Helen Atsma is now at Ecco, but her fingerprints remain over all these books, and I’m eternally grateful for that. At Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, thanks so damn much to Jaime Levine, Fariza Hawke, Marissa Page, and Michael Dudding for all the heart and muscle you’ve put into both sharpening these books up and getting them out into the world. A brilliant copyeditor is an amazing gift, so a huge round of applause to Tracy Roe, MD, the best in the biz.

Thanks to Dan Hernandez at Carleton College for answering all of my weird and annoying questions about academia, biology, and fungus in particular. And thanks to Michelle Martin at Prairie Creek Community School and to the naturalists at the Wolf Ridge Environmental Learning Center in northern Minnesota for serving as additional resources. You all helped bring my “out of this world” ideas down to Earth, authenticating the fantastical.

I pawed my way through many articles when researching The Unfamiliar Garden, but I’d like to especially highlight “The Social Network: Deciphering Fungal Language,” by Abigail C. Leeder, Javier Palma-Guerrero, and N. Louise Glass, which appeared in Nature Reviews Microbiology in May 2011; and “How the Zombie Fungus Takes Over Ants’ Bodies to Control Their Minds,” by Ed Yong, published in the Atlantic in November 2017. I also took many notes when watching the fantastic documentary Fantastic Fungi.

My parents are both naturalist nerds—and my mother in particular is trained as a botanist—so if she hadn’t constantly quizzed me on trees and mosses and seeds and flowers as a kid, I don’t know that I would have written this book as an adult. And of course I need to thank Lisa, my wife, for her love and support and patience over all these years. And you know what? I’ve never thanked my kids before in the Acknowledgments, but Connor and Madeline, if not for my deep and total love for you, I could never have imagined the terrifying possibility of loss that informs this novel. So you better stay safe—and keep out of the woods during apocalyptic meteor showers.

About the Author

BENJAMIN PERCY has won a Whiting Award, a Plimpton Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, an NEA fellowship, and the iHeartRadio Award for Best Scripted Podcast. He is the author of The Ninth Metal, The Dark Net, The Dead Lands, Red Moon, and The Wilding; three story collections; and an essay collection, Thrill Me. He also writes Wolverine and X-Force for Marvel Comics. He lives in Minnesota with his family.

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Praise for The Ninth Metal

“[In The Ninth Metal], debris from a comet drops a fabulously valuable new metal on Northfall, Minnesota, turning it into a bloody, brawling boomtown. Great characters, fine writing, totally engrossing.”

—STEPHEN KING