David Michael Slater has written 40 books, but he describes his newest as “my first big book.”

The book, “Ugly,” released last October by Library Tales Publishing, derives its length, in part, from the three distinct stories that weave together across its pages.

“It’s three generations of women from the same family experiencing horrible maltreatment from various men in their lives,” Slater said. “It’s about their resilience.”

In the first generation, the protagonist escapes a World War II-era London orphanage to wed a rich aristocrat whose lavish lifestyle hides danger. Her daughter, the second generation, travels to the United States, taking refuge in a finishing school where disaster strikes. Her own daughter, generation three, ends up as a famous model in Los Angeles before an event from her past comes back to haunt her.

“Ugly” is an homage to John Irving, particularly “The Cider House Rules,” “A Prayer for Owen Meanie” and “The World According to Garp, as well as being inspired more generally from Irving’s gift for tragicomedy.

“[Irving] said, ‘The books are funny right up until they’re just not funny,’” Slater said.  “That’s how you get someone laughing and then shock them and then they’re like, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t see that. That’s horrible. What’s coming?’”

Often, when he starts on a book, Slater has no idea what’s coming himself. He explained that there are “planners” and “pants-ers” in writing; the former having a carefully-laid path prepared before drafting starts, while the latter fly by the seat of their aforementioned trousers. Slater classifies himself in the second category.

“I’ve written enough to know now that I’ll figure it out,” he said. “I’ll get to some unexpected place at the end, which is probably the most exciting part of writing the way I do, having no idea that I would’ve gotten to such a great place.”

It’s been a successful methodology for him; enough so that his first novel, “Fun and Games,” will be re-released for its 10th anniversary in the coming weeks.

“[‘Fun and Games’ is] about a dysfunctionally hilarious Jewish family in 1980s Pittsburgh, where I grew up. Jonathan, the main character, lives in my house, went to my high school,” Slater said, noting that’s where the similarities end. “Locationally, it’s autobiographical, but what happens? No way.”

Jonathan is an observer of his famous father and two sisters, one of whom is an “evil genius,” in Slater’s words, and the other of whom is “so beautiful people can barely look at her.”

Slater is also set to release a British edition of his novel, “The Vanishing,” which is a fantasy novel about an 11-year-old girl in Germany who literally becomes invisible after witnessing a horrific event in the beginning days of the Holocaust. It will bear a different title there, Slater said, “something less literary and more on the nose, but that’s what they say sells those kind of books there.”

His next work, “Animal Campus,” which is set to release this fall, is a sequel to George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” that serves as an allegorical examination of college campus life post-Oct. 7. The animals journey begins, Slater said, when “they find painted on the barn wall, under many layers of paint, the speech that Old Major gives at the start of ‘Animal Farm’ where he recruits everybody. It’s just that they do something very different with that call to arms.”

Until then, “Ugly” is available at Powell’s Books and other major booksellers. Learn more online at davidmichaelslater.com.