An occasional newsletter from a writer of weird things...Musings on writing, reading, and various piffle, but always a cute animal video.

Three Weeks and Counting:

Plus Reading a Novel by Keanu Reeves, How My MC's 2 Childhood Deaths Were Nearly My Own, and Animal Hugs

Sept 4, 2025

While the Gods Sleep

Book One of The Perilous Gods is currently on NetGalley and is set to release three weeks from today!

What the early reviews are saying:

And of course, this amazing endorsement:

"The pleasures of Greek mythology mixed with the dark undercurrents of contemporary fantasy."

-- Walter Jon Williams, New York Times bestselling author

What I'm Reading:

I'm sure you know by now that I'm a sucker for novels with gods as characters among us, contemporary fantasy, dark fantasy, and underworlds -- both for writing books and for reading them. I was pretty jazzed, as you can imagine, to discover The Book of Elsewhere: A Novel by Keanu Reeves. I didn't know he was a writer until now, but apparently he authors the comic series BRZRKR and recently this novel -- a spinoff of that world -- co-written with one of my favorite authors, China Miéville. Coincidentally, while trying to get the font to add the accent to Miéville's name, I ran across this article which will tell you everything I was about to only more and better: https://www.thetimes.com/culture/books/article/keanu-reeves-turning-60-graphic-violence-and-why-ive-written-a-novel-b3xcjrns8 The book came out about a year ago and has mixed reviews, as China Miéville's stuff often does, but unsurprisingly, I'm finding it to my liking. I will give a heads-up that it has frequently changing POVs and the prologue is pretty much a white room with seven, mostly unnamed, men, which took me multiple rewinds in the audiobook to parse who was doing what. Also, a couple of the chapters have been written in very passive voice (only two so far, and I'm about 1/2 way through). The story, though, is very much my jam: A tortured hero in the form of an immortal working -- more or less -- with the government. He doesn't want to die but wants to know how he might so that he can, at least, have the option. If you've liked the BRZRKR comics or Miéville's fiction, you'd be a good bet to like this.

And now, before I was able to finish The Book of Elsewhere, Katabasis has come available.

Publisher's description: Dante’s Inferno meets Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi in this all-new dark academia fantasy from R. F. Kuang, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Babel and Yellowface, in which two graduate students must put aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their professor’s soul—perhaps at the cost of their own.

Okay, seriously, how could I resist that! I'll obviously be rolling straight from The Book of Elsewhere into Katabasis.

Interestingly, I was already familiar with the term "Katabasis" since the foreword for While the Gods Sleep was written by the incomparable Natalia Theodoridou (author of Sour Cherry), and it begins with this:

"Katabasis, a descent to the underworld, has been a compelling subject for me ever since I first read the Odyssey—a compulsory part of the curriculum in Greek schools when I was a student. As a reader and as a writer, I’m also intrigued by retelling old stories because it feels to me that this reworking hinges on taking risks and pulling on whatever threads tickle our particular anxieties. Sometimes, I think of retelling itself as a kind of katabasis, a descent into material that feels at once familiar and foreign, where one might find his way but lose herself. Down here, on these shores that have been visited by so many before, we’re met by the welcoming soup of non-existence as well as the fearsome confrontation with one’s insignificance: we are one shade among many, all of us drinking, forgetfully, from the same river."

And here's another glimpse into While the Gods Sleep I'll share with you. The book description for While the Gods Sleep begins with the tagline about Ty's two near-death experiences as a child:

The first time Ty died he was five, the second time he was seven. He's always believed his third death will be the final one, and now he may find out.

More than twenty years after his near-death experiences and the visions of terrifying gods that came with them, Ty leads a quiet life working as a locksmith.

When a client persuades him to play in an ancient game of throwing bones his peaceful existence is shattered and Ty quickly finds himself deeply in debt, his life hanging in the balance once more.

Forced to descend to the eerie mid-world of Erebus to repay his debt, his fate is soon entwined with sleeping gods, the factions that seek to control them, and an enemy powerful enough to destroy them all.

His two "deaths" explained early on in the book, were drowning and hanging, both while playing enthusiastically, if not wisely. What I'll share with you is that these were both taken from my childhood. Though I didn't actually die and get revived, I did nearly drown at a city swimming pool around age 5 (a fully dressed man on the pool deck dove in and pulled me out because the lifeguard was on lunch!), and I nearly hanged myself with a fabric shower curtain around age 4 while trying to imitate older and taller preschool kids who'd been playing at some Old West movie re-enactment and then left me alone in the bathroom.

Here, just for you, is a short excerpt from the book about Ty's drowning. Except for the setting (well, and the gods and the dying) it's pretty much my experience:

Ty didn’t care for deep water. His first death, by drowning, had been the summer he’d turned five, shortly after he’d been allowed to join the older boys playing at the quarry pond. On a day like any other, bored with the endless squirting games and diving for stones games and chicken fights, he’d decided to swim across the pond, despite the fact that he’d never learned to swim. He tiptoed along the underwater boulders that divided the shallow water from the deep. With the invincible faith of a child, he stepped off the rocks and dogpaddled just far enough to cramp up over a section of water as deep and black as a night sky. His legs sank like columns of stone.

Drowning hadn’t been the frantic, screaming thing people always seemed to imagine. It was a quiet death. He’d been unable to wave his arms because instinct kept them horizontal, pushing down on the water to lift himself up. He hadn’t yelled; unable to kick, his head was never above the surface long enough to both breathe in and yell out. Breathing trumped yelling.

He bobbed in silence a few feet from where his friends were playing for maybe a minute or two, frightened, but not yet terrified, his mouth intermittently at, and then below, the waterline. When he sank beneath the surface for the final time his drowning was still quiet, but that’s when it got ugly.

He saw the old gods while he was down there—after the panic, after the struggle and the inevitable burning lungful of water. They were in some dark enclosure that was everywhere or nowhere. He could still remember their faces, all lined up on biers, as if they too were dead: Morpheus, Hestia, Thanatos, Hypnos, Eros, Hemera and more, stretching back into the shadows. The room vibrated with quiescent power. He was a child in the company of gods, and dead or not, real or not, they had terrified him.

Want a longer excerpt? I have the full Chapter One up as a preview over at BookFunnel. It's in a promo for newsletter signups, but since you're already a newsletter subscriber, I'm going to give you a special link to bypass the signup and download the first chapter.

Preorders help fight algorithm invisibility SO much. If the book sounds like something you'd enjoy, please consider preordering at any of these fine booksellers: https://geni.us/whilegodssl

The print books are loading still. The Amazon link is to an old version (this book alone is a re-release by Solaris Nova. The other two in the set have never been published), but the Barnes & Noble link looks like the new edition.

Cute Animal Video

I'm closing out this time with "A Compassionate World Begins With You" because compassion is seeming to be in too short supply lately and animal hugs are good for us all.

Until next time, happy reading!

L. D. Colter has farmed with draft horses and worked as a paramedic, Outward Bound instructor, athletic trainer, roller-skating waitress, and concrete dispatcher, among other curious choices. She’s an author of contemporary, epic, and dark fantasy novels, a WSFA Small Press Award finalist, and a two-time winner of the Colorado Book Award for science fiction and fantasy. Find more at her website: The Speculative Worlds of L. D. Colter

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Three Weeks and Counting