My Debut Novel 'The Deading' Announced By Erewhon Books

An Eco-Horror Nightmare Set in a California Seaside Town

Erewhon Books announced the first in a two-book deal, The Deading, half of which I wrote about four years ago, the second half I wrote in the UC Riverside Low-res Program in Creative Writing. I graduated that program in June and will be teaching writing & argumentation for the Ethnic Studies Department at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo starting this fall. In the meantime, I’m working on rounds of edits, trying to get this eco-horror/climate fiction novel ready for its Summer ‘24 release.

I’ve mostly been absent from newsletters, having worked on several works: The Deading, Ten Sleep, Brown State and American Fade. I mostly finished three out of four. I also spent a lot of time the past few years birding, exploring, hitting trails, recording data, some of which was used in The Deading. Identifying birds in the field is both easy and difficult. I drew from strange and awesome experiences for parts of that story. While birding can be tiring, I do have to say it isn’t just a pain in the rear. It can be super fun too. Around Christmas, I joined some birders for a four-hour drive to find a stark-white bird sitting on someone’s rooftop. CNN used some of my video of a super rare Snowy Owl in Southern California for a fun holiday report. Legendary CNN journalist Jeanne Moos poked fun at both me and the owl. I love it.

The Deading was acquired by Erewhon’s Diana Pho in early March. A fabulous editor, she’s kind, generous, curious, imaginative. She previously worked for Tor Publishing, won major speculative fiction awards, and has been integral to our rounds of editing, helping me find ways to expand both character and story.

Many of you know I’ve been writing a long time. The dream has always been to publish at increasingly higher levels. I’ve had a few low-tier book deals, published in journals and anthologies, and ghostwrote for famous writers. Some of that was a headache, to be honest. Long stories to tell in dark corners of bars. This multi-book speculative fiction deal is what I’ve always been hoping for, the culmination of strategizing to get an MFA, then using that experience as a launching pad into publishing long-form fiction. Somehow, it worked! While I was in the program, I didn’t expect to work on The Deading. My thesis was a different work entirely, not speculative fiction but Chicano literature. American Fade, which is going through more revisions, is loosely based on my family between 1961-2017. Even my graduate lecture was on crafting family in literature. So, The Deading has been a complete surprise! Anyway, I ended up studying a few quarters under Stephen Graham Jones (Don’t Fear the Reaper, The Only Good Indians, Mongrels). He taught me quite a bit about the horror genre, so much that I found myself immersed in expanding The Deading into sub-genre, eco-horror. He helped rearrange some of the book too, made it tidier.

Stephen Graham Jones has this to say about The Deading: “Do not eat fish from these waters. Or oysters. Really, just stay inland. Except that, in The Deading, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re safe, either.”

I love that blurb. Feels like my novel will be kind of scary!

According to the promotional materials Erewhon released, “Only the dead get to live.” That’s not wrong. The Deading is a nightmarish lens into the horrors that are unexplainable in nature, that is, if things get even weirder during this tail end of the Holocene. In a way this is a reflection of us today, how dead many feel in this climate of insane politics and constant eco-threats to the fabric of our delicate and harsh world. Yes, delicate and harsh. We live in an oxymoron, on a planet that sustains itself, yet somehow is so delicate that sometimes I’m surprised it hasn’t collapsed on itself. Through our immense use of resources, and destruction of habitats, somehow seeming to slice into the vast interconnected ecosystems of our planet, weakening its every joint, we somehow manage to survive. Conservationists help piece some of it back together. Our world is building its preserves. And we can only hope fauna within natural spaces won’t out die before more preserves are created.

Current signs are bleak. Every day we hear about coral reefs dying from intense ocean heat, habitats destroyed and replaced by palm oil plantations, Joshua trees burning that can’t be replaced, cities like Phoenix hitting record temps while people sit in their 100-degree homes with no air conditioning; and floods, somewhere, maybe everywhere, it seems there’s always a flood or a storm surging beyond expectations. And threatened species suddenly dying out, disappearing instead of adapting.

But we are alive. We’re all so alive. And we have choices. And that’s what this novel is about. The choices we make. The choices the ocean makes, if it could. The choices animals do make. It’s about the choices we all have when things get really, really bad. We don’t always make the poor choices though. We don’t.

Anyway, I’m really happy about the announcement. You can read more about my ongoing writings here, you can see the official description of the novel here, and of course you can find me on FB, Twitter/X, Bluesky, Insta, Threads, all those places, if you want to have a chat.