My Strange Path to a Book Deal
The power of a domino effect
The Cabinet of Curiosities
In February 2020, I began collecting data for a very cool study that I had been planning for months. Participants would enter my lab, put on eye-tracking glasses, and examined a cabinet of curiosities filled with bizarre items: a dental mold from a cannibalistic serial killer, bullets used in an execution, a medallion from a failed exorcism, and many others.
After inspecting the items, the participants would put on a pair of nitrile gloves and choose a few items to pick up and look at. They would also choose a few items to learn more about.
I told the participants that these strange items were on loan from the Field Museum in Chicago as part of a study on museum curation. In reality, they were taking part in something much stranger: a study on morbid curiosity.
Unfortunately, less than a month after I began recruiting participants, the whole world shut down in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
I never finished the study, and I’m pretty sure that cabinet of curiosities is still stowed away somewhere in my old lab at The University of Chicago.
The First Domino
Like everyone else, I had to make a lot of changes to my research after March 2020. My research project that was supposed to be the core of my dissertation was no longer viable, and I had to shift to online studies.
I wasn’t sure what to shift to. I was really relying on this cabinet of curiosities study since it had so many components to it. Then Penny Sarchet, an editor at New Scientist, reached out to my colleague Mathias Clasen with a simple but timely question: Would horror fans be more resilient during the pandemic?
To which, Mathias replied:
And that was the first domino to fall.
The Second Domino
I led the study along with Mathias, Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, and John Johnson. It was a simple and straightforward study where we investigated whether or not people who watched a lot of horror movies and who were more morbidly curious were more likely to experience greater psychological resilience during the early months of the pandemic.
As it turns out, they did. It was a cool study that found something we predicted, which is always great. I reached out to Penny, as promised, and she covered the study in New Scientist. I never thought it would get much media attention beyond that, but boy was I wrong.
What started as a niche study suddenly became a global talking point. Everybody wanted to talk about this. The New York Times, Forbes Magazine, The Guardian, The NY Post, The Boston Globe, and dozens of other newspapers and radio shows.
All the press around this paper put my name at the top of Google for anyone searching for information about horror and morbid curiosity.
That was the second domino.
The Third Domino
I got a call one day, I think around September 2020, from Christopher Borrelli at the Chicago Tribune.
He wanted to do a profile of me and my work on morbid curiosity for the paper. We set up a time and met at my favorite oddities shop in Chicago: The Woolly Mammoth. We did a photo shoot with some creepy stuff at the shop and Chris interviewed me about my work for about half an hour or so.
The profile came out online sometime in early October. I was in Aarhus, Denmark for a month working on a haunted house study with Mathias, so I didn’t even know it had been published.
Then I started getting messages from people back home: “Did you know you’re on the front page of the Tribune??”
I just assumed it would be an online-only story. I certainly never thought it would be a full page of the Arts & Entertainment section or be featured on the front page of one of the largest newspapers in the US.
Getting on the front page of The Chicago Tribune was the third domino, and it was a big one.
The Final Domino
After the Tribune profile was published, I started getting a lot of emails from people. A&E asked if I had considered doing a TV show on morbid curiosity. I talked with a producer there for a while, but it ended up going nowhere (sort of… I’m working on one now, but not with A&E).
Then I got an email from an editor at Penguin Books asking if I had considered writing a popular science book.
Writing a book wasn’t really on my mind in 2020. I was still in my PhD program and hadn’t even begun writing my dissertation yet. But how could I pass up this opportunity?
I didn’t know anything about writing a book, so I started asking people I knew who had written books what I should do. I quickly found out that having a major publisher ask you to write one is essentially a huge cheat code. I was lucky to be in that position; it was really just a matter of all these dominoes falling in the right place at the right time.
My advisor suggested I get an agent to help me get the best deal possible. Again, I knew nothing about book agents, so I started asking people who I thought had agents how they found theirs. After talking with several people, I was fortunate enough to have Rob Henderson connect me with Max Brockman.
And that was the final domino
I signed my book deal with Penguin for Morbidly Curious in the summer of 2021. I asked for a longer contract since I was still finishing my PhD. I had some studies I was just starting that would be important for the book and I wanted to be sure they were included. I also still needed to write my dissertation, which is a whole book in itself.
So now, 4 years laters, it’s finally about to see the light of day. Two years of writing, about a year of editing, and then a year wait for the release. Lots of luck, some hard work, and saying yes to the right things as the right time, even if they didn’t have an obvious payoff at the time.
And the best part is that the book will be released in October: the most fitting time of year I could imagine.
As a reminder, if you pre-order my book ($19.00) you get 3 free months of my Substack ($18.00 value). Just send a screenshot of your order confirmation to MorbidlyCuriousBook@gmail.com
