourself. Regardless, I found Julie easy to root for and empathize with in all her missteps.

June Wood in It’s Different This Time

Joss Richard’s debut was one of my favorite books I read last year. June Wood is my girl. It’s so relatable how she gets in her own way with her avoidant tendencies. She waits for the other shoe to drop, scared that Adam is too good to be true, and haven’t we all been there? But all of June’s insecurities and fears only makes it all the more satisfying when she finally accepts that good things can happen to her and gets her HEA.

Issa Dee in Insecure

Issa in Insecure is a very real kind of messy. Her mess is often driven by her awkwardness and the fact that she’s a young woman in her twenties, trying to find her way in life. Issa can be an unreliable and selfish friend at times, but who among us hasn’t hurt a few people while in crisis? She doesn’t always know what she wants, and she missteps in her pursuit to figure out what it is. Personally, I don’t know what’s more relatable than that.

Angela Gutierrez in Kiss Me, Maybe

You want to talk about messy? Creating a scavenger hunt on TikTok where the winner earns your first kiss. That’s pretty messy—and it’s exactly what Angela does in Gabriella Gamez’s sophomore novel after she goes viral from posting a video about being ace and a late bloomer. Luckily, she needs help pulling off the event. Enter Krystal, the hot bartender Angela’s had a crush on for years. Krystal isn’t ready for romance yet, and Angela is in the process of figuring herself out. It’s swoony, it’s romantic, and yes, it’s a bit messy.

Tashi Donaldson in Challengers

Love triangles are messy by nature, and a love triangle that spans 13 years like the one at the center of Challengers is all the more so. To be fair, everyone in this movie is a bit unhinged—but this is a list of messy women, so forget the guys for a second. Tashi shows that mess can be calculated. It can be intentional. Tashi is such a puppet master in this movie—but everything she does is messy, it’s fantastic to watch. From kissing both men as teenagers and telling them she’ll give her number to the winner of the next day’s tennis match, to everything she does before their match as adults, Tashi knows she has the guys wrapped around her finger, and she utilizes her power to its most chaotic degree.

Fleabag in Fleabag

A list of messy women wouldn’t be complete without Fleabag. She basically rewrote the book. In terms of influential characters, she’s top of the list when it comes to what I write. Every move she makes is questionable, yet thoroughly entertaining and empathetic. Season 2 of Fleabag might be one of the best seasons of television ever written—Hot Priest, anyone?—and so much of it is because of the growth we get to see her go through.

A Few More Messy FMCs Releasing in 2026

If you’re a fan of the aforementioned messy women, there are several books releasing in 2026 whose FMCs should be on your radar!

First up is Kaia Harper in Adrienne Thurman’s Don’t Tell Me How It Ends (out now). Kaia is a floundering twenty-something who has sworn off romance—only to be roped into her meddling sister’s matchmaking business. When Kaia begins falling for Ro, she pushes him away because it’s what’s familiar to her.

Next, Violet Lumani’s Not Good Neighbors (out now) is about Penny Huff, who is so irritated about the tragically thin wall between her apartment and her neighbor’s that she attempts to soundproof it…only to literally blow a hole in it, trapping the two in each other’s spaces.

Commitment-phobic Norah Gold in Rachel Pologe’s Now That We Don’t Talk (out 10/20) is a certified bolter who avoids emotional situations at all costs. So when she returns home for the holidays, her goal is to avoid Henry Cole, the boy who broke her heart back in high school. Easier said than done, since she discovers that their mothers are dating.

Alix Kelinda’s The Christmas Curse (out 10/20) is about Devra, a Christmas-hating recluse convinced her family is cursed due to the catastrophes that have tormented them every December for the past 30 years. So of course, when holiday-obsessed Bradley moves in next door, she’s certain he’s been sent by the curse.

A young adult romance to check out is Angelica Cheng’s The Fast Track (out 8/4) about a 17-year-old up-and-coming young driver Justine Kwong, who is trying to make it to F1 and falls for her biggest rival on-track.

Lastly, Harper Kinsley’s Spikes, Dice and Other Variables (out 9/15) centers on high schooler Riley McMahon, who struggles to keep her grades up and pretends to know how to play D&D to get her love interest to like her enough to tutor her. Sounds like teenage messiness at its finest!

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About When Dealing With Dragons: Bonding with dragons gave humans magic to craft metal—now, two school rivals have to work together to protect a priceless secret, all while fighting their growing attraction to each other, from Dana Swift, author of Cast in Firelight. Releases June 30th 2026.

Want to know a universal truth? Before every writer is a writer, we are readers. For me in particular, I’ve went from reader to bookseller to book buyer and event planner, writing along the way. So, I’ve recommended a book or two in my time (maybe even a few hundred).

Nerd Daily is one of my absolute favorite book outlets so when they asked for a list of my reader recommendations for this summer, I happily put my bookseller cap back on. Because what’s easier than talking about my own book, WHEN DEALING WITH DRAGONS, hitting shelves June 30^th from Wednesday Books? Talking about other books, of course!

Three Young Adult 2026 SUMMER releases I’ve read and adored:

CURSED EVER AFTER by Andy C. Naranjo

Okay, I’m biased with this first one, like really biased. But that doesn’t stop CURSED EVER AFTER being one of my favorite stories.

For a time, it felt like fantasy wasn’t allowed to be funny anymore and Andy said hold my witch’s hat and let me break that curse upon young adult literature with this one! This book is funny, heartfelt, diverse, and seeped in fairytale whimsy.

Even better on June 30^th Andy C. Naranjo and I will be hosting our joint launch event at BookPeople at 6:30pm CT. So, if you’re in or near Austin, Texas come see two friends who just so happened to luck out that our books come out the same day!

ROLLS AND RIVALRY by Kristy Boyce

I’m a huge Kristy Boyce fan and have been since we debuted together in 2021. I especially love her Gaming and Romance series! When I learned her new one starred a color guard captain I was sold because well, I was a color guard captain in high school.

This third installment in the series might even be my new favorite of Kristy’s because all the band references, the childhood friends turned rivals, and her sparkling dialogue? Nothing is more perfect for summer! I read it in one day!

OF FLAME AND FURY and OF VENOM AND VENGEANCE by Mikayla Bridge

The moment I read OF FLAME AND FURY last summer I was hooked! Phoenix racing, fake-dating, and a critique on capitalism wrapped up in one of the most beautiful covers I’ve ever seen!

Therefore, you can imagine my excitement for the companion novel, OF VENOM AND VENGEANCE. Set in the same world this book follows two new protagonists, who you can expect to give you the most delicious romance.

Three Young Adult 2026 releases I haven’t read yet, but can’t wait for:

FIRE TO THE STARS by Morgan J. Watchorn

If you’re into dragons, then may I suggest dragon shifters? Because I can’t wait for this YA debut from Morgan J. Watchorn.

Written in dual points of view (my favorite) this is a story about two teens from opposing worlds forced to form an alliance. The cover is stunning too!

IMMORTAL GAME by Allison Saft

Do I know how to play chess? No. Will that stop me from reading the next Allison Saft release? Never! Add in Fae and deals and the lyrical whimsy I know this will have and I’m beyond sold.

This book is the next one on TBR because I’ve somehow been chosen for the honor to be Allison’s conversation partner for her Austin, Texas tour stop.

Link here to RSVP now if you would like to watch and join me fangirling over Allison Saft.

ALL WE HUNGER FOR by Anna Mercier

A magical baking competition with a side of brewing rebellion? Excuse me, Anna! What a concept!

It reminds me a little of WHEN DEALING WITH DRAGONS in that it’s a cozy premise bundled with high stakes and guarded secrets. I’m all for books with that combination. So excited for this debut that is out now!!!

Looking for something like WHEN DEALING WITH DRAGONS in a different age category?

Middle Grade: KINDRED DRAGONS by Sarah Mensinga

Sarah has crafted the perfect pitch for a book, as if it was written for me––Anne of Green Gables meets Dragons.

I don’t know if I need to say more than that, but this graphic novel is beautifully illustrated (also done by Sarah because she is amazing and talented and wonderful) and the story is heartfelt, with a magic system anchored in the bonds between people and dragons like WHEN DEALING WITH DRAGONS!

Also, I gave this graphic novel to my cousin’s seven-year-old daughter and have heard back that she loved it and thus I have received the brownie points for years to come because it’s the first in a series!

Adult: STRANGE FAMILIARS by Keshe Chow

If you want more magical veterinarian and rivals-to-lovers content, but for the adult audience, look no further than STRANGE FAMILIARS.

It’s set at a magical college with cute animal familiars. Nothing can be more perfect, except oh, it also has a delicious spicy romance too! Perfection!

Because it is always easier to talk, sell, and promote other books I deeply appreciate everyone, especially, Nerd Daily, for promoting WHEN DEALING WITH DRAGONS! I wrote this book for dragon lovers and kids who want to see protagonists who win through kindness. A few elements in the book I incorporated because of my bookselling background include:

• It can be read as a standalone. Though a companion novel is coming in summer 2027 for those who fall in love with the world.
• It fits firmly in the young adult category, with some reviewers even saying they see it as a bridge book between middle grade and young adult.
• It’s warm and heartfelt but doesn’t avoid high stakes and hard topics that make people think long after the last page.

I really hope you enjoy the story! Thank you!

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About Every Hunter Is Hunted: From the world of Barry Lyga’s New York Times bestselling I Hunt Killers trilogy comes a thrilling adult mystery about the hunt for a monstrous serial killer. Released June 23rd 2026.

Nostalgia, man.

It’s a powerful thing. Even when we try to resist its song, the damn thing becomes an earworm. And lately I’ve been wondering: Is it possible to feel nostalgia for something you yourself created?

The notion of nostalgia is usually targeted at something we remember from our youth, something that was created and aimed at us generationally, if not individually. That Nintendo Power Glove. Christopher Reeve’s knowing smile. The opening notes of the “Imperial March.” The startup chime on your first Mac. The theme song to that sitcom you watched endlessly.

I’m no stranger to the tug and the lure of nostalgia. My office is cluttered with shelves of toys and books from my childhood. My attic is crammed with long boxes of old comic books. And my media server is stuffed with, among other things, old episodes of Super Friends and Looney Toons cartoons that, let’s face, I’ll probably never watch again.

But it’s nice having it all, right?

A while ago — forever, it sometimes seems — I wrote a trilogy and a series of prequel short stories collectively known as I Hunt Killers, the story of Jasper Dent, teen son of a notorious serial killer. It was, in the words of Daniel Kraus, my attempt to “craft the most serious (and bloodiest) crime series yet for teen readers.” The common consensus is that I succeeded. The series wrapped up in 2014.

Killers was, without a doubt, the most successful book of my career. It landed me on the New York Times bestsellers list and to this day, I still get requests to blurb “dark YA.” When I typed the last words of the last book, I felt like I was finished.

But something funny happened.

I started to miss Jasper. I started to miss his traumatized, blood-drenched world. I missed living in his skin, seeing the world through his monumentally messed-up perceptions.

It felt strange to be nostalgic for something I had created. But eventually, just like that Lightning Lad action figure I really didn’t need to buy, I had to do it. I had to go back.

The end of the Killers series saw seventeen-year-old Jasper come to a final reckoning with his monstrous father and learn the truth about his missing mother, a truth that nearly destroys him. I began to wonder what Jasper might be like today. How had the traumas of his life informed his maturation? What was he like as a twentysomething, no longer a kid? How had he changed?

Had he changed?

It was sort of a crazy idea, honestly. YA is YA and adult fiction is adult fiction, and while occasionally a successful adult series might spin off a kid-friendly version, I was unaware of any story that had done the opposite — a YA series aging up, keeping pace with its readers.

Growing up. Looking forward.

And maybe, just maybe, the occasional look back. For nostalgia, you know.

I started tentatively, poking around the edges of a new tale. Jasper Dent, isolated by choice, living the life of a shut-in, forsaking both the fame and the infamy the world bestowed upon him. Doing his level best to cope with the bespoke horror-show of his past.

In deep, intensive therapy.

An unlikely hero. Maybe not even a hero at all, any more. I wasn’t sure.

One day, not knowing what I was working on, my agent said to me, “You know, I think it’s time.” I had to laugh; I wasn’t the only one in the grip of nostalgia.

But the story couldn’t just be nostalgia. Sure, I would want to put in references and little rewards for those who’d been there from the beginning, but I knew that this had to be a new story that stood on its own. A tale for any audience that would come to it.

The book that resulted — EVERY HUNTER IS HUNTED, out on June 23 — was a forceful blend of new and old, triumph and tragedy. Everything you need is in the book, but of course if you’ve read the YA series, you’ll see textures and shadings that others will miss.

So, not nostalgia after all, even if that’s how it began in my head. An entirely new story. The start of a new world.

For those of you new to Jasper Dent and his world, I say: Welcome.

For those of you, like me, coming back for a new hit of an old pleasure, I say: Welcome back.

The post Not Just Nostalgia (But a Little Nostalgia Never Hurt, Right?) appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

About The Ocean and the Bones: Friendship is tough in the Stone Age, especially when your best friend is part-Water Spirit… In a pre-historic world where the spirits are fickle and the people are cautious, Little Meg is a Sunhealer’s apprentice. She must learn to read the signs of nature and commune with the spirits to guide her people and keep them safe. But when she keeps back the fingerbones of her deceased parents from a ritual, Meg knows that the resulting storm and the destruction it causes is entirely her fault. As the rain clears, Meg discovers a strange girl washed up on the shore. Returning the girl to her island home is the only way to right her mistake and save her village. What follows is an adventure across land and sea where friendships are tentatively made and generation-old legends are set right… Released on June 4th 2026.

Bone Music by David Almond

From the multi-award-winning author of Skellig, Bone Music tells the story of Sylvia, who has had to move to rural Northumberland from the city of Newcastle. When haunting music calls to her at night, she meets Gabriel, who plays a flute carved from a hollow bone. Together, they explore the wild new landscape she finds herself in and he helps her to carve her own flute from the bone of a dead buzzard. Through her bond with Gabriel, Sylvia learns about ancient customs and beliefs like the power of the hollow-bone flute to cross the boundary between the living and the dead. This lyrical tale from a master storyteller highlights the power of connecting with nature to heal a sore heart.

Bog Child by Siobhan Dowd

Set against the backdrop of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Bog Child follows 18-year-old Fergus as he navigates A-levels, the increasing threat of violence and his imprisoned brother’s hunger strike. When he and his uncle Tally find the perfectly preserved body of a girl in a local bog, Fergus fears she’s been murdered in the recent fighting. But when archaeologists tell him the body is from the Iron Age around 2000 years ago, Fergus is haunted by dreams from long ago and his story is entwined with that of the ancient girl.

Wolf Brother by Michelle Paver

The first in the bestselling Chronicles of Ancient Darkness series, set in the pre-agricultural Stone Age of northern Europe. Torak is a member of Wolf Clan, who live in the forest following the prey they hunt and gathering wild plants. When Torak’s father is killed by a demon-possessed bear, Torak must travel to the Mountain of the World Spirit to find and fight its dark magic, with his adopted wolf cub by his side. Action-packed and with high stakes, Wolf Brother is a thrilling tale ideal for older children and is guaranteed to raise goosebumps. 

The Wild Way Home by Sophie Kirtley

In this time-slip adventure, modern-day Charlie finds an injured boy face down in a river. But when Charlie rushes to the hospital for help, the local streets have been replaced by forest, somehow returning to the Ireland of almost 10,000 years ago. In helping Stone Age boy Arby save his little sister Mothgirl, Charlie returns home more capable of coping with the stresses of everyday life, having learned survival techniques like fire-making and way-finding. A heartwarming tale perfect for keen younger readers.

The Ocean and the Bones by Genevieve Carver

My own debut novel is an adventure story taking place around 6000 years ago, during the Neolithic period in Britain. One night, Little Meg’s coastal village is struck by a huge storm, and in the morning Meg finds a girl about her own age washed up on the shore. The girls discover that they come from very different worlds, speak different languages, and have different habits and customs. Yet they form a friendship that will set them off on a journey to a mythical island, where they must come face to face with the powers of the Water Spirits. The story is inspired by the flooding of the Doggerland land mass that once connected Britain to mainland Europe, and highlights themes of friendship, loss, prejudice and connection.

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About Vervain Hollow: Two years ago, Laura was in a cult. But when the sprawling house in the hollow burned down with the cult’s magnetic leader trapped inside, Laura had nowhere to go but home. Brokenhearted, she finds herself longing for Vervain, their lost leader—despite the trauma of that strange and terrifying year, she knows the power he promised her was real. But when her estranged friend, Aliyah, calls to tell her that another acolyte has been lured back to the hollow by a message from Vervain, Laura only hears one thing: He’s still alive. As Laura and Aliyah venture back to the house of their nightmares to find the truth, Laura soon realizes that not everything she remembers can be trusted—and that the darkness will do anything to get her back. Releases June 16th 2026.

In the classic Gothic novel, the protagonist enters a shadowy world with its own rules, cut off from reality. They are unable to leave; they are gaslit, made to doubt their own sanity; often, they come under the influence of a mysterious, controlling figure, a source of both desire and fear.

In other words, it’s very much like joining a cult!

The thematic fit between the Gothic and cults is a driving force behind my novel Vervain Hollow. The protagonist Laura, naïve, passionate, and insecure, has all the characteristics of a Gothic heroine – characteristics that make her highly susceptible to cult recruitment. Meanwhile, Vervain, the antagonist, is both a prototypical Gothic villain – dark, brooding, linked to the supernatural – and a classic cult leader, whose initial seductive charisma quickly gives way to manipulation.

Here are five more Gothic novels about cults, where the aesthetic and thematic tropes of the Gothic marry perfectly with the authors’ explorations of brainwashing, groupthink, and coercive control.

Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas

Fleeing a series of bad decisions made in her last summer of high school, Ines winds up in Catherine House: an elite college where tuition and board are free, on condition that students cut themselves off from the outside world for the duration of their three years’ study. Thomas’s dreamlike prose perfectly evokes the fugue state Ines drifts into during her time in Catherine, a mindset as Gothic as the house itself: a sprawling, interconnected mansion of decaying rooms and maze-like corridors.

While the novel invites multiple interpretations, it can be read as a surreal extrapolation of the experience of attending an elite institution. Ines feels the exhilaration of being chosen and the joy of belonging, but around every corner lurks the dissonance of her complicity in a dark legacy. Ultimately, her choice is between letting Catherine absorb and define her, or breaking away in search of an uncertain, terrifying freedom.

Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez

Part horror, part magic realism, Enriquez’s epic novel takes on the legacy of the Argentinian dictatorship through the story of a family entangled in a darkness-worshipping cult. Weaving back and forth through forty years, the story follows Juan and Rosario as they attempt to protect their son Gaspar from the machinations of the cult they are both deeply enmeshed in: Juan as the medium who can call the darkness into the human world, and Rosario as a privileged scion of the cult’s founding family.

What makes this novel Gothic is not just the surface elements – ghosts, family secrets, legacies of trauma – but the darkness within the characters: Juan and Rosario are trapped in the cult partly by their inability to let go of the power and prestige it offers. Meanwhile, the cult itself, and the colonial compound that serves as its stronghold, function as a clear allegory for the callousness of the rich and their complicity in the country’s suffering. Often deeply painful, the novel is also drenched in wonder and love of beauty, bringing an aching tenderness especially to the complicated father-son relationship between Juan and Gaspar.

Hagstone by Sinéad Gleeson

Part horror, part magic realism, Enriquez’s epic novel takes on the legacy of the Argentinian dictatorship through the story of a family entangled in a darkness-worshipping cult. Weaving back and forth through forty years, tOn a wind-battered island off the coast of Ireland, artist Nell ekes out a living, maintaining her freedom at the price of a deep loneliness. When she is offered a commission to create an artwork for the Iníons, an all-female group who live in an abandoned convent on the cliff, she is curious enough to accept. Working on her piece, Nell becomes enmeshed in the lives of the group and their leader, the mysterious Maman, whose motives she can’t quite figure out.

A masterpiece of sustained mood and gradually building tension, Hagstone eschews the obvious: there is no shocking revelation about the cult’s true nature, no climactic bloodbath. There is just the quiet unease of distance: between people, between events and their explanations, between the island and the rest of the world. An immersive, rewarding read for those who like their Gothics atmospheric and open-ended.

Bunny by Mona Awad

Part horror, part magic realism, Enriquez’s epic novel takes on the legacy Like Catherine House, Bunny takes an elite college as its setting. But the focus here, as in Bunny’s Gothic predecessor Frankenstein, is on the perilous allure of creation. When misfit MFA student Samantha discovers that the other women in her cohort, the creepily identical Bunnies, are transforming rabbits into uncanny simulacra of men, she gets sucked into their world and into their hive-mind. As Samantha gradually loses her identity, the Bunnies cannibalize her creativity, rooted in hardship, to lend some grit to their insipid creations.

Bunny is both an allegory about privilege and authenticity, and a very funny satire of critique workshop culture. It’s also extremely Gothic, from the aching isolation that pushes Samantha toward the Bunnies, to the eldritch, horrifying version of Providence, RI that she scurries through ‘like prey from some unknown but imminent beast’. Like a classical Gothic heroine reclaiming her agency, Samantha can only escape from the Bunnies’ control once she discovers the extent of her own creative power.

You Weren’t Meant to Be Human by Andrew Joseph White

Crane, a young trans man, flees his home after a suicide attempt and takes refuge with the Hive, a cult living under the sway of sentient parasitic insects. When cult member Levi gets Crane pregnant, the Hive demands that Crane carry the baby to term.

White’s novel is a harrowing, visceral read, at times darkly comic, at times intensely claustrophobic: Crane is trapped in his own changing body as much as he’s imprisoned by the Hive. The book is also Gothic to its core. Beneath the hallmarks of the genre – doppelgangers, possession, not trusting your own mind – lies the dysphoric meta-horror of Crane being forced into the narrative role of the Gothic heroine: a role he is determined to reject at all costs, even if it means committing monstrous acts. Like all the books on this list, You Weren’t Meant to Be Human uses the cult not just as a horror trope, but as an allegory for the way real-world structures seek to limit, control, and define us.

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About Goldenborn: A girl with a mission. A god with a deal. A story that could change everything. When 17-year-old Akoma Addo stumbles into a world of ancient gods and modern magic, she’ll have to choose between saving her father… or staying true to everything she’s ever believed. Released June 2nd 2026.

If I’m the protagonist, then writer’s block is certainly the antagonist in my publishing story. Every time I thought I’d reached smooth sailing—the words were flowing, the scenes were building—my nemesis would gleefully appear and knock me off course. Unable to return to the blank page waiting for me, I discovered three different creative pursuits that helped to reignite my imagination and get the words flowing again.

1 – Pottery Class

There was something about staring at a shapeless lump of clay that reminded me of the first draft of a manuscript. Both held raw potential, waiting to be shaped into something beautiful. My first attempt at the potter’s wheel was nothing short of disastrous. The clay spun off the wheelhead and landed on the floor with an audible splat. I laughed as I retrieved my clay and started over. After several attempts, my hands finally fell into the right rhythm. Eventually I managed to shape the clay into something that could pass for a small bowl. I felt triumphant. I’d created a functional receptacle for storing my jewelry, and I carried that sense of accomplishment back to my desk. As I returned to my manuscript, I pictured the story turning and turning in my mind the way the clay had turned beneath my hands. I allowed the scene I was shaping to fly off the wheelhead, so to speak, knowing that with enough patience and persistence, it would eventually become something worth reading.

2 – Archery

I knew early on that I wanted to include archery in my novel. I envisioned it as my main character’s favorite pastime. But when I sat down to write those scenes, I struggled to make them feel authentic and alive. Eventually, I hit a wall. Then it occurred to me that perhaps my lack of experience with the sport was part of the problem. So I took my family out for an afternoon of archery lessons. It was winter, and the weather was chilly by Northern California standards, but the scenery was beautiful. The stage was set for a great day.

Turns out, I was terrible at archery. But I had a fantastic time. Going through the motions and listening as the instructor corrected my form set my imagination on fire. Suddenly, details I had been missing began to click into place. Toward the end of the lesson, I managed to hit a bullseye. You’ve never seen a more triumphant person! I returned to my desk armed with a fresh creative spark, and the scene that had previously felt impossible to write, flowed with ease.

3 – Glassblowing

I’m not sure why I ever thought glassblowing would be easy. It wasn’t. In fact, of the three writer’s-block-busting activities I tried, it was by far the most challenging—and my favorite.

The hot shop, where the roaring furnace of molten glass is housed, was exactly what the name suggests: hot. Every step of the process was fascinating and demanded complete focus unless you wanted to risk injury. I started by dipping one end of a blowpipe into the furnace to gather molten glass. There was something magical about seeing a glowing blob of liquid fire hanging from the end of the pipe. Once I learned how to shape it into a perfectly round bulb, the blowing began.

My cheeks have never hurt so much. The simple act of blowing a small bubble of air into the glass took far more effort than I’d imagined. The piece had to be returned repeatedly to a second furnace to remain malleable as I continued shaping it. The entire process reminded me of writing. Just as the glass needed constant reheating to stay workable, I needed to keep returning to my manuscript with renewed enthusiasm to maintain momentum.

My finished piece was a small terrarium that I’m incredibly proud of. But even after all the shaping and blowing were complete, there was one final step. The terrarium had to spend a full day in an annealing oven, where it cooled slowly to prevent cracking from sudden temperature changes. That final stage spoke to me. It reminded me that sometimes the best thing I can do for my writing is step away for a while and let my imagination rest. In that quiet cooling period, new ideas often emerge, ready to rekindle the creative process when I return.

Final Thoughts

In the end, exploring other creative activities didn’t take me away from writing, it helped bring me back to it.

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