In April 2024, Lethe Press will publish a new horror novella I wrote, Changes in the Land. The paperback is now available for pre-order from Lethe, and the Kindle version can be pre-ordered from Amazon.
The wonderful cover and a really thoughtful interior design was created by Jeremy Parker, one of my favorite book designers.
Jeremy and I first met when we were office mates in grad school — he was doing his MFA in fiction at UNH, I was working on my PhD, and we were both teaching Composition. I had no idea about his side habit of design until I got involved with Outlook Springs, for which, in addition to editorial duties, Jeremy did design and publicity. I followed his work and kept hoping we might get a chance to collaborate on a project. Changes in the Land felt like something he would enjoy and understand, and so I begged publisher Steve Berman to at least get a bid from him. And lo and behold, it all worked out brilliantly! Indeed, Jeremy provided us with four possible covers, and I could not choose between them. Each was a marvel. The cover we chose was the one that seemed to convey the most information about the book’s genre and ideas most efficiently and commercially — we really did want the potential reader to be able to judge the book by its cover. But as pretty much everybody I tried the covers out on replied: we couldn’t have gone wrong with any of them. We got Jeremy to adapt one of them for the title page, and I hope one day we’ll share the others as well, because they’re all powerful in their own ways.
(Additionally, I’m thrilled that Jeremy designed my friend Richard Scott Larson’s memoir The Long Hallway for University of Wisconsin Press, which is also due out in April. Changes in the Land had a long drafting process, starting out as a 4,000-word short story, eventually growing to its present 22,000-word form, and taking just about every shape in between — and Richard read many of the drafts, patiently encouraging me to keep at it even when I thought the story would never find a fitting form.)
Changes in the Land is a story about a large, mysterious tract of land in New Hampshire that has been used for generations by a wealthy family as a private game/hunting reserve. Terrible things happened there, and the novella explores the ultimate consequences of those terrible things. In its own perverse way, it’s a story of rewilding.
Astute readers may know that there is a famous book of environmental history by William Cronin that is titled Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. The overlap of titles is not a coincidence. Cronin’s book was a hugely influential one for me when I was in college; it changed my perspective on the place I was born and have lived most of my life, and it also changed my perspective on the history of humans’ relationship to the natural environment. (See also Cronin’s essay “The Trouble with Wilderness”, another title I considered for the novella.) A further influence on my story was Dan Flores’s Wild New World, which I was reading while writing and editing it.
I am excited to see what readers make of this strange and, I hope, disturbing story. It brings to a certain culmination a lot of ideas and concerns I’ve wanted to bring into fiction for my entire adulthood. It’s also truly a work of horror fiction, the genre I am most devoted to, but which I often end up writing in such a way that it is only questionably within the genre itself. No question here. This is a horror story. And one I hope you enjoy!
