I Grew up in Idaville

I grew up in Idaville. I grew up in Riverdale, in Smallville, in Shopton, in a house on Klickitat Street where it meets Rover Avenue. I knew that when I became a teenager, I would drive around in a van and solve mysteries with my friends and my dog. Then, as an adult, I would get a job at Swift Enterprises building spacecraft, or I would open my own detective agency. Or both.

Even as a kid, I knew that wasn’t the way the world really worked. But I wished it did.

I grew up in Boise, Idaho, at a time before the Internet, with four channels on our TV. I walked to school, where my friends and classmates had names that could have been written by Beverly Cleary. I loved reading and books, and when I disappeared into them, I recognized an ideal version of my own world.

So it was not too outrageous to believe that I could be a boy detective or a young inventor. I read books about crime and tried to make robots out of Legos and Micronauts and wished for something cool like a spaceship to appear in the sky. At Collister Elementary, my friends and I traded stories of Bigfoot, or, as we got older, urban legends about the mayor and the richest people in town worshipping Satan at Dry Creek Cemetery. (We dared each other to go out there at Halloween, and while we all said we would, we never did.) We watched monster movie marathons on Channel 12 and passed around Stephen King books like they were contraband.

Even when things got hard, I was lucky in so many ways I only see now.

One way in which I was especially lucky was to have a teacher named Kathy McNally in second grade. She let me write anything I wanted after I proved I couldn’t stick with the topics she put on the chalkboard for our papers. She didn’t see my inability to stick to the lesson as disobedience or disrespect, but creativity. She gave me permission to use my imagination. And I did.

I still am. I wouldn’t be where I am now if not for her.

This week, I’ve released my seventh novel, REUNION, and I tried to put those same feelings of growing up in a magical place into it. There is a boy genius, a girl detective, a young wizard, and a warrior princess. They do their best to keep Middleton, their little part of the world, safe from the monsters, but they are only children. And when they grow up, they have to come back and reckon with everything they thought they left behind. For kids, magic and horror often live side-by-side. The world is big enough to contain unknown monsters, but still small enough to save. Now more than ever, I think we are seeing the truth of that. And that’s the story I tried to tell.

I couldn’t have written this book if I had not grown up where I did, when I did.

REUNION is out in the world now. I hope you enjoy it.

REUNION cover reveal

Well, I’ve been practicing shutting up for a while. But I’ve decided it’s time to start talking again. And I’ve finally gotten my new novel to the point where it’s ready for the world, even if the world might not be ready for it.

So here’s the cover for my next book, REUNION.

A girl detective. A boy genius. A warrior princess. A young magician. Four young people with extraordinary gifts.

For years, they solved mysteries, caught crooks, and slayed monsters. They were secret heroes, keeping an idyllic small town in the middle of America safe from the things that lurked in the dark.

Then, the year of their high school graduation, the darkness came for them. During what the media called “New Year’s Evil,” a demonic force rose to turn their hometown into a literal Hell on Earth.

They gathered to stop it. They fought. And they won.

The rest of the world never discovered the truth behind the disaster. For twenty years, the four tried living like normal people.

Now their past is coming back to haunt them.

The darkness is gathering once more. They’re summoned back to their hometown to face it, along with everything else they left behind. Whether they want to or not, they’ll have to be heroes again.

For fans of Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, and Victoria Schwab, REUNION is about what happens when the good guys grow up.

This is probably my favorite book I’ve written, and it’s certainly the most personal. More to come soon, including publication date and order link.

Fight Test

If I were still in the business of being professionally glib, I’d say something today like, “Putin is not only mired in the Cold War, he’s still fighting World War I. He believes an empire is made up of territories and borders, that conquered lands and people are assets, not liabilities, and that he can bomb the world all the way back to the 1950s.”

And it would be utter bullshit, because like 99 percent of the world, I have no real idea what’s happening in Ukraine, and nobody can say what’s going to happen. All I know for certain is that a lot of people are going to die for no good reason, and a lot of people here are going to treat it as entertainment. The closest most of us are going to get to the tragedy is on our screens.

It’s a good day for shutting up. History teaches us a lot of lessons. The problem is, we only learn them after the test is over.

I’ve been quieter in the past couple years, despite the fact that writing is my job, and despite the fact that being wrong about everything does not seem to have stopped other people from shouting their opinions from every platform.

I’m not against this, for what it’s worth. Shout away. It’s the only way we learn what we think, and find out how we’re wrong, which is the only way we get a little closer to being right.

One thing I can say with certainty, after years of writing stories: Conflict sells. We want our narratives to include fights and explosions because they are easy and exciting, and they throw the everyday business of being human into stark contrasts.

But I am trying to be more compassionate about the suffering of people I don’t know, especially when I don’t know what is happening in their lives. Especially when talking about a disease that has currently left a million people in America dead, or the cost it has incurred on the living. Or when I talk about kindergarteners being shelled so someone can make a larger political point.

Today I am thinking about five-year-olds, because I am a parent, and because one of the places that was hit in the hostilities between Ukraine and the Russian-backed separatists was a school called, of all things, “Fairytale Kindergarten.”

Imagine that for a second: a class full of children who are still trying to master tying their shoes being told they have to run and hide because there are people they’ve never met who are trying to kill them. Think of being one of the teachers suddenly burdened with that awful responsibility. Think of any five-year-old you know, happy and laughing or throwing a tantrum or just playing in the corner with their toys — and then, in a moment, that kid’s world now includes the reality of bombs and shrapnel and death.

I am so lucky that I only have to imagine it. I am historically lucky that my children have never had to face it, while so many kids in this world do.

But I cannot imagine anyone, when actually faced with that reality, saying, “Yes, this suffering is good and necessary, and I would gladly litter the ground with these small bodies because I am right.”

That is flat-out insane. And we would rightly consider anyone who walked into that kindergarten with a bomb on a belt or an automatic rifle to be a monster. I have to believe that 99 percent of us would, if placed in that classroom, instantly recognize that nothing is worth killing children. There is no miracle that will come from that sacrifice.

This is how stories can be turned against us, and therefore we have to be careful about what we are sure we know. We only get people in glimpses, even if we get more glimpses than ever before. We see them in 140 characters or screenshots or 10-second video clips. It is so easy to turn them into points to be scored on a board, and excuse their deaths in the name of some larger, grander victory. We do that all the time.

And the people, like Putin, who start these wars are almost never the ones who pay for them. The kindergarteners and their families are the ones who pick up that check.

Our distance from the actual fight is a luxury. We get to turn it into a joke, or a talking point.

But I still feel obliged to say something, because that is how I get through these days. And because I believe we have to name what we love to make sure it survives. It is the same basic thing I have repeated to my kids over and over so I can learn it myself, the simplest possible recitation of fact: We have to use our words to say only what’s true and necessary, even when the temptation is to find all the ways we’re right and they’re evil. Especially when the bombs start dropping.

I still believe most people are doing the best they can, even if the proof of that is sometimes in short supply. I believe in kindness outlasting rage and compassion moving the world into a better direction, like waves slowly eroding the rocks on shore. I believe most of us, if we were in that kindergarten, would embrace those kids and shield them with our own bodies.

I could be wrong. But of all the hills to die on, this seems like the best one to me.

The COVID Box

Back at the beginning of the pandemic — which is something I never thought I’d type unless I was working on a zombie novel — I was surrounded by piles of snacks from Costco and searching for something to take my mind off the daily body count. I picked up Nick Harkaway’s massive, challenging novel Gnomon again. It’s a near-future mystery set in a world where everyone is always monitored, and the state exists as a mostly benign busybody, nudging you gently into proper behavior with constant, 24-hour surveillance and AI-calibrated social feedback.

Harkaway throws away concepts that other writers would use for an entire novel. One of those is something called a Reboot Box. In the future he describes, it’s possible to bring people back from otherwise fatal conditions, but not without cost. They often wake up with broken memories, the inevitable result of the mucking about in their skulls and the damage done by induced comas.

I thought about this a lot, especially as the COVID casualties started to mount. A close family friend of ours was in an induced coma for weeks. When she came out of it, she had to learn how to walk again. And she was one of the lucky ones.

I’ve seen what happens when you lose bits of yourself.

One of my grandfathers died of Alzheimer’s, and before he passed, he would occasionally talk to me and my brother as if we were his sons, bringing up incidents that happened decades before I was born. My stepfather went through dementia before he died as well, and there were times when he would look at me and speak to the kid I was in high school. I could see his difficulty as he tried to bridge the fact of this middle-aged man in front of his eyes with his brain’s certainty that I was still only 16 years old.

I think that’s why he was most comfortable sitting in his chair at the kitchen table every day, reading the same magazine , starting over almost every time he got to the bottom of the page, beginning again at the top as if it were completely fresh to him. It was familiar, and it reminded him of who he was supposed to be: an accomplished businessman, a pilot who soloed when he was 12 and flew jets in Korea, an inventor with multiple patents to his name.

The description of Al, the father in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, seems like a very accurate summary of what he must have felt whenever he got up from that chair, and had to confront the world that would not sit still, that insisted on changing, every time he blinked:

“‘Al? What are you doing?’ He began a sentence: ‘I am — ‘ but when he was taken by surprise, every sentence became an adventure in the woods; as soon as he could no longer see the light of the clearing from which he’d entered, he would realize that the crumbs he’d dropped for bearings had been eaten by birds…”

This past summer, I got to experience a milder form of cognitive decline myself, after a Homer Simpson episode where I cracked my skull. (I was doing pull-ups as part of my quarantine exercise routine, managed to yank the bar from the doorway, fell backward, hit my head on a bottom shelf and tore my scalp open. I got five staples and a mild concussion. On the plus side, I now know my wife can clean up a lot of blood.)

I thought I was fine, and then discovered that I would begin typing a sentence and lose track of what I was saying before I got to the end. I made more typos in a couple of weeks than I had in the whole year before. Reading exhausted me; I couldn’t remember what had happened in the previous chapter, or sometimes on the previous page.

It went away, but I still wonder what I would have done if it didn’t.

There’s a body of research that says much of what we think of as identity — who we think we are — is dependent on context: we become different people when we’re in different situations. We’re not fixed in place, but constantly shifting between different personas as we move through the world.

Likewise, who we are at any given moment depends on what we remember. As much as we’d like to think we have some stable core, we are surprisingly flexible and changeable depending on which version of ourselves we remember at any given moment. As both Daryl Gregory and Ted Chiang have illustrated in their fiction, we are different people at every moment of the day.

The self, like so many of the ways we interact with the world, is a story. And like all stories, it’s changeable. We can rewrite it at any time.

This is why I’m considering a Reboot Box of my own. I am trying to decide what is most important to me, what parts of my life I want to serve as touchstones, what memories I want to keep, and which pieces of me I wouldn’t mind losing.

A year into our quarantines and lockdowns, I know that a lot of other people have been cut loose from everything that used to signify who they are. They no longer have their work family. They no longer have their assigned roles. They may not have a job to go to anymore. They have to inhabit a different life, at home, all the time now. There is less room to be someone else. In some homes, there is no chance to escape.

Or they’re just alone. Which is its own kind of burden, if you don’t want it. Loneliness can actually kill people.

The joke now is that every day in the pandemic is Groundhog Day, and nothing changes. But that’s never true. Everything changes. And I think a Reboot Box — even a mental one — reminds us of that truth.

Lately, at the dinner table, we have taken to looking at the memories some algorithm selects randomly from our twenty-year-archive of digital photos. Our daughters get to see themselves as tiny babies and toddlers again. We get to remember the moments we brought them home from the hospital and what it felt like when the whole world changed because of their presence in it. I get to see myself younger, and wonder at the priorities of that man, and the time he spent as if it were an infinite resource. (My daughters put it another way: “You used to have hair, Dad.”)

I know that I’m lucky in this age of isolation. I’m safe and healthy, and my family is with me in our house with plenty of food and 100 mbps wi-fi. But I need to remember that, or it doesn’t exist. My wife, wiser and better than me, says it all the time: “How lucky we are to be alive right now.”

Of course there are days when I fail. When I’m insufficiently kind, or grateful, for all the gifts and love and luck that I have. When I forget that other people suffer worse with more grace.

Memory, like almost everything else we do, is a choice. Most of the arguments in our culture right now are about which parts we want to include in our stories. With the vaccine — and an end to the pandemic — in sight, I am less worried about being put on a tube and more about what happens next; how we recover from this injury, and how we decide what normal means after more than a half-million deaths.

So I try to remember who I am, and who I want to be. And I hope that tomorrow, I’ll be able to pull those same memories from the box, and be that person again for the first time.

Apocalypses, Fast and Slow

A couple of months ago, my biggest concern about my health was my cholesterol levels. Now I am self-quarantined with my family to escape a deadly virus with no cure and no vaccine. My kids go around the house every day singing, to the tune of “Come On Eileen:”

Covid-19

Don’t know what it means

At this moment

I’m in quarantine…

A hundred years from now, it’s going to replace “Ring Around the Rosie.”

I always wanted to live in a science-fiction novel. I just thought it would be more fun.

***

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking (and reading, and writing) about the End of the World.

I read once that the Black Plague devastated Europe twice. First, when it hit the cities, and spread like wildlife, killing the people who lived clustered closely together. And then, when it spread to the countryside, where people thought they were safe, crops rotted in the fields because there was no one to harvest them. Some of the people who survived the plague starved to death. The first apocalypse was fast. The second one was slow.

So sometimes I wonder what kind of apocalypse we might be facing, and what that means for the survivors.

Zombies — Fast. Massive collapse, almost overnight, in every movie, with the survivors huddling in their homes and deserted malls.

Nuclear war — Fast, then slow. Most of the planet dies in the first exchange. Survivors comb the ruins and battle mutants and disease during the nuclear winter that follows. Plus, you know, Terminators or some other variety of killer robot.

Giant meteor — Slow, then fast. At first, it’s just a small glowing speck in the sky. Then people start to lose their minds as it gets bigger. See Ben H. Winters’ excellent The Last Policeman trilogy for how that plays out.

Alien invasion — Fast, unless they want to eat us. Then slow for the people kept in the human veal pens.

***

In case you were wondering, this is not the Black Plague.

We’ve been here before. This will come as a great shock to those people who cheerfully refuse to vaccinate their kids, but social distancing is what happens when you have a contagious disease and no immunity and no vaccine. My mother went through it in the 1950s, during the last polio epidemic in the United States (she was one of the only kids in town to get a polio vaccine, because my grandmother worked in the local doctor’s office). The entire world went through it in the 1918 Flu Pandemic.

It’s not Doomsday.

But this could be an apocalypse.

Apocalypse is from the Greek word for “revelation,” and sure, it sounds bad. It’s come to mean what was promised in the Book of Revelation: fire and brimstone from the sky, the seas turning to blood, the dead rising, and of course, plagues.

But it also means an unveiling of things not seen. An apocalypse can be the discovery of the truth.

Which, admittedly, can feel like the end of the world.

***

I say this knowing that people are scared, that the last thing many of them need is yet another hot take, yet another goddamn opinion about what it all means, yet another joke about zombie movies. I know there are going to be a lot of people in pain. There are going to be people who lose the loves of their lives, their parents, their grandparents, and their children.

I want to take a moment to confess: I know how lucky I am. My work doesn’t require me leaving the house. We have plenty of money and space and food here. Our biggest problems right now are getting the glitches out of the kids’ online learning classes and figuring out what to stream on Netflix.

I hope that luck holds. I wish no one had to feel any pain. And I am fully aware that words mean little when the shit well and truly hits the fan. When that happens, we hold onto each other and we find comfort where we can.

What we’re facing right now is the kind of dread that comes at three in the morning, when you can’t sleep and you realize that your life is not quite what you expected. I imagine a lot of people, stuck at home with more time on their hands than they’ve had in years, are having that quiet moment.

I think a lot of people are wondering how we got here. And I hope they’re also wondering what we do about it.

Because this is not the last apocalypse we are going to see in my lifetime, or my kids’ lifetime. Much of human history is a long flat line of the drudge work of everyday survival. That’s not where we are now. There will be more diseases jumping the species barrier for which we have no immunity. There will be rising seas, and burning forests and we will have to face all of these problems as they overlap and compound one another.

This will require our best solutions and our best selves. This is where we determine the future. This is a time for us to figure out what really matters to us, and what we really want.

Because if this is the end of the world, then we’re going to have to build a new one.

The University of Harlan Ellison

I don't write many fan letters, which is a little odd, because I am a natural fanboy. I suppose it's because I spent so much time being ashamed of my enthusiasms and vaguely embarrassed about all the things I loved so much.

But a couple of years ago, I decided, the hell with that, and I wanted to tell some people how much their work meant to me.

So I wrote Harlan Ellison a letter.

Dear Mr. Ellison,

I was re-reading your collected essays in An Edge In My Voice, and even though you said not to, I wanted to drop you a line.

I was in college in Idaho when I first read The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat. This was pre-Internet, just barely. (I was born one day and 37 years after you.) I stumbled along then, trying to figure out how to be a writer.

And your work gave me direction. Before I got my first job at a weekly paper, I read Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed during breaks at my desk as a substitute teacher. I found out that someone could be a writer and proud of it, and actually make a decent buck at it, and still say what he wanted to say. It was something of a revelation to me then. And it’s still an inspiration to me now.

I’m a published author now. My fifth book will be out from William Morrow early next year. I’ve also written screenplays and newspaper articles and I’m currently struggling through a pilot script, despite all your warnings about getting involved in TV. It’s nothing compared to your output. I’m still in awe of that.

But I would not be here now without what I learned by reading you. I didn’t have an MFA program. I had the University of Harlan Ellison. I am not sure how how well I’ve applied my lessons, but I keep coming back for reminders.

So thank you for teaching me by example. You made a big difference in my life, and I owe you for it. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Christopher Farnsworth

I never heard back from him. I never really expected to. He was always more busy writing books and screenplays and comics and short stories, and he'd recently suffered a stroke, which is probably why I felt some urgency about sending him the letter.

He lasted two more years, and wrote more books, and continued to inspire and enrage. I was not, unlike some of my friends, lucky enough to meet him in person. My friend Steve, who interviewed him several times, told me that he still expects to pick up the phone and hear Ellison yelling at him about the quotes he used.

But he meant a lot to me. And I owe him, even though we were never in the same room.

I picked up that copy of An Edge In My Voice again very early this morning when I could not sleep. I found this line, which I had marked:

"We live in a time in which cowardice is garbed in moral outrage.”

Despite his flaws, you can never say that Ellison was silent in the face of injustice. He used his talent to expose the lies he saw and reminded people what real outrage sounds like.

He reminds me that I need to be more courageous. To say what I mean. To write more, and write bravely, and fill the page. Just like he did.

We've all got stories to tell, and only so many days to write them.

RIP, Daniel Cohen and Brad Steiger

I was saddened to learn today of the deaths of two writers who meant a lot to me when I was growing up. I've written before how I was a strange kid who'd hang out in certain sections of the library, reading all the weird books about weird things, like Bigfoot, Nessie, and UFOs. 

Not all of those books were the same, though. Even as a kid, I appreciated the ones that were well-written, that knew how to tell a story, and that actually provided some proof of the unbelievable and impossible things they described.

I learned to look for the names of the authors on those books, and I would pick up whatever they would write.

That's how I first found Daniel Cohen and Brad Steiger.

I was a bigger Cohen fan when I was young. I checked out his Encyclopedia of Monsters so often that it was just my name on the card, over and over again. When he wrote about Mothman and Mokele-Mbembe, it made the world seem bigger. I read everything he had in our public library, but I especially loved The Great Airship Mystery and Monsters, Giants and Little Men from Mars. Honestly, what kid would not want a book with titles like those?

I also read Steiger, but I liked him much more as an adult for one main reason: his books were scary. While Cohen had more of a sense of humor, Steiger could create authentic-sounding horror stories. When I read him, I usually had the lights on. His stories of shadowy evils, especially Out of the Dark and Shadow World, informed and added to the villains and dark forces in my books about Nathaniel Cade.

Reading those books led, eventually, to me writing books myself. I even got to correspond with Steiger a bit after I wrote The President's Vampire when I quoted him in my text. He was very kind and courteous and gracious.

But now both men are gone. I learned from Loren Coleman — another one of my great favorites as a kid — that they both passed away on the same day, May 6, both at the age of 82.

You can read Cohen's obituary here, and Steiger's obituary here.

Unfortunately, there have been several writers about the paranormal who have died within a few weeks of each other. Even though I'm more of a skeptic now than I ever was, I hope that there are other people who keep diving into the deep weirdness out there. I will never forget how these writers opened doors for me, and widened the boundaries of what I considered possible.

In the end, that's one of the best things that writing can do.

I'm grateful, and I am sorry to see them go.

Why Tony Stark Is A Terrible CEO

I know this verges on heresy, but I'm just going to come out and say it. It might be possible that Elon Musk is not that great at making cars.

Today, after Musk was kind of a dick on a conference call, a bunch of analysts are waking up to the fact that Tesla has spent a billion dollars a year for ten years, and they're still producing fewer than 30,000 cars per quarter. (Not to mention all those injuries on the production line.)

And yet Tesla, which lost $675.35 million last quarter, is worth more than Ford — which has been building cars for more than a century and made $1.74 billion in profits last quarter. Ford currently trades at about 11 bucks a share. Tesla trades at about $277.

I know people who will say, sure, but Teslas are cool. I have several friends who own them, and they say it's the best thing they've ever driven. The car of the future. They go at ludicrous speed!

Which is not a great argument. Ford could build a car that sold for $100K and it would have most of the neat stuff you find in a Tesla. And I bet it would not be struggling to get its "flufferbot" to work.

The problem is, Ford doesn't make cars just for millionaires who live in California. They're in the business of selling the most cars to the most people.

So what makes people think Tesla is fundamentally different than Ford, which is far more successful at moving cars off the assembly line and actually delivering them to customers?

Only one thing: Elon Musk.

This is probably obvious to anyone who's been paying attention, but it's been banging around my skull for a long time. Tesla is not a car company. Tesla is a company that sells Elon Musk.

You buy a share of Tesla, and you're buying into a dream. You're buying a piece of a superhero, a visionary intellect who shoots cars into space and promises to build colonies on Mars.

I'll admit it: I'd like to believe in that. Aside from his apocalyptic predictions about AI, Musk is one of the few people who seems to believe in a boundless future. I know he's way, way smarter than I am, so I would love to let him deal with global warming and space travel and he'll solve it on a spare weekend.

But that's the problem with celebrity. It distorts our picture of real people, and turns them into symbols. And eventually, if you treat people like celebrities, guess what? They start acting like celebrities.

I don't think it's entirely their fault. I think it's an almost-rational response to the pressure of being the most popular kid not only in school, not only in town, but in the entire world. It's hard enough to live with the expectations of the small circle of people you know on a daily basis: your family, your friends, your co-workers, your boss. Now imagine that you also have to live with the needs and wants of literally millions of observers every day you wake up; that your livelihood and the jobs of hundreds or thousands of others depends on how you conduct yourself; that you're treated like a god some of the time, but the trade-off is everyone feels they own a piece of you, because they helped make you.

Yeah. That sounds insane. And so it should be no great surprise that even the most stable, well-rounded individuals sometimes lose it a little. If you're not a stable, well-rounded individual — if you began with a need for attention, or love, or success to fill the hole inside your chest — then just imagine what might happen.

Musk is compared to Tony Stark all the time. So, if this were a movie or a comic book, the conference call yesterday was basically that scene in Iron Man 2 where Tony was a cocky asshole to the Senate committee investigating him. And eventually, it turned out that Tony was right, and the senator was a Hydra agent, and the good guys won.

In the meantime, Stark Enterprises gets reduced to rubble roughly once a year, and its stock price regularly tanks because Tony is so busy being Iron Man or chasing supermodels that he doesn't care much about getting the latest StarkTech out the door.

Which is great, as long as the world actually gets saved. The problem is, that sort of ending generally only happens in comic books and movies.

Pretty sure there's a lesson there for anyone who wants to see it.

Happy Birthday, Superman

I don't remember the first time I saw Superman. It feels like I've always known him, like I was born with the knowledge of Clark Kent and the Man of Steel, like the S-symbol was encoded into my DNA. Grant Morrison has pointed out that his origin is so well-known and so simple that it can be told in just eight words: "Doomed planet. Desperate scientists. Last hope. Kindly couple."

Today, 80 years after he first appeared on the cover of Action Comics #1, he remains one of the most popular fictional characters of all time. He's been adapted into every possible medium from books to film to TV to video games. He's generated untold billions in revenue. He's been plastered on everything from peanut butter to underwear. His shield is tattooed into people's skin. People love to say that Batman is cooler, but honestly, everyone really wishes they could fly. (And Batman vs. Superman? Please. Shortest fight in recorded history.)

Other people have complained that Superman is too boring, that he's got a superpower for everything, and so there's no drama in his stories. Worse, he's such a boy scout. He doesn't lie, or cheat, or murder anyone.

But see, that's the secret. That's what makes Superman so enduringly popular, even now. Because his real superpower isn't flight, or invulnerability, or strength.

It's integrity. Despite having the power to make himself king, to crack the planet in half with a tantrum, or to burn everything he sees to ash, he chooses to help others. He chooses to do the right thing, no matter what. He humbles himself to lift other people up.

In other words, Superman's real superpower is being Superman.

I admit, it's been a rough couple of decades to be a smiling, optimistic hero. Superman was such a potent symbol during the first half of the 20th Century because he embodied the best hopes for the future. He came from a perfect world to make ours better. He really believed in justice for all. He wasn't made for dystopias.

But I am confident that Superman will soar again, no matter how many times we try to kill him. His other super-power is adaptation. There is something in him for every generation if we look hard enough. (These days, it's sort of fitting that Superman's arch-nemesis is a power-mad billionaire who puts his name on everything he owns. And that he was created by two geeky, Jewish kids from Cleveland.) There are still stories to tell.

I still love Superman, and I always will. Because he shows us how high we can rise, if we'll only look up.

Up in the sky.

FLASHMOB now out in paperback

Hey, if you've been waiting for a slightly cheaper copy of FLASHMOB -- one of Publishers Weekly's BEST BOOKS OF 2017, just saying -- with a more attractive cover, then have I got a deal for you.

FLASHMOB is now out in paperback at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, and at your local independent bookstore through IndieBound.

If you have already bought and read FLASHMOB -- thank you -- please feel free to use one of those links to leave a review and tell everyone else what you thought of the latest adventure of John Smith. It helps a lot.

And as always, thank you for reading.

The Love Song of Dr. Johnny Fever

Let me tell you why I love “WKRP in Cincinnati.”

I watched a lot of TV as a kid. A good four to six hours a day sometimes. Which is especially amazing when you consider how little there was, compared to what we have now. (Three channels. No TiVo. No cable. My daughters simply do not believe this was the way TV worked when I was a kid. My daughters thought that Spider-Man was a real person, but they don’t believe me when I tell them this.)

But “WKRP” still stands out in my memory, and not just because it was good.

“WKRP” was a mildly successful sitcom in the late 70s and early 80s about life at a struggling AM radio station in Cincinnati, Ohio. I got to see it both when it was first-run — my dad let me watch with him — and later, in syndication.

The show struggled to find an audience — it was moved around the schedule constantly — and was dissed by Mary Tyler Moore herself (“Let me put it this way: I wouldn’t watch it.”), even though her company produced it. CBS clashed with the series’ creators about the show’s direction, and it was canceled after four seasons.

Despite all that, the show produced some of the best television around at the time, including one legendary Thanksgiving episode. (“As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”)

“WKRP” is the spiritual godfather to workplace comedies like “The Office” and “Parks and Recreation” and “Scrubs” — a group of zany characters, all trapped in a zany place, doing zany things. Like so many other shows, it was about a bunch of lovable losers — and they were losers, there was no getting around that.

Andy Travis, the program director hired to turn the station around, was a success — and then he came to the lowest-rated station in a dead-end market. Dr. Johnny Fever was a big-time L.A. DJ once — and then he said the wrong thing on the air and was blacklisted in the business. Herb Tarlek is a terrible salesman and a failure even as a sleazy lounge lizard. Les Nessman, the station’s news reporter, can’t pronounce most of the names in his stories and is obsessed with hogs and communism. The station’s general manager, Arthur Carlson, only has a job because his mother owns the station.

They are all trapped together in Cincinnati. I know now that their sets were limited by the budgets and designs of TV at the time, but it really looked like they spent their time in an ugly office before going home to cramped, cheap apartments. I could picture them even when the camera was not on them, heating something out of a can, watching bad sitcoms from the couch, before shuffling off to bed and starting the whole process again in the morning. Their lives were lonely, and like most lonely people, they were weird and complicated and sometimes hard to like.

I suspect that’s what makes a show like WKRP so rare now. You saw glimpses of it in “Community,” but it's not easy to sell a show about losers to a studio or a network or an audience. Real life deals enough loss to all of us.

That's not to say there are no losers on TV anymore. But other shows invite us to laugh at those characters — that Michael Scott, he’s such a moron; that Kramer, he’s so weird; and so on. We get to look down on them from behind a thick, protective coating of irony. We get to be the winners while they struggle.

The characters at WKRP aren’t so easily mocked. (Aside from the fashions and music from thirty years ago, I mean.) They tried too hard, and there’s nothing that’s so repellent to ironic distance as actual effort.

Here’s a good example, from the first season — and one of my favorite episodes. WKRP sponsors a band called “Scum of the Earth” and it’s a disaster from the moment the exceedingly well-dressed men show up. After abusing and insulting everyone within spitting distance, they refuse to play. So Andy and Venus and (reluctantly) Johnny have to beat them up to get them onstage.

It’s probably the smallest joke in the whole episode. (Johnny’s weary sigh: “Rock and roll.”) But as a metaphor, it’s pretty perfect.

Everyone at WKRP knows, on some level, that they’re all stuck. They know they’re never going to make the real big time. The ones who were there before, like Andy and Johnny, know they don’t really belong.

But they never stop aiming for something a little better. Not too much better. They’ll fight for it. Literally punch people in the head for it, if necessary, for reasons that aren’t too clear anymore.

And most of the time, they still fail. We can laugh about it. They do. (Eventually. Usually.) But it’s hard to look down on them for that. It seems a little too close to what we all do every day. We all need to believe we’ve got a shot — or at least a sense of humor — or we wouldn’t get out of bed. Especially on those cold, gray, winter mornings in Ohio.

(Note: I first published this, with minor differences, on August 20, 2014. It was lost from the site when my host service crashed a while ago. I went to the trouble of finding it again and re-posting it now because Hugh Wilson, the creator of WKRP, passed away over the weekend. RIP, Mr. Wilson. You made something great.)

Best News

I was floored to find out that FLASHMOB was named one of the Best Books of 2017 by Publishers Weekly in mysteries and thrillers. I'm honored to be included with some amazing authors and books, and very grateful to PW for including me.

FLASHMOB is here.

Today's the day. FLASHMOB hits stores everywhere.

“Gifted troubleshooter John Smith, introduced in the acclaimed thriller Killfile, must take down a shadowy figure who has weaponized the internet, using social media to put a price on the heads of his targets in this intense, unstoppable thriller from the author reviewers have compared to Michael Crichton, Brad Thor, and James Rollins.

As a fixer for America’s one percent, John Smith cleans up the messes of those rich enough to afford him. But he’s no ordinary gun for hire. Smith is a man of rare gifts, including the ability to read minds. Arriving at the wedding of Kira Sadeghi, a reality television celebrity he recently saved from kidnappers, Smith witnesses a group of gunmen open fire, hitting the bride and others. Though he’s unarmed, Smith cripples one of the killers and is able to pry one word from his mind: “Downvote.”

Eager to learn more, Smith hacks into the brain of an FBI agent to discover the Bureau has been investigating a nefarious new threat called “Downvote,” an encrypted site on the “dark net” that lists the names of celebrities and offers a hefty bounty for anyone who can kill them—unleashing an anonymous and deadly flashmob with a keystroke.

Finding a mastermind on the internet is like trying to catch air—unless you’re John Smith. Motivated by money and revenge, he traces a series of electronic signatures to a reclusive billionaire living at sea, accompanied by a scary-smart female bodyguard who becomes Smith’s partner in his quest. The hunt for their prey will lead from Hong Kong to Reykjavik to a luxury gambling resort deep in the Laotian jungle. Yet always this criminal mastermind remains one step ahead.

The only way Downvote’s creator can stop Smith is to kill him . . . because while this diabolical genius can run, there’s no hiding from a man who can read minds.”

You can read the first four chapters and order your copy here. You can also listen to the great Bronson Pinchot read the audiobook version here.

Publisher's Weekly called it "brilliant... intelligence and knuckle-biting suspense. Many will want to read this novel in one sitting.” Booklist said, "Farnsworth is a genuinely gifted storyteller, able to take a fantastic premise and build onto it a story that feels not just plausible but completely natural... A fine genre-bender." And Kirkus Reviews said it's "a smooth, assured effort... another entertaining performance by Farnsworth, who brings an edgy sense of humor to the proceedings."

FLASHMOB was also named a hot summer read by the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Huffington Post, Bookish, and Inverse.com.

And if you want to pick up a copy in person, come to one of my events, and I'll sign it for you at no extra charge.

Once again, thank you all for reading my books. I am very lucky -- and very grateful. Hope you enjoy the latest adventure.

PWned.

Flashmob: A Novel

By Christopher Farnsworth

Well, this is a pretty great way to start the week. FLASHMOB just got a starred and boxed review from Publishers Weekly. 

“The main elements of Farnsworth’s brilliant second thriller featuring the man known as John Smith would individually be enough to sustain interest; the combination of a telepathic lead and a terrifyingly plausible effort to use the Internet for social manipulation produces intelligent and knuckle-biting suspense… Farnsworth credibly ups the ante for his hero and makes accepting his paranormal abilities easy. Many will want to read this novel in one sitting.”

You can read the entire thing here.

Booklist gave FLASHMOB an excellent review as well. (Not online yet, but here's the highlights.)

"Farnsworth is a genuinely gifted storyteller, able to take a fantastic premise and build onto it a story that feels not just plausible but completely natural... A fine genre-bender."

Kirkus Reviews also had some kind words for FLASHMOB:

"A smooth, assured effort... another entertaining performance by Farnsworth, who brings an edgy sense of humor to the proceedings."

And remember, if all this fulsome praise from the world of reviewers makes you want to pre-order FLASHMOB, you can get a free Nathaniel Cade ebook. Details are here.

FLASHMOB hits stores on June 27. You can get your copy through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, iBooks, Kobo, and from your local independent bookstore through IndieBound.

THE RETURN OF NATHANIEL CADE

About once a day, I get an email or a message over social media from someone I’ve never met before. It’s always the same question, phrased in different ways.

“Hey, when are you going to write another book about Nathaniel Cade?”
“When are you going to tell us what happened to Cade and Zach?”
“When are you going to do the next book in the President’s Vampire series?”

And I’ve always had the same answer: Eventually.

It's incredibly flattering that so many people like my vampire so much. And I've wanted to write more about him. But Cade was stranded several years ago when I switched publishers, and I’ve been busy writing other books since then. I always intended to get back to him, but I didn’t know when it would happen.

Lately, however, I’ve been getting a lot more questions about Cade. For some reason, the last election inspired a lot of people to start thinking about monsters in the White House again.

It’s inspired me, too. I’ve written a new short novella about Nathaniel Cade: DEEP STATE.

It’s been four years since a new president ascended to the White House. Zach Barrows has not seen Nathaniel Cade, the President’s Vampire, since being fired from his position as Cade’s handler and sent to a small, cramped office in a government building in Nebraska.

Once, he and Cade fought a shadow war against the monsters, spies, and demons that threatened the United States. Now Zach pushes papers and listens to conspiracy theories from people who have no idea how dark the real world can get.

Then Zach is summoned to the Situation Room by President Lester Wyman, who is both the commander-in-chief and a possible traitor. 

But he and Cade are bound to follow Wyman’s orders. They are told to find out why a top-secret missile silo has gone offline. If they fail, a nuclear warhead will launch, and the world will die in a hail of fire.

In other words, it’s just another night on the job.

After a long absence, Cade and Zach are back in action together — for what might be the last time.

So, everyone who wanted Cade back? Well, he’s back.

HERE'S HOW YOU GET HIM.

DEEP STATE is not available in stores or on Amazon. There’s only one way to get this ebook: it’s free to anyone who pre-orders my next John Smith novel, FLASHMOB.

FLASHMOB is the sequel to KILLFILE, and in this one, John Smith must use his psychic talent to track down a shadowy computer genius who has weaponized the Internet.

Arriving at the wedding of Kira Sadeghi, a reality television celebrity he recently saved from kidnappers, Smith witnesses a group of gunmen open fire, hitting the bride and others. Though he’s unarmed, Smith cripples one of the killers and is able to pry one word from his mind: "Downvote."

Eager to learn more, Smith hacks into the brain of an FBI agent to discover the Bureau has been investigating a nefarious new threat called "Downvote," an encrypted site on the dark net that lists the names of celebrities and offers a hefty bounty for anyone who can kill them—unleashing an anonymous and deadly flashmob with a keystroke.

Finding a mastermind on the internet is like trying to catch air—unless you’re John Smith. Motivated by money and revenge, he traces a series of electronic signatures to a reclusive billionaire living at sea, accompanied by a scary-smart female bodyguard who becomes Smith’s partner in his quest. The hunt for their prey will lead from Hong Kong to Reykjavik to a luxury gambling resort deep in the Laotian jungle. Yet always this criminal mastermind remains one step ahead.

The only way Downvote’s creator can stop Smith is to kill him . . . because while this diabolical genius can run, there’s no hiding from a man who can read minds.

All you have to do is email me a copy of your receipt at flashmobpreorder@gmail.com, and you will be on the list for DEEP STATE. On June 27, when FLASHMOB is released, I will email you a copy of the ebook in PDF format, which is readable on any device or computer. You can even print it out on actual paper if you want to go old-school.

But wait, there’s more. You’ll also get excerpts from the CODENAME: NIGHTMARE PET briefing book, a historical timeline of the secret history of the United States, and “Cade vs. the Bloody Benders,” a deleted scene from Red, White, and Blood where Cade battles an infamous family of serial killers in the Old West.

You can pre-order FLASHMOB from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, iBooks, Kobo, and from your local independent bookstore through IndieBound. A receipt from any one of those sent to flashmobpreorder@gmail.com will qualify you to get the free ebook of DEEP STATE.

To my UK readers -- the same offer applies to you, but for a different book. Over there, FLASHMOB is titled HUNT YOU DOWN. Pre-order HUNT YOU DOWN and I will send you the free ebook of DEEP STATE. Again, send your receipt to flashmobpreorder@gmail.com.

This free ebook giveaway lasts until June 27, 2017 in the United States, and until November 2, 2017 in the United Kingdom.

Please share this with anyone you think would like to see Cade again. 

I know a lot of you have missed him, and I hope you'll be happy to see him back in action. I know I am.

Thanks so much.

BIG DAMN WEEK

It is a big damn week here at Secret Farnsworth HQ.

FIRST, I was at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books all weekend, thanks to the grace of the incomparable Maret Orliss, who runs the whole thing. I got to shake the hand of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who was very gracious despite my squealing like a little schoolgirl. I saw friends and family moderate panels on literary families and prisons and punishment. Then I signed books at Mystery Ink before sharing a panel with big damn heroes Lee Goldberg, Eric Jerome Dickey, Gregg Hurwitz, and Daniel Suarez. We had a great time. Hopefully the audience had some fun, too. 

NEXT UP: TUESDAY, APRIL 25, the paperback edition of KILLFILE hits shelves. If you've been waiting for a snazzy, portable version of the story of a man who can read minds, now's your chance. Pick up a copy at your local indie bookstore or online.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 26, my first comic book, 24: LEGACY -- RULES OF ENGAGEMENT from IDW Publishing will be out. This is a prequel to Fox's hit series, and basically tells the origin story of Eric Carter, the man who has to fill Jack Bauer's shoes. You can get a copy at any comic book store or at Comixology.com. If you'd like to see a free preview, check it out here.

And FINALLY, as if that wasn't enough, later this week I will make an announcement about Nathaniel Cade. Not too huge, but it should be welcome news for anyone who's missed the President's Vampire... So stay bloodthirsty, and stay tuned.

24: LEGACY: RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

The secret is out now. As told in the Hollywood Reporter today, I will be scripting the comic book prequel to 24: LEGACY for IDW Publishing.

This is my first published comic book, and it's a pretty big deal for me. I love comics. I learned to read from them. And after five novels, multiple screenplays, and countless news articles, I'm finally getting to write one. Lifelong dream unlocked.

I'm very grateful to Ted Adams, Chris Ryall, Denton Tipton for letting me do this. And of course, to the legendary Beau Smith for opening all the doors.

Look for the first issue in April. Antonio Fuso's art is going to be amazing. And I hope my writing will live up to the TV series.

FLASHMOB on sale 6.27.17

You can now see the cover for the next adventure of John Smith: FLASHMOB. On sale June 27, 2017. Available for pre-order from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, iBooks, and through your local independent bookstore via IndieBound.

New Year, New Book

I’m pleased to announce my next book, KILLFILE, is available for pre-order now. Here’s the description:

John Smith possesses a special gift that seems more like a curse: he can access other people’s thoughts. He hears the songs stuck in their heads, knows their most private traumas and fears, and relives their most painful memories. The CIA honed his skills until he was one of their most powerful operatives, but John fled the agency and now works as a private consultant, trying to keep the dark potentials of his gift in check — and himself out of trouble.

Unfortunately, John is plunged into dangerous waters when his latest client, billionaire software genius Everett Sloan, hires him to investigate a former employee — a tech whiz kid named Eli Preston — and search his thoughts for some very valuable intellectual property Sloan is convinced he’s stolen. But before John can probe Preston’s mind, his identity is compromised and he’s on the run for his life, along with Sloan’s young associate Kelsey Foster.

Hunted by shadowy enemies with extensive resources and unknown motives, John and Kelsey must go off the grid. John knows that using his powers to their fullest potential is their only hope for survival — even if it means putting his own sanity at risk.

I know I’m not supposed to have favorites among my books, but this was the most fun I’ve had writing since my first novel, BLOOD OATH. I hope you enjoy it just as much.

KILLFILE will be released August 9, 2016 in hardcover and ebook from William Morrow. You can pre-order through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, or from your local bookstore through IndieBound.

Required Reading

You can read the first chapters of THE ETERNAL WORLD for free at Wag The Fox or on my Facebook page.

I also wrote a couple new blog posts:

At The Page 69 test, I wrote about what happens on page 69 of the novel, and what it means. Fortunately, it’s a pretty important page.

For SF Signal, I named a few of my other favorite immortals.

After reading all that, if you agree with the New York Post and decide you must have the book, you can get it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, or from your local bookstore through IndieBound.