Some bumper sticker slogans to help center you:
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CARCOSA BUT BEAUTIFUL
FAKE BELIEVE
HORROR AND FANTASY AND MAGIC REALISM
CRIME AND MAGIC ARE NOT SO DISSIMILAR
GHOSTS ARE WOUNDS IN TIME
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Hazeland is an intergenre work, though I'm drawn to the horror category if not for the simple fact that you're allowed to have a tonal range there that other genres don't want to touch. Urban fantasy? Yeah, only the books don't have any resemblance to the vast majority of that whole mode. Different thing entirely.
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There's a couple blog entries where I talk about thought behind the series -
Crime and magic at The Means at Hand
Carcosa is Here, Dreamland is Not
Made of Light Like the Rest of Us
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And if you're more visual, I get you -
Influence map for the Queen of No Tomorrows (and blueprint for the Hazeland setting)
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All that said, it's easier to see rather than to have me yammer at you making promises about what you'll read (see Marketing and Other Lies for the reasons why). Anyways, Hazeland will never be up for awards, short or long list. It won't make you smarter. It won't make you a certified good person for reading them. My hope is that they'll entertain, maybe even momentarily move you as a reader. They won't fix you. Fiction doesn't fix you. Fiction isn't praxis. Don't mess with that greasy kids' stuff.
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ORDER BOOK ONE: THE QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS (ebook, paper or hardback)
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Los Angeles, the eighties.
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Cosmic mysteries
Weird crimes
Gothic rock
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Cait MacReady is an ex-punk kid, ex-librarian and ex-forger of both rare and expensive occult volumes. What started as an experiment in creating her own, original work ended in a confrontation with the queen of No Tomorrows on the streets of Los Angeles and even in the storming skies above it.
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Cait is finding out that the city she once thought familiar is slowly changing and that the color and wildness of the club crowds is drab and pale compared to what waits between words and worlds.
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Written by Matt Maxwell, the HAZELAND series tells stories of California slipping not into the sea, but a far weirder place entirely.
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Starting originally with inspiration from the short story "Chunked" as published in Broken Eye's Tomorrow's Cthulhu, Matt Maxwell weaves narratives of crimes and outsider cultures taking place in a world that once used to be ours.
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Cover art by Gabriel Hardman from the Broken Eye Books edition on the left. If you've got this, you've got a genuine collector's item. 2023 cover to the right.
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The second book in the series, All Waters are Graves, immediately follows on from Queen of No Tomorrows.
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Cait MacReady wrote a book, a book that the powerful Queen of No Tomorrows knew about before it was even started and wanted to take for herself. The struggle between them destroyed the Queen and it very nearly destroyed Cait.
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Six months after, she’s sleepwalking through life, trying to convince herself that she’s recovered, that she’s still alive. But she’s hearing voices, not the Queen or the god she tried to call down. Something from the water, something that haunts the edge of sleep. Instead of giving in, Cait fights it but her strength can't hold out forever.
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When Cait crosses paths with an Appalachian witch in search of her lost brother and a local developer ends up dead with water in his lungs from Cretaceous seas and guts filled with fish that went extinct millions of years ago, Cait finds that denial and running away from what happened will only work for so long. Then the LAPD come calling and worse than that, something out of time is testing the boundaries of the shoreline and wondering if it is safe to come forth now. Waiting to see if it can stop being the Thing That Wants and instead become Thing That Takes.
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But how can Cait hold on when the Thing in the waters knows what she’s afraid of? How can she resist the call of the drowned chorus? How can she fight when the thing can call anything that’s touched the water, when the waters themselves remember all that has happened within them? And those waters are only rising.​​
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You can order All Waters Are Graves here.
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Seven collected short stories from the streets of Hazeland. Shifting the focus from Cait MacReady, we see the variety of strangeness in the city, both from natives and new visitors. Theoretically, you could start here, though the last story works better if you’ve read the other two books. I think of this as a bunch of episodes of Night Gallery, things not quite long enough for their own novels but strong stories all the same, heavy on the texture and setting.
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A veteran returns to his childhood neighborhood finding it gone but for one house and the ghosts within it need his help.
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A private detective digs at the secret behind gentrification in downtown and the fabricated and inhuman residents moving in.
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A girl at a mysterious block party confronts her past and future and a place that might not even exist.
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A ragtag crew of filmmakers chases down the Bigfoot of the Southland and instead finds something terrible that wants to be set free.
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An industrial/goth singer flees to LA and finds that someone just like her already blazed that trail and haunts her assumed identity.
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Two luckless strongarm men try to rob the wrong bar on the wrong night and find a witch in need of entertainment.
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A book forger attends an auction where her career is one of the featured items.
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MY GIFTS ARE HUNGRY (2026 - Highway 62 Press)
This one’s in progress. I’m writing the last fifty or so pages as we speak. Going to Kickstarter for funding in May, should be out by August/September depending on everything.
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Grace Cather is running away from home, only she doesn’t know it just yet. Where better to run than to Hollywood, where all dreams come true? She’s spending her first night there crashing the Last Prayer Club, where the Queen of No Tomorrows herself is holding court for a special night where all are welcome. That night, she’s offered a place to stay with other girls who’ve also found themselves leaving home and trying to find another.
Of course, she accepts, unaware that the house itself is far more than it seems. Enmeshed in the plans of the Queen and finding that she’s the only one that the ghost in the house wants to speak to, Grace is initiated into a series of secrets that come together in a shattering realization of her place in things and the plans of others.
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Cover's in progress. Might be this. Might be something else.
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Kickstarter for this book coming in May, 2026.