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.
