The Film Rights to OCTOBER Are Sold!

Well, it's official. The film rights to my novel October have been sold to L.A.-based indie filmmaker Dominic Haxton, as Publisher's Marketplace Deal Report announced today, in a deal quarterbacked by my agent, Sam Hiyate of The Rights Factory. 

I'm over the moon to finally be able to share it. I was a fan of Mr. Haxton's short films long before he approached me about making a feature film of October. I'd found his powerful short film, Tonight It's Me, about an encounter between a young trans woman, Ash, and a hustler, CJ, beautiful and remarkably moving. 

His queer horror short, Tonight It's You, on the other hand, which again featured the character of CJ, was as dark and chilling as its more optimistic predecessor was tender and revelatory. It's one of my favourite short horror films. 

In the afterword to October I mentioned a young filmmaker in California who had enquired about making a feature film of the novel, and what contemporary updates he might apply. 

That filmmaker—unnamed in the afterword—was the brilliant Mr. Haxton. 

Two years ago, he acquired a shopping deal for October, and earlier this summer, he purchased the film rights themselves, to make October as his first full-length feature. 

I couldn't feel more confident that the book is with the right filmmaker.  If you click this Tonight It's You link, I think you'll understand why. 

I can't wait to see what Mr. Haxton does with the novel when he applies his own elegant, modern horror aesthetic to the story of Mikey and Wroxy, and Adrian, and the haunted town of Auburn. 

We'll keep you posted as the process unfolds and develops. 

But for now, we're going to open some champagne. 

Cover Reveal à la Française

Here's the cover of the forthcoming mass-market edition of Les Ombres de Wild Fell, the French translation of my haunted house novel Wild Fell, which will be published by Editions Bragelonne in Paris, in October, 2020.

In the same way that many authors pine for a hardcover edition of their novel, I've always pined for a mass-market paperback edition of one of mine. I grew up on mass-market horror paperbacks. 

We all read them at school, traded them, collected them, hoarded then, and loved them to shreds. I still have some of my best-beloved ones from the late-70s and 80s. 

The late, legendary Michael McDowell, who wrote some of the best original horror fiction of the era, always said he was proud of being a paperback novelist—a writer whose books were published only in mass-market paperback. 

I always admired him for that, as well as for his tremendous storytelling gifts. 

Bragelonne published a beautiful trade paperback of the novel in 2016, with a glorious translation by Benoît Domis. 

I've never been able to read my work to myself in English without hearing my own voice, and finding things I would have loved to have done differently. It's a weird neurosis, but I own it. What I found, reading the book in French, was that it was like reading a novel by someone other than myself. I enjoyed that sensation. I likewise had a much clearer sense of the book when I didn't attach that authorial self-consciousness to the process.

I hope French readers of the new mass-market paperback edition enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it. There's an enormous amount of pleasure in imagining someone picking up the novel at an airport somewhere in the French-speaking world, maybe for a long flight, and imagining them spending those hours in the air, being transported, in their minds,  to Canada, to a remote, windswept island in Georgian Bay, and an old dark house presided over by a very particular, very possessive, quite terrifying châtelaine.

Bonne chance, mes potes. 

Meet My New Publisher, Open Road Media

I'm delighted to be able to share some exciting news, as well as some new book covers

Early in 2020 we were approached by Open Road Media about acquiring the publication rights for my fiction backlist, the novels Enter, Night, Wild Fell, and October. These novels, originally published by ChiZine Publications, have consistently remained in print since 2011 when Enter, Night was first published. 

A French edition of Wild Fell was published by Editions Bragelonne in Paris in 2016.

Open Road Media is America's premier global backlist publisher. Their roster includes legends such as Joan Didion, William Styron, Alice Walker, Dee Brown, Pat Conroy, Paul Monette, Joyce Carol Oates, Gloria Steinem, Octavia Butler, John Jakes, Pearl S. Buck, Walker Percy, and Sherman Alexie. 

Closer to home, I'm honoured to have my books appear alongside some of my favourite speculative fiction authors, including Graham Masterton, Robert McCammon, Thomas Tryon, Poppy Z. Brite, Elizabeth Hand—and of course, the elder gods: Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, J. Sheridan LeFanu, Ann Radcliffe, among many, many others. 

Best of all, the partnership with Open Road Media assures that my three novels will remain in print for the foreseeable future—certainly as e-books, but also as print-on-demand paperbacks and hardcovers further on down the line. 

The e-books are up for pre-order on Amazon. They will be released in October 2020.