Grill's Brandy Bread

Nyden McNeil drives forty-one minutes every Thursday to a dying dive bar in Hemet, California, and has done it for five years. He tells himself he comes for the loosening — for the amber light and the bad karaoke and the ordinary human warmth of strangers getting through their week. He does not tell himself the truth, which is that he comes to make sure the building is still standing. To press a finger against a wound. Five years ago, in the worst eleven minutes of his life, Nyden used a gift he doesn't have a name for to write a demon out of existence on a cocktail napkin. He felt it look at him in the instant before it came apart — not surprised, not afraid. Memorizing his face. He's been waiting ever since. When Pyre Carrion begins to return — a too-still cigarette, a shadow that doesn't match its coat, a cold draft that arrives ahead of a smell no one else can find — it doesn't go for Nyden. It goes for Serenity, the woman who throws herself a birthday in the bar once a month because there is no one left to throw her one, whose grief is as warm and steady as a candle flame. And Nyden understands with sickening clarity what he has always understood and never wanted to face: the thing doesn't just want to feed. It wants him to watch. He is a witness. He has always been a witness. He has the gift and the notebook and five years of carefully preserved inaction, and a bar full of people who have no idea what lives in the corner with them, and he is running out of Thursdays. Grill's Brandy Bread is a literary horror novel about the space between seeing and doing, between the gift we carry and the moment we choose to use it. It is set in the Inland Empire's dive bars and orange groves and long bright highways, and it is about loneliness the way the best horror always is — not as backdrop, but as the thing the darkness feeds on, and the thing, in the end, that starves it out. For fans of Stephen Graham Jones, Paul Tremblay's A Head Full of Ghosts**, and Joe Hill — a story about a man who can write monsters out of existence, and the question of what it costs to finally put the pen to the page.**