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Evan J. Peterson - Better Living Through Alchemy - SSBA Fantasy Winner

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For my final post featuring the 2025 SSBA Artists, I present Evan J. Peterson, the winner of the Fantasy category. Spoiler alert for the upcoming review - I am halfway through this book and loving it!

As usual, more information on the SSBA can be found here, and links to all of my other SSBA posts can be found here. Side note, nominations are open for the 2026 awards - so send them in!

On to the author spotlight!  

 Evan J. Peterson - Author Biography


Evan J. Peterson is a game writer, novelist, and poet. His first novel, Better Living Through Alchemy, won the Small Spec Book Award for fantasy fiction, and other works include METAFLESH: Poems In the Voices of the Monster; Drag Star!, the world’s first drag performer RPG; and The Road to Innsmouth: Arkham Horror. His writing has appeared in Weird Tales, PseudoPod, Queers Destroy Horror, and Nightmare Magazine. POSTHUMAN, his next RPG, is coming in 2026 from Choice of Games. Evanjpeterson.com can tell you more.

Where you can find Evan J. Peterson: 

 
I'm semi-active on Instagram and BlueSky, and if you DM, I'll write back. My website www.evanjpeterson.com is the more direct way to contact me, and I curate the site as a part of the bigger Alchemy project. 

Interview

1. How did your writing journey begin/come about?

My parents always read to me, and when I was old enough to write stories, I didn't know where to stop. So I just kept going, even when I'd used all the vocabulary words in the homework assignment. Stories have to have a satisfying ending! I always wanted to be an author. 

2. Who are your biggest influences/favourite authors/books?

There are so many. I love Frankenstein and Dune. Both of those were extremely influential and formative, but so were the works of Clive Barker, Toni Morrison, and Anne Rice. Angela Carter, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, Shirley Jackson, Neil Gaiman, and William Burroughs are all highly influential. I also bring pop culture consistently into my work; outside of print literature, I'm mad for Bowie, Cronenberg, Dario Argento, John Waters, Kieron Gillen, Alan Moore, Peaches, Bjork, Prince, Tori Amos, Janelle Monae, Grace Jones, all those delicious weirdos. And, yes, Lovecraft. Of course Lovecraft. His work is obviously influential on my own. 

3. What are some recent books you’ve enjoyed and can recommend?

I've been on a Hailey Piper and China Mieville kick this year (2025). Piper's novella The Worm And His Kings is exactly the queer-trans-homeless-cult-cosmic-body-horror-love story I needed. That lady's got moxie. I've been rereading W. Scott Poole's Wasteland each year. It's nonfiction, and it's written so harrowingly. After the film adaptation of Poor Things knocked my socks off, I had to read the book; it was great up until the coda ruins everything. I'd recommend that one with the caveat that you can stop after the first, happy, ending. Next on my TBR pile is Sylvia Moreno-Garcia's Silver Nitrate; I'll hopefully be done with that before we speak live. 

4. Please tell us a bit about some of your other writing/work

Gladly! Before I finish writing the sequel to Better Living Through Alchemy, I've got a new text RPG coming out in 2026: Posthuman, from Choice of Games. Superheroes save the world–or don't, depending on how you play it. CoG also released my drag performance RPG, Drag Star!, in which you can make a nuanced and original drag persona and compete against other queens and kings. I still get fan mail about that one :-).  My most recent poetry collection is Metaflesh: Poems in the Voices of the Monster, and that's my love letter to (and from) Frankenstein, body horror, experimental poetry, and queer monsters. My short stories are uncollected, but you can find links to many of them on my website, www.evanjpeterson.com.

5. What’s next for you?

After Posthuman, I'm really excited to flesh out the sequel to BLTA. The working title is Dead Names. There will be more monsters, lots of drag, a cosmic cult or three, and more fakelore. I hope you enjoy it. 

Better Living Through Alchemy by Evan J. Peterson

Kelly Mun is a private detective... with an uncanny sense of smell. She runs Non-Linear Investigations with her cousin Critter, using psychic and esoteric methods to try to earn a living. When a mysterious businesswoman hires them to find the source of a deadly new street drug called bardo, Kelly's life gets even stranger than usual in this occult-noir Seattle.
The monsters are incidental.

Buy the book here!


1. What inspired you to write this book?

Everything! My kooky Seattle experiences, my fascination with folk magic, and my monomania for obscure deities. I thought this would be a short story, culminating in the discovery of the drug lab where the substance is harvested, and that big reveal of what the drug is made of. But this warranted a whole short novel. 

2. What was your favourite part of writing it?

The monsters. Always the monsters. Coming up with original monsters is a challenge I love to meet. 


 

 

 

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