It’s been a week since I returned from Pulpfest 2026, and I’m still catching up on unfinished business. I was at the four-day convention representing Flinch Books with my partner and co-founder Jim Beard. We’ve been there almost every year since 2016, and our table in the dealer room gets more crowded with books and visitors every year.
This year we dropped the news about our upcoming anthology and revealed its cover to the Pulpfest faithful. Freeform Flinch: Tales of the Unique and the Unusual is just what the title suggests—a collection of ten stories that veer off the well-traveled paths and into unknown territory where the guardrails that define specific genres no longer apply.
An excerpt from the back cover copy says it best:
“Within these pages you’ll find familiar genres—crime, science fiction, fantasy, mystery, adventure—but from voices and pens that will likely surprise you, and maybe make you think twice about what those genres truly are and what they encompass. To freeform is to untether oneself—as a writer or reader, or both—from preexisting notions of what storytelling should be and where it should go. The tales in this tome take that exercise in experimentation and dial it to eleven!”
My contribution to the collection is called “Misfit Justice,” a story of what happens when three individuals with very unusual abilities happen to converge one evening in a place where lives are threatened in an armed confrontation.
The other nine writers on the roster include Jim Beard, Glen Held, Terrance Layhew, Craig McDonald, Robert J. Mendenhall, Charles F. Millhouse, Will Murray, Duane Spurlock, and Dayton Ward. Every one of these talented scribes sidesteps convention, each in their own way, and plots a course into uncharted territory.
Adam Benet Shaw, a longtime Flinch collaborator, provided the surreal cover illustration. Maggie Ryel—Flinch’s secret weapon for more than a decade—created the logo, designed the cover and worked her magic with the interior page formatting.
Stay tuned. The journey into the unique and the unusual gets under way soon when Freeform Flinch goes on sale this fall!