Another Powerful Baker’s Dozen
Chicken House Press Announces Acquisition of Bathing in Fire - A Collection That Proves Transformation Requires Total Immersion
BC author Ace Baker returns with his second thirteen-story collection, proving lightning can indeed strike twice.
Following the reception of his 2023 debut collection How to Make a Killing Jar, prolific BC author Ace Baker is back with Bathing in Fire—a searing new collection of thirteen stories that explores what it truly means to be consumed by the forces that shape us. Where his first collection offered a poetic, compelling, and sometimes shocking set of fables that unpacked snapshots of the human experience, this new work dives deeper into the transformative power of complete immersion in our most intense emotions and circumstances.
From the adrenaline-fuelled world of smokejumpers to the intimate betrayals that unfold beneath tropical waters, from the prairie landscapes where new love takes root to the devastating choices made in wartime, Bathing in Fire spans continents and centuries while maintaining an unflinching focus on characters who must navigate the most extreme circumstances imaginable.
The collection showcases Baker’s evolution as a storyteller, with several pieces displaying the masterful rhythm and dark humour readers have come to expect. His ability to weave together disparate elements—future technology and ancient human nature, passionate love and calculated revenge, small-town dynamics and global conflicts—creates a reading experience that is both deeply engaging and profoundly unsettling.
Ace Baker signing the contract for Bathing in Fire
As a high school English teacher with over twenty years of experience, Baker continues to draw inspiration from his students and his commitment to the craft. When he signed his contract for Bathing in Fire, he was characteristically seated on the floor of his library, surrounded by the 18,000 pieces of a massive jigsaw puzzle he's working on—a fitting metaphor for how he approaches storytelling. Like a puzzle master, Baker takes seemingly disparate pieces of human experience and fits them together to reveal larger patterns of meaning. Each story in this collection represents another piece of the complex picture he’s assembling about what it means to be truly transformed by life’s most intense moments.
His mentorship under notable figures including past Poet Laureate of British Columbia Evelyn Lau and Order of Canada recipient Patrick Lane has helped him refine his voice into something both accessible and literary.
Diana Gabaldon praised Baker’s previous work for its “overlapping layers of depth and meaning,” while the late Jack Whyte noted how Baker’s prose “left me breathless and awed by the indelible images it thrust into my awareness... terse, taut, and terrific in its brilliant intensity.”
Bathing in Fire promises to deliver that same intensity while pushing into even more challenging territory. These thirteen stories don’t just observe their characters from a safe distance—they plunge readers directly into the flames alongside them.
Bathing in Fire will be available from Chicken House Press in October 2025.
Do you want to be part of the release team? CHP needs early reviewers to help create a stir and to give us marketable blurbs we can use in promotion. Sign up to be part of the review team today and you will be notified when we’re ready to start generating buzz for this incredible book. Reviewers for this particular title should be prepared to read in the spring of 2023.
