Toward Ecosophy

Since before the final volumes of The Weird of Hali saw print, I've had people asking me about the recipes for some of the dishes that are cooked and served by characters in the novels. (No, nobody's asked about Owen Merrill's cheap college meal of dollar store ramen, frozen vegetables, and a sliced hot dog, but that one's pretty self-explanatory.) One of the basic rules of the writing trade is that you pay attention to what your readers want to hear about, and so once the novels themselves were done, I considered the possibility of a cookbook. 

Fortunately I had help. Characters are a novelist's imaginary friends -- well, at least mine are -- and so it was the easiest thing in the world to hand over the project to Brecken Kendall, the protagonist of The Shoggoth Concerto and The Nyogtha Variations, who loves to cook when she's not pursuing her career as a composer of neo-Baroque music. She duly dictated a cookbook which contains most of the dishes featured in my tentacle novels, from cheese polenta all the way to exotica such as authentic pirate salmagundi (she got the recipe for that from Toby Gilman, of course). 

I should probably mention that all the recipes in this book are real, and none calls for ingredients you can't get this side of the plateau of Leng. Since Brecken and I share the conviction that food should be cheap, tasty, filling, and not especially complicated to make, this is also not the kind of cookbook that's meant to permit members of the overprivileged classes to show off how much money and leisure they have by wasting a lot of both turning out desperately precious yuppie chow. It's geared toward people (like Brecken, and in my younger days, me) who don't have a lot of money or a lot of time to spare, and still want to eat well. 

So if you're wondering what to feed the shoggoth who's unexpectedly shown up in your kitchenette, or simply want to have plenty of tasty meals to serve and eat while you're waiting for Great Cthulhu to rise from the sea, here you go.  The current release date is August 18, and you can order your copy in advance here.