A Preliminary Look at ISBN - 0-9779049-1-1

Needless to say, I'm a happy dude. Alan Clark's incredible illustration sets this off beautifully. I love how the typeface lets the light in at the top...

We're still working on layout and having endless fun with Italics, CAPS, font -- my font guru, Kate Campion, where are you now!!!

To think, just a day ago, this is what it all looked like...

On a separate note: "Just North..." has had a mini-review from Nebula Award winning author Richard Chwedyk who wrote this about it...

"There is only one greater pleasure to hearing Lawrence Santoro read his tales of Bluffton aloud, and that is having them collected together here in this volume, where you have the opportunity to read, re-read and savor every little description. The added revelation of this book, for those who have read or heard parts of the narrative separately, is how seamlessly and inevitably it all comes together. Santoro has assembled a remarkable cast of characters, but none so vivid, so funny, so dangerous and variable as Bluffton and surroundings itself. Bluffton is one of those tiny jewels -- locked away in the bottom drawer of a desk of someone long ago passed and forgotten -- that reflects the world with excruciating clarity in every facet but casts its light in unfamiliar and unsettling ways. It is at once diabolical and redemptive, as all great works of dark tale-telling should be. And now, with gratitude to Larry, this jewel is ours."

"May we use it wisely."

Five-time Bram Stoker nominee, Wayne Allen Sallee said...

"Have you ever driven down a highway at night and off in the distance you can see a tiny red light, you realize it is a soda machine at some gas station in some town you'll never see. Well, Lawrence Santoro's voice resonates throughout the streets of that town, giving it form and history and most of all, giving it to us in his own words, telling us about another town while we were driving to nowhere."

I love the image Wayne conjurs in that. Strangely, it's part of the fetchings of the Bluffton stories. When I used to drive north from Chicago into the driftless to visit an old friend, the last 50 miles were on two-lane blacktops that wound among the mountainettes and bluffs and, from time to time, eased through small dark towns. Late nights, the automata of missing humans -- winking stop lights, wells pumping through the night, and, yes, the patient glow of the soda machines -- in the untenanted places of these buttoned up worlds reminded me of how lonely and how, somehow, American it was to be driving a hole through the middle of the night. American Zen. Something of that, I think, nudged me toward Bluffton.

We're in final proofing. Should be done in about 24 hours -- give or take a lifetime and a few billion synaptic coffee-jangled misfires. This is harder than writing the damn thing but we're working our asses off to get "Just North..." ready for the World Horror Convention in Toronto at the end of this month. It'll be a hump but Roger Trexler -- the publisher -- is certain we can do it!

If we can't I've got a rusty razor in the cupboard, dulled and waiting!