‘Lockdown’: Stories to Help Bookstores During COVID-19

20 authors riff on a pandemic.

For the past few months, I’ve been working alongside co-editor Steve Weddle and publisher Jason Pinter (of Polis Books) on a very special project: “Lockdown,” an anthology of 20 suspense, noir, and horror stories set against the background of a (fictional) pandemic. One hundred percent of the proceeds from “Lockdown” will go to support BINC, the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, as it seeks to help booksellers recover from the devastating COVID-19 crisis.

Some background: This project came together super-fast by publishing standards, and I’m in awe of how quickly our authors turned around their uniformly excellent, mind-blowing stories — especially since everyone was also scrambling to figure out their self-imposed lockdowns. The pandemic in the book is fictional, which allowed them to play with all kinds of subgenres: heist, zombie, murder-mystery, even an incredible riff on “Peter Pan.” If you want to help booksellers through the pandemic while landing some enjoyable reading, check out “Lockdown” from the following bookstores:

Bookshop.org
Indiebound
Barnes & Noble
Amazon

The authors include:

Hector Acosta
Scott Adlerberg
Ann Dávila Cardinal
Gemma Amor
V. Castro
Angel Luis Colon
Jen Conley
Terri Lynn Coop
S.A. Cosby
Alex DiFrancesco
Michelle Garza/Melissa Lason
Rob Hart
Gabino Iglesias
Nick Kolakowski
Richie Narvaez
Cina Pelayo
Renee Asher Pickup
Eryk Pruitt
Johnny Shaw
Steve Weddle

We’re incredibly proud of this effort, and we hope you like it, too.