Seems like it’s fast approaching now, the September 2026 release for A Shadow So Big, my debut horror novel from Spilt Ink Press.
I wrote this novel from November-December 2024. It was an unplanned pregnancy. For more than a year I’d been outlining an entirely different book, a cosmic horror/mystery hybrid inspired by The Maltese Falcon and the film noir Out of the Past. By this point, it had been nothing but false starts. Right after Halloween, we pack up and embark on a long drive from Madison, Wisconsin, to Winnipeg, Canada. The occasion? A 50th anniversary screening of Brian de Palma’s horror rock musical Phantom of the Paradise, which was a flop all across the world except in Paris and Winnipeg, where it ran for a very long time. I’m thinking we might even make it to the city in time to catch a screening of Winnipeg legend Guy Maddin’s latest film. But we get a flat, and we can’t drive the rest of the way on the spare, so we take a pit stop in Eau Claire, WI, buying new tires. This was where my wife and I met, in college, a place we don’t visit very often anymore, but it puts my mind back to the mid-90s and some strange experiences I’d had my freshman year. Things I don’t tell anyone about, because they wouldn’t believe me. People get itchy when you talk about spirits.
We’re on the road again at last. There’s simply no hope of making it to Winnipeg before the sun goes down, and forget the Guy Maddin. We’re tired – but we’re doing this for Paul Williams and the Juicy Fruits and the Phantom, right? The landscape becomes flatter, emptier, and there’s inexplicable snow on the ground, like we just missed the first winter’s breath of the season, and it’s ominously lingering. My son drifts off into the games on his tablet, zonked out; my wife closes her eyes and lets me pick what we listen to. I’m ready for this. I’ve loaded up my phone with paranormal podcasts.
As it gets darker and darker, driving past farm fields and truck stops, I slip from one episode to another: demons, cryptids, UFOs, haunted spaces. I am swollen to bursting with ghosts. And one true-life recounting, the story of a babysitter who, Henry James style, has to care for a child in a haunted house, really sticks with me for a couple reasons.
- The story, as the former babysitter tells it, is really goddamn scary. The owners of the home don’t even seem to know what’s happening; she is in her own private nightmare.
- The worst part? When she quits the job completely and goes home to her parents’ house, the entity follows her.
- And catnip for my wife, who is awake and listening and is definitely the Scully in our Mulder/Scully relationship: our narrator drops hints that the entity’s hallmarks recall childhood memories of her domineering but still-living father. Which could mean…maybe it’s all in her head? Some psychological condition?
Which is frustrating, because there’s Scully one seat over, crossing her arms, always waiting to deploy a “sleep paralysis” explanation or a “that person’s just crazy.” But it’s also kind of wonderful, because – and this becomes clearer when I’ve soaked up even more podcasts on the drive back from Winnipeg (we met Paul Williams randomly during breakfast!) – the paranormal is seldom so cut and dry. In fact, it’s quite embarrassingly messy.
Which brings me back to some of the things that happened in college. Where shit got really messy. (Was that real? An act of manipulation? What do I think now, and what really happened?)
I get home, I pull out a notebook and stream-of-consciousness write the first couple of pages of A Shadow So Big. An inciting incident about a rabid bat. I’m also thinking about the paranormal messiness, but in the mind of a character, Jane Canyon.
A day later, I’m at the computer, and Jane keeps talking to me and I write it all down. She says some things that make me wonder…does she realize what she just implied, in that slip in the middle of a sentence? Are there secrets buried in her past she’s not telling me? Yes, as it happens. We tell her story together – when she stalls out, I give her a prompt from my own life. She spins it into what she did in that situation, which is often the exact opposite of what I would do. Jane has real backbone. She can be a bit prickly, what she calls her “Jane Canyon charm.” She is also a glowing talent, a brilliant horror filmmaker in the making, but she’s taking her time getting to that part of her story. We start with her childhood, when she begins encountering this entity she decides to call “the Bat.” Because this thing seems to be rabid too.
Something bad happens when she’s a child. She doesn’t want to talk about it. We move on for now. College? She needs a prompt.
Oh, I have plenty to give her. Freshman year. Spirits.
Ah yes, she says. The Bat followed me there. The Bat never leaves me.
What happens, I wonder, if you can’t escape that shadow? If you live your whole life with a demon that just won’t leave you alone?
And so this collaboration continues. She has a mystery, I insist, if only she’ll stop and look at it. Finally, she does; she begins asking questions about moments in her childhood that never meant that much to her before. Odd behavior from her parents. A secret church they had to leave. And what really happened in college?
By the Christmas holiday, I’m done. And I let Jane rest where I leave her. She deserves peace, after a life lived in a demon’s shadow.
I can’t wait for you to meet her.
In the meantime, go watch Phantom of the Paradise. Maybe for the fiftieth time.
Note: cover art, pre-order links, and specific release date forthcoming…watch this space.
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