Ugly Spring: A Note from the Editor
Everything is falling apart and everything is coming together
Hello, Callers. Thank you for being here, and welcome to another semi-irregular note from your friendly neighborhood editor.
What I’ve Been Up To
It’s been a real bastard Spring here at Cold Caller HQ. Our HVAC broke down, our lawnmower busted, the coffee maker crapped out1, and our honeybees swarmed. In the midst of all this, we’re also helping my mom prepare for a move, which has meant weekends spent packing and priming and painting. It has been Kind Of A Lot, and along with that comes the feeling of falling further and further behind on everything else we might like to be doing, if we weren’t cutting our grass with nail scissors.
But we’re dealing. We’re dealing! We dusted off the French press, borrowed a push mower, and our wandering honeybees have, for now, been rehomed in a new hive.
Cold Caller, I’m happy to say, has had a wonderful Spring, thanks entirely to our amazing contributors. And just this week I’ve sent out more acceptances, contracts, and interview questions, and I am very excited for what we have coming up.
Speaking of which…
What’s Coming Next
Cold Caller is a crime and mystery review, but we’re leaning into the mystery in the upcoming weeks. That includes:
May 20: A historical whodunnit from Nick Guthrie. Nick’s just announced preorders for the first of his DI Bolam series, and we’re thrilled to feature his work.
June 1: An interview with Keith Roysdon, an investigative journalist-turned-novelist whose new book Seven Angels launches next month.
June 10: A brand-new murder mystery from the great Mike McHone, whose work has been featured in just about every major mystery mag you can think of. This story also marks a personal milestone for Mike, but more on that later…
What I’ve Been Reading
Continuing with Tolkien, I’ve picked up The Fellowship of the Ring, which is wonderfully weird. I’m also fascinated by the immediate retcons it makes to The Hobbit, including details like who (or what) Gollum’s “my precious” actually refers to.
I’m also reading Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates, a collection of interviews edited and published by University Press of Mississippi and now out of print. Hard Case Crime is currently republishing some of Oates’s crime novels written as Rosamond Smith, but she’s written plenty of crime fiction under her own name, including High Lonesome, one of my all-time favorite short stories.
High Lonesome is about murder, revenge, loneliness, shame, and the worst moment of somebody’s life. But it takes it’s time getting there, and when that “worst moment” actually arrives it’s somewhere between pathetic and comic. It’s everything that unspools from that moment which makes the story such a masterpiece. The reader discovers, just like the narrator, how badly you misread the stakes of that moment until it’s too late.
But back to Conversations: In this collection almost every interviewer will, at some point, ask Oates how she can possibly be so prolific, and she always says something like, “if I don’t write so much my head will explode.” For example:
Callers, I have to admit, I really admire this.
WHY, GOD?? WHY MEEEE???
I read somewhere years ago (I think) that Oates publishes about half of the books she writes. After she finishes each one, she decides whether it will be one that she publishes or one that she just puts over on the shelf. Am I remembering that right?
Push mower? Don't you have, like, 17 acres?