Every one of them is getting a second edition. Own a first? Yours is free.
I’ve been sitting on this one long enough that it’s started to feel like a secret I’m keeping badly, so here it is.
Every novel I’ve published is getting a second edition. Wicker Hill, The Morgue, Safe, When Man Becomes God—all four of them—rolling out online over the coming months, one at a time, until the whole shelf has been replaced.
And I want to be blunt about the part that matters most before anything else, because I’d rather you hear it from me than find out by clicking a dead link.
The first editions are already gone. Pulled. You can’t buy them anymore.
Which sounds dramatic, and probably reads like bad news if you’ve had one of them sitting in a cart. It isn’t. Stay with me.
So what’s actually changing...
Edits. A lot of them—far more thorough than what went out the first time.
Here’s the honest version, and I’m aware of exactly how it sounds coming from a guy who runs a publishing house: I published those books as well as I knew how to publish them at the time. That’s the caveat doing all the work in that sentence. At the time.
I’ve written a lot since then. I’ve edited other people’s manuscripts since then. I’ve sat on the other side of the desk at Marrow-House and watched what a real, unhurried, line-by-line pass does to somebody else’s book—and then gone back to my own shelf and found every place I let something slide because I was too close to it, too tired of it, or too eager to be finished with it.
Every writer knows that feeling. You hit a point where the book stops being a thing you’re making and becomes a thing you want to be done making. And that point almost never lines up with the book actually being finished.
So what’s in them?
Cleaner prose. Tighter pacing. Typos hunted down and put in the ground. Scenes that always sat a half-step wrong finally sitting right. Nothing that changes what these books are—no rewritten endings, no new characters, nothing that turns the copy you own into the wrong one. Same stories. Told properly.
The way they should have gone out the first time.
One exception, and I want to be straight about it: The Morgue is getting more than a polish. That one’s being rewritten by about half. The story doesn’t change—same events, same ending, same book—but there are aspects of how it’s told that I’ve wanted to take another run at since about a week after it went out. More on that below.
If You Bought a First Edition, the Second One Is Yours. Free.
This is the part I actually care about, so it’s getting its own section where nobody can scroll past it.
You bought the version I’m now standing here telling you wasn’t as good as it should have been. You paid full price for it. You took a chance on an author most people had never heard of—and a lot of you did it before there was a single review on the page to reassure you that you weren’t wasting your money.
You don’t get charged twice for that. Not by me.
So every single person who bought a first edition gets the digital second edition free. Here’s how it works:
- Email me at FCMarrow@gmail.com with a picture of you holding your physical copy.
- Leave an Amazon review on the new second edition of that book.
- I’ll email you the digital second edition. No cost, no catch.
That’s the whole process. Photo, review, done.
And I’ll say the quiet part out loud about that review, because I’m not going to pretend it’s a formality. Reviews are the entire ballgame for an independent author. Not sales—reviews. They’re what decides whether a book ever gets shown to somebody who’s never heard of me, and there is no amount of money I could spend that does what twenty honest reviews do.
So that’s the trade. You already backed me once. Back me one more time with thirty seconds of typing, and the better version of the book you already own is yours.
Wicker Hill
My first published novel, and Book One of the Wicker Anthology.
Psychological horror by way of Lovecraft—and the one that started all of this.
Boston journalist Abigail Alden goes back to her strange hometown of Wicker Hill to visit her mother’s grave, and to finally deal with having been abandoned by the woman lying in it. What she walks into instead is a fight against fate and against eldritch things sitting well past her ability to understand them, and the whole thing turns into a reckoning with what life, love and family actually mean when something older than all three is pulling at the edges.
It goes to dark places. It goes to taboo ones. That was deliberate then and it stays deliberate now—it’s a book about trauma and transgression, and sanding that down would have made it a lie.
It’s also the one carrying the most first-timer scar tissue, for the obvious reason that it was the first time. The second edition is where that finally gets sorted.
The Morgue
Book Two of the Wicker Anthology—and the one getting real surgery.
I started The Morgue practically the week Wicker Hill went out. I loved that world too much to leave it, so I went straight back in and kept going.
Look at the cover. That toe tag says Abigail. If you’ve read Book One, you already know what that means and roughly how worried you should be about it.
This is the one I’m rewriting by half, and I’d rather say so plainly than quietly ship a different book and hope nobody notices. The story isn’t moving. Nothing that happens stops having happened. But there are things in how that story is delivered—craft things, structural things, choices I made while I was still learning what I was doing—that have bothered me ever since, and this is my one shot at going back for them.
Only a handful of people own the first edition of this one. If you’re one of them, you’re holding something genuinely rare, and the offer below is very much aimed at you.
Safe
A family drama wearing the skin of a zombie apocalypse.
Ten-year-old Wrenley Wilson lives in a rooftop penthouse and has never once seen the world underneath it. Her father Andrew has—every day, up close, at street level, in a city full of the dead.
The book runs on both of them at once. He’s down there fighting through it. She’s up there living inside a story he built specifically so she’d never know it existed. And when the lies he stacked around her to keep her safe finally start coming apart, she has to face a ruined world and he has to face the fact that he can’t hold it off her anymore.
Is it a horror novel? Technically, sure. The dead are in it.
But Safe is for every parent who has ever fought like hell to love and protect somebody—even when it hurt to do it. Even when it meant lying to them.
When Man Becomes God
Some of us only ever learn what matters once it’s already too late.
This one came out of two things I love that have no business being in the same room together: 1950s alien invasion pictures, and the flat cosmic indifference of Lovecraft.
It opens on a win. Doctor Elijah Grant’s faster-than-light Helios drive completes a successful test flight, and humanity is suddenly one manned launch away from the stars. Then a voice from the cosmos cuts in. Within hours they’re here—and with the planet staring down its own destruction, we have to work out what to do about ourselves and answer for the arrogance that got us noticed in the first place.
It’s a book about reaching further than we should. About what it costs to stare outward so hard that you stop seeing the things standing directly beside you.
Existential horror, mostly. The aliens are almost incidental.
So when does all this actually happen?
I don’t have a date for you. That’s the honest answer, and I’d rather hand you that than a number I invented so I’d sound organised.
What I can tell you is that Wicker Hill is already in its final stages. That’s the one landing first, and it isn’t far off. The rest follow as each finishes its pass—one at a time, over the coming months, in whatever order they’re ready.
And when a book is done, it gets its own post right here. Not a line buried at the bottom of something else—its own announcement, the day it goes live. You’ve got enough people in your life promising things on schedules they invented. I’d rather just tell you when it’s actually finished.
And to everybody holding a first edition right now? Hang onto it.
It’s the version that existed before I knew better, there won’t be any more of them made, and I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t some small stubborn part of me that’s glad those are out there in the world exactly as they are.
Just send me the photo. Let’s get you the good one too.