(2/) Next, we get a paragraph of set up, followed by a paragraph of inciting incident: now everything is about to change. We end with a pitch to the literary reader that ends in a bloody twist.
If you have multiple cravings, this blurb says, it will satisfy them all . . .
Lucy Rose's The Lamb
Blurb: A FOLK TALE. A HORROR STORY. A LOVE STORY. AN ENCHANTMENT. Margot and Mama have lived by the forest since Margot can remember. When Margot isn't at school, they spend quiet days together in their cottage, waiting for strangers to knock on their door. Strays, Mama calls them. Mama loves the strays. She feeds them wine, keeps them warm. Then she satisfies her burning appetite by picking apart their bodies. But Mama's want is stronger than her hunger sometimes, and when a white-toothed stray named Eden turns up in the heart of a snowstorm, little Margot must confront the shifting dynamics of her family, untangle her own desires and make a bid for freedom. With this tender coming-of-age tale, debut novelist Lucy Rose explores how women swallow their anger, desire and animal instincts - and wrings the relationship between mother and daughter until blood drips from it.
Blurbs in the wild (1/2): How do we pitch horror stories to a literary crowd? One way is to hold back the horror until they're hooked in. The blurb for @lucyrosecreates.bsky.social The Lamb begins by keeping the reader's options open – folk tale, horror story, love story, enchantment. Take your pick
A 'cremulator' is involved, apparently. The Terminator film series is not a patch on The Cremulator film series in my head: 'You'll be dust.'
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Of course they can't, they were trained on internet conversations . . .
www.newscientist.com/article/2516...
(2/2) Best of all are the final lines, archly advising you to buy & read the book – or contact Dirk himself; plus an endorsement from none other than Adams himself. This is knowing, self-referential & delighted with its own absurdity – you will immediately either hate it or fall in love with it.
Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
Blurb and quotes: What do a dead cat, a computer whiz-kid, an Electric Monk who believes the world is pink, quantum mechanics, a Chronologist over two hundred years old, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (poet), and pizza have in common? Apparently not much; until Dirk Gently, self-styled private investigator, sets out to prove the fundamental interconnectedness of all things by solving a mysterious murder, assisting a mysterious professor, unravelling a mysterious mystery, and eating a lot of pizza – not to mention saving the entire human race from extinction along the way (at no extra charge). To find out more, read this book (better still, buy it then read it) – or contact Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. 'A thumping good detective-ghost-horror-who dunnit-time travel-romantic-musical-comedy-epic' - Douglas Adams
Blurbs in the wild (1/2): @panmacmillan.bsky.social know how to have fun with a funny book. First, we have two increasingly ridiculous lists – the first asking a question and the second list (deliberately over-deploying the word mysterious) answering in an unilluminating but also intriguing way.
(2/2) Key to the power of these lists are the verbs and adjectives: shadowy, purged, eerie, stalk, capture, sweeps, 'cure.'
The blurb has already taken us into the world of the novel.
Kay Dick's They
Blurb: This is Britain: but not as we know it. THEY begin with a dead dog, shadowy footsteps, confiscated books. Soon the National Gallery is purged; eerie towers survey the coast; mobs stalk the countryside destroying artworks - and those who resist. THEY capture dissidents - writers, painters, musicians, even the unmarried and childless - in military sweeps, 'curing' these subversives of individual identity. Survivors gather together as cultural refugees, preserving their crafts, creating, loving and remembering. But THEY make it easier to forget ...
Blurbs in the wild: (1/2) @faberbooks.bsky.social reissue of Kay Dick's unsettling THEY has a blurb that is having great fun with its title. Making the perfectly ordinary word THEY sound increasingly sinister & ominous, the blurb, through a series of lists describes how THEY change the world ...
(4/4) . . .invoking a past world that already feels vaguely dreamlike and half-forgotten for those that never experienced it firsthand, but also tying the stories together into a whole.
This is how you pitch a short story collection: you make it feel more than the sum of its many parts.
(3/4) Paragraph two tells you what you’re going to get. Five sentences give us five stories in five alternate countries . . . Tales adjacent to who we are and what we know. This is the promise of fantasy.
A brief paragraph three argues why you should read it . . .
(2/4) Paragraph one introduces our author, offers up her credentials (awards and novels) and suggests both contemporary and antecedent writers of note whose work Goss’s own convincingly stands alongside.
Theodora Goss's Letters from an Imaginary Country plus magnetic alphabet letters
Blurb: Roam through the captivating stories of World Fantasy and Mythopoeic Award winner Theodora Goss (the Athena Club trilogy). This themed collection of imaginary places, with three new stories, recalls Susanna Clarke’s alternate Europe and the surreal metafictions of Jorge Luis Borges. The infamous girl monsters of nineteenth-century fiction gather in London and form their own club. In the imaginary country of Thüle, characters from folklore band together to fight a dictator. An intrepid girl reporter finds the hidden land of Oz―and joins its invasion of our world. The author writes the autobiography of her alternative life and a science fiction love letter to Budapest. The White Witch conquers England with snow and silence. Deeply influenced by the author’s Hungarian childhood during the regime of the Soviet Union, each of these intricate stories engages with storytelling and identity, including Goss's own.
(1/4) @theodoragoss.bsky.social and @tachyonpub.bsky.social brilliant Letters from an Imaginary Country does what is says on the tin. These remarkable short stories take you places you didn’t know existed. The book’s blurb is a three parter:
(2/2) Here’s the tale. Here are the themes. Here’s why the author knows what she’s talking about. Take it, or leave it. The book, like the employers our heroine Teresa has to deal with, couldn’t give a shit about what the reader wants. This is what’s on offer. My advice? Take it. It’s what we need.
Joanne McNeil's Wrong Way and Princess Peach toy car
Blurb: For years, Teresa has passed from one job to the next, settling into long stretches of time, struggling to build her career in any field or unstick herself from an endless cycle of labor. The dreaded move from one gig to another is starting to feel unbearable. When a recruiter connects her with a contract position at AllOver, it appears to check all her prerequisites for a “good” job. It’s a fintech corporation with progressive hiring policies and a social justice-minded mission statement. Their new service for premium members: a functional fleet of driverless cars. The future of transportation. As her new-hire orientation reveals, the distance between AllOver’s claims and its actions is wide, but the lure of financial stability and a flexible schedule is enough to keep Teresa driving forward. Joanne McNeil, who often reports on how the human experience intersects with labor and technology brings blazing compassion and criticism to Wrong Way, examining the treacherous gaps between the working and middle classes wrought by the age of AI. Within these divides, McNeil turns the unsaid into the unignorable, and captures the existential perils imposed by a nonstop, full-service gig economy.
(1/2) Plotless, dreamlike, meandering, Joanne McNeil’s and @fsgbooks.bsky.social Wrong Way is the mid-21st-century work novel par excellence. The blurb on the back, like the book it describes, is a long no-nonsense straightforward explanation of what you’re going to get. No hard sell. No hooks...
Cover for Colin Brush's EXO - a figure runs towards what looks like a thick fog/smoke cloud. The title, in large text, runs down the centre of the image, author's name along the bottom.
UK paperback edition of EXO by @colinthecopywriter.bsky.social is out today!
zenoagency.com/news/exo-uk-...
Published by @diversionbooks.bsky.social.
(3/3) . . . what you're reading isn't what quite you're reading. It suggests that if you like having your expectations played with then this might just be for you.
(2/3): . . . dying world, burn, hellbent, warring factions, taunt, battlefield boast, deaths, war, war, wars. But between these words another story is being told: a letter, unlikely correspondence, romantic – and the final word – 'right?' – questioning the entire proposition. The blurb says . . .
Amal-el-Mohtar and Max Gladstone's This is How You Lose the Time War
Blurb: Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading. Red and Blue, two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions, strike up an unlikely correspondence. But what started as a taunt, a battlefield boast, grows into something more: something epic and romantic. Something that could change the past and the future. The discovery of their bond will mean their deaths. There's still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win that war. That's how war works. Right?
Blurbs in the wild (1/3): A war story is a love story. And the quietly subversive blurb sneaks up on you. In @amalelmohtar.com and @maxgladstone.bsky.social Quercus-published This is How You Lose the Time War, the blurb ought to be bleak, filled with the language of anger and violence: . . .
(2/2) . . . who you disagree with to the point of death. Here, it's not what the protagonist wants, but what's in the way of them getting it.
Katabasis by RF Kuang
Blurb: Grad student Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become the brightest mind in the field of analytic magick. But the only person who can make her dream come true is dead and – inconveniently – in Hell. And Alice, along with her biggest rival Peter Murdoch, is going after him. But Hell is not as the philosophers claim, its rules are upside-down, and if she’s going to get out of there alive, she and Peter will have to work together. That’s if they can agree on anything. Will they triumph, or kill each other trying?
Blurbs in the wild: (1/2) @rfkuang.bsky.social Katabasis' blurb is all problems & stakes. The first paragraph gives the set up: to be a best magician. All else is obstacles in our hero's way: a dead facilitator, a visit to Hell, the rival whose help you need but . . .
Lovely early Christmas present for Exo, being part of @libraryjournal.bsky.social selection of the Best SF Books of 2025.
@zenoagency.bsky.social @awfulagent.bsky.social
