News & Blog

Did you miss the reading John Langan and I did at the New York Review of Science Fiction last week? Well, fear not! Examiner.com has a write-up of the event so you can feel like you were there! Here’s what the author of the article, Mark Blackman, has to say about my reading in particular:

Taking the podium, Amy Goldschlager introduced the first reader of the night, Bram Stoker Award, Shirley Jackson Award- and Thriller Award-nominated author Nicholas Kaufmann (nicholaskaufmann.com), who read an excerpt from his new novel, Die and Stay Dead, a follow-up to Dying is My Business (St. Martin’s Press). Opposed by a small group seeking a perilous grimoire, necromancy intrudes on a fannish (or perhaps, in this context, mundane) event, a medieval festival in Lower Manhattan’s Battery Park (the Battery is really down) in the form of mind-controlled living dead called revenants. The situation is further complicated by the presence as well of a flash mob of fake zombie walkers, and, in the confusion, the protagonist is abducted by the necromancer’s real rotting corpses.

Unfortunately, that’s not quite an accurate description of the scene I read. It’s actually a conflation of two different narratives, the scene I read (which takes place during a zombie walk in Battery Park) and an anecdote I told before I started reading about how there’s a scene in the first book that takes place at the Medieval Festival in Ft. Tryon Park, which I only mentioned in order to illustrate a theme in the series of actual supernatural threats intruding upon gatherings of fantasy and horror fandom. But no biggie. Blackman goes on to write:

The audience of about 30 included Richard Bowes, David Cruces, Derrick Hussey, Kim Kindya, Gordon Linsner (sic), James Ryan, Terence Taylor and Nick’s mom.

See? I told you my mom was going to be there.