Nicholas Belardes’s eco-horror/climate fiction The Deading, forthcoming July 2024, was acquired by executive Editor Diana Pho of Erewhon Books, and has been chosen by NetGalley and Publishers Marketplace as one of its Buzz Books Great Reads for Spring/Summer 2024.
Excerpt: Read the first four chapters by clicking on the Summer 2024 Buzz Books “free download.”
Pre-order links and more on The Deading page.
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The Deading listed as a top 25 science fiction book to look forward to in 2024! Read more!
Erewhon Books Executive Editor Diana Pho says about The Deading: “Disquieting, haunting, and aching, The Deading kept me awake long into the small hours of the night thinking about the horrors of nature, both human and otherwise. Not to mention how much I learned about birding from Nicholas! This is a gem of a book, and I can’t wait for others to discover its dark beauty.”
Short bio: A writer of the American West, Nicholas Belardes’s fiction combines elements of the literary fantastic, fantasy, eco-horror, and science fiction. His obsession with nature, history, the world’s ongoing climate disasters, blended with a daily birdwatching habit, has filled his prose with not just warblers and flycatchers, but also other obscurities from the natural world. From the habits of migrating creatures, to odd nighttime encounters on coastal California’s Montaña de Oro trails, to a mountain of bones he came upon in the outskirts of Helena, Montana, Belardes’s connection to the natural and strange, surrealistically and emotionally comes to life in his work.
Additional bio: Nicholas Belardes’s work reflects his studies, which includes pursuing his MFA in Creative Writing from UC Riverside Palm Desert Low Residency, where he split his time studying the craft of monsters under the tutelage of horror writer Stephen Graham Jones (The Only Good Indians, My Heart Is A Chainsaw, Don’t Fear the Reaper), as well as the craft of family in literature under crime writer Tod Goldberg (Gangsterland, Gangster Nation, Gangsters Don’t Die). While studying at UCR, Belardes received the Founder’s Award, given each year to a promising new student.
Belardes has published short fiction in the first Chicano sci-fi anthology, El Porvenir Ya!, and Ohio State University Press’s Speculative Fiction for Dreamers. He doesn’t limit himself to speculative fiction, also having written Chicano fiction for Carve Magazine, Southwestern American Literature, Pithead Chapel and other anthologies and journals.
Nonfiction Pulitzer Prize nominee Kim Barnes describes his nonfiction as “part poet, part storyteller, part historian, part pop culture cartographer,” while Pulitzer-winning Los Angeles Times journalist Christopher Knight called his Boom California (University of California Press) essay, “South Bakersfield’s Confederate Remains,” an “engaging” and necessary read in the fight against infrastructural racism and student indoctrination. Belardes also contributed nonfiction to The Nervous Breakdown and Latino Rebels.
Between 2008-2010, Belardes fused technology and literature by writing Small Places on Twitter. The first twitterature in novel form and a critique of corporate culture, his work is considered part of the age of digimodernism by scholars who study the intersection between art and digital technologies. Small Places has been talked about around the world in university classrooms and featured in newspapers and news sites, including the U.K. Guardian, Vogue, Telegraph, Reuters, Christian Science Monitor, Wired, Folha, The Bohemian, and many more.
Belardes continues to write about the American West, the Chicano experience, birds, and the natural world. He currently teaches writing in the Ethnic Studies Department at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He is represented by The Jud Laghi Agency.
You can find him on BlueSky, Insta, Facebook, Threads, though he still mostly tweets: @nickbelardes