All the Meaner Things by A.K. McCarthy Cover Reveal: The Mob Has Fangs

Welcome to the All the Meaner Things cover reveal, the first public look at A.K. McCarthy’s debut novel, with hand-painted art by Justin T. Coons. The book is vampire noir set in a California city during Prohibition, where a war-scarred hitman called Kieran Russe finds out that the crime family he works for is full of vampires. Below you will find the story, a little about the author and the artist, and a theory about the title. First, though, a word about one of horror’s most loyal fall guys: the hard man who is quite sure he is the deadliest thing in town.

The Geckos, the Abigail crew and Teddy Lobo all meet their monsters as strangers. Kieran’s problem is worse. The monsters are not across town. They sign his wages. He has been one of the family’s meaner things all along, and he thought he was the wolf.

Horror has been telling this joke for decades, and it never gets old. The crew in Abigail are six hired pros paid to mind a twelve-year-old ballerina for one night and collect a $50 million ransom. Easy money, until the ballerina turns out to be the most dangerous thing in the house, and her dad turns out to be a powerful underworld figure.

In Renfield, Teddy Lobo plays at being the hard man of New Orleans’ Lobo crime family. Then he meets Nicolas Cage’s Dracula and learns, very fast, where he sits on the food chain. The rule is simple. In horror, the man who calls himself the deadliest in town is not describing himself. He is reading out the menu.

Meet Kieran Russe, the Deadliest Man in Town (Allegedly)

Which brings us, with no shame at all, to Kieran Russe. He is a hitman in a California city during Prohibition. He fought in the First World War. He believes he is the deadliest man in town.

You can see where this is going. Kieran can’t. Not yet.

Today Ginger Nuts of Horror is proud to reveal the cover of All the Meaner Things, the debut novel from A.K. McCarthy. The cover is the work of painter and designer Justin T. Coons, and you will find it in the box at the top of this page. Scroll back up and have a proper look. Then come back, because Kieran’s employers would like a word.

The book is a noir vampire novel. Picture a crime family running booze through a dry country. Now picture that family running on something a lot redder than bootleg whisky. Kieran does the dirty work. The family does the drinking.

What Is All the Meaner Things About?

The trouble starts with the bootleggers. They begin to die of a strange illness that nobody can explain. Then Kieran spots the same signs in Ana, a strong-willed nurse and the woman he has started to fall for. At the same moment, a band of odd strangers turns up in town with a theory. They say the dead men are the work of vampires. They say Kieran’s boss, Goolsby Markham, is one of the undead, and that he has left ruin behind him for generations.

This is awkward news for a man who takes Markham’s money.

Kieran has always got through life alone and by force. It worked in the trenches, and it has worked in the rackets. Here, it is going to cost him. To save Ana, himself and maybe the whole city, he has to work out who he can trust and how to stop the bleeding. His own mind is not much help, because the war left it cracked. He is caught between the hunters, the family, the romance and his own head, and none of the four is playing fair.

The story runs through smoky speakeasies, dark mine tunnels and graveyards where the wise guys do not stay down.

Setting all this during Prohibition is a sharp choice. Prohibition made one drink illegal and turned ordinary men into smugglers. A vampire crime family is in the same trade, just with a darker product. Both run on thirst, on secrets, and on people who keep quiet about what is in the cellar. You could say the Markham family was always going to go into booze. They already knew how to move a red liquid through the dark.

A.K. McCarthy has this to say about All the Meaner Things

If you’ve ever wondered how Raymond Chandler would write a horror story, All the Meaner Things might show you. It’s a bleak world with oddball characters, wisecracks, stiff drinks, and more than enough blood to go around.

Kieran lives the life of a vampire, minus the fangs. He only works at night, and he believes himself to be a monster, with his scarred face and his long list of victims. But starting with the first scene in this book, Kieran finds himself in an unusual role: protector instead of predator. When he has the choice to continue hurting people or to save those he cares about, he has to find a part of himself that he thought he left back in a trench in the war.

The Painter Behind the Cover: Justin T. Coons

Coons is a traditional painter and designer who makes hand-painted art for book covers and posters. He has lots of experience laying out covers. He builds his own fonts, and he works across the genres. He lives outside Philadelphia with his wife, his daughter and two dogs. You can see more of his work on his portfolio site.

A painted cover suits this book. Noir and vampires both grew up in the pulps, and the pulps were sold by painters. A brush suits gangsters and fangs far better than a stock photo could.

Who Is A.K. McCarthy?

McCarthy writes dark fiction, and his stories have run in a string of independent horror anthologies. All the Meaner Things is his first novel, but he is no stranger to deadlines. He studied journalism and history at Indiana University. Then he worked for magazines, newspapers and websites in Indiana, Alaska and Virginia. At the Juneau Empire he won seven Alaska Press Club awards between 2017 and 2019.

He has also written a great deal for Living Blues Magazine, as well as for the British horror magazine The Dark Side, Dread Central and America’s Civil War. That mix of history and horror suggests a man who gets the period right before he sets fire to it.

He lives in Indianapolis with his wife, Alison, and three cats: Archie, Henrietta and Wilhelmina. Anyone who lives with three cats already knows how it feels to work for something that sleeps all day, eats first and could end you if it felt like it. Kieran Russe has a lot to learn. McCarthy, you suspect, did his research at home.

Rats, Owls and Hitmen: Why the Title Bites

The title seems to come from Bram Stoker. In chapter 18 of Dracula, Van Helsing warns that the Count can “command all the meaner things.” He means the rat, the owl, the bat, the moth, the fox and the wolf. These are the creatures that run a vampire’s errands. They do the dirty work so the master does not have to.

I do not know if McCarthy meant it this way. Still, it is hard not to read Kieran into that list. A hitman is a meaner thing in a good hat.

Now, to be fair, crooks who stumble into vampires are not a new idea. I have just spent two paragraphs proving it. Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Certain Dark Things put vampires among the crime gangs of Mexico City back in 2016, and the book’s own pitch names it as a match. The pitch also points to Laird Barron’s Isaiah Coleridge novels, starting with Blood Standard in 2018, where a former mob enforcer turned private eye keeps bumping into the uncanny. Then it sums itself up with a neat line: “If Raymond Chandler were to tell an Anne Rice story.” Barron grew up in Alaska, and McCarthy reported from there. Something up north clearly breeds cold-blooded men.

So what is new? The Geckos, the Abigail crew and Teddy Lobo all meet their monsters as strangers. They walk into the wrong bar, or they grab the wrong kid. Kieran’s problem is worse. The monsters are not across town. They sign his wages. He has been one of the family’s meaner things all along, and he thought he was the wolf.

In Stoker’s list, the wolf comes last. Kieran Russe has always taken it for granted that he was the wolf. On this evidence, he may be closer to the rat.

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