It's been a long time coming, but my eighth novel, titled Bully, is available as of today.

It's not the book I expected to be published just after Nightmaria. I'd talked a lot about Kane, and I assumed that would be it, if not Wake Up Charlie. Both of those books are just around the corner, but somehow the timing felt right for Bully, even though it was written years after the other two.

When looking at the chronology of books (American Vampires, Requiem, The New World, Sunrise, In the Dark, The Pumpkin Patch, Nightmaria) Bully felt like the next step.

It's a departure in a couple ways. While there are a few lengthy bits of third-person narration, the whole of Bully is technically written in the first-person, which I've never kept up outside of a short story before. But as soon as I had written the first page or two with the character of Aaron, I knew that this book had to be his story, in his own words.

Bully is also not a horror novel. Nor is fantasy, nor science fiction. It is a very realistic book that I hope will feel as real as possible to the reader. It is not meant to give you shivers and keep you awake on cold autumn nights, but at times it is, I think, the most uncomfortable, disquieting thing I've ever written. For anyone who has ever experienced abuse themselves, I will be up front about the trigger warnings. This book does not shy away from the topic it covers and makes no attempt to glorify anything. It is about young adults and perhaps about a coming of age, but it is not a young adult novel. Yet I believe it is a story that needs to be heard. The idea had sat in the back of my head, and news story after news story about the state of bullying today, the rise in anxiety, apathy, and even sociopathy in American youth wasn't something I could ignore anymore.

And so I had to write a book to tell people who had suffered through this, who had suffered abuse at the hands of a bully (whoever their bullies may be, children or adults, family or friends, lovers or ex-lovers) that recovery is always possible, and that they are not alone.

Because they don't seem to be hearing it much of anywhere else.