Holy shit friends it’s my BOOOOOOK! It comes out from Norton on July 5 (Doubleday/Penguin in Ireland/UK/Australia July 21), so preorder to have it delivered on pub date and be the coolest literary horror reader on your block. Here’s how to order from Amazon and indie booksellers!
You can now preorder my debut novel, Hawk Mountain, today!
15 AprLISTEN HERE VIA SOUNDCLOUD OR ON Apple Podcasts • Spotify • Breaker • Anchor
Friends,
Here’s a special episode of Against Everyone With Conner Habib about my debut novel of psychological tension, desire, and violence, Hawk Mountain. I read from the novel’s first pages, I talk about how it came together, about being a writer, and also about a blurb from one of my heroes which is still blowing my mind.
Importantly, though, I also talk about preorders! Preorders are so important to an author, a fact which I just discovered since, uh, I’ve never published a book before. But anyway, instead of just saying “it’s important,” here’s why.
WHEN YOU PREORDER MY BOOK YOU
- Boost the first week of sales! Preorders are tacked on to the first week of sales figures, which are key in how much publicity/promotion the book gets.
- Get all the right people talking about the book! This includes distributors and publishers in foreign countries, then media and…well, you can see where this is going. A book with strong pre-sales enters into the world dancing!
- Get bookstores and organizations interested in events with me. Which means there’s a better chance that I’ll come to your town*
- Get the book right away! Like, right away. The day it comes out with some sites below.
SO PREORDER HAWK MOUNTAIN HERE!
US RELEASE DATE, JULY 5
Bookshop.org US – The site is the site I use for all book recommendations, since it supports independent bookstores. When you order a book from Bookshop, it finds the closest indie store and sends it to you from there. It works just as well as Amazon 99% of the time, in my experience.
Amazon US – the big cheese, of course. The best thing about ordering from Amazon is that you’ll get it day of publication.
Some other sites: Barnes & Noble • IndieBound • Hudsons
IRELAND/UK/AUSTRALIA RELEASE DATE, JULY 21
The Gutter Bookshop – Ireland only. If you want a signed copy from a local store in Dublin, order from this gay-owned shop!
Look, obviously I think my novel is good, but if that’s not enough to convince you, here’s some of the advanced prasie:
“Conner Habib’s debut novel is a bleak, dark adrenaline rush.”**
– Clive Barker
“Hawk Mountain is a suspenseful, shocking and ultimately poignant study of anguished conflict, both domestic and internal. Incisively written and intensely imagined, it’s the novelistic debut of a real original.”
– Ramsey Campbell
“The opening lines of Hawk Mountain plummet you into an atmosphere of creeping dread and precarious restraint that won’t let up until the final, shocking moments.”
– Caitlin Doughty
“A moving and unflinching portrayal of a man caught in a trap of his own making, but willing to do almost anything―to almost anybody―if it will keep him from having to face up to himself. Hawk Mountain is a wonderfully bleak and beautifully written debut.”
– Brian Evenson
“A brilliantly disturbing, expertly crafted literary noir that will stick with you long after you put it down. Conner Habib has written a flawless meditation on the fruitless, but eternally human, effort to kill off the parts of ourselves we cannot love―literally and metaphorically. I love this book.”
– Sara Gran
“Hawk Mountain is deft horror, made of precise strikes into our most vulnerable psychic terrain… Finally, a horror story that knows cisheteropatriarchy is the villain!”
– Andrea Lawlor
“Tender, horrifying, utterly transfixing.”
– Kelly Link
“Dripping with menace from the first page, this story of childhood enemies meeting up fifteen years later is utterly enthralling. Brilliantly written with homoerotic undertones, this savage tale is uncompromising in its reflection of teen friendships and isolation, and unflinching in its examination of the delicacy of the human body. There is gold among the gore. I found it compelling, shocking, and beautiful.”
– Liz Nugent
“Conner Habib writes with an hallucinatory precision, and a kind of merciless humanity, about the poisonous work of repression. His forebears-Poe, Highsmith, even classical tragedy-are clear, but his originality is clearer still. Hawk Mountain is a work of strange, glittering darkness.”
– Mark O’Connell
“A deeply disturbing yet, somehow, soaring novel I won’t soon forget. It plumbs the depths of traumatized characters trapped within our damaging culture. I couldn’t look away, even when I was looking from between my fingers.”
– Paul Tremblay
I can’t wait to share my first novel with you, friends. Please do get your copy preordered today!
C
PRE-ORDER my debut novel HAWK MOUNTAIN today!
19 NovFriends, my debut novel of murder, desire, and high tension, Hawk Mountain, is out from W.W. Norton in the US and Penguin/Doubleday in Ireland and the UK next July, but if you pre-order it now, you get it delivered straight to your door the day it comes out (or maybe even earlier, since Amazon sometimes surprises you with early delivery!). I can’t wait to share this novel with the world. I’ll be posting some videos, podcasts, and interviews about the book and writing it in the days to come. But be one of the first people to read the book by clicking one of the following links and ordering it!
Indie bookstore-supported bookshop.org
From Amazon
Here’s the description:
An English teacher is gaslit by his charismatic high school bully in this tense story of deception, manipulation, and murder.
Single father Todd is relaxing at the beach with his son, Anthony, when he catches sight of a man approaching from the water’s edge. As the man draws closer, Todd recognizes him as Jack, who bullied Todd relentlessly in their teenage years, but now seems overjoyed to have “run into” his old friend. Jack suggests a meal to catch up. And can he spend the night?
What follows is a fast-paced story of obsession and cunning. As Jack invades Todd’s life, pain and intimidation from the past unearth knife-edge suspense in the present. Set in a small town on the New England coast, Conner Habib’s debut introduces characters trapped in isolation by the expansive woods and the encroaching ocean, their violence an expression of repressed desire and the damage it can inflict. Both gruesome and tender, Hawk Mountain offers a compelling look at how love and hate are indissoluble, intertwined until the last breath.
Can’t wait for you to read it, friends!
XO
CH
Happy Halloween from legendary horror author Ramsey Campbell and me on AEWCH 168!
27 OctLISTEN HERE VIA SOUNDCLOUD OR ONApple Podcasts • Spotify • Breaker • Anchor
FRIENDS:Do you find this podcast meaningful? Support it! This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. Do contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon! Thank you so, so much.
Buy Ramsey’s books and all the books mentioned on/related to this episode via my booklist for AEWCH 168 on bookshop.org! The site sources from independent bookstores in the US, not a big corporate shipping warehouse where the workers are treated like machines. Plus when you click through here to order, the show gets a small affiliate kickback!
Friends,
Happy Halloween. I don’t really need to introduce legendary horror author Ramsey Campbell, but I will just say it was an honor to have him on the show. Very few people have done as much as Ramsey to deepen horror narratives, and very few have shown – with dozens of books penned – such a commitment to the genre.
SHOW NOTES
• For more on Ramsey, go to his website. Some books not available on bookshop.org, but that are Ramsey Campbell essentials include The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Doll Who Ate Its Mother, The Searching Dead, his excellent story collection Strange Things and Stranger Places, and my favorite, The Face That Must Die. Also, here’s Ramsey’s essay collection (which includes the essay we mention on the episode, “Granted by Granta”), Certainly. Here’s another good (short) interview with Ramsey.
• Early on, Ramsey mentions the 1944 1953 sci fi/horror movie The Lady and the Monster and a later incarnation of a similar theme in Donovan’s Brain.
• Here’s that scene from War of the Worlds where the priest gets disintegrated.
• Other horror-themed episodes of AEWCH include:
- AEWCH 166 with Phil Ford and JF Martel of Weird Studies.
- AEWCH 158 with Paul Tremblay
- AEWCH 93 with Sara Maria Griffin (and also, I was on Sara’s podcast, Juvenalia, talking about Clive Barker)
- AEWCH 61 with mystery and horror author Sara Gran
- AEWCH 58 on horror films with screenwriter (of The Invitation and Destroyer, among other things) Phil Hay
- AEWCH 40 about horror and poetry with Zachary Schomburg
- AEWCH 44 on the vampire as a theory with Kelly Link and Jordy Rosenberg
- AEWCH 23 on postmodern horror with Brian Evenson
• Here’s HP Lovecraft’s “vampire” story, “The Shunned House” (I also think that “The Picture in the House” is a sort of vampire story!)
• T.E.D. Klein’s list of 25 most popular horror themes is in The Book of Lists: Horror
• “I’d rather have an enigma than an explanation…they last longer.” – Ramsey Campbell
• Have you seen Last Year in Marienbad yet?
• The calm moments in David Lynch films are the half smile on the government agent’s face thing I mention brought to you by Jon Ronson, who I spoke with on AEWCH 163.
• Here’s a bit on when horror comics were banned in Britain by the communist party, or if you want to really go deeper into the story, read Martin Barker’s A Haunt of Fears: The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign.
• Watch the trailer for Dario Argento’s horror classic, Deep Red + Roy Ward Baker’s Quartemass and the Pit + And watch Fritz Lang’s Cloak and Dagger.
Until next time, friends,
CH

Bestselling horror author Paul Tremblay joins me on AEWCH 158!
3 AugLISTEN HERE VIA SOUNDCLOUD OR ON Apple Podcasts • Spotify • Breaker • Anchor
FRIENDS: Do you find this podcast meaningful? Support it!
This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. Do contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon!
Thank you so, so much.
Buy Paul’s books, and all the books mentioned on/related to this episode via my booklist for AEWCH 158 on bookshop.org. Bookshop.org sources from independent bookstores in the US, not a big corporate shipping warehouse where the workers are treated like machines. Plus when you click through here to order, the show gets a small affiliate kickback!
Friends,
I’m so excited to share this episode about horror, free will, and compassion with novelist Paul Tremblay
Paul is the author of multiple bestselling horror novels – including The Cabin at the End of the World and Disappearance at Devil’s Rock which are my two favorites – two hardboiled detective novels, and a whole lot of short stories.
ON THIS EPISODE
- Horror as a balance between free will and determinism
- Horror as the withdrawal of love
- The dreaded return to sociability
- Kitchen table horror versus Irish Midlands horror
- Slasher vs supernatural horror
- Books that stand on the precipice of the supernatural
- Does Paul believe in ghosts?
- “What if there’s a God/Reader/Writer and he’s an asshole?”
- The book you write has to be beyond you
- The unreality of facts
- Respecting violence in fiction and why bad art is worse than the content it portrays
SHOW NOTES
• For more on Paul, go to his website. Here’s a good interview with Paul at Gridmark Magazine, and another one in legendary horror magazine Cemetery Dance.
• One of my favorite episode of the show is AEWCH 93 with Sara Maria Griffin (and also, I was on Sara’s podcast, Juvenalia, talking about Clive Barker). And here are a few other horror-themed episodes of AEWCH: AEWCH 23 on postmodern horror with Brian Evenson, AEWCH 40 about horror and poetry with Zachary Schomburg, AEWCH 44 on the vampire as a theory with Kelly Link and Jordy Rosenberg, and AEWCH 58 on horror films with screenwriter (of The Invitation and Destroyer, among other things) Phil Hay.
• Paul and I both love Sara Gran’s absolutely scary novel of possession, Come Closer. And Sara was on AEWCH 61, talking Lacan and detective novels. It’s one of my favorite episodes.
• Paul mentions using George Saunders’s book on writing, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain. That said, the best writing book out there, I think, is a bit of a best-kept-secret thing. It’s Stuart Spencer’s The Playwright’s Guidebook.
• The (fun!) cellphone horror novel is Ghoster by Jason Arnopp.
• Weird Studies is one of the best podcasts around. Listen to it. The great quote from the cohost, JF Martel, is “The hope is that (art) saves us in reality by damming us in art.”
• “The Eighth Episode of Twin Peaks: The Return Is Horrifyingly Beautiful“
• Lake Mungo is a great horror movie. Here’s the trailer.
Until next time friends, hold each other close in the dark,
CH
(oh, and stop tormenting Grover)

Desires, dark and light. Carmen Maria Machado on AEWCH 149!
21 AprLISTEN HERE VIA SOUNDCLOUD OR ON Apple Podcasts • Spotify • Breaker • Anchor
FRIENDS: Do you find this podcast meaningful? Support it! This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. Do contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon! Thank you so, so much.
Buy Carmen’s books and the books mentioned on/related to this episode via my booklist for AEWCH 149 on Bookshop.org. Bookshop.org sources from independent bookstores in the US, not a big corporate shipping warehouse where the workers are treated like machines. Plus when you click through here to order, the show gets a small affiliate kickback!
Friends,
The French psychoanalyst and philosopher Jacques Lacan once said, “there is no other good than the one that can pay the price of the access to desire.”
There’s a lot about this statement, which is, like a lot of what Lacan said, a riddle – but one thing in it – paying the price of access – so our desires are not accessible? So we must lose something, give something to meet them? To see them? To talk about them?
To discuss all of this, I spoke with Carmen Maria Machado, author of the memoir In The Dream House, the collection of strange tales Her Body And Other Parties, and the graphic novel The Low, Low Woods.
I think what’s really interesting to both of us, and this comes up quite a bit – is how desire functions, how it is somehow always ahead of us, appearing and disappearing like a friend or an enemy on the path in a fairy tale. Sometimes it gives something to us that is useful later on. A key, a sacred object, a weapon. Sometimes it gives us a gift that leads us to being stuck. Like the fairy market where someone accepts the gift of an apple from the goblin, eats it, and wakes up 100 years later, if they wake up at all. Sometimes it has a strange shape, it frightens us.
Why should desires be like this? How do they know us, in a way, before we know ourselves?
This is a conversation that finds proximity to creation, to danger, to repetition, to the abuse that Carmen writes about in her memoir In The Dream House,and to the abuse I wrote about in my essay ,”If You Ever Did Write Anything About Me, I’d Want It To Be About Love“.
How do we talk about the desire and the horror in abusive relationships while still holding the abuser accountable. How do we make the necessary move of accountability while not reducing the complicatedness of the encounter and the relationship?
Again and again, Carmen and I touch on desires and on storytelling – almost like we’re knocking on wood to allow ourselves to go forward in difficult conversation.
What do we sacrifice to know our desires?
What are the prices of following our desires
Of not giving way to them?
Of not giving ground to them?
If all that sounds dark and complex, well, it is. but this is also such a warm and friendly episode. With lots of laughter and curiosity and affinity.
I’m so happy to share this episode with you.
ON THIS EPISODE
- The way desire knows itself before you know what it is
- Why is the fox from Robin Hood so hot
- Evading the temptation of metaphor when we read
- The response to the subconscious is determines the genre of writing
- Horror as spiritual narrative
- H.P. Lovecraft’s mission of mercy
- Sexuality as a genre
- The imagination of the abusive partner after you’ve left them
- The missing language of understanding for the person who has been abused
- Why we need to talk about resilience
- The importance of meta-devices and melodrama
- The Law & Order SVU-niverse
SHOW NOTES
• For more on Carmen go to her website (which has a badass picture of her in a chair). Here’s an interview with Carmen that goes horrifically wrong on Electric Lit. Here’s Carmen talking about haunted houses and horror movies on the American Hysteria podcast. And if you’d like to read one of her stories, here’s the early version one we reference the most, “The Husband Stitch“.
• My essay from 2010 “Looking at Men” describes the clouded shower glass incident.
• McArthur Award-winning writer Kelly Link comes up a lot on this episode. Have you listened to AEWCH 44 with Kelly, Jordy Rosenberg, and me? It’s awesome. Also, here’s Kelly’s essay about the “silent partner.“
• Here’s an interview with the great Argentine writer, César Aira.
• It looks like Grant Morrison’s Seaguy is not available on bookshop.org, so here it is from that, uh, other place.
• If you haven’t read Susan Sontag’s essay, “Against Interpretation,” read it, friends. And if you have read it, read it again. Same goes for H.P. Lovecraft’s essay, “Supernatural Horror in Literature“.
• And the Lovecraft quote is, ““The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
• Here’s my essay “If You Ever Did Write Anything About Me, I’d Want It To Be About Love” about the boyfriend who beat me up, which is mentioned at the end of Carmen’s memoir (and through which Carmen and I first communicated).
• I love author Sara Maria Griffin’s appearance on AEWCH 93. It remains one of my very favorite episodes.
• I have not yet read Jeannie Vanasco’s Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was A Girl but I definitely will now. I also (forgive me, Father!) have not yet seen Fleabag. I will, I will, I will!
• Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s movie The Bitter Tears of Petra Van Kantis one of the best films ever made. And also watch Lars Von Trier’s Dogville for another sort of disorientation.
Until next time friends, follow your desires!
XO
CH

My novel, Hawk Mountain, out in 2021 from W.W. Norton in the US, and Penguin/Doubleday in Ireland and the UK.
17 AprFriends, some good news.
My (very dark) novel, Hawk Mountain, will be published by W.W. Norton in the US and Penguin/Doubleday in Ireland and the UK in summer of 2021.
I can barely believe it.
My whole life I’ve wanted to be a novelist.
I’m beaming, friends.
Hi. Can’t wait to share my book with you.

The Publishers Market entry
Can art contain evil? I explore mystery and murder with crime writer Sara Gran on AEWCH 61!
5 MarLISTEN HERE OR ON iTunes • Spotify • Overcast • Soundcloud
I put out many hours of free content every month, please do support the show by donating to my Patreon today. For the price of a piece of cake or a bourgeoise donut in San Francisco or a delicious Yuengling lager in Pennsylvania, you can support the show in a major way and contribute to my mission to bring deep conversations to the world and inspire others to have them!
PATRONS GET ACCESS TO THE FULL YOUTUBE VERSION HERE
Friends,
When you follow a mystery, you see that’s it’s unending. And what better explorer of mysteries than acclaimed mystery writer Sara Gran, whose mystery and crime books rove through philosophy, the occult, and the hardboiled on their way to the murderer.
Sara is the author of mysteries and horror, from her acclaimed Claire DeWitt series (start with the excellent Claire Dewitt and the City of the Dead), to her shiveringly creepy demonic possession tale, Come Closer.
We talk about why detectives in fiction are always wounded, how criminals are materialists but detectives are spiritual, being an outsider, the philosopher she invented named Jacques Silette, the unknowingness of writing, how our creative projects becomes spells & become our friends, whether or not people actually succeed in Hollywood, the difference between real genre and mere spectacle, fairy tales, why political solutions don’t work, why the presence of the dead is healing, why people can’t accept the supernatural even in fiction, Suspiria vs Texas Chainsaw Massacre vs Hereditary, Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion, how art responds to and creates evil, and how psychoanalysis connects to the Western esoteric tradition and yoga.
Click HERE for show notes!
XO
CH
All about movies with DESTROYER screenwriter, PHIL HAY on AEWCH 58!
5 Feb