As you can probably tell from the photos, owners Anthony and Tina Long know how to throw a party.

I hope you all had a fantastic Halloween, saw many great costumes and ate too much chocolate (or drank too much… whatever).

Absolutely wonderful review of Incarnate over at Ginger Nuts of Horror, with the best insights into the “Dorian Gray-ness of it all” yet.

Just two more Incarnate events this year: November 15 I’ll be signing from 12 - 3 pm at a new Barnes & Noble in Alexandria, Virginia (4513 Duke Street) and at the Miami Book Fair on November 21st, on a 4:30 panel with Paul Tremblay and Luke Dumas, with Tananarive Due moderating. Dream team! Download the Miami Book Fair’s guide HERE.

I’ll be doing a few events in the New Year, including a February trip to NYC. More details coming.

In UK news: Incarnate is one of the November picks for the subscription box! To find out more, click HERE.

Short reads you won’t want to miss:

• I told you horror was a burgeoning genre: The NYT writes about the growth of horror-only bookstores.

• This article in Wired about how the internet has misled us all sounds like one of my talks for Incarnate.

Bookplates are available for Incarnate, Fiend, Red London, Red Widow. Also, I have new “Alma Katsu Books” bookplates suitable for any other book! Send me your U.S. mailing address, which bookplates you’d like, if you’d like them personalized, and I’ll get them in the mail. Don’t forget: signed books (even bookplates) make great gifts.

First, I want to tell you about a contest from my publisher, Putnam. You can enter to win seven recently released novels including INCARNATE. The contest ends 10/31/2026. Click here to enter.

COVER REVEAL: Vintage Books released the cover for The Shining-inspired anthology, VIEWS FROM THE OVERLOOK, along with a list of the contributors. I’m honored to have my story, Fear is a Luxury You Cannot Afford, in the collection. I honestly think this might be the best thing I’ve ever written. This is one you might want to consider pre-ordering. Coming July 2027.

Help build the buzz for THE INVISIBLE ENEMY

Lastly, if you’re a bookseller, librarian or reviewer with a Netgalley account, you can now request THE INVISIBLE ENEMY for review. When a CIA ops officer is stuck down by what appears to be Havana Syndrome and the Agency and the current U.S. Administration refuse to address the matter, he decides to investigate and finds a sordid web of deceit and responsibility. Based on discussions with former Agency officers, my experiences in intelligence, and first-hand observation of how issues are politicized to appease policymakers who may be acting in bad faith.

Circumstances kept me from attending that year, and every year until now. After Saturday, I can only wish I’d been able to attend sooner.

MVHBF is its own wonderful community. Not to say that it’s exclusive or that anyone who is a stranger won’t be welcome. A lot of Camp NECON folks are there (and if you’re a horror or speculative fiction writer/creator and don’t know about NECON, I encourage you to check it out).

I got to see friends I don’t get to see too often, such as the aforementioned Chris, and Jennifer McMahon, Ellen Datlow, John Langan, and folks with whom I’ve been on panels or chewed the fat at Stokercon like Christina Henry, Tanya Pell, Sam Rebelein, Corey Farrenkopf, Patrick Freivald, Dianne Buja. I also got the chance to meet folks I follow on social media in person, like John McIlveen, Tony Tremblay, Thomas Sniegoski, Brennan LaFaro, and Trisha Wooldridge. I had the awesome pleasure of meeting Francois Vaillancourt in person, too, the man the myth the legend who illustrated the SST version of The Hunger. Regretfully, I had to leave early when my headaches returned, not wanting to possibly retrigger vertigo, but that meant I missed getting a chance to see John Hornor Jacobs, Bracken MacLeod, and others.

The best part is meeting readers, of course, and I can’t thank you, enough, all the great folks who came up to say hello, brought books for me to sign or folks who haven’t read one of my books before but decided to take a chance and picked up Incarnate or Fiend. (Speaking of which, Copper Dig Books has a stack of signed copies, if you’d like one for your very own.)

Being surrounded by so many good folks, in a library, was just the medicine I needed.1

Mellisa Sherlin took over organizing duties from Chris and she did a tremendous job. My thanks to her and her crew of volunteers who a wonderfully smooth event.

Events will slow down from this point forward, but if your appetite to see me in person has been whetted, I have the following dates on the calendar:

• October 27 at 6:30 pm at the Mary Riley Stiles Library in Falls Church VA, in conversation with thriller author KT Nguyen. Hosted by Bards Alley Bookstore.

• October 31 at FearLit, Thrillerdelphia’s first convention for horror, to be held at the Venice Arts Center in Manayunk PA. Get tickets here.

• November 14, I’m a keynote speaker at the Rappahannock Writers Conference in Fredericksburg VA.

• November 15, 12 - 3 pm, I’ll be signing at the new Barnes & Noble at The Shops at Foxchase at 4513 Duke St, Alexandria VA.

• November 21, 4:30 pm, I’m at the Miami Book Fest on a panel with Paul Tremblay and Luke Dumas.

What’s next

Now that the busy part of the Incarnate tour is over, I plan to settle into work on the next novel, which is a secret for now but is going to be challenging. I hope to be able to clear away the distractions and burrow into the work so if you start to hear less from me, this is why. Send good thoughts and maybe donuts.

Signed copies: The list of stores with signed copies of Incarnate is growing. In addition to Copper Dog, you should be available to find them at Park Books of Maryland (both the Severna Park and Sykesville locations), Queen Takes Book in Columbia MD; Backwater Books in Ellicott City MD; One More Page, The Story House and Bookmarx in Springfield MO; Riverstone Books in Pittsburgh PA; and Pocket Books in Lancaster PA.

For those who don’t live near one of the above-mentioned stores, you can always order signed books through Park Books.

I can also send a signed bookplate for Incarnate. Please send a U.S. mailing address to almakatsubooks2@gmail.com and I’ll get it out to you soonest.

NEW! I also have non-book-specific bookplates coming in, so if you’d like a signed bookplate for one of my earlier books, write to me at almakatsubooks2@gmail. Don’t forget to include a U.S. mailing address.

Is it time to retire from writing? And yarn.

Maybe it’s stupid to tell the readers of my newsletter that I’ve been wondering if it’s time to stop writing. After all, you might be the last people on the face of the earth who read my books. And, sincerely, I am not looking for anyone to tell me, no, don’t stop. I’m not looking for pity.

Publishing is the strangest of ways to make money. I’ve been commercially published for 15 years and it seems every year I say, wow, it’s so hard to sell a book. This year is no exception and yet it also feels like the hardest it’s ever been. In case you haven’t heard—and there’s no reason why you would, unless you’re in the book trade—readership rates have fallen very low. Some categories more than others; apparently it’s impossible to sell non-fiction to publishers right now because sales for non-fiction have cratered.

The reasons are many. The economy is horrible. You’re paying twice as much for groceries than you did a year ago, so it feels frivolous to spend money on a book. The world is burning down around us, we need a more immediate distraction. It’s too easy to doomscroll, too hard to put down the phone. And—very important—consuming all that short-form video has made it hard for us to concentrate long enough to carry a plot in our heads. We forget what we’ve read as soon as we’ve read it.1

If you go by the numbers, it would seem that almost no one is interested in things literary anymore, but at the same time submissions to (not subscriptions to) literary magazines and publishers are way up. One magazine said submissions are up by a factor of seven. But guess what? A lot of those submissions are generated by AI. So, people have no interest in reading but a lot of people want you to read what they’ve produced on ChatGPT or Claude.

We are a world more interested in pursuing our creative impulses than consuming others’ creative output.

Wait, wait, don’t go yet. It gets better. This is where yarn comes in.

If you’re a reader of this newsletter, you already know that I took up weaving recently. I am still in its thrall. Lately, I can’t stop ogling yarn. I get newsletters from many producers of artisanal hard-dyed yarn and… I’m drawn to the colors, which are rich and gorgeous. More beautiful than anything I will be able to produce with my inexpert hands. I hope you have something in your life the way weaving is for me. It’s a painfully sweet obsession. I’ll never be able to afford all the yarn I want, yet I can’t stop looking. It answers a yearning I didn’t even know was there.

In this respect, I am like everyone else. The internet and social platforms have made it easier than ever in the history of mankind to see what other people are up to. We can find people doing amazing things with their own two hands and imaginations and find our tribe. We can admire their output and aspire to recreate it (hopefully to better our craft; it’s always mimetic in the beginning, don’t forget that).

But we can also retreat into our own echo chamber, content with existing in our little sphere of joy but forgetting to be part of the tribe. We can stop looking at the work of others (because we feel inadequate, because it scares up, because we’re jealous) and just do our own thing. And that can be okay for many reasons—but I feel that the joy of creating is increased manifold when you are part of a community. You can step back from the community at any time, for your sanity or to protect yourself from an overly aggressive member of the tribe, or whatever. But you should have a tribe.

The joy of discovering more in your chosen creative field through the company of others is, well, sublime.

I recently discovered Modern Daily Knitting—or I should say, rediscovered it, because I used to subscribe to the daily blog written by Ann Shayne and Kay Gardiner. I loved their chatty, friendly blogs even though I was not a knitter. I was a quilter. I don’t remember if they stopped blogging when blogs fell out of favor or if I drifted away when I stopped quilting, but I recently rediscovered them, bigger & better than ever, powering a super-charged community of knitters. Reading the daily MDK email is often the best part of my day—yes, better than writing--even if it fuels a powerful hunger for expensive yarn. I’m not a knitter but I admire the intricate sweaters others have tackled. I learn from their triumphs when they overcome a craft problem. I see something new in their color and texture choices.

I’m advocating here for you to find your own human community and to throw yourself into it. Learn from them and let them learn from you, Don’t shy away from the longer road, the more effort-intensive road, and squeeze enjoyment out of every difficult minute.

I remember when reading first became social. I was a technologist, and when I first saw talk about “making reading social”, I guffawed because it seemed like a solution in search of a problem. Reading seemed like essentially a solitary pursuit. You read, you thought about it. Maybe you told a friend about a book you just read. I didn’t think it would catch on.

But soon, everything became social. Whatever we did, we wanted to tell others about it and to avoid eyerolls at the dinner table, we searched out others who wanted to talk about it, too. Hence, Goodreads and similar platforms; book influencers on Instagram and Tiktok; reviews on Amazon. Book Riot and LitHub.

I’m not saying that, if you like to read, you need to get involved with online communities. But the pastime you love will start to change and soon if you don’t let the industry know that you’re still here. That means buying books—or not buying them but checking them out at the library or borrowing a friend’s copy. It can be as easy as hitting the “like” button on a book review, particularly if it’s in traditional media, where a lot of book coverage has been dropped because readers don’t engage with that content. Don’t see a book you’ve heard about on the shelves of the library or local bookstore? Ask them to stock it. Borrowing ebooks or audiobooks from libraries? Drop a review or even just a “like” on the book’s page. In the social age, metrics are everything. Administrators see low numbers and think, these services aren’t important. No one will miss them if we shift the funding elsewhere.

Alright, enough from me. If you don’t have a pastime that you love passionately, go out and find yourself one. I hope it’s reading.

This week I’m back on the road:

• October 12th, 6:30 pm, I’ll be talking to author Richard Chizmar about his latest book in the Boogeyman series, Killing the Boogeyman, at Park Books in Severna Park MD. Please note this event is for Richard’s book, not Incarnate, though there should be copies on hand for purchase. Please register in advance HERE.

• October 14, 6 pm, I’m speaking at the C. Burr Artz Public Library in Frederick MD. This is the only event where I’ll be doing a solo presentation on Incarnate and I plan to talk a bit about the evolution in social media and AI that is the inspiration for the novel. Curious Iguana bookstore is hosting the event. More more information, click HERE.

• October 15, I’m on a panel talking about researching your novel as part of the International Thriller Writers’ online thriller school. The series kicked off on September 22nd but you can still join. Find out more HERE.

• October 17, I’ll be in Lawrence MA for the Merrimack Valley Halloween Book Fest. There’ll be dozens of horror writers on hand for panels, signing, and informal chats. Because of renovations taking place at the Merrimack location, it’s being held at the library in Lawrence this year. More information can be found HERE.

I slipped out one afternoon to Queen Takes Book, an indie bookstore in Columbia MD not far from where we used to live! It’s only been open a year or two, I think. It’s utterly delightful and hosts a number of thriving book clubs, if you live in the area and have been looking for someone to talk to about books. There should be a signed book or two of mine there.

The week for Incarnate

• Incarnate was released in the UK on October 6.

• The Secret Life of Books is this amazing, smart podcast about classics, but they also looks at aspects of what might be considered “the classical” in life, and I was lucky enough to be interviewed by them about what makes Dorian Gray a classic and where that overlaps with Incarnate. Really, I was just so impressed and tickled to talk to these two book lovers.

• You might be interested to know there was another chapter, originally, in Incarnate. It’s chapter 32 in the ARC but was replaced in the final version with a different chapter. We needed the new chapter to make things make sense, but as much as we all loved the old chapter, it was decided that we couldn’t afford the extra pages (for pacing, as well as economic reasons, I suppose). But all is not lost! The interviewer on On the Same Page, who read the ARC, loved the old chapter so much that they offered to make it available to their subscribers. Unfortunately, it’s behind a paywall for the moment but we’ll see if we can get that changed…

• Don’t forget: you can order signed books through Park Books of Maryland. Naturally, I’d prefer if you bought from one of the stores that hosted an event but that doesn’t work for everyone and the good folks at Park Books are making it possible to send signed books anywhere. I can also send a signed bookplate if you write to me at almakatsubooks2@gmail (don’t forget the “2”) and give me a U.S. mailing address.

In evil social media news:

• Joseph Gordon-Levitt made this video for the NYT about his role as the UN’s global advocate for human-centric digital governance. Love, love, love this video: it’s a complex issue and he gets it right, how AI right now is a race for economic dominance, how AI is portrayed as being almost human in order to confuse and fool us as it’s not anything like human consciousness. Good interview with one of the fathers of AI, Yoshua Bengio.

• The Social Reckoning movie, the sequel to the Social Network, is out. It focuses on Meta (Facebook) in the modern era and the attempt by whistleblower Frances Haugen to make the world aware that Meta is manipulating us.

Pre-order my novel about Havana Syndrome, THE INVISIBLE ENEMY, coming March 2027.

Pre-Order Now

• Read the NYT’s review of the non-fiction book The Havana Syndrome, just released.

  

That’s it for this week. As always, thank you for your support and keep reading.

You can get signed copies of Incarnate and select backlist titles in Springfield at One More Page Bookshop, The Story House Bookstore; Bookmarx; and Barnes & Noble while supplies last. While I’d love it if you get a book from a store that’s sponsored an event, I know that isn’t always possible, so you can also order signed books through Park Books of Maryland.

I get a week of rest before the next events:

• October 12th, 6:30 pm, I’ll be talking to author Richard Chizmar about his latest book in the Boogeyman series, Killing the Boogeyman, at Park Books in Severna Park MD. Please note this event is for Richard’s book, not Incarnate, though there should be copies on hand for purchase. Please register in advance HERE.

• October 14, 6 pm, I’m speaking at the C. Burr Artz Public Library in Frederick MD. This is the only event where I’ll be doing a solo presentation on Incarnate and I plan to talk a bit about the evolution in social media and AI that is the inspiration for the novel. Curious Iguana bookstore is hosting the event. More more information, click HERE.

• October 15, I’m on a panel talking about researching your novel as part of the International Thriller Writers’ online thriller school. The series kicked off on September 22nd but you can still join. Find out more HERE.

• October 17, I’ll be in Lawrence MA for the Merrimack Valley Halloween Book Fest. There’ll be dozens of horror writers on hand for panels, signing, and informal chats. Because of renovations taking place at the Merrimack location, it’s being held at the library in Lawrence this year. More information can be found HERE.

More media:

• Is INCARNATE more science fiction than horror? Interestingly, it’s gotten mentions in a couple science fiction circles, including SciFiNow and New Scientist.

• I talk to The Daily Beast’s book podcast On the Same Page about the dangers of certain technologies.

• Lovely review in Bloody Flicks (UK).

• The Secret Life of Books podcast looks at classic literature, and had me on to discuss Incarnate in the context of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

THE HUNGER ebook is a Kindle Monthly Deal for October—for all of Europe! In the UK, you can get the audiobook for 99p and, I imagine, the deals are similar elsewhere in Europe (sorry, they haven’t sent the links yet.) Now’s a great time to pick it up if you haven’t read it yet or to let your friend know who’s been promising to read it for years so you two can have a good chin-wag over it… Especially since AMC and Ridley Scott have optioned it for a TV show! (Hopefully you got the memo a few weeks back…)

Book recommendations: There have been a ton of books published the last few weeks, and a few more weeks to go of this deluge of good reading. I’ve mentioned some of the books that I’ve either read or hope to read soon, but let me highlight a few in the horror and speculative fiction genres:

TRAD WIFE by Sarah Langan. Maybe you’ve read Yesteryear (along with everyone else) and were like, meh. Or you don’t think a story about trad wives is going to interest you. Nevermind all that—this is the best trad wife book. This is the one you want to read. Zibby Owens has been buzzing about it, and Amazon named it one of the best books of the month. You’re sure to see yourself in the protagonist: she’s sure the whole thing is a scam, yet she also wants on some level for it all to be true. The whole phenomena, it’s fascinating, it’s appalling, it’s a train wreck but we can’t look away. This will be a great book club read.

MAZYWOOD by Tananarive Due. The author has followed up her blockbuster historical horror hit of last year, The Reformatory, with another historical, this time looking at Black Hollywood during Hollywood’s heyday. I haven’t had a chance to read this yet but loved the short story that was the seed for this novel, so honestly there’s no way it can not be great.

LIFE OUT OF ORDER by Audrey Niffenegger. Why did the author wait all these years to write a sequel to THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE? Who cares, all that matters is that she did and it’s coming out October 6. I’ve written before about how I studied TTW to figure out how to handle jumping around in time in The Taker.

CRONE by Keith Rosson. Rosson writes noir-ish horror, gritty and violent, but he writes so well that even if noir isn’t your thing or you shy away from too much hurting, his books are worth reading.

Winner, winner: Congratulations to Sarah B. of TN, winner of a copy of Incarnate, swag and that much-coveted skull notebook.

Also, thanks to Jo & Derek G. of SC for making the winning bid on my book + swag offing on the Ashland Library’s fundraiser auction. Very generous of them to support this library in Massachusetts.

We’ll have another contest in a week or two.

Just as I was basking in the glow from that review, this came in from Bookreporter.com: “Incarnate is a wonder to behold. It takes us behind the curtain of social media influencers and the powers of deepfake technology, and completely corrupts them with an evil that is as tempting as that of original sin in the Garden of Eden… Katsu refers to the book as a modern retelling of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and she does so masterfully with a lead character and a story that are quite unforgettable.” Pinch me! I hope this convinces you to give the book a chance.

Yes, I’m on the road: The Patapsco Literary Festival in Ellicott City, Maryland, became the first stop on my tour, cane in hand. It is, btw, a charming festival put on by a charming bookstore (Backwater Books) in an utterly charming town filled with cute shops and great restaurants and cafes. Many thanks to the crowd who came out to see me and to Becky, my partner in-conversation and one of the booksellers at Backwater, for a delightful time.

On Thursday, October 1, I’ll be at the Springfield-Greene Public Library in Springfield MO for “Terrifying Tales Reimagined”, a talk with author Saratoga Schaffer and host Konrad Stump. It’s part of the library’s excellent Oh, the Horror! series.

Coming up: October 14 in Frederick MD; October 17 the Merrimack Valley Halloween Book Fest in Lawrence MA; and more. See my Events page for details and links.

Good news! I know many of you cannot make one of my live events but would like signed and/or personalized books from me, and while I hope you will consider getting my books from one of the stores that have sponsored an event, we now have another option. You can now order signed books through Park Books of Maryland! Click here to check it out and don’t forget, signed books make great gifts.

Meanwhile…

• A scholarly review of Incarnate, if a bit spoiler-ish, from the LA Review of Books.

• My friend author David Yoon sums up the current tech backlash perfectly.

In other news

RED WIDOW got a great shout-out over at Women.com in this article, “Five Books to Read If You Like Netflix’s The Diplomat”. What tickles me most about this article is it’s not cut-and-paste click bait. The author seems to be a big fan of the Diplomat and really digs in on what makes each of the books a good comp. “Lyndsey Duncan will remind “The Diplomat” fans of Kate’s unwillingness to back down in the face of career-ending pressure or backroom cover-ups. Duncan is as fiercely capable as Wyler and refuses to yield when institutional optics collide with the truth.” 

While we’re talking about spy thrillers, let me remind you that my next spy novel, THE INVISIBLE ENEMY, is available for pre-order. While it’s not a Lyndsey Duncan novel, it is about a very serious topic—Havana Syndrome.

Struck down but never out.

Vertigo, headaches, nausea … all debilitating, all stemming from a sudden and unexplained attack in a foreign hotel room following a meeting with a Russian asset. CIA operations officer Jack Dunn has seen everything in his line of work, but he’s never experienced something like this before.

Two years later, he’s retired, divorced, and still struggling with the effects of what happened in that room. When he hears of a similar attack on a White House staffer, Jack knows it’s more than an isolated incident. And this time, he’s not letting it go.

CIA leadership has warned him to stand down. His ex-wife and fellow officer won’t be easy to convince. But Jack’s decorated career as a federal agent has earned him loyal contacts, even if the agency itself is a bust.

He gave his life to his country. To a government that left him out to dry. But Jack Dunn isn’t finished fighting for it―or himself―just yet.

Chuck Palahniuk, co-editor of the Silent Nightmares anthology, which just came out on the 29th, reports that it’s already been picked up by two book clubs and there’s brisk interest in its foreign rights at the Frankfurt Book Fair. It’s off to a great start.

I stupidly try to ignore it, kidding myself that the perfect one will just come to me in the heat of the moment. (Spoiler alert: it doesn’t.) One great thing about the week your book comes out, however, is that all these great reviews come in that cut through the murk that has obscured my vision of what my own GD book is about.

I think the review by Matthew Jackson for Bloody Disgusting strikes the perfect balance between telling you what to expect in the story without giving away too much. So, in case you’re still not certain what Incarnate is about (and if you’ve only been listening to me, I don’t blame you), ladies and gentlemen, here is INCARNATE:

Dorothy has spent much of her life on the periphery, always just out of sight of the people she most wants to see her value. Bullied as a child, she’s grown into a talented young visual effects artist who’s talked her way into a job with one of the field’s fastest rising stars. At Dorothy’s new job, she learns not just how to create realistic digital renderings of people, but how to make entire digital twins, fully formed characters who can sound and look like any celebrity willing to pay for such a creation.

As she plays around with the technology, Dorothy decides to experiment and create not just a twin, but an alter ego, an ethereal, gorgeous young woman she dubs Isabella. A few quick social media experiments later, and Isabella’s a celebrity, the biggest new influencer of the moment, the person Dorothy’s always wanted to be.

But such things have a price, and that price is what makes up the bulk of the horror in Incarnate. The deeper Dorothy gets into her time as Isabella, the more she seems to lose herself, both physically and psychologically. She realizes she’s done things she can’t remember doing, that her clothes fit strangely, that her coworkers are growing more and more suspicious about her seemingly sleepless existence and her late nights in the studio.

When the Isabella thing takes off, it’s thrilling for Dorothy, right up until she realizes that in order to keep up the facade of Isabella’s reality, she’s going to have to work harder to put herself out in the world and ask for the things she wants. Following along as she deceives her way through life as an incognito influencer is great fun, but it also establishes that we’re dealing with a person whose self-worth is so distorted by years of neglect and mistreatment that she can barely see who she truly is anymore. For Dorothy, a transformation is actually necessary, even if what happens in this novel isn’t what she planned.

But as Katsu develops the thematic underpinnings of this story, it takes on more meaning. It’s a story of masks and parasocial relationships and computed hallucination, yes, but it’s also a story about the horror of realizing you’re not who you’re meant to be, the terror of rebuilding yourself. It’s about the price we pay to be seen, not just in a shallow, attention economy way, but on a very human level. This book is thrilling and clever, and moves like a rocket, but it’s also deeply empathetic horror storytelling, and that gives it even greater weight.

I think I’ve been hammering on the big thematic issues in the novel—the dangers of technology, how social media is changing us (body horror!) Maybe instead, I need to go closer to the human element. I need to emphasize the vibes.

INCARNATE is The Picture of Dorian Gray and Frankenstein with a pinch of Rumpelstiltskin thrown in. There are The Substance vibes, too.

Please check it out. It should be available in most bookstores for the next few weeks, as well as in ebook and audio.

Buy the book

In the news in support of the release

• How to write about a red hot technology that’s changing even as you’re writing the book, over at Crime Reads.

• A fun interview at Cinemachords.

• Largehearted Boy has me back to do a playlist for Incarnate.

• Trevor at Sley House Presents always asks the most thoughtful questions.

• Turn the Page, the podcast of the Syosset Public Library, has me back to discuss Incarnate.

Events

As of this writing, I think I’m on track to return to touring and so I’d love to see you at one of the following events:

Springfield, Missouri area: October 1, 7 pm, I’m appearing with author Saratoga Schaffer and host Konrad Stump at the Springfield-Greene Public Library to discuss our latest books, both reimaginings of classic tales. Click here to register.

Frederick, Maryland: October 14, 6 pm, I’m at the C. Burr Artz Public Library talking about the novel. For more information, click here.

Lawrence, Massachusetts, October 17, 10-4 pm, I’m taking part in the Merrimack Valley Halloween Book Festival, an annual fundraiser for the Merrimack Library. This year’s event is being held at the public library in Lawrence as renovations are ongoing at Merrimack. There will be a ton of authors on hand for panels, chatting, and signing.

Falls Church, Virginia, October 27, 6:30 pm, I’m at the Mary Riley Stiles Public Library, in conversation with author K.T. Nguyen. Sponsored by Bards Alley Bookstore. Register here.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, October 31, 12-4 pm. Thrillerdelphia Bookstore is holding its first annual convention, FearLit, this Halloween! Join me and 24 other authors for an afternoon of panels and signings. Register here. It’s going to be held at the Venice Island Performing Arts Center.

Contest time: Let’s give away a copy of INCARNATE along with an Incarnate wristband (stylish!) and this fat little skull notebook I picked up at the Village Well Bookstore in Culver City, CA, last year. You know the drill: leave a comment that says you’d like to be entered. You must provide a U.S. mailing address to win. I’ll draw the winner’s name in about one week so please check back. (I love the inadvertent little gleam in her eye in this picture.)

And then disaster struck (being a little dramatic here). I woke up in the middle of the night because the room was spinning. I’ve mentioned before that I have a condition that causes vertigo (if you haven’t heard the whole story, you will when The Invisible Enemy comes out in a few months.) Instead of the spinning lasting a few hours, like with most folks, in my case the spinning will last for weeks. Even months.

I hoped fervently that it was minor but even a minor incident typically lasts two weeks. Reluctantly, I asked my publicist to cancel the first four tour stops. I am very sorry for disappointing you, and the store owners, and for the inconvenience to everyone. As it stands, the events at One More Page (9/21), Riverstone Books (9/22) and Zoetropolis/Pocket Book Shop (9/23) are canceled. I will have missed the Carroll County Book Festival (9/19).

It’s not great, but okay, it’s not quite a disaster. The book is still going to be on bookstore shelves on Tuesday and, with some luck, I’ll be able to make the rest of the events.

And this doesn’t mean you can’t participate in the INCARNATE release. First, you can visit the book in your nearest bookstore. You can tell the copies that their mommy is working hard to recover and get out on the road to see them. If you notice that one of the copies is frightened or upset, you can take it home with you (I’m pretty sure the store owner will want you to buy it first) and give it a secure, loving environment.

You can listen to one of the interviews that are already up. We talk about the threat from AI, what social media has done to human behavior, and more. I think you will find these convos interesting and, maybe, not what you expect:

• The conversation with Mark Cecil on The Thoughtful Bro is quite wide-ranging. Mark’s podcast is part of A Mighty Blaze, the by-authors-for-authors effort that sprung up during the pandemic, when events were canceled by the lockdown. Still going strong six years later!

• On The Protectors podcast…

• And Suit Up! with Terrance Layhew

• … and I have a lot to say about where technology has taken us on Words, Images & Worlds.

I could really use your help. If you pick up a copy of INCARNATE or see it at the library, please post a picture and tag it #incarnate or #almakatsu so I’ll find it.

Chapter One is available to read at The Nerd Daily. The prologue is available on my website.

Also…

I learned that ALL HALLOW’S EVE, one of the anthologies in which I have a story, is a USA Today bestseller, entering the list at #103. Congratulations to Ellen Datlow, the editor, and all the other authors.

Looking for something cool to do on Halloween? Thrillerdelphia, a bookstore in Philly, is hosting the first running of FearLit, a horror convention. Find out more HERE.

Hey, as long as you’re in the bookstore or library tomorrow, check out these other new releases…

MAZYWOOD by Tananarive Due came out of a fantastic short story she wrote. It’s another historical horror from the author of The Reformatory, this one about black Hollywood in the Jazz Age and a monster created by the main character’s grandmother in exchange for the granting of a wish that changed her life forever.

CRONE is the latest horror novel by Keith Rosson. Rosson writes propulsive, noir-ish stories that have made Stephen King a fan, among others.

When I get back in a couple weeks from launching Incarnate, we’ll do some contests and give away copies of various editions of The Hunger to celebrate, okay? I don’t want to run the contest until I’m in a position to handle everything.

Regarding the other TV project, it did close recently (contracts signed) and has a fantastic actor attached to star but the details are embargoed for now. Really hoping they do a public announcement soon. It is, frankly, inconceivable to have two of my stories in the hands of such powerhouse production teams.

As always, thanks to each and every one of you for your support.

First, don’t ever move house anytime near publication of your book.

I didn’t think we’d be moving this close to pub day for Incarnate. We’d assumed it would happen in June, mid-July at the latest. Here it is, a week away from Incarnate’s release, and I’m still spending oodles of time on the phone badgering tradesmen to call me back and trying to find new doctors. We still haven’t hung any art on the walls. All our kitchen stuff was put in “temporary” places that I suspect will soon become “permanent” by default. My writing office is settling into a state of gentle neglect already…

All that to say I can’t shake the sneaking suspicion that I’m dropping the ball on book launch stuff. I have to say, the interviews have been going GREAT. Early readers are really responding. Podcast interviews will start to come online next week and I’ll put links in the coming newsletters. I’m excited for the events. I wish I’d been able to go shopping for a few new things to wear to events but… maybe there’s still time to squeeze this in. Probably not.

Also, the timing couldn’t be better for a book about the dangers of AI and social media. If you’ve read my older newsletters, I’ve been calling for tighter regulation of tech but considered it a pipe dream but now, every day, there are more calls for the government to step in… even from the heads of tech companies themselves. Honestly, I was afraid the public would react to a book about social media and AI with a yawn—been there, done that, have the embroidered trucker’s cap—but it seems that people are ready to talk about all this.

So… come out and see me on tour. There will be plenty to talk about! And, while supplies last, I’ll be giving away Incarnate wristbands.

Details and links to ALL events here.

• Incarnate as been named one of the most anticipated books of September by Lithub, Book Riot, Bloody Disgusting and Crime Reads.

• A year ago, I was getting ready to launch FIEND. Here’s what I had to say about it.

He’s also one of the first people in the horror community to welcome me and has been unfailingly supportive and caring since day one.

AK: Chris, thank you for taking time away from your just-released CARRY ME TO MY GRAVE. Before we talk about your unique approach to the book tour this go-round, tell us how the release is going.

CG: It’s always hard to say, isn’t it? It went back for a second printing, which is always good news, and readers seem to really be loving it. Honestly, CARRY ME TO MY GRAVE [see more below] is my favorite of any book I’ve ever written, and I have a hard time imagining ever writing something I love more. It’s probably the most me novel ever, made up of elements that I love. Typically when I finish writing a novel, I’ve wrestled with it for so long and with so much frustration that I’m just glad to send it off. This is the first time I’ve ever finished a novel and truly loved it enough not to really care what other people think of it. Of course, now that it’s out in the world, I want everyone to read it!

AK: I’d like to ask you about your last couple book tours. I think it’s safe to say that since covid, book events as a promotional tool have been up and down, very much subject to the whims of the economy, the daily political crisis, and other things beyond writers’ control. One result of this has been the switch to “in-conversation” style events (as opposed to the author appearing solo) and other ways to make a book tour stop more special. Would you agree?

CG: For sure. As a writer, and as a reader, I vastly prefer the “in conversation” events. The conversations between writers are usually much more interesting and entertaining than any one writer on their own. Plus, I’m one of those people who fidgets a lot at a reading, regardless of whether I’m the reader or part of the audience. Unless the reader is someone as remarkable at the job as Clay McLeod Chapman or Robert Shearman, I’d much rather hear the writer talk about their work.

AK: For CARRY ME TO MY GRAVE you’re doing something like mini-festivals at each stop, appearing with a number of other horror writers. For THE HOUSE OF LAST RESORT, you hosted your own horror weekend, inviting readers and writers to join you at a hotel for a weekend of panels, readings, and all-around good times.

First, where did the idea for these somewhat unconventional formats come from?

CG: This is such a big subject, so I’ll try to be succinct. I don’t know where the cutoff is for publishers to invest money in sending an author on tour, but I’ve been below that line for my entire career, with one exception that has a long explanation that I won’t bore you with. Publicists have always told me that they don’t see signings as making much difference, but I’m not sure if that’s partly because they don’t want me to be troubled by the fact that the publisher won’t spend any money to send me on tour. Regardless, I’m always trying to think of something new and different to get attention for a new book, and I also like to share the fun, engage with the community of writers, readers, and booksellers. The HOUSE OF LAST RESORT Weekend was Brian Keene’s idea. I’d never have had the audacity to think of it myself. I said at the time that I’d never do anything like it again, so when it came to CARRY ME TO MY GRAVE, I wanted something different.

AK: Tell us about the HOUSE OF LAST RESORT event. You brought in writers like Joe Hill, Victor LaValle, Owen Hill, Brian Keene and Mary San Giovanni, Paul Tremblay, and many more for a long weekend at a hotel in Portsmouth NH. The write-ups I’ve read make it sound like a reader’s dream: warm, intimate, generous. Still, it must’ve been incredibly difficult to coordinate and manage. Care to share your thoughts? Would you ever do something like this again?

CG: When Brian first suggested it to me, I had to call a number of other writer friends to say, first, will this make me look like an asshole? Will it look like I think I’m something special to plan an event themed around my new release? Do you think anyone will actually show up to this thing? And, of course, would YOU come to this? I could not have imagined the result. I did the recruiting of authors and made all the arrangements with the hotel, but Brian handled the programming. It was such an incredible gift from him to me, and from Mary. The two of them mostly handled the arrivals of attendees and so much more. I’ll never be able to repay them for that. I feel like I’ve been working away in the background for decades, sort of overlooked. For that weekend, thanks to Brian, I felt like maybe I’d had more of an impact than I knew. I put a lot of time into that, and Brian certainly did. Plus, it still makes me uncomfortable and awkward to think about. I said at the time that it was a one-time only, that I’d never do anything like it again. That’s probably still true, but I suppose we’ll see what happens next year.

AK: Is this where the idea for the unique format for the CARRY ME TO MY GRAVE tour came from? How has that been, compared to both conventional book events and the HOUSE OF LAST RESORT weekend?

CG: The jury’s out on that, and probably always will be. I’d toured the previous year in the UK with Tim Lebbon and we had a wonderful time, which honestly was the entire point of doing that tour. I knew that financially it would not pay off, but that we’d have a blast, and we did. When I decided to tour for CARRY ME TO MY GRAVE, I knew it would cost me a lot of money, and it certainly did. The sense of community is very important to me, as is turning the spotlight on writers whose work I admire, some of whom don’t need the additional attention and some of whom could really benefit from that. I’d had this idea for a series of what I called “pop-up mini-conventions” and shared it with Brian, who’d originally considered joining me on tour. When he eventually decided he had too much on his plate, I went ahead anyway. It was an absolutely huge undertaking. I recruited all of the authors and most of the stories. My publicist arranged a couple of the stores, but the planning fell to me. We did panel discussions and signings with anywhere from nine to I think fifteen writers. The four mini-cons were in Brooklyn, Chicago, LA, and Beverly, Massachusetts. Along the way, I also did several “in conversation with” events, the largest of which was in Boulder, Colorado, with Stephen Graham Jones. The greatest trouble I ran into was of my own making—at the big, multi-author events, I didn’t talk about my new novel almost AT ALL. At the first two events, truly not at all. Other writers participating had to tell me afterward. So I planned all of these things, but in my effort to make it more about community I dropped the ball on the promotion element, which is something I would do differently if I were ever going to do something like this again...which is about as likely as me winning the lottery.

AK: What would you say to authors considering going this route for an upcoming tour in terms of costs? This brings us to the question of what publishers will support these days in terms of promotion.

CG: I have no way of knowing what publishers will and will not do to support other authors. I have only my own experience. I think investing in something like this needs to be more about building awareness of your work in general than it is about sales of any one book. It’s wonderful to go out and see other authors, meet booksellers, and engage with readers. That part of my tour was all wonderful. You also have to remember that the number of books you sell at any given event is only part of the equation. Short-term, there’s the social media awareness you’ve created for that one book, but long-term, as I said, it’s about engaging with the community. You’ve got to do that with an open heart, too. If you’re only out there engaging from a mercenary perspective, people can feel that. If that’s your only goal, your money is better spent on other forms of promotion. It’s impossible for me to say if the money I invested paid off for this book. I doubt I’ll do it again, but I’m very glad that I did it.

AK: Some readers want an intimate experience with the author (small groups, the opportunity to ask questions) while some readers want spectacle, to be entertained. Where do you think we’re at currently? Is the in-conversation format already getting stale?

CG: Not for me. I can’t speak for others, but I think the in-conversation format is both intimate and entertaining. I’d like longer ones, though. More in depth conversations. That’s probably just me.

AK: Where do you see the future of book events going?

CG: When I founded the Merrimack Valley Halloween Book Festival, I think I accidentally started something. It caught on massively. People came and had a wonderful day full of joy. It cost them nothing to enter. It cost authors nothing to have a table from which to sell their books. People were so relaxed and so happy, and that became infectious. I truly feel like MVHBF is one of the reasons we have such a massive number of horror book festivals all over the place now. I’m not sure the number of such events is sustainable, but I hope the format lasts, because it really is such a fun experience to walk around and talk to different authors about their books. I think the in-conversation format is here to stay, while the single-author event is only going to become harder to sustain unless you’re a writer with a huge following. Then again, I have no crystal ball. As long as people keep reading, that’s what matters.

CARRY ME TO MY GRAVE

Maggie Wise will take your eyes.

When Malcolm was growing up, the local kids made up that chant about his mother, claiming she was a witch. He and his siblings did their best to ignore it. Now, Maggie is dying, and those same siblings have left Malcolm and his sister-in-law Violet to hold a vigil at her bedside.

But they’re not as alone as they think they are. A dark figure waits and watches from beneath the willow tree across the street. Hundreds of miles away, an ancient evil stirs in its burrow under a farmer’s cornfield. Across the country, other buried things begin to dream in anticipation of Maggie’s demise. On her deathbed, the old woman elicits a promise from Malcolm, her youngest child―when she dies, he and Violet must return her body to her birthplace in Shediak, Maine.

From the moment she takes her last breath, before her remains are even loaded aboard the baggage car of the Imperial Limited, there are forces trying to stop Malcolm from fulfilling that promise. Violence erupts on the train, evil preys on its passengers, and once the sun goes down, those long-buried things are coming to make Maggie Wise pay for her past. God help anyone who stands in their way.

"Masterfully plotted... As cathartic as it is anxiety-inducing, Carry Me to My Grave is a poignant and perilous story sure to keep readers on tenterhooks right until the very end." —Booklist, starred review

"Intense, violent, nuanced, heartbreaking, and fun to read, Golden's latest gives readers everything they could want in a thrilling horror story." —Library Journal

"Combining a genuinely creepy plot with grounded and relatable characters, this 1956-set horror outing from bestseller Golden shines... Golden skillfully integrates supernatural elements into the leads’ harrowing cross-country road trip." —Publishers Weekly

BUY NOW

More on Chris

Personally, I love anthologies. They’re like a box of chocolates: a variety to choose from. Bite-sized and perfect for when you have a bit of time but not too much. Plus the chance to try a new author.

The first to come out—today, September 8th—is All Hallow’s Eve, edited by Ellen Datlow. The theme is tales from the spookiest season of the year, with a stellar line-up that I’m lucky to be part of: Stephen Graham Jones, Christopher Golden, Lee Murray, Linda Addison, Richard Kadrey, Brian Evenson, Josh Malerman, Clay McLeod Chapman and more. There’s a nice review in FanFiAddict. My story is The Kuker.

Next up—September 22nd—is The Big Bad Book of Kaiju, edited by Jonathan Maberry and Henry Herz. Stories from 24 authors including Tananarive Due, Ai Jiang, Kelley Armstrong, Luke Dumas, Cynthia Pelayo, Lee Murray, Scott Siegler, and more. My story is Don’t Tell Me How to Love Kaiju and it’s a little different, even for me. The editors have a series of Q&A with the authors that you might want to check out.

The last is Silent Nightmares: Haunting Stories to be Told on the Longest Night of the Year, Christmas-oriented horror stories in the old Victorian tradition, edited by Michael Bailey and Chuck Palahniuk (yes, Mr. Fight Club) with stories from Gabino Iglesias, Joe Lansdale, Ramsey Campbell and many more. Really nifty illustrations by Orion Zangara. Pre-order and you can center to win a signed copy of Fight Club! Pub date is September 29th.

This time out is compounded by the fact that we just made the most complicated house move ever and are still dealing with aspects of it. It is taking more of my attention away from book launch than it should. But here’s where I am:

The unboxing: The finished books came in this weekend!

Tour: For Fiend, I ended up being on the road for most of three weeks solid, then a couple days a week for a couple months after that. It was unexpected, but great. Tiring, but it meant I met up with not only old friends but a bunch of new readers.

This year my tour schedule looks a lot different. I’m only doing a couple in-store events. The rest of the calendar is book festivals and library events. This is the new reality for authors. It’s not just me; it seems that publishers feel they’re not seeing the return on investment from sending authors out on tour and have cut back—drastically. Most authors I know are sending themselves out on tour, picking up the tab for transportation and hotels, which is not cheap. Even when you’re invited to a book festival, many times you’re expected to pay your own way.

I’m not complaining. Not at all. I know many people appreciate that I report truthfully, so that’s why I’m sharing. Many authors set up the book store events and pay for airfare, Ubers, hotels, meals. If they invite a friend to interview them for the event—pretty much expected now—they’ll at least take them out to dinner or drinks. And publishers are correct: the number of books you’ll sell at one of these events will not cover those expenses, not unless you can sell out an auditorium. As an author, you have to look at those expenses as part of the cost of doing business. Events give you something to post about on social media, give you a chance to meet readers and re-engage with bookstore owners. The bottom line is not the only consideration.

I will say, too, that this pulling back on bookstore events is not good for your favorite indie bookstores. In-store events are money makers, for the most part, but they don’t generate enough of a profit to allow them to pay for a writer’s hotel or transportation. We’ve found that people tend not to buy books during online events hosted by bookstores, which is why you’re not seeing as many as you did after the pandemic. Stores need to bring people through the front door.

I’m sorry not to be touring widely for Incarnate. As you’ll see from the tour card, it’s mostly in the mid-Atlantic. Close to home. I’m going to think about sending myself out to some bookstores in other parts of the country, perhaps for the paperback release. But in the meantime, look for me at horror-oriented events which are popping up all over. I’ll let you know about upcoming events in this newsletter as well as on Bluesky and Instagram.

In the meantime…

Buzz:“Best books of September” lists are starting to come and I’m gratified to see Incarnate on some of them: Lithub’s September’s best science fiction and fantasy books (“A modern take on The Picture of Dorian Gray by way of social media algorithms, Alma Katsu’s latest feels very in conversation with Yesteryear”), Crime Reads (“Another excellent effort from a consistently entertaining writer, this one should please audiences of thrillers and horror alike”) and Bloody Disgusting (“One of the most detail-focused and narratively gifted writers working in the genre right now, Katsu’s always worth reading”) and Book Riot.

So. Incredibly. Grateful.

If you want to add to the buzz, I would appreciate anything you would do to help get the book out in front of potential readers. Ask your librarian or bookseller at your local shop if they plan to stock it. Add it to your “Want to read” shelf on Goodreads. Suggest it to your book club (plenty of things to talk about in the book, I assure you). Forward this newsletter to a book-loving friend. Every bit helps.

More awesome blurbs have come in:

Signed bookplates: I’m happy to send a signed bookplate. Please send a U.S. mailing address to almakatsubooks2@gmail.com. Let me know if you want it personalized. No need for proof of purchase.

Is it too early for me to say signed books make great presents?

Buy Now

After years of tech companies getting a (mostly) free hand thanks to timid or bought-off politicians, the tide may finally be turning.

As you’ve undoubtedly heard, Meta (nee Facebook) has been ordered to pay a $17 billion fine for driving young people to develop addictions to social media. The funny thing is that this should apply to the rest of us, too—same algorithm, same brains—but apparently child endangerment is easier to prove in court..? Pundits seem to believe this is far from the last of Meta’s potential legal problems, so maybe we’ll see the tech behemoth finally brought to heel. (And don’t forget the movie, The Social Reckoning, based on whistleblower Frances Haugen’s expose, coming October 9.)

This is big: Sony and Warner Brothers are suing Anthropic for billions for copyright infringement of their music, claiming Anthropic is responsible for “the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history”. The music giants are seeking $150,000 in damages per work and $25,000 per copyright violation. Makes Anthropic’s $3,000 in damages per pirated book seem downright quaint, doesn’t it.

Apple and Google are being sued by various parties for using stolen data to train its LLMs, too. Textbook authors are suing OpenAI.

The New York Times ran an op-ed this morning, too, on the backlash against data centers. I would like this sentiment to extend beyond just data centers but hey, you gotta start somewhere. The author says the near-universal opposition to data centers among Americans is due to a mix of concerns: the impact on the environment, “not in my backyard”, opposition to oligarchs and the unchecked trammeling of the population by tech companies. (It’s not just one issue, it’s ALL the issues.)

If you’ve been reading my newsletter for any length of time, you know that I have deep concerns over the way tech companies have been given a free pass to do as they please, particularly social platforms. They claim they’re not responsible for the content that’s posted, and yet they’re the rule-makers—though that hardly matters, because they don’t enforce their own rules, at least not consistently.

Let’s keep this movement going.

Group reads

Turns out a couple book clubs will soon be reading some of my books: on October 20, Get Lit, the book club of the Itinerant Literate bookshop in North Charleston SC, will be discussing Fiend, and the Seattle Horror Book Club will be tackling The Fervor in November. I’ll be Zooming in to both—and am happy to Zoom with your book group if my schedule permits (inquiries to almakatsubooks2@gmail).

I’m grateful, as I believe my books are great for book clubs as they are issue-based and are sure to spur discussion. Most have reading group guides available on my website. Incarnate will be no exception, I expect. If you are in a book club, I’d love your support.

It’s not too late to pre-order Incarnate

Pre-Order Now

I’ve started doing interviews for Incarnate which means having in-depth conversations about social media and AI. What I learned as an early researcher in the field of social media, applying lessons learned to the AI explosion/bubble/hype we’re living through now.

I’m absolutely loving the discussions that are coming up. And what keeps coming up is, wow, this book is really prescient.

There’s a lot of food for thought in Incarnate. That is absolutely why I wrote it. I drew on seventeen years in emerging tech to understand the long-term patterns and to question what we’re seeing.

I love that early readers are saying this would make a great book club pick.

I’ll be linking to these conversations in the coming weeks and I hope you’ll check them out. In the meantime, you can read the prologue HERE and learn more about the book HERE.

Join me on the ride starting September 22.

With Incarnate’s pub day less than a month away, I’ve been working on the promotional end of things: working on my presentations, writing background notes and opeds. Spending a lot of time thinking about not only what the novel is about, but why I wanted to write it.

As you know, not so long ago, I was a tech futurist for the intelligence community, writing articles to alert the agencies about emerging technologies with the potential to disrupt things. I’d say I wrote my first piece on deep fakes at least ten years ago, probably more (I can’t pin it down with precision because my notes only go back to when I retired and started working as a consultant).

But it was the last article I wrote on deep fakes in 2022 that haunted me and, a few years later, I knew this was a technology worth writing a novel about. Because it had the potential to upend life as we know it.

So, what is a deep fake? It’s an image, video, or audio, or combination thereof, that’s been manipulated to produce something that isn’t real. It’s funny to think, now, of those early days, before generative AI made manipulation easier. People were trying to manipulate still images and then videos for a long time, with not very convincing results. Still, it was enough to make the intelligence community and law enforcement concerned about how bad actors would use this to convince populations that world leaders said something they never said, did things they never did. It was a 2017 paper written by researchers at the University of Washington that kicked off the firestorm with a deep fake of President Obama.

You use generative AI to create deep fakes, though back in the early days generative adversarial AI was clunky and the breakthrough idea of using ginormous data sets to train models had not yet occurred. At the time, it was hard to coordinate the video and audio to work together smoothly. Glitches were often the give away, the ghost in the machine making itself known. There was a lot of hand work, meaning a human had to labor to smooth out all these glitches, to make things look seamless. Sure, there were apps you could play with (remember FaceApp?) that aged you twenty years or switched your gender, but they were toys and what they produced was easily identifiable as fake. Synthetic.

The breakthrough came in 2021 with the work of Christopher Ume, a visual effects artist who created videos of Tom Cruise—only it wasn’t Cruise, but hyper realistic deep fakes. This was the game changer I wrote about for the intelligence community in 2022. With Ume’s work, we collectively jumped from deep fakes being an amusing novelty to being highly convincing, and with that change, the floodgates opened. Ume showed that you didn’t have to have a PhD in artificial intelligence to do the work. And, being part of the online community of practitioners in the field, Ume even shared how he did it—up to a point. His software was open source. He hired a Tom Cruise impersonator to provide the base footage, then labored over this footage to create something that made you doubt your own eyes.

The revolution in generative AI came in 2023, when OpenAI started compiling huge data sets to train its large language models, most famously ChatGPT. Not long after that, we went from needing to spend a lot of time and effort to make a convincing deep fake to being able to apply these newer models to get something better with little effort. It took a little while for this approach to be applied to video and audio data but by 2024-2025, I’d say (eyeballing it here), multimodal AI was going mainstream. Remember the uproar over SoraAI, a genAI model that was going to enable any person to make their own movies? There was panic that this would disrupt the movie industry overnight—but then OpenAI pulled the plug on it, citing unsustainable compute costs.

Which brings me to an important thing to remember about new technologies. They never arrive fully realized, fully baked. They start with basic research, concepts that are tested in university and industry labs. This work is refined over time. Sometimes it doesn’t pan out and ends up in the dustbin of history. It takes a confluence of events—the tech to be perfected but also, say, the right hardware to exist to make the software run quickly enough and cheaply enough, and the right societal conditions so that it hits a human need—for a truly transformative and often disruptive technology to be fully realized.

Like multimodal genAI.

In Incarnate, the main character, Dorothy, is able to use software created by her boss to create a fake person, an avatar she names Isabella. She’s able to create an avatar so perfect that everyone believes Isabella is real. Through Isabella, Dorothy is able to have the life she’s always wanted, the life she sees others having on social media. Keeping up on the hamster wheel that is an influencer’s life, however, takes a toll on Dorothy and when someone—or something?—offers to help, Dorothy doesn’t ask enough questions. She sees others succeeding—why not her? Is it so wrong to take shortcuts?

For all the tech in Incarnate, the novel is really about what this tech has done to us humans. How it’s fundamentally changed us and in a short amount of time, too. How it’s changed society, our ideas of right and wrong. I’ll expand on this idea in a future newsletter.

More Incarnate:

• Read the prologue here.

• Want a signed bookplate? Send your mailing address to me at almakatsubooks2@gmail.com. US mailing addresses only, please.

• “A deal with the devil is reworked for the online age, with a healthy dose of body horror joining AI. The combination makes the story uniquely terrifying. Katsu has again taken a real-world danger and woven it into a horror novel that is truly frightening, all the more because much of it could happen.” - Library Journal

Previous newsletters on Incarnate and technology:

• Fake People, Real Consequences

• Dorian Gray and the Digital Twin

• When Even Experts Can’t Believe Their Eyes

• When is social media a “psyop”? (or, achieving virality is harder than you think)

Event update:

September 23, Pocket Books in Lancaster PA: They’ve paired the INCARNATE talk with a showing of the movie THE SUBSTANCE for a match made in heaven (or hell?) Tickets are $15. If you’re in the Lancaster area, please join us for a night of female rage and horror at Zoetropolis, which is both a cinema and a distillery. How cool is that? Register here.

But enough about the downside. The upside is that the house we’ve bought was formerly owned by artists, artists who’d lived there for over thirty years and who put a lot of themselves, and a lot of love, into the property. It’s the most loved, pre-owned house we’ve had the good fortune to buy.

The other exciting bit is that it comes with a huge outbuilding. The couple were metal artists, so they had a complete fabrication shop on premises. They nurtured their business from this 3,000 square foot building—creating, packing, shipping, heading off to ACC shows in their spiffy camper van. We, of course, don’t need all this space. But… I’ve always been drawn to having a separate building not only for working but playing around with (as I suspect a lot of people do). As a matter of fact, as we were moving our stuff onto the property yesterday, it dawned on me that we were spending more time in the outbuilding than the house.

If you’ve been following me for a while, you know that in the recent past we had a guesthouse above our garage, and I used that as my office for a couple years. I found, after we sold it, that I really missed it. The new property gives me the opportunity to recreate it. Really: you’ll recognize most of the furniture from that earlier space. It was the artists’ gallery, on the top floor of the outbuilding. I can’t wait to get it all set up—and honestly, I can’t wait to get it set up because I start taping videos and interviews for INCARNATE starting tomorrow (gulp).

In addition to my work space, we plan to house a rehearsal space for my husband, the musician; a separate garage for his motorcycles; a storage area for his musical equipment; and a home gym. The basement will be for storage, but with all this space, it will probably sit empty for a while. His recording studio will be in the basement of the house, and my weaving studio will be in an upstairs room in the house (at least for now).

We are inheriting from the previous owners a goldfish pond and a lot of plants. We’re not gardeners and have never had koi before so it’s all a little scary. There’s even a small greenhouse that will probably fall rapidly into disuse. Maybe it’ll become gothic inspiration—that’s my story, anyway, and I’m sticking to it.

Are we lucky? Yes, very. In many ways, it’s a dream come true. A dream we never expected.

But it’s also scary. It’s far more house than we ever thought we’d own. It needs some work and some additions, like a fence for the dogs. And, it goes without saying, it’s expensive. But—you only live once, amirite?

In other news: swag for INCARNATE is coming in! The bookplates are finally here (my fault; we had to put ordering on hold until we knew what our future address would be). If you want a signed bookplate, email me at almakatsubooks2@gmail.com with your mailing address. Sorry, can only send to U.S. address due to the craziness & expense of international mail right now.

I also have INCARNATE wristbands which I’ll be giving away at in-person events while supplies last.

Tour dates:

It’s still shaping up times are needed for a couple events but… please take a look and consider coming out to see me if it looks like I’ll be in your area.

September 19

Carroll County Book Festival, Carroll County Farm Museum, 500 W. Center Street, Westminster Maryland. I don’t know the time of my panel yet but will post on my website once it’s confirmed. Jodi Picoult is the headliner!

September 21, 7 pm

Book launch at One More Page Books, 2200 N. Westmoreland St, Arlington VA. I’ll be in conversation with author & screenwriter Jamie Flanagan.

September 22, 7 pm

Riverstone Books, 5841 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh PA. I’ll be in conversation with author Gwendolyn Kiste.

September 23, 7 pm

Pocket Book Shop, 903 Wheatland Ave, Lancaster PA. I’ll be in conversation with author Gwendolyn Kiste. More details coming.

September 26, 4:30 pm

Patapsco Literary Festival, Ellicott City, Maryland. My talk will be held at The Market at Caplan’s, 8125 Main Street.

October 1, 7- 8 pm

Springfield-Greene Public Library, 4653 South Campbell Ave, Springfield MO. I’ll be appearing with Saratoga Schaffer in “Terrifying Tales Reimagined”. More details HERE.

October 14

Curious Iguana, Frederick, Maryland. Details coming soon!

October 15

Thrillerfest Online School. I’ll be on a panel on research. Details coming soon!

October 17

Merrimack Halloween Festival, Lawrence Public Library, Lawrence, Massachusetts. Details coming soon!

October 27, time TBA

Mary Riley Stiles Public Library, 120 North Virginia Ave, Falls Church, Virginia. Sponsored by Bards Alley Bookshop, in conversation with author KT Nguyen.

November 14

Rappahannock Writers Conference, Germanna Community College, Fredericksburg, Virginia. Details coming.

As always, thanks for your kind indulgence! Your support! Your good thoughts!

The Invisible Enemy is the story of a CIA operations officer, Jack Dunn, who has sacrificed much for his job and feels betrayed when the Agency publicly states that it doesn’t believe Havana Syndrome is real. Jack decides he’s going to prove the Agency wrong and, in so doing, uncovers a huge political cover-up protecting treasonous acts at the highest level. Jack also enlists the help of his ex-wife Cat, also a former ops officer, and Andy, a cyber analyst, to put the pieces together.

I like to think that The Invisible Enemy is more than just another political thriller. It was written at the suggestion of a friend who was the first CIA officer to go public and reveal the physical and mental health effects of this phenomenon on USG officials, including career ending injuries of multiple intelligence officers who worked on Russia. You may have seen him on 60 Minutes, as evidence of Russian complicity and a USG cover-up now become clearer. There are other, more personal reasons why I wrote it, which I explain in the afterword. Also, I did a lot of research to write this book, including looking into all the recent allegations and developments, and I applied my knowledge of the intelligence community’s technical means to come to my conclusions.

There will be plenty of updates on this one as we get closer to publication, but in the meantime please consider pre-ordering or forwarding this email to friends who enjoy spy stories. And let me know what you think of the cover in the comments below!

Pre-order now

The NYT did another “best books of the 21st century” list, focusing on thrillers this time, and while none of my books made the list (of course) I was again asked to nominate. I did not let them share my picks, however, as I did last time. It’s nevertheless fun to see how one’s picks fared in the final tally.

Quick takes: In case you’re living under a rock and hadn’t heard, Ted Lasso is back… It feels we’ve waited forever for the new season of House of the Dragon and it’s over already… If you’d like a female serial killer TV show that is gritty and unapologetic, you might like Furious, starring Emmy Rossum (of Shameless fame). The show came on my radar during talks with Rossum’s production company, Composition Eight, earlier this year… My friend Jennifer McMahon’s novel Stay Buried comes out on Tuesday. Jennifer’s books are perfect for readers who like spooky and suspenseful without being traumatized. Stay Buried has a dual timeline, a small New England town with secrets, and a creeping evil that won’t stay dead… Some writers are incredibly prolific and Clay McLeod Chapman is one of them. His latest (Devil Inside) is an emerging genre, horrormance, which is exactly what it sounds like. Also coming Tuesday, August 11.

On Instagram, I recently posted a few captioned photos of my saga with headshots, which as a reader of this newsletter, you are already familiar with. I did it not because I like plastering my face in public spaces but because there’s a trend of still photos + inset captions on IG right now and it seemed a good way to reuse old photos. I’ve done this twice now and the uptake is exponentially better than my usual posts, so the verdict is clear: expect more photos of my face on IG in the future.

Part of that post, however, has to do with the fact that I’m at an age when it’s hard to take a good picture. I’ve reconciled myself to the fact that women my age must embrace who they are at this age.

And that age is crone age.

Fear not: this is not a derogatory term.

I came of crone age not too long ago. In my case, it happened after my mother had passed. It hit me that I was in the last third of my life (presumably) and I had some decisions to make. Life is finite. I had ten, twenty (if I was lucky) good years left to me—how would I spend them? What did I want to do with my life?

Some people come up with bucket lists full of travel or crazy things, like jumping out of airplanes or bungee jumping off bridges. No surprise, those people are usually men. My husband took up riding motorcycles up and down mountains. (It’s not as bad as it sounds: he’s careful, and it’s safer than driving a motorcycle on city streets. But I will point out that there are no women in this local group.)

I think women, in general, take up different pursuits. I won’t say gentler pursuits, but they tend to be things we can do indoors or can do for many, many years. I like to learn something new every 4-5 years just to goose my brain. It started with quilting, the love of which surprised me in its vivacity. I had to stop eventually because it was very hard on my hands.

There are only so many crone-appropriate activities. Keeping an herb garden, roasting children in ovens, putting chicken legs on forest huts.1 Anything requiring fine motor skills like embroidery and cross-stitch were out for me. Gardening was out, too; while I admire flowers and like having fresh herbs, I don’t like sweating profusely in the heat and having bugs dive bomb my face. So picky!

I highly recommend my latest passion, weaving, a very crone-appropriate hobby. My journey to weaving started with a potholder-making kit (gateway drug!) because I’d always loved the look of plain weave. After a few weeks of that, though, I knew it was time to move on.

Having a craft/hobby makes crone age so much more enjoyable. It gives you time to be alone with your thoughts and to indulge your curiosity. You’re doing it just for you, which means you can experiment, you can learn as you go. Who cares if it doesn’t work out? And for many activities, there’s plenty of tutorials on YouTube so you can learn from the comfort of your own home.2 I’m entirely self taught as both a weaver and a quilter.

Taking up writing, whether fiction or poetry or memoir, is a good activity for crone age and that’s because by the time you get to crone age, you know yourself better. There are many resources online to get you started on your writing journey. Reading is an elemental part of writing: make sure you make time to read more, expand your writer brain. (If there’s interest, drop a comment below and I’ll do a post on writing resources to get you started on your journey.)

The other thing about crone age is that it will be much more enjoyable if you exercise regularly and it will be a misery if you don’t. Bodies fall out of tune much more easily the older you get. The upside is that you’re released from the need to prove yourself in the gym. No need to try for a personal best every time you pick up a dumbbell. “Just enough” is fine. We’re talking maintenance, not bodymaxxing. The goal is to keep your body functioning, not to blow out your ACL. Parts may be on the verge of breaking; you don’t need to hurry the process along. Make sure you do some strength training for your bones and to preserve muscle.

Crone age will also be more enjoyable if you have crone-age friends. A gaggle (or coven!) of friends at the same stage of life, who enjoy a quiet evening of cards or playing board games, who like to go on day trips to the local orchard or—if you get along exceptionally well—escape together for a week of like-minded travel, lazing in beach house, hiking through the badlands, whichever floats your boat. (This is undoubtedly amusing our friends because we are notorious homebodies who rarely travel.)

In short, crone age is nothing to fear. If you’re lucky, it might just turn out to be the best time of your life.

• The NYT equates crone age with menopause. (Boy it is so much more.)

Enter to win a copy of Incarnate on Goodreads! You have until August 10th.

What readers have said about Incarnate:

“Fans of psychological horror and techno-thrillers will probably tear through this one. Katsu blends classic gothic themes with modern digital anxieties in a way that feels smart, vicious, and incredibly timely.” - NikkiNeedsNovels

“In the current attention economy, what would you give up for money and fame? That is the question Incarnate asks at its core. It is The Picture of Dorian Gray updated for modern influencer culture.” - Dan T.

“I LOVED this book... It felt otherworldly while still being firmly planted in modern society. Dorothy, while a bit despicable, is such a compelling character.” - Hannah H.

Great companion think piece to INCARNATE in the NYT: "The more we try to stabilize ourselves through self-observation and posting to the grid, the more fragile we become...We present a perfect digital double at the cost to our real selves." Read the entire piece here.