“It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar. Yet do this till you can do better, and you may perhaps find some ‘Symmes’ Hole’ by which to get at the inside at last.”

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

I don’t know what my first exposure to the Hollow Earth was. Probably one of the assorted cinematic adaptations of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth or similar fare, released starting in 1959 and watched by me on television when I was a kid, remembering only the monsters – guys in rubber suits or lizards with sails glued to their backs.

If not that, then one of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar novels, a smattering of which were stocked, alongside Tarzan and John Carter of Mars, in my high school library.

I don’t recall much of either. But the Hollow Earth has always been with me, for as long as I can remember. Not as an article of faith, like many of its believers, nor even as a world often explored in fiction, but simply as a nice thought. Something I was always pleased to have in the back of my mind.

Years ago, I made an analogy about the dinosaurs that were often posited by various pulp fiction writers as dwelling in the Hollow Earth. These dinosaurs were, to me, what a relationship with some sort of divine figure was for many people. Something that may not be real – something, in this case, that I didn’t even believe in – but it made my life better to think that they might be there.

Despite this, I never wrote a Hollow Earth story until I started on the seven story cycle that became Notes from Underground, my latest short story collection – and one unlike any other I have ever published before – which is now up for pre-order from Word Horde and due out in just a few weeks, with a cover reveal today showing off the artwork of Matthew Revert.

In some ways, Notes from Underground is the culmination of a lifelong obsession with the Hollow Earth. In other ways, it’s nothing like the Hollow Earth book I might have imagined I would write, if I had set myself the task. But, like so many things that occur in your writing life, this wasn’t exactly planned – it just sort of happened organically.

There aren’t many dinosaurs in Notes from Underground, but there are no shortage of monsters. Spider-like ghouls, the coeleopteran race that will eventually replace humanity, and other, stranger things. There aren’t many Burroughs-style heroes, either, nor any Verne-style digging machines. There isn’t even much in the way of mushroom forests, more’s the pity. But there are magicians and psychics and lost souls who are looking desperately for something – something that they just might find at the bottom of a Symmes’ Hole.

Here’s how Trevor Henderson, artist and author of Scarewaves, describes it in a very kind blurb: “With Notes from Underground, Orrin Grey uses the fantastic imagery of the high strange and the charming weirdness of pulp adventure stories as gateways to deeper, murkier depths. He tunnels deep into the honeycombed caverns of his characters’ interior lives and shines a light on what lurks there. A wonderful collection quite unlike any I’ve read before.”

Notes from Underground is also quite unlike anything I’ve written before. Caught somewhere between a short story collection and a short novel, it is made up of seven linked tales, each one of which can be read on its own (indeed, six of the seven were previously published in places as diverse as Pseudopod, Nightmare magazine, and Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year) but all of which together tell the story of the Hollow Earth itself – its past, its future, and what comes next.

After all, as one of the characters tells another, “Nothing lasts forever, not even forever.”

Tying these stories together is a new novelette, written expressly for this volume, which follows the widow of a stage magician whose husband disappears in the midst of a macabre trick. As she delves into his past to locate him, she finds that there may be an unexpected place waiting for her, too, below the ground…

Notes from Underground is due out from Word Horde on October 14, and is up for pre-order now. Every week, from now until then, I’ll be posting a new installment of Hollow Earth Expeditions, exploring some of the many influences that shaped the stories in Notes from Underground, and my own odd conception of the Hollow Earth.

I hope you’ll join me. We’re about to dig deep.