News & Blog

The good folks at online literary magazine Upcoming4.me are running an article by me on the story behind Die and Stay Dead. Here’s a taste:

When you’re writing the first book in a series — especially when it’s a fantasy series — you need to spend a good deal of time building the world in which it takes place. But with the second book, that hurdle is gone. Now, your characters have a chance to fully inhabit and explore the world you’ve created. That’s what I hoped to accomplish with Die and Stay Dead…I could expand upon what I’d already built and give Trent, the series protagonist who has only recently had his eyes opened to this secret world of magic and monsters, a chance to explore and make new discoveries. It allowed me to bring him to secret locales hidden all around the city, even one within the walls of the famous New York Public Library branch on 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue (you know, the one everyone who’s not a New Yorker knows from Ghostbusters).

In other good news, Rue Morgue, one of my favorite magazines, has a rave review of Die and Stay Dead in their November issue. It’s a capsule review, so I’ll just reprint the whole thing here:

Demons and revenants stalk the streets of New York City once again in Nicholas Kaufmann’s sequel to Dying Is My Business. Die and Stay Dead builds on the mystery set up in the first installment — that of the history of the narrator, Trent, a demon-fighter who cannot die and has no memories of his past — and Kaufmann keeps the tension high in this energetic page turner.

Pretty snazzy, huh? Have you ordered your copy of Die and Stay Dead yet?

Did you miss the reading John Langan and I did at the New York Review of Science Fiction last week? Well, fear not! Examiner.com has a write-up of the event so you can feel like you were there! Here’s what the author of the article, Mark Blackman, has to say about my reading in particular:

Taking the podium, Amy Goldschlager introduced the first reader of the night, Bram Stoker Award, Shirley Jackson Award- and Thriller Award-nominated author Nicholas Kaufmann (nicholaskaufmann.com), who read an excerpt from his new novel, Die and Stay Dead, a follow-up to Dying is My Business (St. Martin’s Press). Opposed by a small group seeking a perilous grimoire, necromancy intrudes on a fannish (or perhaps, in this context, mundane) event, a medieval festival in Lower Manhattan’s Battery Park (the Battery is really down) in the form of mind-controlled living dead called revenants. The situation is further complicated by the presence as well of a flash mob of fake zombie walkers, and, in the confusion, the protagonist is abducted by the necromancer’s real rotting corpses.

Unfortunately, that’s not quite an accurate description of the scene I read. It’s actually a conflation of two different narratives, the scene I read (which takes place during a zombie walk in Battery Park) and an anecdote I told before I started reading about how there’s a scene in the first book that takes place at the Medieval Festival in Ft. Tryon Park, which I only mentioned in order to illustrate a theme in the series of actual supernatural threats intruding upon gatherings of fantasy and horror fandom. But no biggie. Blackman goes on to write:

The audience of about 30 included Richard Bowes, David Cruces, Derrick Hussey, Kim Kindya, Gordon Linsner (sic), James Ryan, Terence Taylor and Nick’s mom.

See? I told you my mom was going to be there.

Reminder: John Langan and I are reading tonight in NYC!

Here is all the info!

Be there or be SCARE…okay, I don’t even know what that means. Just be there!

Folks, if you read and liked Die and Stay Dead (or Dying Is My Business, for that matter), please consider reviewing it on Amazon, Goodreads, or your blog. We really need to get the word out there if you want this series to continue. Even just spreading the word among your friends helps!

Thanks for your support! We now return you to your regularly scheduled kvetching about Doctor Who…