2024 in Review Part I: Reading and Writing

Posted on December 21, 2024 by Bev Vincent

Season’s greetings and happy holidays and all that! This is part one of my annual year-end review. As the title above suggests, this one is about writing/publishing and things I’ve read, which seem to go hand in hand.

This year has been a pretty good one for writing projects. My latest book Stephen King: His Life, Work, and Influences (Young Readers’ Edition) came out in September. As that title suggests, this one is geared toward teen readers who are beginning their journey into reading adult fiction. “A thrilling visual companion curated for young adults voraciously reading their way through Stephen King’s colossal corpus of creepy books” that Booklist called “catnip for King enthusiasts.”

I also had a chapbook called Lost (or Found) in Translation from Lividian Publications come out the same month. In this one, I tracked down all the foreign editions of King’s books and collated the titles used for the translations, reverse-engineering them into English as best I could. François Vaillancourt contributed the chapbook’s cover, along with ten full-color interiors depicting what these King books would look like if he had been hired to illustrate the translated editions.

I’ll have an essay called “High School Confidential” in Carrie’s Legacy: Revisiting Stephen King’s Girl with a Frightening Power, also from Lividian Publications, in the spring.

Related to writing, I was interviewed a few times this year:

The second one was interesting in that it related to a 1984 People magazine interview with Peter Straub and Stephen King about The Talisman. The fourth one was with a radio station in Australia which was done live during an overnight radio program, another first for me! And the first one was different in that it focused primarily on my short fiction, which was a nice change of pace.

Regarding short fiction, the following stories appeared in 2024:

I have a few more stories queued up for 2025. The most significant among them as far as I’m concerned is a little tale called “Lockdown,” which will appear in The End of the World As We Know It: Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand, which will be published by Gallery in the US and Hodder and Stoughton in the UK next August, together with a German edition from Buchheim Verlag in December.

Other exciting news forthcoming for 2025, but I can’t say anything more about that yet.

I had a moderately good year reading, 37 books finished or will be finished very soon. (Full list here, if you’re interested.) If you’ve been following me on these year-end posts for a while, you’ll know that I’m crap at making best-of/top-10 lists, but I can probably narrow the list down to a dozen in the order in which I read them (with a few links to the ones I reviewed).

  • Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay
  • You Like It Darker by Stephen King
  • Trust by Hernan Diaz
  • Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng
  • I Will Ruin You by Linwood Barclay
  • House of Bone and Rain by Gabino Iglesias
  • Moonbound by Robin Sloan
  • Memorials by Richard Chizmar
  • The Bang-Bang Sisters by Rio Youers
  • Absolution: A Southern Reach Novel by Jeff VanderMeer
  • Midnight and Blue by Ian Rankin
  • Never Flinch by Stephen King
This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply