New local publisher Cryptic Bindings is a self-described “creepy little press.” Their current entire list is one photo book, but this fall they’re publishing On/Off, which is billed as “A Jekyll and Hyde story.”

In the last decade or so, Seattle has really lost a lot of ground to Portland by way of publishing companies. There’s not a lot of diversity or energy in our publishing scene, so we should keep our fingers crossed, because a boutique horror press could add a lot to our publishing diversity.

At the moment, on their website, Cryptic is unrolling a serial thriller novel. It’s untitled, and there’s a contest to name it. Now, I’ve always been a fan of the idea of serial novels—when I read Dickens I usually stop between chapters to sort of get the rhythm of how his books were initially published—and I’m a little disappointed that there’s not a whole lot of this going on on the internet. Sure, the New York Times always runs a serial novel, but it feels vaguely like a throwback, as though the publishers are amused with how quaint they are. So the first five chapters of this novel are up, with a promise to publish every Monday. There are a lot of cliches, but that kind of thing is a valuable tool in the telling of serial fiction. It’s hard to tell what’s going to happen, or if the story is going to eventually be worth anything, but I’ll gladly load the thing into my feed reader and find out.