Beautiful Things.

Do you like my story “The Things”?

Do you more than like it? Do you adore it with a burning passion that puts the so-called “fandom” of all those other Things posers to shame?

Do you wanna prove you do, no matter how much it costs?

Then mammal, does Angel Bomb have a deal for you.

Todd Thyberg’s boutique press turns words into works of art. The dude doesn’t settle for reprinting the same old prose in a leather-bound jacket, maybe slapping on an autograph, and calling it a day. This man transmutes fiction into sculpture, into puzzle boxes full of hidden messages. His latest offering, Pathogenesis―which “looks at gun violence in America through the lens of disease”―comes with a 3D printed sculpture of a coronavirus with protein spikes made of actual ammunition. He’s put out a profusely-illustrated edition of J.W. Campbell’s original Who Goes There? complete with maps, notes, and expedition medallion. And his adaptation of my own “The Things” is, well…

I mean, see for yourself.

Hard-cover, cloth-bound, gleaming metallic foil-stamped dust-jacket. Illustrated (by Thyberg himself) up the wazoo. Signed by both of us, and including an interview in which I go into the history and process of the story’s creation. Deluxe enough for a boutique edition even if he’d stopped there. Most would have.

But you might have noticed that small flashlighty thing which ships with this artifact. It’s not just any old flashlight. It shines in UV―because this edition of “The Things” is also printed in ultraviolet ink. You need that light to see the annotations and illustrations hidden on pretty much every page, which add a whole new dimension to the things you can detect (see what I did there?) with your unassisted pathetic little meat sack eyes[1]. Every page is infested with phantom teeth and pseudopods and spiky alien pathogens. If you look closely, you’ll even catch a snippet of the BASIC (it was 1982, after all) that Blair coded into his desktop to simulate global infection rates.

Even completely blank pages contain multitudes:

You know―just in case you missed it a few frames up:

That’s the standard package. If you go for the deluxe edition you also get blue goatskin binding, a foil-stamped slip-case, and―if you really want to go all-out― a hand-painted flashlight in the form of the flying saucer that carried the Thing to our world in the first place.

Neither of these editions is for the weak of heart or the low of bank balance. The standard package will cost you $200 US; the deluxe will set you back $850. Even if you’re up for that kind of price tag, you might want to wait a few weeks until the rest of the world switches to Euros or Yuen, and the US dollar crashes; then you might be able to pick it up for fifty bucks Canadian. But don’t wait too long: the print run for the standard edition is only 200 copies, for the deluxe a mere 50.

I have to admit that when Todd first approached me with his proposal, I was deeply skeptical he could sell any copies at all; this is clearly an item for stalker-level fans only, and my (extremely limited) experience with that demographic had convinced me that a) I have hardly any of those, and b) none of them are rich. But these editions have only just been released and I’ve already received a couple of pretty solid royalty checks, so someone’s buying the damn things.

If you have money to burn, why not join them?

And for making it this far, here’s a picture of Doofus the Cat, absolutely free of charge.

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1. Also to check for urine and semen stains in your reading area, which should go without saying. ↑