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When exactly did the word “witch” become a label one wears with pride?

Today, the word evokes images of power and success, emblazoned on everything from mugs lining the shelves of Target to Instagram and #WitchTok posts. What was once a pink glittery “girl boss” in loopy font is now “100% that witch” in glittery black loopy font. The message is the same, though. This is a woman who has her life together and is doing all the things.

The witch: she’s having a moment.

Maybe you’re lucky enough to live in a town where bigfoot is sighted so often you need bigfoot crossing signs. Or a town with a lake so well-stocked that every cast yields reptilian monsters. Or one where midnight visits from flashlight-headed pterodactyls and woman-faced wolves are common. But chances are you don’t. Cryptids—those beasts that science doesn’t (yet) acknowledge but so many eye-witnesses do—don’t always come to you. Sometimes you gotta go to them.

And that means a road trip.

Heading to New York Comic Con this year (10/6–10/9)? Make sure to stop by booth 2941 to say hi, and keep this schedule handy to catch our author signings and book giveaways.

Oh, and by the way, #QuirkTurns20 this year. To celebrate, we’re bringing back our secret password giveaway throughout the show. If you’re going to NYCC, recite the password to a Quirker behind the booth to receive a prize. *Limited quantity available!*

Secret password: QUIRK TURNS 20

When I was in junior high, I wanted to read Carrie Fisher’s first novel, Postcards from the Edge. So for Christmas, I asked my mom for the book.

My mom, however, didn’t think that was an appropriate gift for a 13-year old. She’d heard that the book was an unflinching look at Fisher’s drug addiction. Concerned about such undue influence, she did not want me to read it.

That decision did not sit well with me, so I checked out the book from the local library and read it in secret.

We’ve all got our ghosts. Some of them simply stick around a lot longer than others. For my new novel, Ghost Eaters, the idea had been haunting the back of my brain for years.

Five-ish, to be (kind of) exact.

I’ve been a fan of David Lynch ever since high school, when I recklessly watched a VHS of Eraserhead alone at one in the morning. Such an experience leaves its mark. As it turns out, my latest novel, the speculative thriller Dare to Know—about a company that can calculate the precise time of one’s death with perfect accuracy—has been described as “Lynchian.” Cool!

But what does “Lynchian” really mean? David Foster Wallace tried to define it as the “irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.” (Pretty fancy talk for a guy who kept doing a running joke about Depend adult undergarments in Infinite Jest.)

But there’s more to Lynch than just that macabre/mundane tension, DFW! Instead of one totalizing formula, I feel there are several distinct tendencies that recur in Lynch’s work—and yeah, some of those tendencies also show up in Dare to Know.

So settle in with your coffee and cherry pie—or garmonbozia, if you’re hardcore—and let’s look at what makes something Lynchian.