I. Editor’s Note
II. FEVERCHAIN
III. ROOMMATE
IV. Readercon 35
V. Books
VI. Reading
VII. Writing
VIII. Misc.
I
Note
What’s that statistic? Murder and other violent crimes increase by about ten, give or take a bunch, up to near thirty percent when it’s hot.
It’s hot.
Nevertheless, I’m throwing more bales on the turpentine bonfire. Waxing the double-sided candle, thick, only to light both ends again. Molten tallow metronome, drip drip dripping like the click-off cadence of a banded march to war.
Imagine being a snare drummer marching with musketfire and cannon booms in the periphery and you’re just focused on staying in step as the fields burn or lay fallow with salt; and bodies fill barn rafters and ditches hold thinly covered corpses with a dusting of stretched lye.
Especially if it’s hot.
Especially when the guy in front of you explodes and paints you in 99-degree blood and bits of bone that burn embedded within pockets of your body they were never meant to go. Now you’re lying in a Georgia ditch mid-summer, trying to drag yourself to the nearby river that glimmers under the stars and reflects the gold pulses beaconing from delicate bellies oxidizing luciferin in paper-thin photophor encased in tergum thoraxes. Lightning bugs give their regards—they want to mate on your corpse. Blowflies and dermestid beetles salivate at the slough.
Worse than the marching of enemy soldiers, worse than the gnawing bugs, is the keen of the hungry wolves.
Your blood is on the air and they’re attuned. Some pheromone, maybe (Google: trans-4,5-epoxy-(E)-2-decenal (or E2D)), it’s pretty interesting), draws them closer. You can hear them—or is it just one? Something snuffs the dirt, a heavy paw lands on your spine, thick nails curling down to click off your transverse process and the other facet joints through the flesh, a tip piercing the jelly disc, and all you can smell is the warm gaminess, the acrid ribbon of their breath.
You wait for the rip, eyes clenched. This monster. This feral killing machination of god itself. Please, don’t rip your paw away.
A snarl rips out instead and feels so harsh your first thought is that it tore the very air. Ripped through the fabric of space. The snarl fades but rolling clicks, breath hitching off a rattling cage of bones and invasive veins, echoes down their throat. And that ripping rasp echoes wider along the river’s edge.
You only wish to see this creature. This unbent companion ancestor at its most violent, its most natural, most regal form. You wish to meet this being holding the entirety of your deigned fate at the tines of their dripping teeth. In the damp, in the unendurable heat and pink mist of blood, you feel the tug of destiny.
But when you turn,
there is M.A. Knight
This is the summer of FEVERCHAIN. The summer with the unbearable heatwave, the summer of fervor, the summer of blood and bones and bombs. The summer to protect our families. To gnash our teeth. The summer we willingly fall into the fray in order to save our loved ones. The summer of change.
The July summer of heat, blood, hunger, love, and rage.
-
DB
II
FEVERCHAIN
I know I’ve already talked about how proud I am to present:
The gay werewolf serial is under a $1,000 paywall.
That’s how you know it’s good.
If you don’t believe me, what are the ARC readers saying?
Two weeks out, six reviews, and pre-order milestones.
Speaking of pre-orders:
I hate to sound like the guy on campus with a megaphone, but the response we’ve gotten so far has been incredible, and, if we can keep it rolling, it does make a difference when we try to get the book shelved at physical bookstores.
For the current shelves (Pre-order)(ACTIVE):
there are others, but the overseas stuff, I’m not too familiar with…
Also, speaking of Pre-orders:
We’re going to do box giveaways.
Stuffed with other Substack horror novels and collections, plus other fun items like stickers, bookmarks, dead animals, I’m not sure what else, yet. But I know the books I want to put in these giveaways, and they are books you’re going to want to put in your keepaways.
A few of the winners will be drawn at random using a random number selected from the order numbers with a random selector app. (good lord…) I’ma spin a wheel.
However, the person to place the 100th pre-order will automatically win the biggest and best box of the pre-order bundles, filled with extras that will allow you to tell other people, especially strangers, that you are better than all of them. At everything.
Quality:
For the first run of fast-tracked pre-orders, they’re almost perfect, but not 100%. There is a thin line at the top where the cover was cut on some of the early copies—I’m not exactly sure why, but I overstretched the corrected file, and it’s no longer an issue. You can see that line in these pictures.
***Disclaimer here: We had a tiny tiny working period before a deadline we needed to hit if we wanted to have FEVERCHAIN physical copies by a certain time for a lil’ somethin’ somethin’ you’ll read about below. Anyway, we hope you’ll forgive that some of the first books to come through in this pre-order phase may differ slightly (possible format changes, minor editing or adjusting, etc.) from the final version that will be distributed through Ingram.
If a person receives a copy from these earliest sets that has an error such as the cover fill at the top of these here, your order will come with some extra stuff to make up for it. (Shh. Don’t tell anybody else.)
Not Sold?
Try these:
III
ROOMMATE: a collection of inopportune rants
You all know Will Boucher, correct? Active, involved in a bunch of projects here—the guy just seeps talent.
His Roommate stories are coming to print this fall, from Nascent Night.
I am incredibly lucky to publish the people I publish. Will’s book, or the stories that make it, stood out within the first paragraph or two of my first read when I was discovering people upon arriving here. And I remember, they stood out for the voice inside them, the sheer creativity in the concepts and directions the stories took, how smart the criticisms underneath the humor were, how varied and precise the vocabulary enriched by the depth of research that flavored it all.
Every new person I publish is someone far out of my league.
I remember thinking at one point that if Will ever put that together to sell, it’d get snatched up.
Like I said: lucky.
If you haven’t read any of Will’s Roommate stories yet, just go. Go right now.
Go away from here and read all of them. As many of them as you can until you force yourself to close your laptop or lose your eyes. You'd better hurry, too—they’re not going to be there, just out, free like that, forever.
Don’t panic if you don’t make it in time, though—we’re putting them into print for all the people to glower over or gobble down on this fall.
As if that weren’t enough, Will’s written a bunch of stories for this collection that you’ve never read. It’s going to be what you all love and expect, plus new, fresh stories—rife with the same brilliant mode of critique cleverly woven throughout even the most innocuous exchanges.
This one is edited by The Editor: Emil Ottoman. Who, if you don’t know, is a neuro-space surgeon unapologetic razorblade. Sometimes he wears the skin of a pathologist with the deft reflexes fit for war triage. You might know him from his autopsy series, wherein he cuts away at willing dead tissues, but I assure you—that scalpel is CSR-clean, and the sharp orchestrating, is theater-worthy.
I’ll be designing the interior and typesetting.
The cover is coming from another lauded member of the fiction community. I can’t yet say who, for no other reason than I haven’t gotten permission to say, and we haven’t gotten moving on it anyway. Just, trust.
This book that’s coming together is a supergroup creation.
IV
Readercon
Yes, you’re reading that one thing on that one page correctly. Early early copies will be available at Readercon—exclusively—in a very limited quantity. This early Readercon print comes at 2/3 the normal cost, and is gone once it's gone.
Don’t stop there, though. If you’re in the area, the 9th through the 12th, take a look at what else we’ll have.
For more about Readercon:
Visit the official site: HERE
V.
More Books
VI
Recent Reads:
It looks like the last reading update I did in a newsletter was Margins No. 7, where I left off with Lolita, and the Quartet.
Since then, I’ve read quite a bit—most of it briefly mentioned in notes. I’ll recap it here, and then add what I haven’t officially added. I think it’s cool to keep a running list of what I’ve read for the year and include it every month. It could inspire some good conversation.
2026
January
Boy Parts - Eliza Clark
Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
Teatro Grottesco - Thomas Ligotti
Outer Dark - Cormac McCarthy
Ham On Rye - Charles Bukowski
February
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
To Keep Silent - Thomas Sachs
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Quartet stories - Vladimir Nabokov
March
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
East of Eden - John Steinbeck
The Road - Cormac McCarthy
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
April
Tortilla Flat - John Steinbeck
When the Wolf Comes Home - Nat Cassidy
Wretch - Eric LaRocca
Drippy Trippy Doom - David Kane
Not a Speck of Light - Laird Barron
May
Wolf Worm by T. Kingfisher
Suttree - Cormac McCarthy
Lonesome Dove - Larry McMurtry
June
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter - Stephen Graham Jones
FEVERCHAIN - M.A. Knight
Headlights - CJ Leede
Streets Of Laredo - Larry McMurtry
July
Dead Man’s Walk - Larry McMurtry
I gotta admit, it feels like way more than twenty-six books.
Let’s be real, though—some of these are massive, and some of these are difficult. Some of these are massive and difficult. I’d been striving for 100 the last few years, but looking back, and being honest with myself, the quality of much of that wasn’t exactly great. It’s difficult for me to simply count an eighty-page horror novelette as a book-read, and have it qualify as the same theoretical tally-weight as East of Eden or Moby Dick. In there somewhere is the realization that the number read per year didn’t matter.
For reference, FEVERCHAIN up there—even with that small, compact font size and leading—sits at the thickness shown above at 55k words. Moby Dick has ~210,000 words. If Moby Dick is four FEVERCHAINs, and FEVERCHAIN is two Fruiting Bodies, then Moby Dick is like eight “books” by the way I’d been counting my splatterpunk years.
I don’t think any reading is a waste of time, but for someone who proclaims to love books and reading as much as I do, there were a lot of things that I’d never read, or read so long ago it didn’t matter anymore.
I’m embarrassingly ignorant of most Russian lit and need to get to it eventually, but I’ll be honest, I don’t fucking want to.
I did a lot of Southern Gothic last year, some Northeastern United States, plenty of American South/Southwest/West this year. A little Northwest. I sort of want to flow down to read more Central and South America fiction, as well as stuff from Caribbean writers. Any big “don’t miss” suggestions you have, let me know.
VII
Writing
I still have a couple of pieces out with some publishers I’d like to place something with at some point in 2026. I had two recent shoot-the-moon stories that are oddly specific, and overall, hard to place unless it’s alongside my other, similar work. For both of these, I thought I’d picked about the one publisher for each that might pick them up, but neither hit how I’d hoped with their respective editors.
You win some/you shove the grief and crumbling remains of the deep-seated longing for someone to be proud of you down your blackened throat, straight into a lung some.
Here’s Return. It’s a little on the nose, but it’s about challenging the standard ideas and “"truths” absorbed generationally/culturally.
Here’s Churn. This one is a little more complicated. Multiple scenes over multiple years over multiple states of consciousness—all colliding at the same time.
TW: Some content might be upsetting? Idk, I have a lot of new followers…
Other writing? Fffffffffffsssssss o sos so busy, but I’m plugging away at stuff, trying to reorganize my life after the last month or two sort of uprooted my benign, press non-existence.
I’ve got a few short stories I’m tinkering with, and like five times over the last several months, I’ve been sure I had the greatest novel idea of all time, only for my interest to peter out after I wrote the first eight hundred words or so.
This time, though…
I might have something I’m seriously excited about, something that seriously works. The writing is flowing in that hallucinatory state I love. I blew through thousands of words without noticing, for the first time in a long time, and instead of wanting to stop or getting tired of the story already, I’ve taken spare moments at great risk just to read more research.
I’ve never been an “ideas” -matter person, and felt the artistry of the prose (not merely ornateness), along with manifested meaning, or often, meaning contested and left to interpretation, was the only thing that mattered, and things like “ideas” were the shits anybody could do.
I have an idea that demolishes that long-held belief that’s probably been stifling me. I hope I can write it how I want to show it, and I hope I actually like it. Maybe you’ll see it.
VIII
Misc.
Readercon is in two days. Go to it.
Images, lists, and descriptions of giftbox packages for FEVERCHAIN giveaway winners - soon to follow.
I mentioned above once or twice in this newsletter that Roommate: a collection of inopportune rants by Will Boucher was coming this Fall. Some of you may remember that we said Summer in our earlier announcement. Due to some small changes, we had to hold off on certain aspects of design and production. We have everything lined up and ready to cook as soon as we’re able. Just as FEVERCHAIN has finished carrying most of you into early Autumn, ROOMMATE will be right there behind it to make sure your days aren’t left with nothing new.
In a perfect world, if you were to imagine the perfect gift box you could win in a giveaway for ROOMMATE, when that time comes, what books would you include? What else? What kind of merchandise do you want to see us do next, even beyond ROOMMATE?
In a less-than-perfect world (hey, there’s still two weeks for me to work magic), what would go in your perfect FEVERCHAIN gift box?
Thanks as always, so much, for reading.
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I've got the FEVER and it FEELS GODDAMN GOOD
I still can’t believe you didn’t know I was from GA yet wrote this…