News & Blog

All this weekend through Cyber Monday (12/1), über-cool sf/f/h publisher ChiZine Publications is having a massive e-book sale! All e-books are 80% off the cover price! This includes my Thriller Award-nominated and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated book Chasing the Dragon, which you can get for a mere $1.99!

Already have a copy of Chasing the Dragon? All of ChiZine Publication’s e-books are DRM free, which means you can buy e-copies for all your friends and family for Christmas / Hanukkah / Kwanzaa / Festivus / Cthulhumas without worries! Chasing the Dragon already makes a fine stocking stuffer, but in e-book form it won’t even take up any space in the stocking!

So what are you waiting for? Get over to the ChiZine Publications store and get an e-book of Chasing the Dragon for only $1.99! The sale only lasts through Monday, 12/1, so you better act fast. (They’ve got lots of other great books, too, which you should also buy!)

Necon E-Books, the publisher of my 2012 collection Still Life: Nine Stories — as well as many other fine e-books by Charles Grant, Ramsey Campbell, Christopher Golden, and more — has given its website a snazzy new look! Check it out!

The good folks at online literary magazine Upcoming4.me are running an article by me on the story behind Die and Stay Dead. Here’s a taste:

When you’re writing the first book in a series — especially when it’s a fantasy series — you need to spend a good deal of time building the world in which it takes place. But with the second book, that hurdle is gone. Now, your characters have a chance to fully inhabit and explore the world you’ve created. That’s what I hoped to accomplish with Die and Stay Dead…I could expand upon what I’d already built and give Trent, the series protagonist who has only recently had his eyes opened to this secret world of magic and monsters, a chance to explore and make new discoveries. It allowed me to bring him to secret locales hidden all around the city, even one within the walls of the famous New York Public Library branch on 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue (you know, the one everyone who’s not a New Yorker knows from Ghostbusters).

In other good news, Rue Morgue, one of my favorite magazines, has a rave review of Die and Stay Dead in their November issue. It’s a capsule review, so I’ll just reprint the whole thing here:

Demons and revenants stalk the streets of New York City once again in Nicholas Kaufmann’s sequel to Dying Is My Business. Die and Stay Dead builds on the mystery set up in the first installment — that of the history of the narrator, Trent, a demon-fighter who cannot die and has no memories of his past — and Kaufmann keeps the tension high in this energetic page turner.

Pretty snazzy, huh? Have you ordered your copy of Die and Stay Dead yet?

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.