Thanks and appreciation go to many people when writing a book. None more than my wife, Yvonne Navarro. Thanks for listening to me talk about the crazy idea that giants are real aloud without laughing at me, and thanks for reading this and helping me make it what it is. Thanks to Tynan Ochse for his Caltech math brain. You’d make one hell of a bone chaser, nephew. Thanks also to my manager, Pete Donaldson, and my agent, Cherry Weiner. I also want to thank my beta readers, Paul Legerski, Dania Wright, Michael Huyck, Jay Chase, Brian Gross, and Pamela Donovan. Also a thanks to Steve Saville for getting me some much-needed Finnish from award winning Finnish author Maria Turtschaninoff. Thanks to the real Richard Laymon, who spent time with me joking about the Thing. It seemed only proper to put you there, if only for a moment. I know you’d be laughing now. Thanks to Joe Monti for taking a flyer on me. It’s been absolutely terrific working with you and taking your keen advice. Thanks also to the promotion and editorial team at Saga—Lauren Jackson and Madison Penico.
I’ve been wanting to write about giants for years, ever since my mother first read me the stories when I was but a wee bairn. The idea that they might exist always lured me into tangential research, much of which I used here. The facts the bone chasers used were part me and partly derived from the work of other “bone chasers.” Patrick Chouinard’s terrific book Lost Race of the Giants: The Mystery of Their Culture, Influence, and Decline Throughout the World; William Hinson’s Discovering Ancient Giants: Evidence of the Existence of Ancient Human Giants; and Richard Dewhurst’s The Ancient Giants Who Ruled America: The Missing Skeletons and the Great Smithsonian Cover-Up were great source material. Although I found all their work in different places online, it was nice to have it all in one place. I literally spent three years researching this book, taking voluminous notes. I enjoyed the research as much as I did writing the book. The amount of information on giants and angels is staggering. Readers of Burning Sky and Dead Sky might note that I included a different sort of giant mythology in those books. I wrote those after I wrote this one and just couldn’t put the idea down. It’s such an interesting concept that the truth of it all might be hiding in plain sight.
This, of course, is a work of fiction. But it’s funny, the more I researched, and the more information I found, the harder it was to disbelieve. I know. If Ethan McCloud were here he’d give me a stern lecture with some math mumbo jumbo about how unsubstantiated facts have a zero value, but I’m starting to really believe. And if they really do exist, can you imagine the cover-up? My God. It would be the greatest secret ever kept.
Just something to think about when you’re feeling all high and mighty, or when you wake up from a particularly disturbing dream about something gigantic.
Weston Ochse, Desert Grotto, 2020