‘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: