Marla went wide on August 18, and the hardcover arrives with a prequel novelette tucked inside it called Moonflowers. That created a question almost immediately, and it is the kind of question that stops people from starting a book at all. Do you have to read the prequel first? We asked Jonathan Janz on the show, and his answer was clear.
No, You Do Not Need to Read Moonflowers First
Jonathan built it that way on purpose, and his reasoning will sound familiar to anyone who has tried to catch up on a franchise lately.
I love superhero movies. I love Marvel movies, but it does feel kinda like you have to do homework now.
He had just seen an article listing everything you are supposed to watch before Doomsday and hit a wall with it. He is a fan. He still has not seen the Loki series. He has not watched Wakanda Forever yet (he plans to). If the homework pile is too tall for someone who actually loves the thing, it is definitely too tall for a reader picking up a horror novel for the first time.
So the rule he set for himself was simple: additive, never required.
I didn’t wanna put more burden on the reader.
Start with the novel. Moonflowers is a bonus, not a gate.
Listen to the full episode here:
What Moonflowers Actually Is
Around the second page of Marla, there is a short paragraph explaining why she became an urban legend in the first place, and it references something that happened on Halloween night eleven years earlier. Most readers register that and move on.
Moonflowers is that night. It also follows the private detective who took the case.
The finished piece runs 10,000 to 11,000 words, which was not the original plan. Weird Tales editor John Harlacher asked for a short story and was thinking three or four thousand words. Jonathan could not crack it at that size, mostly because of the constraint he had set for himself. He wanted the story to matter without being homework, and that turns out to be a hard needle to thread in 3,000 words.
The title does real work too. Moonflowers appear in the novel; the characters smell them, and the scent functions as a signal that Marla is close. Read the prequel, and that smell carries more weight the next time it shows up. Skip it, and the novel still works exactly as written.
You Can Only Get It in the Hardcover and the Audiobook
This part matters if you are deciding which edition to buy, because Moonflowers is not in every format. It is in the hardcover, and it is in the audiobook. Jonathan did not even know about the audiobook inclusion until the Wednesday after release, which is a nice reminder that authors are not always the first to know what their publisher is doing.
The original plan was different. Harlacher wanted something special for the hardcover, and the early idea was to host the story behind a paywalled section of the Weird Tales website for people who preordered. They scrapped that and put it in the book instead, which is the better call by a mile.
The hardcover also has foil letters, sprayed edges, and a lot of interior art. Arthur’s summary on the episode:
And buy the hardcover because it is beautiful.
The Season Two Connection Nobody Is Talking About Yet
Here is the part that makes Moonflowers more than a bonus track. Jonathan wrote it with the showrunner of the Marla series.
The two of them text daily. She built a Pinterest board for the series where they collect images and ideas, and she has been pushing him hard on the lore because she wants to know everything about King’s Branch and everything about who these characters were before the novel starts.
That pressure is where the prequel came from. Jonathan had been carrying a character in his head for a possible second Marla novel, mentioned him during one of those conversations, and she found the character intriguing enough to build around.
So the character introduced in Moonflowers is positioned to be a major part of a potential second season. Meaghan called it correctly on the episode:
That’s like a lore drop that you get from the book.
That is a genuinely fun position for a reader. You are getting early access to something that might pay off on screen in a few years.
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What If You Already Read Marla in 2022?
Fair question, since the original Earthling Publications run was only 500 copies, and the people who own one paid attention to this book long before the rest of us.
The text is close to identical. Weird Tales and Blackstone ran it through their full editorial process; Harlacher edited it, it got a line edit, and Jonathan made a few small tweaks he had been sitting on for four years. His own estimate is 98% the same, and he does not think a 2022 reader would notice most of the changes.
Which means the reason to pick up the new edition is not a rewrite. It is Moonflowers, the audiobook performances, and a hardcover that looks like someone actually cared about making it.