News & Blog

You guys, Die and Stay Dead has garnered me my very first starred Publishers Weekly review ever! I’m reprinting it here in its entirety, even though technically I’m not supposed to, because oh my God, I am so thrilled!

In this smart and fast-paced follow-up to Dying Is My Business, unkillable gangster Trent and the rest of the Five-Pointed Stars race against time to stop a madman from destroying the world—but the true danger comes from a far closer source. Kaufmann wastes no time in taking Trent and his allies all across New York City, where they uncover hidden magic and danger everywhere. He crafts twin mysteries—figuring how to stop a villain from summoning a destructive demon and finding the truth of Trent’s past—that gradually intersect. The fighting and introspection are finely balanced in this well-developed magical world, which includes harsh costs and sacrifices that don’t always pay off. Each character has a strong voice, allowing for quick engagement even if the reader missed the first book. The strong writing and open ending will leave fans hungry for the next installment.

This breaks the streak of Publishers Weekly pretty much hating everything I write, for which I’m both grateful and overjoyed, but a muthaflippin’ starred review? I never would have imagined! I was nervous that readers wouldn’t like Die and Stay Dead as much as they seemed to like Dying Is My Business — it’s a sequel, after all, and for every The Empire Strikes Back there’s a hundred Ghostbusters 2 — but maybe it’ll be well received after all. Time will tell. I’ll try not to worry about it, said the man who practically invented worrying about things he can’t control anyway.

Die and Stay Dead hits bookstore shelves September 30, but why wait? You can pre-order it right now from Amazon or any of these fine, upstanding booksellers.

Snowblind by Christopher Golden

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A tremendous horror novel that brings to mind many of the best early works of Stephen King and Peter Straub. Golden understands that horror is more about the characters than the monsters, and SNOWBLIND is full of indelible characters you feel like you know intimately by the end. By following an interconnected group of townsfolk as they deal with the ghosts of their past, both emotional and real, Golden finds a way to remind us that horror is, more than anything else, the genre of tragedy, of loss, and ultimately of picking up the pieces afterward. An outstanding work that feels both classic in its structure and refreshingly new in its conversation with the genre. More books like this, please.

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Hey, folks! There’s a new interview with me over at the Book Plank talking about Titan Books’ re-release of Hunt at World’s End. In it, you’ll learn all about how I came to write this volume of the adventure series, what it was like to work with mad genius Charles Ardai, and the character who got edited out of the novel entirely!

Check it out here.