The first volume of Mezzo and Pirus's extraordinary suburban horror trilogy, KING OF THE FLIES, will be released early next year. As an advance teaser, we're serializing the first chapter, "Hallorave" (which is also the title of the book) right here, a page a day. Since it takes place on Halloween, it seems appropriate to run it this week.

This is the first foreign book of ours in a while I didn't translate, control freak that I am; fortunately I found Helge Dascher and John Kadlecek to pick up the slack, and they did a superb job on it.

Volume 2, "The Origin of the World," will be released at the end of 2010, and Volume 3, assuming Mezzo and Pirus have it finished by then, will (we hope) premiere by San Diego 2011.

If this looks at all familiar, a few chapters of this book were published in HEAVY METAL five or six years ago - probably to the bafflement of readers since even though the book looks like it's a series of short stories, they're a very tightly interwoven narrative, and HM only published a couple of them.

Each volume will be in the traditional European hardcover format, 64 big, very dense, full color pages. The cover price will be $18.99. It will be worth every penny.

(click image to enlarge)