Waiting on Wednesday – Ink by Jonathan Maberry

Welcome to my weekly segment, Waiting on Wednesday, where I look at upcoming books that I am planning to order and review in the next few months and which I think I will really enjoy. I run this segment in conjunction with the Can’t-Wait Wednesday meme that is currently running at Wishful Endings. Stay tuned to see reviews of these books when I get a copy of them. For my latest Waiting on Wednesday article, I am going to take a look at Ink, an intriguing upcoming standalone supernatural novel from one of my favourite authors, Jonathan Maberry.

Ink Cover

Maberry is an extremely impressive and talented author who has been writing science fiction and horror novels since in 2006, with his debut novel Ghost Road Blues. He has since gone on to become one of the leading authors of horror in the world today, with such series as the Rot & Ruin series, the Dead of Night series and the Pine Deep trilogy. I myself am a massive fan of his Joe Ledger series of books, which pitches military operatives against various science fiction and horror scenarios, including manmade zombies (Patient Zero and Code Zero), genetically mutated vampires (Assassin’s Code) and other inventive scenarios (such as Air Force One getting turned into a weaponised drone in Predator One). The latest Joe Ledger novel, 2019’s Rage, started a whole new series of books, the Rogue Team International series, and I am eagerly waiting for the next Joe Ledger book. In the meantime, Maberry has come up with a brand-new supernatural mystery novel, Ink, which, due to how much I love his other work, I thought would be intriguing to check out.

In this upcoming novel, Maberry returns to his fictional town of Pine Deep (a crossover town that has been featured in several of Maberry’s novels, a bit like Castle Rock or Derry in Stephen King’s works), for a whole new set of mysterious occurrences.

Goodreads Synopsis:

Tattoo-artist Patty Cakes has her dead daughter’s face tattooed on the back of her hand. Day by day it begins to fade, taking with it all of Patty’s memories of her daughter. All she’s left with is the certain knowledge she has forgotten her lost child. The awareness of that loss is tearing her apart.

Monk Addison is a private investigator whose skin is covered with the tattooed faces of murder victims. He is a predator who hunts for killers, and the ghosts of all of those dead people haunt his life. Some of those faces have begun to fade, too, destroying the very souls of the dead.

All through the town of Pine Deep people are having their most precious memories stolen. The monster seems to target the lonely, the disenfranchised, the people who need memories to anchor them to this world.

Something is out there. Something cruel and evil is feeding on the memories, erasing them from the hearts and minds of people like Patty and Monk and others.

Ink is the story of a few lonely, damaged people hunting for a memory thief. When all you have are memories, there is no greater horror than forgetting.

Now this sounds like quite a fascinating new novel from Maberry and I am very curious to see what sort of story he comes up with here. The whole concept of someone or something stealing the memories of the protagonists is quite compelling, and it has quite a lot of potential as a story element, especially if the characters end up losing key memories or forget big story moments. Maberry has always had an ability to turn complex story ideas into amazingly entertaining narratives, and I am curious to see what sort of supernatural mystery he creates in this upcoming book.

Due to how much I have enjoyed Maberry’s prior work, and because of how interesting this new novel sounds, I am now rather excited for this upcoming standalone book. Ink, which is currently set for release on 17 November 2020, is sure to be a really fascinating read, and I think that it has some real potential to be one of my top books for the year. I will probably end up getting the audiobook version of this novel when it comes out, due to the fact that Ray Porter, the impressive narrator of the Joe Ledger audiobooks, is once again lending his vocal talents to Maberry’s latest novel. However, if I can score an early copy of this from the publisher, I probably will not be able to help myself. I cannot wait to immerse myself in Maberry’s new intense novel, and I am really looking forward to checking out Ink a few months time.