Essays
A little news that might please you
Welcome to 2024, the Year of the Potato Peeler. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you didn’t read last month’s newsletter. I’m sorry to say this, but you disappoint me. I don’t write this newsletter just so you can fail to read it.
As if failing to read it wasn’t hurtful enough to me, it is worse when you go on Tik Tok to flaunt the fact you didn’t read it. Those little videos of you taking a printout of the newsletter and putting it through a paper shredder, toasting marshmallows in the flames as you burn it in a campfire, picking up your dog’s poop with it, driving my little newsletter out into the desert and leaving it alone to fend for itself—they are not as amusing as you seem to think.
Such cruelness could make a grown man cry. Not this grown man. This grown man could walk barefoot across a bed of broken glass and shed not one tear. This grown man could accidentally trigger a nail gun and put a spike through his foot and fail to cry, not because he passed out and didn’t regain consciousness for a month, but because this grown man is more stoic than you could possibly understand.
I’m talking about certain soft-hearted grown men of my acquaintance who weep over videos of kittens and are weeping right now because of what you’ve done to my little newsletter. They are very nice men and do not deserve to be emotionally savaged by your Tik Tok videos, so for their sake, please desist.
To those of you who complain that there is very little news in this newsletter, I ask you to note that nowhere in the heading does it claim to be a newsletter. It claims to be “From the desk of Dean Koontz.” Very little happens to furniture that you would find newsworthy. Furniture leads an uneventful existence until such time as there is a fire, flood, or a break-in by an axe-wielding madman who thinks all furniture is out to get him.
Nevertheless, I have dredged up a little news that might please you. The eBook of my latest novel, The Bad Weather Friend, which is one of my favorites of my own work, will be offered free—FREE—during the month of January to all Prime members through Amazon Reads. Hardcover, audio, and eBook will then be generally available on February first. Also, my desk wants you to know it was recently waxed.
