Chuck Wendig: Terribleminds

The day is upon us when The Staircase In The Woods achieves its final form, which is to say, trade paperback. (Okay, no, I don’t literally know if it’ll be its final form — I only mean, when this happens, the hardcover edition phases out, and the paperback edition becomes the dominant edition they reprint as long as said reprinting is deserved.)

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Let’s just get procurement portals out of the way now —

First, if you want a signed and personalized copy from me whereupon I provide you with your VERY OWN LIMINAL ROOM AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRCASE, hey, you can order a copy from Doylestown in the next few days and I’ll be signing and getting those shipped out next week.

There’s also your local indie, or bookshop-dot-org as options.

For the paperback, there’s also AMZ, B&N, Powells, BAM, and of course in audio and ebook the book is still existing at all the expected places.

And all that being said —

Maybe instead you just wanna come find me and grab the book at The Twisted Spine this Thursday the 5th, where I will hang out with Clay McLeod Chapman. (Details here.) Orrrrr Thursday the 26th where I get to hang with Eric LaRocca at Thrillerdelphia for his newest, Wretch. (Deets here.)

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It’s taken a while to get to paperback release, in part because the hardcover sold very well. I’ve talked about this before, and I say it not to brag, but in hardcover it’s sold more than the full current HC + PB runs of Wayward and Black River Orchard. (Er, not combined.) Something about this book is hitting with people, and I think it’s a polarizing read for some folks, and I think that was true of this book’s spiritual cousin, The Book of Accidents, too. (If TBOA was about family, TSITW is about friendship. And they’re both ostensibly very oblique looks at The Haunted House genre.)

It’s been a nice journey with this book — though I don’t know that I’ve had any really not-nice journeys with a book, barring maybe the Star Wars books, and perhaps the disappointment that Wayward didn’t quite get there in terms of sales or even awareness levels. Staircase has lived a good life so far and I hope it keeps getting to live that life — I’ll admit a small little sad-face-emoji that it didn’t get love at the Stokers this year, but that’s just me feeling Peppermint Petty, because the books that did get recognized are beyond deserving. (And I’ll further admit that my sad-face-emoji turns to the angry-face-emoji when I see that books like When The Wolf Comes Home, Coffin Moon, Victorian Psycho, Vanishing Daughters, Bat Eater, At Dark I Become Loathsome, Crafting for Sinners, all failed to get noms, but that’s life in the big city, and you should check out all those novels ASAFP.)

I’ve had many folks ask me about a sequel to this book, and I’ll say there are no plans for one — while there’s a sort of open door at the end of this, I do think the story for our characters concludes, and sequels to books like this just don’t hit in the marketplace the way I’d hope. (See: Wayward.) That said, if something really tickles me, I’d consider it.

I’ll note that I’ve had in mind for a good year or more now a book that actually gathers a number of characters from my other books — Miriam Black’s daughter, Lulu; Oliver, from TBOA; a character from Staircase that I won’t mention; Pete Corley from Wanderers/Wayward — and kind of sends them on a strange adventure together, sort of an oops our universes discarded us and now we’re here thing, with a great evil to confront in a mad world. That’s a maybe-one-day thing, but I can’t imagine there’s a market for it or that my publisher would be hot to trot for it.

In the meantime, there miiiiight be some loose little threads — like diaphanous spider strands, drifting on the wind — catching on the story in The Calamities and forming a new, gleaming web.

(That book is coming out in August, and you should definitely preorder a copy through Doylestown Bookshop, and I’ll sign and personalize it and tell you who the ancestor is of your fiendish demonic brood, you know, for funsies.)

Ooh, one last piece of trivia —

So, this book has been living in my brain for a long time — many of my books do that, and I often note that when I have ideas I generally try to chase them away, and it’s the ones that keep fucking pestering me that get written down. And this particular idea is actually the very first one that starts my Notes-app BOOK IDEAS file I’ve been maintaining for years and years — and so when it came time to pitch a new middle grade book, I pitched Staircase first as a middle grade book. I know. I know. I aged down the characters to middle-grade, and there was no “grown-up” component (i.e. the POV that dominates this book now), and I pitched it and my editor was like ha ha what the fuck this is too dark, no, nooo, no no no, and so we ended up with Monster Movie! instead — and that became a kind of spiritual cousin to this book, in its own way. Books about friendship and fear! I think if you read both you’ll find some connective tissue.

But somewhere out there is an alternate universe where this book was…

For kids.

*shudder*

Anyway! Paperback is out!

Tell your friends!

Tell your family!

Use it to torment your foes!

And if you’ve read the book, please leave a review in a reputable review receptacle, thank you.

OKAY COOL, ENJOY THE BOOK, LOVE YOU, BE SAFE AND SANE OUT THERE, BYE

p.s. the book also comes out in the UK on Thursday the 5th, where it was a Sunday Times Bestseller (!?) — cover here:

Dorothy Parker famously (but probably not really) said, “I hate to write, but I love having written,” which is a sentiment I don’t largely understand or agree with in the broader sense, but certainly have experienced during a kick-to-the-nuts writing day where the words arrive with the effort of trying to do proctology on a stampeding horse while both you and the horse are blindfolded. But as it turns out, there’s a sort of third level to this notion, one altogether more troubling and ultimately even less understandable: “I hate to write, I hate to have written, I mostly just want to be published.” Or, “I really just want to have money.” Or, “I actually want to just use as few keystrokes as possible to make my computer barf up stolen artistic authorial valor onto the internet in the hopes of charging absolute rubes a couple bucks for the narrative puke I hastily urged into a book-shaped pile.”

What I’m trying to say is, I read that NYT article about author — sorry, “author,” with airquotes as pissily vigorous as you can make them — Coral Hart, a self-proclaimed ugggh “AI evangelist” who over the last year has made AI churn out over 200 novels across nearly two dozen pen-names.*

Reading that makes me feel so angry and so sad at the same time — some combination of fury and weary sorrow for which the Germans must have a word. It’s hard to even articulate my objection, I’m so grossed-out by that — I wasn’t even sure I could mount a cogent response to any of this that didn’t end up as just angry mouth noises and erratic gesticulations. (Which is better, one supposes, than geriatic ejaculations.) Mostly I just want to post a series of photos depicting the faces I’m making, which likely run the gamut of “trying to hold back my rising gorge” and “watching a lion eat a human baby” and “kill me kill me now all of time and all of technology and this is where we ended up oh god just go back in time and end it all before it ever began.”

So, instead, I thought I’d tackle one particular thing Coral Hart (which is itself a pseudonym, since retired) said, and it’s this:

“If I can generate a book in a day, and you need six months to write a book, who’s going to win the race?” she said.

Ahhhhh. What the fuck. Ahhhhhh. AHHHH. That’s not — that’s not how any of this works, Coral! But this smug “winner” attitude is the absolutely natural apotheosis of the Internet’s obsession with churning out content. Generic, shapeless, formless content — a slurry machine where you turn the pipe on and lorum ipsum diarrhea comes shooting out at maximum pressure. It is the natural outcome of a race-to-the-bottom low-price churn-and-burn self-publishing environment, to boot — it’s less move fast and break things and more move fast and make broken things, because who cares, dipshits will pay for it.

This is the equivalent of, “Well, if I can blow up a cow with dynamite in ten minutes, but you need three hours to butcher it, who’s going to win the race?”

But of course, in the quote — a quote which is itself a cocky, smug assertion of superiority based purely on speed — is buried a greater, uglier truth.

If I can generate a book in a day–

and you need six months to write a book–

She’s not writing anything.

And she knows that.

She’s “generating” it.

Intrinsic to this is, “ha ha, you dumbass, over there still writing books like an asshole, whereas me, I just use a computer to do it for me.”

Except, intrinsic to that is the reality that the computer didn’t make that stuff up either. You know who did? We did. Actual authors. Real writers! We wrote the stuff, the fascist techbro fuckwads stole what we wrote, and then ticks and leeches like Coral Fucking Hart are happy to drink the blood those monsters have already stolen from us. She is churning out 200 books a year not out of the ether, but by drilling into the ground and drawing up the juice of an infinity of other books**, all stolen, all turned to narrative petroleum to fuel her fantasy of being a real writer.

And that is a fantasy.

Because Coral Hart is not a real writer.

Coral Hart is an opportunistic vampire — a thief, a grifter, a lazy pick-me.

She’s not even a master vampire. No, the master vampires are the ones who built this plagiarism machine. She’s just a ghoulish neonate, a feral bloodsucker down in the sewers happy to feed on the blood-soaked fatberg formed in the tunnels by the elder lords.

She’s a “writer” the same way I’m a “chef” when I pull a frozen dinner out of the fucking microwave. Someone else did all the work and packaged it together. I just hit the buttons and set the time.

So, to remind you:

Writers who use AI —

Are not real writers.

And this comes after years, years where Authorial Discourse has worked very hard to build all these fences in order to define who gets to be a Real Writer — and up until this point, all those fences have been false, bullshit borders. They’re illusions. I’ve long said that the test is so, so simple: real writers write. That’s it. That’s what it takes to be a writer.

Writers write.

And writers who use AI?

They’re not writing, are they?

They’re churning. They’re clicking buttons. They’re stealing. They’re plagiarizing.

But they’re not writing.

And they don’t even want to be writers. Because if they wanted to be writers, guess what? They’d fucking write! They’d want to write! Because writing, even on the worst day, the hardest day, is glorious. Even when the words suck and you break your teeth from grinding them so hard, it’s still a powerful, formative experience where you take all that you know and have been and have dreamed and are afraid of — you take all of that and you turn it into something else. You crystallize it. You coalesce it. You turn all this stuff that exists invisibly in your mind and make it visible on the page, inventing new people and new worlds and strange situations and you reach for revelations about love and hate and jealousy and all the ideas both big and small. You take nothing and you make something.

So powerful.

But AI acolytes don’t do any of that.

They wait for you to do it, sure.

Then they stick their greedy teeth in and tear off a piece.

The saying goes, why would I want to read something you didn’t even bother to write, but then we must also ask, why do THEY want to do it? Why does someone want to publish something they didn’t write, didn’t conceive of, didn’t edit, didn’t gestate, didn’t birth forth across amazing and frustrating writing sessions? Because it’s all just a get-rich-quick scheme. That’s it, revealed. Coral Hart gave up the game. She doesn’t want to write.

She just wants to generate, just wants to get paid, get that money, so fuck writers, fuck readers, fuck you.

Real writers don’t use AI.

That’s the red line.

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* It’s unclear if she even makes much money at it, but she does make money teaching you how to make money at it, which is a profound irony and ultimately ends up being one of those get-rich-quick schemes where you see an ad in the paper telling you how to make all this money stuffing envelopes but what you’re stuffing the envelopes with is the exact same information you got about making money stuffing envelopes, which is to say you’re charging people money to tell them secretly that you’re scamming them and now they can scam other people too, an endless human centipede of shit being passed down the line, ass to mouth, mouth to ass.

** Note too the absolute gall she has to act cocky as fuck about this when she’s using Anthropic’s Claude, which was verifiably built on stolen books, including mine, and has been proven through a class-action suit!

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Anyway!

Buy my books! A human wrote them! (Ahem: me.) Humans edited them. Humans designed them inside and out. Humans helped sell and market them, both at a publisher and at a bookstore. You could even gasp order my newest, my demonic novel, The Calamities, coming out in August. I’ll even, as a human, sign it and personalize it and tell you who your DEMONIC PROGENITOR secretly is. Do it. Preorder it. Make us humans happy, please and thank you.

BEHOLD: A WILD (twist) APPLE APPEARS. But first: a brief digression about agricultural-industrial apple storage!

Did you know that the reason we get apples (and ostensibly a lot of other fruits and veggies) year-round, way outside their harvest period, is thanks to the magic of industrial agriculture? An apple gets picked and then is preserved in its current state through magic, which is to say the apple is fixed by the gaze of a merciless god, placed upon an accursed altar made of wyvern bones rimed with hoarfrost, and then insulted endlessly by a gamboling satyr-like figure known as the Apple Jimby, and it is these wicked insults and cursed configuration that keeps an apple fixed supernaturally in the state where it can still be eaten fresh months later.

*receives a note*

Okay never mind, it’s apparently something called “science” where they put the apples in “controlled atmosphere” (CA) storage rooms, where the apples are “put to sleep” by “gases” and “temperature.” Whatever. I was told it was the god and the Apple Jimby wyvern insult thing.

You can read about apple storage here. It’s actually fairly neat — and also interesting that each apple can’t just be stored the same way as the apple next door to it. They are each precious apple snowflakes and must be tamed and pleased according to their capricious apple whims.

I’m also to understand that the way apples truly lose their character is not in this storage but rather, once they’re out of it — taken out of controlled storage, loaded onto trucks or trains or, I like to assume, an army of Big Ag Hovercrafts, left in grocery store bins for far too long. And that’s where apples get old and weird and lose the thing that makes them what they are, and it’s why you end up with mushy, meh, mediocre lumps — the ghost of good fruit rather than good fruit itself.

All right. Onto the review.

My review of a Wild Twist apple, from Giant grocery, late-Jan:

Two “wild twists” regarding this apple come to mind —

First, that it was once known as the Sweet Cheeks apple, which is a puzzling and vaguely-porny name, and I’m fascinated by how anyone thought that was a good name for an apple, because it’s a terrible name for an apple, yet also somehow an amazing name for an apple. Especially if you were intending to cat-call the apple on the streets of Appletown, like a weird apple creeper.

Second, that for an apple once named SWEET CHEEKS and now named WILD TWIST, the apple is alarmingly mid.

It’s crunchy, not crisp. It’s moderately juicy. It’s incredibly sweet, with minimal tartness detected. The cheeks, they are sweet, and nothing else beyond that. Its taste is, you know, apple. There’s zero complexity afoot. It’s just such a dullard’s apple. I don’t hate it! It’s fine! Totally fine! I’d eat one if you gave it to me but I’d never choose it directly.

I ate it and was left with almost no impression. Like I barely have any memory of eating the apple. I know I ate it. You can watch me eat it here. But it passed through me, like winter light through a clean window.

I’m to understand that this is a Honeycrisp x Pink Lady cross, and I like both of those apples, but smash them together and you get something less than the individual parts, I guess.

This is a straight-down-the-middle 4.5/10. My initial score was a truly-median 5/10, but I feel like, “I would eat this but never seek it” drops it below that. It’s whatever. It’s fine. Meh.

Wild Twist: The wild twist is *fart noise*

Reviews in 2025: Honeycrisp, Sweetie, Crimson Crisp, Knobbed Russet, Cortland, Maiden’s Blush, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Reine des Reinettes, Ingrid Marie, Hudson’s Golden Gem, Holstein, Suncrisp, Ashmead’s Kernel, Opalescent, Orleans Reinette, Black Gilliflower, Red Delicious Double Feature, Jonathan, Ruby Mac, Crimson Topaz, Esopus Spitzenburg, Mutsu, Hunnyz, Winesap, Stayman Winesap, Winter Banana, Ribston Pippin, Rhode Island Greening, Roxbury Russet, Opal, Cosmic Crisp, Black Oxford, Ananas Reinette, Sugarbee, Granny Smith, LucyGlo/LucyRose, Ludacrisp, D’arcy Spice, Lemonade

Movies like this don’t generally get to exist.

Sorry — to rewind here a bit, I saw Iron Lung, the (very indie) Markiplier movie that adapts the David Szymanski game of the same name.

To rewind further, do you know who Markiplier is? If you have a teenager or are in any way interested in video games, you probably do — I guess you’d call him a YouTuber, which is accurate but also just feels too small. You could go with “content creator” but that also sucks, because content is just such a fucked-up AI barf word these days, as if anything created ever is just a starchy gruel lump you can shove into your brainmouth to give it something to chew on for a while. Mostly, I think of him as a very funny, very creative, and very popular dude-who-makes-videos. I don’t know that I’m a fan in the sense of weeping and shrieking and swooning dizzily as the Beatles come on stage, but my kiddo watches him, and so I started watching him, and he’s good stuff.

(He’s also a killer comedian, by the way — his Supermarket Simulator videos make me laugh heartily. I guffaw even! Guffaw.)

OKAY GOOD YES ANYWAY

He made a movie based on a video game.

And to go back to the fore of the post, it’s the kind of movie that doesn’t really get to exist any more, and I hope — nay, I pray to whatever heretic gods I can find in the gurgling crimson mess of the blood sea — that more get to happen.

Here’s why.

This is a flawed, fucked-up little sci-fi-horror movie about a convict welded into a primitive submarine, flung into an ocean of literal blood on some distant moon, and then asked to search blindly in the crimson deep for Something Mysterious while also being hunted by Something Mysterious. There’s patchy backstory and staticky communication and — I dunno what the fuck is going on. Ghosts? Some kind of apocalypse? A plague? A blood god? Again: I really don’t know. I could not tell you what the fuck I just watched. And I really like that I could not tell you what the fuck I just watched. It brings this fascinating vibe of something… Lynchian, paired with the claustrophic (and bloody) early work of Sam Raimi. A little bit Eraserhead, a little bit Evil Dead. A soupçon of Event Horizon, too.

(This is actually somewhat ironic then that Iron Lung was up against a Sam Raimi movie at the box office, duking it out.)

(And Iron Lung won that battle on Friday, and almost won the weekend.)

(And Iron Lung kicked the everloving shit out of Melania, thus proving that, in fact, there may be a god. Or gods. Or a sentient blood ocean. I dunno.)

Anyway. Here’s the thing — I just feel like, for the most part, movies and even television shows have to kind of be One Specific Thing now. Everything genre is Marvel Star Wars Stranger Things, and non-genre is probably something a little more high-minded than that, and it’s not that I hate any of these things. I don’t. I’m a basic bish a lot of times. I am not a fancy man. But while I may like and appreciate these things, I also really, really like weird-ass shit, shit that doesn’t belong, shit that doesn’t make sense, just some real head-fuckery, and I think this film is exactly that, and I am glad it exists.

Again, is it flawed? Sure. It’s pace is off. It runs too long. Sometimes it vibes a bit much like “a guy who plays video games for a living is now starring as a guy inside a video game.” But then it reaches for these big weird gross moments, and it gets them. Markiplier has real directing chops in this — some stunning visuals and truly twitchy moments are present.

And in a world where we learn again and again that streamers want shows and movies where the plot is explained three or four times throughout to keep people who are looking at their phones from clicking elsewhere —

Well, it’s mighty fucking refreshing to get a movie that does not give one hot little rabbit shit about that. You’re just like the convict in the movie — welded into a box for two hours, given little clue or context, good luck, it’s gonna get weird down there in the blood-dark tides.

So, I dunno — see it. It’s weird. It’s neat. I’m gonna find and play the game. I hope more movies like this get to exist. I hope more Markiplier movies get to exist. This feels truly independent — and, when you learn how he made the damn thing, and how his community supported him, you’ll see just how independent this was.

MORE WEIRD-ASS INDIE MOVIES, please and thank you.

In fact, if someone could please let Markiplier make an Inscryption movie, that’d be lovely. *pushes money into defunct CD-ROM drive I have nearby*

(Oh and speaking of weird little indie horror movies, if you haven’t seen I SAW THE TV GLOW, that’s another. So. Yeah. Go see it.)

OKAY BYE