Issy issy@unbound.co.uk

https://unbound.com/books/everything-will-swallow-you https://tomcox.substack.com/p/bloomin-eck-my-new-book-is-finally As you all know, I have chosen to crowdfund my latest seven books, rather than - as I once did - going through more traditional publishing channels. I just finished editing my latest book, which means that the supporters list will soon be closing, as the manuscript gets readied for the printers. There’s still plenty of time to order the book before its publication in March next year, of course, but if you’d like your name in the back of it, and to contribute to its funding, the deadline is September 17th at 4p.m. The novel is called Everything Will Swallow You. The title was handed to me by silent invisible hands (as the best ones tend to be) in January when I was hiking along the West Dorset coast, roughly in the spot you can see in the photo above. It seemed perfect for the book’s main setting - a coast prone to dramatic landslips - and many of its themes, which include the overwhelming nature of modern life. It’s quite a big novel - bigger than 1983 and even Villager - centred around a record and antique dealer - a man from northern England, of roughly my parents’ age - and his… unlikely housemate. I think it’s the one I’m most proud of (I’ve certainly never worked harder on a book in my life). As a thank you for those of you who have supported my work during the book’s creation, I’ve decided to share an extract here today, and there is more exclusive material on my substack: tomcox.substack.com CARS WERE NEVER SUPPOSED TO BE THIS BIG Once they were walking, Carl felt better. The day had pivoted, letting mild sagging clouds through a narrow window in its rear wall. The unforeseen melt of the glistening varnish on everything reminded you just how much of the lower parts of the landscapes remained underwater. A couple of floods necessitated a detour from the planned route, a steep climb through woods where black earth sucked impartially at your legs. The rain felt less like rain and more like a purifying mood you just happened to be walking through. He relished the feel of his hands as they splashed through the little pools that were slowly draining into the spongey acid turf. The triangle of knowledge that had hit him as soon as he’d walked into Corndon Manor had been one of the vastest he’d ever experienced. It made him feel like he was falling backwards through a series of unlocked exits. ‘Help me,’ he wanted to say to his two companions who, as they engaged in the customary pleasantries of a previously unvisited porch, suddenly felt so far away. That not being an option, he padded quietly off, found a door leading to the garden, let the weight of what was hitting him - all the images informing him that he knew this place, more than knew it, that it was somehow part of him - knock him over, because there was nothing else he could do. When he did give in and permit it to do that, he was relieved to discover that most of the images were not negative. As the images gradually slowed, he analysed the garden: the secret upper tier, through the attractive gap in the granite wall, which - maybe because of something he was seeing in those flickering images coming through the triangle or maybe something in the atmosphere he felt in wandering through it - made him think ‘monks’. There was a rambling rose behind him, swallowed by 2022’s brambles, and 2021’s, and possibly even 2020’s. He was aching to get in behind it, chop the bastards off at the ankles, give the big red goddess chance to breathe. He’d probably leave the moss on the steps leading up to the peeling conservatory to do its thing. It gave them character. But the steps begged for extra definition. Something stately on either side of them. Cordyline, perhaps, or Trachycarpus. Trachycarpus would perhaps be the obvious choice, but Cordyline should never be underestimated. At the beginning of winter, on another record hunt not far from here, he and Eric had driven past a moorland house where they’d once lived and seen the little one he’d planted in the garden there in 2016. It had really gone to work in the intervening years and now reached the roof gutter. A couple of years ago at a desultory record fair in Taunton, where one of the other dealers had put on the second Crosby, Stills and Nash album in an attempt to pump some life into the morning, Carl, from his elongated meditative position under the table, had heard Eric drift into a discussion of the concept of déjà vu with Reg Monk. Reg said he believed it was the universe opening up little windows to the other lives we had lived, past, future and parallel. Eric, being Eric, the man who saw death as a beyond black wall protecting nothing but the void, immediately poo-pooed Monk’s romanticism. ‘Nah. Faulty wiring in the brain, that’s all it is, pal, nothing more. Dust on the needle. An old biscuit crumb stuck in the groove. Blow it away and it’s business as usual. I’ve never been here before and I’m not coming back again and that’s probably for the best.’ Considering the manner of their first meeting and his unquestioning acceptance of all his housemate was, it never ceased to baffle Carl how little credence Eric was willing to give generally to ideas of the unexplainable or supernatural. It was frustrating to have to wait to tell Eric precisely what he’d seen through those triangles in the manor, a wait that would be even longer now that the small industrious lady responsible for the building had unexpectedly accepted Mel’s invite to join them for the walk, but what was there to be so impatient about? He could predict what Eric’s reaction would be. Eric would no doubt tell Carl that Carl was ‘probably just sleep-deprived’, turn it into a joke or deftly reroute the conversation to a quasi-related topic. It would be doubtful that he’d be up for any more lengthy investigation into Carl’s growing theory that recently he’d been experiencing something a little like what Reg Monk had been talking about, albeit bigger, more engulfing version. Carl adored that Eric took him so nonchalantly for whatever he was, without feeling the need for analysis, but sometimes he wished he’d just turn off the irreverence for a minute or two and indulge him in serious conversation where everyone looked the details squarely in the face. ‘Ah well,’ he reasoned to himself, philosophically, but not satisfactorily. ‘Rough with the smooth. Maybe I just have to accept that it is part of the emotional avoidance that so often comes with being a man of the generation that he belongs to.’ Like a giant oil beetle, they made their way up the valley, Carl as the head, Eric the thorax and Mel and Penny as the abdomen, the whole body never less than connected. Carl loved the ritual of these walks, which had become a traditional feature of any foraging expedition in an unfamiliar place - and in many familiar ones - for him and Eric. He had recorded and numbered all of them in his notebook. Mel had joined them for several. Not often did the trio add new members to their party but when they did, on days like today, Carl always welcomed it, despite the fact that it limited the potential for self-expression. He liked the young old lady from the tumultuous house, with her sharpened edges and lack of accent, and not simply because of the way she repeatedly flattered him about his appearance and instinctively knew the precise point behind his ears where he preferred to be touched. She had a bullshit-free aura about her, a lack of self-dramatisation and a nice colourful shoulder bag. He was struck by the certain knowledge that her own house was a smoothly functioning one, that she kept her sofas clean, always remembered to put the food waste out and prevent invasion by fruit flies. ‘Why can’t Eric find a woman like this, to be with?’ Carl wondered. ‘Is it me? Have I been in some way responsible, without ever meaning to, for preventing him finding a woman like this?’ There was no need for Eric to consult the map, since Penny knew the best paths - including of unofficial ones - to their destination: a collection of three stones at the head of the valley that were sometimes referred to as The Siren And Her Daughters. Penny said the legend was that on every full moon, the Daughters, and sometimes the Siren, if she happened to be feeling expansive, got up and danced, but Penny had been up there during several full moons over the years and had never personally witnessed it. ‘Maybe people just haven’t been playing the right songs,’ said Eric. Four strangers, edging their way downhill, passed them as they climbed to the summit. Three of these strangers had a version of the same thought: ‘What I am seeing passing me is the New Older People, so different to the Older People of thirty or forty years earlier. They are the ones who flow with technology’s alterations without shrieking or resigning, who stay busy, who have not reserved their retirement bungalow in advance, who progress tidily up gradients in lively-minded trios, barely catching their breath on the way.’ The fourth stranger had no thoughts at all, but that was because he was a man called Damian who had just leased a car with a showy outlandishly manufactured steering wheel and he was lost in a reverie about how nice it would be to soon touch this steering wheel once again, a small near-erotic frenzy building inside him as, with every step, the prospect became more real. At the top of the hill, Carl was relieved to see that Eric only looked partially ragged. ‘Maybe,’ Carl thought. ‘That visibly frail person I saw upended below the hill fort yesterday, and outside our front gate a few weeks before, was an aberration.’ He took the Siren and Mel and Penny took a Daughter each, everyone with their own stone to lean on save for Carl, who preferred the grass. There was something different about the earth here to the earth at home, something at once strange and familiar. Carl wanted to sink his hands into it. Maybe the desire indicated something more profound than he could yet fully parse. Or alternatively he just hadn’t done enough gardening recently, was feeling the urges that the true botanist feels as winter passes into its final stages. ‘I know Sirens are fond of rocks but aren’t they supposed to live closer to the sea than this?’ asked Mel. ‘I think the implication is perhaps that at the point when she was around this was the sea,’ said Penny. ‘It probably will be again, before long, the way everything is going,’ said Mel. ‘Ooh, don’t these puddles look oily.’ ‘Hey,’ said Eric. ‘Did you know that it wasn’t until 1975 that olive oil was available to buy anywhere in the UK except chemists?’ ‘Thief!’ thought Carl, furrowing his brow. The olive oil fact had been one he’d told Eric yesterday after reading it on a blog about the history of cooking. ‘Gosh, in my mind it was much earlier,’ said Penny. ‘But I know that for a long time it was only used for unblocking ears. He’s extraordinarily well-behaved off the lead, isn’t he. Does he never bark at all?’ ‘Nah,’ said Eric. ‘It’s not his thing. He’s a philosopher, this one.’ ‘You should count yourself lucky I don’t, right now, you rank fucking plagiarist,’ thought Carl. Mel and Eric, followed by Carl, walked to the far end of the plateau and tried to locate a 19th Century shipping tower on the coast, five miles distant. A low black chain of cloud was worrying its way towards them from the headland and Mel talked about the summer when she was small and her mum coated herself almost permanently in olive oil and vinegar, having heard from a neighbour it was the best sun protection. ‘She smelled appalling and got skin cancer numerous times in her sixties. On the other hand, she had the best tan in Wolverhampton.’ Upon hearing a low moaning, the three of them spun abruptly around. ‘Oh, er, oh, oh, er… oh-h-h-.’ The moaning carried implications of distress but had a diffident quality to it, as if was equal parts apology and cry for help. Penny was nowhere to be seen and their first impulse was to look with panic towards the steep gorse-decorated drop to their left where sharp rocks and forgotten half-trees jigsawed their way down to a blackly flooded chasm. It was Carl’s idea to look up instead and, as he did, Eric and Mel’s gaze followed, where they were greeted, with a small timid wave, by a horizontal Penny from six feet above head height, where she offered the awkward appearance of a woman who’d reluctantly agreed to recline on an invisible chaise longue. ‘Please don’t be alarmed,’ she said. ‘I’ll no doubt be down in a minute, no doubt. I’m sure it will all be fine.’ ‘Shit,’ said Eric. ‘Oh gosh, shit,’ said Mel. ‘I am intrigued to know what happens next,’ thought Carl. Eric and Mel instinctively searched the barren hilltop for an unlikely soft object - a fully inflated lilo, or a thick blanket, or perhaps a parachute - but, finding nothing, all they could do was place faith in the reassurances offered by the now familiar voice speaking to them from this shallow heaven while, to its rear, the clouds rolled heinously in.

Everything Will Swallow You by Tom Cox

After weeks of tantalising waiting, today I am hugely excited to be able to show you the cover art for my third novel, Everything Will Swallow You… The cover is the work of the enormously talented Joe McLaren: his fourth for me, so far. I think it perfectly encapsulates the book’s mystery, the dusty objects scattered through the narrative and its coastal Dorset setting, with just a hint of the identity of one of its two main characters. When it was in development, just as a starting point I sent Joe this 1982 Picador cover of the autobiography of John Cowper Powys for inspiration. I also made it clear that I was keen to get this character – the Ooser, Dorset’s most infamous folkloric character – on there somewhere, as he plays a not insignificant role in the book… Way back on a cruel, icy day in January, 2018, during the writing of my first short story collection Help the Witch, I was walking the barren landscape of Kinder Scout in the Peak District, wondering what kind of cover might suit the book, and I came across these two inosculated Sycamores, which immediately put me in mind of a branch-handed man, raging at an unjust sky. I sent the photo to Joe (via my then editor Simon Spanton) and a few weeks later he came up with this… Seeing what Joe had done with my seed of an idea was a cathartic feeling for me, after a long period of having to fight – often unsuccessfully – to not have utterly terrible covers on my books. The nadir of the earlier phase had come when Simon And Schuster UK decided to put a kitten inside a baseball boot in an attempt to get 2011’s Talk To The Tail – a book less than 50% about cats, which didn’t even feature a kitten – into supermarkets. Like its predecessor – a kitten sitting in some discarded jeans – I have no doubt that this cover alienated a lot of people who might have enjoyed the writing in the book (I mean, I wouldn’t have bought it, and I wrote it!) while drawing in many people who probably wouldn’t. I’m sure both kittens were lovely but fuck knows who they belonged to. I’d never met them and they certainly had no business being on the covers of my books. None of this was particularly unusual – especially around the beginning of the second decade of this century, just prior to a generally better time for book cover art. No, I had never encountered another author who’d had a publisher try to make their book look like a cheap unattractive birthday card, but – around the time my worst covers were being put out into the world, in the hope of appeasing Tesco – I met a mass market fiction author who had recently dissuaded her publishers from making her adopt a ‘cuter’ pen name and lavishing her debut novel with a cover illustration of a young woman in a woolly hat leaping into the air for glee in her local Starbucks. In 2013 by moving to Little Brown for my final two ‘cats and more’ books, I was at least able to get my own cats on the covers of the books I’d written about them, but even that necessitated a battle, after they initially shot an actor cat lookalike of my elderly cat The Bear for the cover of 2013’s The Good, The Bad & The Furry. The success of those books also gave my agent the leverage to persuade my previous publishers to rejacket the earlier two books. However, when I embarked on my ninth book, 21st-Century Yokel, in 2016, I did so with the feeling that I’d never had a truly great cover on one of my books, nor one that fully summed up what they were about. The covers that Joe and Clare Melinsky – who illustrated the covers 21st-Century Yokel, Ring the Hill and Notebook – have come up with, in collaboration with Mark Ecob of my publishers Unbound, have changed all that. Covers matter. I didn’t buy this 1967 LP by the San Francisco-based psych band HP Lovecraft solely based on its cover, but I would have done, and if I had done, I would have been far from disappointed. Not all records and books with brilliant covers live up the promise the art on their exterior makes, but a lot do. And that’s because when people go the extra mile with their creativity, and push themselves to new heights, they’re likely to fight that bit harder to make the result something whose every element they can be proud of. I started putting more pride and care into my books in 2016 and, when I did, I realised I needed a publisher who understood what I was really trying to do, not one whose main goal was to make my books sell as many copies as possible in Asda over a short period of time then forget about them. I made sacrifices to go with that publisher, and some elements of publishing with them have been harder than they’d have been if I’d stuck with a traditional mainstream imprint, but there are few things that beat the satisfaction I get when I look at these, lined up together, knowing that another member of their family is soon on the way. I’ve been keeping Joe particularly busy of late, since Everything Will Swallow You is the second cover he’s illustrated for me in under a year. Last December he came up with this equally wonderful and apt cover for my second novel 1983, which I feel duty bound to let you know is published in the US and Canada TODAY. I’m hoping those of you over there are going to buy lots of copies then, if you don’t hate it, tell all your pals about it (and possibly leave a nice review on a website or two). You can order from Barnes & Noble, Amazon or Bookshop.org or your local independent store. If you are elsewhere in the world, the book is also already out in the UK, and Blackwells will send pretty much everywhere in the world with free delivery. As a taster you can read about the wonderful school which inspired it here: https://tomcox.substack.com/p/a-great-school.

After weeks of tantalising waiting, today I am hugely excited to be able to show you the cover art for my third novel, Everything Will Swallow You… 
 
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/1_10947e76-6e3b-40e6-82ef-d6488c519d7b_480x480.png?v=1727799118">
 
The cover is the work of the enormously talented Joe McLaren: his fourth for me, so far. I think it perfectly encapsulates the book’s mystery, the dusty objects scattered through the narrative and its coastal Dorset setting, with just a hint of the identity of one of its two main characters. When it was in development, just as a starting point I sent Joe this 1982 Picador cover of the autobiography of John Cowper Powys for inspiration.
 
<img src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/picador_autobiography_480x480.webp?v=1727789332" alt="">
 
I also made it clear that I was keen to get this character – the Ooser, Dorset’s most infamous folkloric character – on there somewhere, as he plays a not insignificant role in the book…
 
<img src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/folklore_myths_and_legends_480x480.webp?v=1727789347" alt="">
 
Way back on a cruel, icy day in January, 2018, during the writing of my first short story collection Help the Witch, I was walking the barren landscape of Kinder Scout in the Peak District, wondering what kind of cover might suit the book, and I came across these two inosculated Sycamores, which immediately put me in mind of a branch-handed man, raging at an unjust sky.
 
<img src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/tree_480x480.webp?v=1727789470" alt="">
 
I sent the photo to Joe (via my then editor Simon Spanton) and a few weeks later he came up with this…
 
<img src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/Help_the_Witch_480x480.webp?v=1727789358" alt="">
 
Seeing what Joe had done with my seed of an idea was a cathartic feeling for me, after a long period of having to fight – often unsuccessfully – to not have utterly terrible covers on my books. The nadir of the earlier phase had come when Simon And Schuster UK decided to put a kitten inside a baseball boot in an attempt to get 2011’s Talk To The Tail – a book less than 50% about cats, which didn’t even feature a kitten – into supermarkets. Like its predecessor – a kitten sitting in some discarded jeans – I have no doubt that this cover alienated a lot of people who might have enjoyed the writing in the book (I mean, I wouldn’t have bought it, and I wrote it!) while drawing in many people who probably wouldn’t. I’m sure both kittens were lovely but fuck knows who they belonged to. I’d never met them and they certainly had no business being on the covers of my books.
 
None of this was particularly unusual – especially around the beginning of the second decade of this century, just prior to a generally better time for book cover art. No, I had never encountered another author who’d had a publisher try to make their book look like a cheap unattractive birthday card, but – around the time my worst covers were being put out into the world, in the hope of appeasing Tesco – I met a mass market fiction author who had recently dissuaded her publishers from making her adopt a ‘cuter’ pen name and lavishing her debut novel with a cover illustration of a young woman in a woolly hat leaping into the air for glee in her local Starbucks.
 
In 2013 by moving to Little Brown for my final two ‘cats and more’ books, I was at least able to get my own cats on the covers of the books I’d written about them, but even that necessitated a battle, after they initially shot an actor cat lookalike of my elderly cat The Bear for the cover of 2013’s The Good, The Bad &amp; The Furry. The success of those books also gave my agent the leverage to persuade my previous publishers to rejacket the earlier two books.
 
However, when I embarked on my ninth book, 21st-Century Yokel, in 2016, I did so with the feeling that I’d never had a truly great cover on one of my books, nor one that fully summed up what they were about. The covers that Joe and Clare Melinsky – who illustrated the covers 21st-Century Yokel, Ring the Hill and Notebook – have come up with, in collaboration with Mark Ecob of my publishers Unbound, have changed all that.
 
Covers matter. I didn’t buy this 1967 LP by the San Francisco-based psych band HP Lovecraft solely based on its cover, but I would have done, and if I had done, I would have been far from disappointed.
 
<img src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/HP_Lovecraft_480x480.webp?v=1727789358" alt="">
 
Not all records and books with brilliant covers live up the promise the art on their exterior makes, but a lot do. And that’s because when people go the extra mile with their creativity, and push themselves to new heights, they’re likely to fight that bit harder to make the result something whose every element they can be proud of. I started putting more pride and care into my books in 2016 and, when I did, I realised I needed a publisher who understood what I was really trying to do, not one whose main goal was to make my books sell as many copies as possible in Asda over a short period of time then forget about them. I made sacrifices to go with that publisher, and some elements of publishing with them have been harder than they’d have been if I’d stuck with a traditional mainstream imprint, but there are few things that beat the satisfaction I get when I look at these, lined up together, knowing that another member of their family is soon on the way.
 
<img src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/Tom_Cox_Books_Lined_Up_480x480.jpg?v=1727789370" alt="">
 
I’ve been keeping Joe particularly busy of late, since Everything Will Swallow You is the second cover he’s illustrated for me in under a year. Last December he came up with this equally wonderful and apt cover for my second novel 1983, which I feel duty bound to let you know is published in the US and Canada TODAY. I’m hoping those of you over there are going to buy lots of copies then, if you don’t hate it, tell all your pals about it (and possibly leave a nice review on a website or two). You can order from Barnes &amp; Noble, Amazon or Bookshop.org or your local independent store. If you are elsewhere in the world, the book is also already out in the UK, and Blackwells will send pretty much everywhere in the world with free delivery. As a taster you can read about the wonderful school which inspired it here: <a href="https://tomcox.substack.com/p/a-great-school" data-mce-href="https://tomcox.substack.com/p/a-great-school" data-mce-fragment="1">https://tomcox.substack.com/p/a-great-school</a>.
 
<img src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/1983_480x480.webp?v=1727789337" alt="">

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