The Nineteenth Dispatch

Happy Friday the 13th!

Dec 13, 2024

2024 is almost over…

…and all of a sudden, April feels so close. I said in my last newsletter that I was pretty sure I’d be hit by how close my launch date is by the end of December, and I was wrong, it started hitting me about a week ago. Just under four months until THE CUT is out in the world, and I am still more excited than nervous but let me tell ya, the nerves are closing that gap a bit.

The Cut

Another month, another little sketch of a character from THE CUT (regular reminder, I just dabble with drawing, this is just for fun. Charcoal pencil and white pencil on gray paper).
Here’s Bill Viago, who is in charge of the power plant that’s been built next door to L’Arpin Hotel.

Also, a smaller thing that I still find super exciting, I am getting some extremely cool bookmarks for THE CUT, and I can’t wait to show them off!

The Writing

This month I’ve still been focused on revisions for my second novel (which doesn’t exactly make for a super exciting update). I love working with this book again (I mentioned in the last Dispatch that this manuscript is one of some personal significance to me), and I’m so looking forward to having two weeks off from the day job at the end of this month to really immerse myself in it more fully.

Recommendations

The past month was a good one for my consumption of horror media! So instead of any one longer, more in-depth recommendation, I’ve got three shorter ones.

I loved the movie Smile 2

For anyone who hasn’t seen the first Smile movie, I definitely recommend that, too, but perhaps skip this paragraph, since talking about the sequel might give away too much about the first movie. Here we go! I love that the sequel picks up almost immediately after the ending of Smile so that we can see the way the curse got from the fairly normal protagonist of the first movie to the superstar protagonist of the second film. And it’s that superstardom that takes Smile 2 to another level, in my opinion. Focusing the second movie on Skye Riley, a Lady Gaga-esque pop star, allows the film to set the surreal horror moments against an opulent backdrop that makes those surreal qualities all the more stark. Alongside the frightening surreal moments, Smile 2 continues to play with what’s real and what’s not in the same way that Smile did, and it works really well. And without getting into spoiler territory, the big moment at the end was great. I really dug the escalation in scope and reach and weirdness that this movie brought to the original, and it left me hoping that there’s a third movie that turns apocalyptic.

Thanks to Netgalley and Quirk Books, I was able to read an ARC of Clay McLeod Chapman’s upcoming Wake Up and Open Your Eyes recently, and it has stuck with me.

This book launches straight into some of the most uncomfortable horror I’ve ever read, before backtracking slightly to walk the reader into how things got that bad. It’s a possession story and also a scathing look at where punditry and the current state of politics has brought us. Wake Up and Open Your Eyes is viscerally well-written, turning a gimlet eye on the state of affairs in America through some incredibly intense storytelling, particularly in the second half when the pacing and action really hit their stride, and with a gut-punch of an ending.

I played The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow from Cloak and Dagger Games, and I want more games like it, please!

The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow is an 8-bit point and click folk horror game set at some unspecified time in the Victorian Era in rural England, following Thomasina Bateman, a student of antiquity who has been invited to the small town of Bewlay to excavate a burial mound called Hob’s Barrow. But on her arrival in town, the person who invited her is nowhere to be found and the locals are decidedly unhelpful as she attempts to find her host and the barrow itself. The puzzle solving element was mostly fun, though occasionally it did feel more like running errands than engaging with horror. However, that errands-to-horrors ratio was my only complaint. When the horror was happening it was engaging, unsettling, and impactful. I loved the art style in this game, particularly in moments of eerie close-ups, I enjoyed the voice acting, and the story was good. Overall, it was a great little game, and I’ll be checking out others by that studio.

Media and Appearances

We’ll start with this list of the horror books coming out in 2025. Notice the article’s header image, that medley of book covers? The Cut’s cover is included there, along with some great looking books (including Chapman’s Wake Up and Open Your Eyes which I mentioned previously, and also including the gorgeous book The Needfire by my friends MK Hardy)!

I only just recently stumbled upon this video that is a few months old, booktuber TheShadesofOrange made a video of her 10 most anticipated horror reads coming out in 2025, and one of the featured books in the video is The Cut.

The Cut appears at number 26 on the GoodReads list of the 200 most popular books coming out in April of 2025.

Here you can find The Cut in the fifth spot on the first part of JamReads.com’s four-part list of most anticipated 2025 releases.

And in short story news, Horror DNA favorably reviewed Found 2: More Stories of Found Footage Horror, a super fun horror anthology that includes my story “A Place Where the Sun Has Never Shone.” The review positively mentions a few specific stories, mine included.

If you happen to be scrolling the bookish sides of social media or the internet in general and see The Cut mentioned anywhere and you think to yourself I bet CJ has already seen this so I don’t need to show it to her, don’t listen to yourself and do show it to me. If I’ve already seen it I’ll be delighted by the reminder, and if I haven’t I’ll be excited to see it for the first time.

Also, starting with the next issue of the Dispatch, when we’ll be less than three months out from The Cut’s launch month, I’ll be posting here a list of my upcoming appearances, so if you want to come hang out with me at some point then watch this space.