Big Damn News

So, as you may already know, Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings, my first collection of short horror stories, went out of print around the end of last year. Originally published in 2012, Never Bet the Devil prompted no less a luminary than Laird Barron to call it “a creepy foray into the realm of the weird and the sinister.” It’s been out of print since December of 2015, and copies on Amazon marketplace are currently listed at upwards of $200. (Please don’t pay that.)

That’s the bad news. Here’s the good: Thanks to the fine folks at Strix Publishing, there’s a new deluxe hardcover edition of Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings on the way. One so amazing that I don’t think any of you who bought the original version will mind double-dipping. (At least, I hope you won’t.) Besides a couple of new stories, including the heretofore hard-to-find “A Night for Mothing,” which originally appeared in The Mothman Files back in 2011 and a brand new, never-before-published tall called “Goblins,” this new edition of Never Bet the Devil is the collection as it was always meant to be.

It’ll be illustrated throughout by the amazing Mike Corley, who many of you will remember from our collaboration on Gardinel’s Real Estate and his many fine covers for Valancourt Books. Besides a host of interior illustrations, Mike also produced the amazing (preliminary) cover that you can see above, which will be cloth bound and gold foil stamped. All that, plus a new introduction by Nathan Ballingrud!

The whole shebang is coming to a Kickstarter near you on August 15, and there’ll be a lot more details coming between now and then, plus cool rewards and stretch goals once the Kickstarter actually gets off the ground, including the chance to add more original stories to the whole package. So for those of you who have been asking how to get copies of Never Bet the Devil, this is the news you’ve been waiting for. And for everyone else, I think we’re putting together something exciting enough that it will whet your appetites as well…