4/16/26 (Updated)
Had a good planning meeting with Dacia and Jim yesterday. We’ll definitely bring back our prepper podcast — HOW TO SURVIVE 2025 — for a limited engagement of new episodes, because we agree that listeners could probably use some tips on things like gasoline alternatives, frugality, and how to stay positive when the 24 hour news cycle is just a fire hose of horribleness.
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Speaking of news, this entire news article reads like a Family Guy cutaway gag, but it is all too ludicrously real: “Struggling shoe retailer Allbirds makes bizarre pivot to AI, adds $127 million in value.”
This one is better: “From lava tubes on Mars to ice pockets on Europa, subterranean environments may offer the best chance of finding life—and living safely—beyond our planet.”
And finally, some good news: “Attention-seeking ‘manosphere’ influencer Sneako thrown to ground by stranger during livestream in NYC.”
I’m old enough to have watched hip-hop go from LL Cool J, Run-DMC, Boogie Boys, and Doug E. Fresh to what it is today. The whole Influencer thing — particularly streamers — feels like it’s to the same point rap was getting to when we began seeing beefs turn into real life violence rather than trading barbs to beats. I miss when streaming was mostly young neurodivergent kids playing Minecraft or classically trained musicians hearing Yngwie Malmsteen or Rush for the first time. Now it’s mostly morons breaking their cheekbones with hammers, “alternative” scientists trying to argue the Earth is flat, incels mad about pop culture, and other nonsense.
Another disasterous fan convention happened last weekend in San Jose.
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Women In Horror Year: Day 14
The Worm and His Kings by Hailey Piper
New York City, 1990: When you slip through the cracks, no one is there to catch you. Monique learns that the hard way after her girlfriend Donna vanishes without a trace. Only after the disappearances of several other impoverished women does Monique hear the rumors.
A taloned monster stalks the city’s underground and snatches victims into the dark. Donna isn’t missing. She was taken. To save the woman she loves, Monique must descend deeper than the known underground, into a subterranean world of enigmatic cultists and shadowy creatures. But what she finds looms beyond her wildest fears - a darkness that stretches from the dawn of time and across the stars.
Mark my words on this — in the decades to come, The Worm and His Kings by Hailey Piper (first published in 2020 by Off Limits Press) will be seen as equally influential and impactful on this generation of readers and writers as Clive Barker’s Cabal* was for the generation before. Other than perhaps John Langan’s The Fisherman, I’m hard pressed to think of a horror novel that’s done more to expand, shift, and grow cosmic horror more in the last ten years than this book. Yes, there are other novels that have smashed the tropes of cosmic horror, or that offered counterpoints to the xenophobia and fear of the other that imbued Lovecraft’s works, but as far as depth of imagination and showing what else can be done with cosmic horror, The Worm and His Kings is king (or perhaps queen if Langan’s novel is king, but “The Worm and His Kings is queen” doesn’t quite sound as effective). If you’ve not read it, you really should.
Which will be hard for you to do because, bizarrely, the book is out of print. No reprinting of the paperback. Not even a fucking eBook, which is a pretty easy thing to do. The only format the novel currently exists in is as an audiobook from Fireside Horror. First edition paperbacks go for as high as $100 on the secondary market. We saw the same thing happen with THE RISING, back in 2003. The hardcover sold out, and began going for $100 to $250 on the secondary market. The difference was that Leisure Books — sensing $$$ to be made — fast-tracked the mass-market paperback and had it in stores by 2004. I don’t know what’s going on in this case. Maybe the publisher doesn’t sense $$$. Regardless, it’s unacceptable. It’s a disservice to readers and, quite frankly, it’s unfair to Hailey, a writer whose star is firmly on the rise, as my own was back in 2003. And because I’ve been there I know first hand how important it is to have your backlist in print and easily accessible to the new readers you’re picking up with each passing day. BRING THE BOOK BACK IN PRINT, and if you can’t bring the book back in print, then release the rights so someone else can. **
In the meantime, if you enjoy audiobooks, then snag this one in that format.
* Yes, I know Clive Barker’s Cabal wasn’t cosmic horror, but in many ways, The Worm and His Kings feels like s spiritual successor to it.
UPDATE
** Hailey checks in to report: “To clarify, the original publisher has released the rights to all the books they published. Worm is just trying to find somewhere new to burrow through the universe and we're waiting on word from a few hopeful homes 🖤 fingers crossed”
Somebody get on that, stat!
