PRE ORDER BOOK ONE: THE QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS (ebook, paper or hardback)
Los Angeles, the eighties.
Cosmic mysteries
Weird crimes
Gothic rock
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.
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.
Written by Matt Maxwell, the HAZELAND series tells stories of California slipping not into the sea, but a far weirder place entirely.
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.
Cover art by Gabriel Hardman from the Broken Eye Books edition. If you've got this, you've got a genuine collector's item.
The second book in the series, All Waters are Graves, immediately follows on from Queen of No Tomorrows. Cait is left hanging on by her fingernails, losing her identity, her focus, her job and maybe even her sanity. She's hearing voices that can't be and seeing things that can't exist. Something waits out not only in the Pacific but in every body of water, every stream, every droplet of rain that never falls in Los Angeles. And it wants.
Following will be the short story collection, Fake Believe. Expanding the world and cast of the Hazeland books, these stories run on several different orbits. Here's a taste: A private detective digs at the secret behind gentrification in downtown, A girl at a mysterious block party confronts her past and future and a place that might not even exist, a ragtag crew of filmmakers chases down the Bigfoot of the Southland, a gypsy cab driver finds himself commandeered for a fare that he can scarcely explain or understand, two luckless strongarm men try to rob the wrong bar on the wrong night, Cait MaCready attends an auction where she is one of the featured items and finally, a band finally finds its audience in the worst possible way.
ASPHALT TONGUES will be out sometime in 2024 probably. Probably.
Hazeland art and design lives over here. Go give it a click, won't you?