The Day of The Last Vanishing Man


Today (May 2, 2023) is the official release date for The Last Vanishing Man and Other Stories. Mostly, that just means it's now available from the online booksellers — it's been available from the publisher for a month and has been making its way into independent bookstores for a week or so. International distribution will be a little longer. Ebook, too. 

But still, we need one day to say, "The book is published!" — and today is that day.

I have some interviews in the pipeline (keep your eyes on Lit Hub and Cemetery Dance) as well as a Largehearted Boy playlist. Also, I will be doing an event at Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn on May 26 with a couple friends (details TBA).

I'll put some notes about the book below, but like a public radio or tv broadcaster, I must pause here to say that if you appreciate the book and/or me, the best thing you can do other than buying a copy is to rate it and leave a review on sites like Amazon and Goodreads. Like so much else in life these days, publishing is beholden to algorithms, and the algorithms reward activity and engagement. That means that you can help books you like just by giving them a rating and writing, "Book. Has sentences. Yes." Even one-star ratings are more useful to a book (generally) than no reviews at all. (Of course, we writers hope you will give nothing but five-star ratings and long, considered reviews!)

My friend Eric Schaller (whose new collection Voice of the Stranger you should check out) and I have one fundamental disagreement: Eric likes all the appendages of story notes, introductions, afterwords, etc. in collections and I dislike them quite strongly. (Eric mentions me in the story notes of Voice of the Stranger, knowing exactly what he's doing. And yes, though I completely disapprove of such things being in collections, nonetheless I read them all.) Many books I cherish are, I think, diminished by such filler. Nonetheless, I seem to be in a minority in believing this.

I am not about to write a bunch of story notes here. The stories are what they are and should be taken as such. However, I think I should talk about these stories' relationship to the idea of "horror". After all, Third Man is marketing this as their first horror book. Two of the stories, "Hunger" and "Patrimony", were published in horror/dark fantasy magazines (Nightmare and Black Static). A friend told me that the first story, which I think of as a bit weird but not horrific, gave them nightmares. Other people have asked me, "Are there stories in the book that I can read even if I don't like horror stories?"

I will be curious to see what reviewers within the horror field make of the book, if it gets any reviews from horror afficionados. I expect (fear?) they will not see it as a collection of horror stories. Because in a strict sense, it's really not. Yet we didn't even market Blood as a horror collection and despite our attempts to get it read as litfic, it only got reviewed as horror or weird fiction, so ... [insert shrug here]. I would be perfectly happy to be seen as a horror writer or a writer of weird fiction. It's the genre I have the oldest and deepest attachment to. I have resisted in the past only because I do not want to disappoint readers who come expecting to be scared or grossed out. But my wonderful editor at Third Man, Chet Weise, who read the manuscript without knowing anything about it or about me, decided it's Horror (yes, capital H!) for interesting reasons that I have come around to embracing. The monsters are human, the horrors existential.

Here, then, on the book's official birthday, a guide to the horrors therein:

How Is It Horror?

"After the End of the End of the World": We live in apocalypse. I don't know a horror greater than this. The pain and suffering of living things is constant and it is exacerbated by the actions of the human species as we drive death into the biosphere. This story aims for something like transcendence, but that transcendence is based in trying to deal with the greatest horror imaginable.

"The Last Vanishing Man": A quiet, rueful story about deep histories, and the horror is in those histories, not the present time of any of the narrators. History is ghosts all the way down, and some of them are scary.

"Winnipesaukee Darling": This is probably the nicest, least horrifying story in the book. I am very fond of all of the characters, messy though they be. However, as with "Last Vanishing Man", there is horrifying history here.

"Killing Fairies": A story about what people do to each other, thus a horror story. For me, the greatest horror is the least supernatural here, and that is the roommate. But there is something of a metaphysical concept in the fairy creature that may or may not exist in the story, and that metaphysical concept proposes a universe of sadism.

"Hunger": As traditional a ghost story as I've ever written. Though I think it has a happy-ish ending, there's some ghostliness, death, and gore to get through before that.

"Mass": Our entanglements with other human beings can be horrifying. Like many of the stories in the book, this one is about what we do after the horrific events. How do we go forward, how do we live on?

"At the Edge of the Forest": Though there may be some ways to interpret this story as supernatural, its main concern is what happens to a character who has chosen to believe he lives in a horror story.

"Wild Longing": More horror in the past, more lives that could have been more free. More ghosts.

"A Suicide Gun": Though I hope this story is about many things, one of the reasons I wrote it was to explore the horror that is masculinity.

"The Ballad of Jimmy and Myra": A comedy at heart, this story almost didn't make it into the book because it is so ghastly. It is horrified not by its two main characters (who admittedly do terrible things) but by a culture that exploits weakness, trauma, and emotion.

"Patrimony": A story that calls out the horror of creating new life in a world of suffering.

"On the Government of the Living": More apocalypse, though farther along than in "After the End...". More children in a world of hurt. A Kafkaesque parable with a Foucauldian title.

"A Liberation": More slow apocalypse. I swear that when I wrote it I thought this was a sweet story. I keep forgetting it's full of corpses.

"The Box": A last kiss of death and resurrection.



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