I woke up to the most lovely thing this morning - an official cover for CINDERWICH, my cozy horror novella coming next spring from Apex. It’s a truly lovely piece of work, with cover art by Daniele Serra and jacket design by Mikio Murkami, and suffice it to say: I am absolutely delighted.
"Who put Ellen in the blackgum tree?"
Decades after trespassing children spotted a woman’s corpse wedged in a treetop, no one knows the answer to that question. No one even knows who’s been asking it all this time, via the persistent, anonymous graffiti that shows up like clockwork each year in the tiny town of Cinderwich.
Now Kate Thrush and her former professor-turned-mentor Judith Kane have arrived, hoping to solve the mystery of the woman in the tree. But her body has been missing for years, and the locals are not especially helpful.
It’s hard to blame them. They’re tired of all these outsiders, looking for all these lost Ellens. Yes, it’s a sad story, and yes, they wish someone, somewhere knew the corpse’s real name. After all, she was someone’s daughter. Maybe a sister, maybe a wife. Or maybe she was only alone and lost, one of the thousands of women who vanish, and are never truly found. Regardless, it’s an old and tedious story to the handful of folks who still call Cinderwich home.
But Kate and Judith lost an Ellen, once. Kate’s aunt. Judith’s secret lover.
Their visit to Cinderwich might close a circuit that’s almost fifty years old. Or it might lead to two more women going missing in the backwoods of east Tennessee…
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Cinderwich is not yet available for preorder on the Apex site, though it will be soon. For now, you can preorder at the two usual suspects, if you are so inclined - and I’ll keep you all posted when it goes live across the internet.