I’ve been sitting on this news for a good long while now, waiting for the chance to finally talk about this, but it only got officially announced recently. (I actually didn’t know it had been announced yet. You can’t find it on Google, though it seems it appeared in Publisher’s Marketplace. That’s as good an excuse as any to talk about it!)
I have two new books coming out from Sourcebooks! The first one, A FAMILY OF KILLERS, is planned to come out in August, followed by another book a year later. Here was the news as it went out to PM: “Bryce Moore’s (The Perfect Place to Die and Don’t Go to Sleep) A Family of Killers, a new historical horror. When a young man hears of a string of disappearances in southeastern Kansas, he goes to investigate and stays the night with the unsettling Bender family. As he learns more about them, he makes a grisly discovery that will change his world forever. To Annie Berger at Sourcebooks Fire, in a two-book deal, for publication in summer 2024, by Eddie Schneider at JABberwocky Literary Agency (World).”
So a few things. First, yes, it’s another historical horror. (I mean, it just says it right up there.) The second book will be another one as well. Both of them are based on serial killers. The Bloody Benders were a family (Mom, Dad, Son, Daughter) who killed people who stayed in their roadside inn in southeast Kansas from 1870-1873. I’m actually in the middle of copy edits for it as we speak. I’ll have those done by the end of the week, and then the book is pretty much ready to go.
The second book I’ll codename BLACKOUT for now. It takes place in WWII during the bombing of Britain. I’m about 25,000 words into it, but I keep getting interrupted to work on FAMILY OF KILLERS.
FAMILY was actually one of the hardest books to write I’ve ever done. I was approaching it in the same manner I’d written my other two historical thrillers, only to realize 2/3rds of the way through that my main character was riding around the frontier on a horse, and that actually, this was a western. You’d think this would have occurred to my earlier, but I’m pretty slow sometimes it seems. So I had to hit the pause button while I read a few really good westerns to make sure I had a sense for what I was doing. Not that this is your typical cowboys vs. ranchers novel. It’s still very much a Bryce Moore book, if that makes sense. But it required a different approach than anything I’ve done before.
Anyway. It’s done, and I’m very happy with the result. I can’t wait for it to start to see the light of day. This is my third historical thriller/horror, and I feel like I’m getting better at the pacing and the nuances of the genre.
If you’ve ever wondered why it’s hard to have things to celebrate as an author, it’s because there’s few pieces of news that you get to celebrate with everyone all at once. When you’re trying to sell a book, you find out that a publishing house is taking it to acquisitions, but there’s no guarantee they’ll buy it. They make an offer, but there’s no guarantee the negotiations will go smoothly. You sign the contract, but there’s still no guarantee the book will get printed. You get printed, but you don’t know how well the sales are.
I know this sounds like a real First World Problem complaint, but it means the celebration comes in dribs and dribbles. So I generally celebrate pay checks. 🙂
Writing historical thrillers wasn’t what I would have guessed I write the most of, back when I was starting out, but they’re a good blend of things I like to do: research and writing. I’m excited to share some new books with you all soon.
Congrasts
Thanks!