We are Broken River Books, a collective of six writers who write strange fiction.

J David Osborne

I released my novel Gods Fare No Better on April 27, 2025. My goal for its first year was to sell 300 copies. We’re a few days from the anniversary and the count now sits at 357. I am putting the book on sale (down from $7) to $3.95. Let’s see if we can get the book to 400 sales before it turns one!

The World Serpent is circling the globe. Any day now it could decide to swallow the world whole. Everyone in Cyclone City knows this. Most of them have decided to keep going anyway.

Jimmy Apanatchi has a solution for a dying world: a fake afterlife, an infinite number of years crammed into seconds, packaged and sold to every gang willing to pay for it. When he goes rogue and gets himself killed, he comes back as something worse — a monster built from scrap tech and pure hate, ready to burn it all to the ground.

Zuno didn’t plan on being involved. He was just a loner with a synthetic deer skull where his head used to be, bolted onto the body of police mech after a rampage gone wrong. His first assignment coincides with the end of the world.

Kentaro has no memory and a talking sword. He’s doing his best.

Cielo is headed straight to hell.

Meanwhile, deep in the Rhizome — the city’s living, mycelial internet — something is waking up and forming opinions. And factions.

Gods Fare No Better is cyberpunk anime at maximum volume: darkly funny, genuinely moving, and relentlessly strange. A kaleidoscopic kitchen sink novel of over-the-top gore and palliative philosophy. Readers have called it Hotline Miami meets The Guyver. Proceed accordingly.

“The start of something new.” — Goodreads reviewer

“Loud, ugly, beautiful. This novel won’t be for everyone. That’s what makes it cool.” — Goodreads reviewer

“Telepathic fungal rhizomes, techno-spirituality, hysterically funny action set pieces, and lots of dick jokes.” — Goodreads reviewer

MECH SUIT DEER MAN SEARCHES FOR FRIENDSHIP
ASSASSINS GO TO HELL
ANIMIST COSMOLOGY IN NEON HELL
A WAR IN HEAVEN IN A DYING WORLD
FUNGAL MYTH WILL INFILTRATE CYBERPUNK REALITY
$3.95 TODAY THRU MONDAY

I’ve recently written some blogs on how we need more heroes in fiction, how to write through fatigue, and how (maybe) to write commercial fiction.

I host the podcast Agitator with fellow BRB brother Kelby Losack, and recently we’ve had some banger episodes:

Deadly Premonition w/ Gwen Hilton

The Japan-American Modded PS2 Cookout

Do You Like Weird Books? w/ e rathke

I’m currently working on a book called Ronin Trash, and several novelettes (the most cursed book length!) about haunted video games and American Shinto.

e rathke

The Rewind Book Fair in St Paul was a great success, despite the unseasonably cold weather. We sold over a hundred books over those two days. Great turnout and lots of kind, fun people.

You can find me next at Inbound Brewing’s Book Fair for Grown Ups coming up in July. Hoping to drink some beer and sell a lot of books!

Books:

Check out the Kickstarter signup page for Broken Katana, which is the omnibus of all four Howl books. The campaign will begin this summer!

Games:

Starting May 7th, my family friendly dueling card game Beetle Battle is crowdfunding on Backerkit. You can download the playtest right now and share your thoughts or just have fun playing with friends or family. I’ve played it countless times with my 7 year old, who is also doing some of the art for the game, along with my wife.

If you like TTRPGs, my zine Briar Bay is still open to late pledges. We’re inching towards the next stretch goal, so there could be more to deliver by the time this goes to the printers. Delivery in July.

David Simmons

His new short story collection, Fetty on the Switches, recently got a good review in Publisher’s Weekly.

Grant Wamack

He’s finishing up revisions on my new book codenamed Project The Darkest Book I Ever Wrote.

And The Frolicking ebook is on sale for $0.99 for a limited time.

Rios de la Luz

Her new book, Daughter of Rot, now has a Goodreads page.

Itza will be free May 16-17 on Kindle.

Follow her on TikTok for updates about her novel-writing process and Daughter of Rot and her journey watching Twin Peaks for the first time.

Kelby Losack

Kelby went on Art of Darkness to discuss CS Lewis. Texas Tea is the Art of Darkness summer book club selection. Pre-order and read along this summer. The book drops Mother's Day 2026.

2026 is shaping up to be a huge year for Broken River. Thank you for subscribing!

Some of you reading this now met us there, so I needn’t get too much into what AWP is, but for those who don’t know: AWP is a big publishing conference that happens in a different city each year. It’s primarily run by university presses, MFA programs, and so on, but a lot of independent presses also show up. Many of those presses are founded by people with an academic background or at least an MFA.

Broken River stands apart in this way, I suppose, since none of us have a degree in writing, let alone a graduate degree in one. While we’ve been in the writing game for a long, long time (J David Osborne’s first novel came out in 2010 and my first novel came out in 2012), our jobs are all unrelated to literature.

So we stick out a bit at AWP.

I do think this is a secret to our success there.

Broken River at AWP, a history

The last time we went to AWP was in 2023. We all shared a single hotel room in the absolute shittiest hotel you could ever imagine. It was, truly, one of the funniest situations I’ve had in years. Kelby and I shot two short movies in the hotel. Rios and I stayed up all night talking about the show Community while everyone else tried to sleep.

We didn’t go to a single reading or offsite event. Didn’t care. Didn’t really go there to meet people or hangout with other writers. We went to Kansas City in 2023 for one single purpose:

To sell books.

I told the rest of the Broken River crew that we should aim to sell 100 books per day. I personally brought 150 copies of my books.

That number likely means little to you so let me tell you a story.

Selling at AWP

The first time I went to AWP was in 2012. This was quite the adventure for me since I had just gotten back from a year in Korea. I had no formal writing education. Didn’t even know many people in the writing game. Had never met any of them in person, even. But I tabled with a few presses that now, sadly, no longer even exist, and I watched as they sold probably forty books the entire three day conference. That is a generous estimation, mind. I honestly would not be surprised to learn that we had only sold ten books.

Why was that?

Well, to put it all quite simply, it’s because we sat behind our table and waited for people to show interest in us, in our books. Since these were two small, indie presses, very few people had heard of them. And the ones who had didn’t really spend money because many writers are not there to spend money but to shop their manuscript to potential indie presses, even ones they’ve never heard of.

Despite paying for a table and paying to have books printed and paying to travel sometimes across the country to be at AWP, I never witnessed anyone at AWP who was really trying to sell books. Because of this, I would guess that none of the presses there even sell 100 books over the course of the whole weekend. I believe Eraserhead Press sold about 130 books one year that I was at AWP and I was absolutely shocked by that.

130 books! What an inconceivable number! Every other press I tabled at struggled to sell ten books in a day.

What AWP really was, I learned, was a networking opportunity. A place for people who knew one another online to come together in a real place and have some fun. And it was fun!

I went back in 2013 (where I met JDO and Rios de la Luz), 2014, and 2015 but only because it was in Minneapolis, where I live. For me, AWP stopped being worth the expense and this was also around the time I abandoned social media for several years.

Back to AWP 2023

Because AWP is mostly geared towards MFA programs and academic publishers, many of the attendees wandering the convention are looking for a certain kind of book. Poetry, short story collections, creative nonfiction, memoirs, and novels. For all of these, the genre they’re looking for is Literary.

That’s not us.

So why did I think we could sell 100 books per day?

I’d done the Twin Cities Book Festival a few times by then, and I sold 50-70 books by myself during the course of a single day. I knew that if one of the other writers was at the table with me, we’d have sold even more.

And because AWP is so geared towards a certain kind of book, this actually gives us an advantage.

When you go somewhere with 400 vendors and everyone is selling a variation of the same product, it all washes together. You stop even being able to process all the things you looked at, all the books you thought about buying, but then someone shouts something at you to break you out of this haze.

Do you like weird books?

Your eyes open wide for a moment and you laugh. You turn to see my goofy face waving you over to our table where I show you cyberpunk vampire hunting, crime cosmic horror, water witches at the US/Mexico border, Walmart Noir, cannibal horror, and our table is just full of books stretching from the literary to the absolutely bonkers.

In this way, you remember us. You remember our table. And because we talk to you, pull you out of that stream of human bodies, you’re more likely to open your wallet.

After all, you came to AWP to find new books, to stretch your literary horizons.

And so we did sell 100 books per day, totaling to 309 books in Kansas City. We sold out of a bunch of books and I personally sold 100 of my own books.

Was good. Made the significant expense of going to Kansas with a car full of books worth the trip.

We didn’t go to AWP in LA because the cost to go there was too high. No chance of breaking even, let alone turning a profit on the trip. And since we weren’t going to AWP to network, we decided to just stay home.

But then AWP was announced in David Simmons’ backyard and we had to go to Baltimore.

Baltimore

I told everyone that I wanted us to sell 400 books this time. I knew we could get there because what’s 100 more books, yeah? But this time we also had our hometown hero David Simmons with us.

David picked me up from the airport that Wednesday morning and drove me to his house in West Baltimore. Along the way, he showed me certain neighborhoods around Baltimore, told me some of the history.

Over the course of the long weekend, I do feel I got a nice flavor of Baltimore. Got a brisket sandwich at an old school deli, some tacos at a nice little spot, and so on. Got to taste some different neighborhoods and parts of the city, which I really appreciated. This is the benefit of going places with locals.

When I was at AWP in Boston and Seattle, I didn’t learn shit! Just bounced from the convention to readings to bars on repeat until I went home.

I have a few takeaways about the people of Baltimore:

• Baltimoreans are among the most bizarre drivers I’ve ever seen

• The people of Baltimore are real nice!

Anyway, back to the convention. We set up and prepared to rock the next day, but first we went to a reading that night to witness David Simmons knock the crowd out with his reading. Ran into a few fellas I’ve known for a long time too, which is always nice.

The nights repeated this way. Every reading David did was the best reading of the night, somehow topping himself each time. This is significant because if you’ve ever been to a literary reading you know that they are almost uniformly dogshit and boring as hell.

David, on the other hand, understands something that only a few others seem to, which is that a reading is a performance. And my man just burns up there on stage, making people in the crowd squirm or cackle and sometimes both at the same time.

Big shoutout to Mark Wadley from Bruiser Magazine who put on some great events.

During the days, we hocked our wares until I lost my voice, which happened earlier and earlier each day. The first day, we sold about 130 books, but then hit a bit of a lull the second day and only sold 90 or so. By this point, I’d already sold out of one of my books, though I’d also brought about 150 books in total.

We had a long way to go for the final day, but that’s also the day they open the convention to the public. And here we started a frenzy. Within minutes of opening for the day, we sold ten books, and the rest of the day was a blur of me carnival barking people to the table until we sold out of Kelby’s books and then Grant’s and then some of David’s books.

And by the end of the day, we crept past 400 and I sold about 110 of my own books.

Was quite an exciting AWP! There were a few people who came back to our table multiple times. I believe someone ended up buying six or seven of our books, which has to be some kind of record. We had people return to tell us they’d already read half of our book, ready for more.

Where Next?

We have several events coming up with possibly many more to come.

• April 18-19, I’ll be at the Rewind Book Fair in St Paul, MN

• April 26th, J David Osborne and Rios de la Luz will be at the Tulsa LitFest in Tulsa, OK

• May 2nd, I’ll be at the Lakefly Book Fair in Oshoksh, WI

• July 11th, I’ll be at the Inbound Bookfair for Adults in St Paul, MN

• October 3rd, I’ll be at the Deep Valley Book Festival in Mankato, MN

Expect more book events to be announced and with other members of the Broken River crew!

Kelby Losack

Kelby has completed his first big book, the neo western noir, TEXAS TEA. Word on the street, it’s around 500 pages. You can still order a physical copy here.

You can read the first chapter of TEXAS TEA on Kelby’s substack here.

Kelby also guest edited a recent special edition of Apocalypse Confidential called Copper Wire. You can check out the issue here.

J. David Osborne

J. David Osborne is hard at work on his new novel, BERSERKER CLUB.

Tucked deep in the back country of southwestern Oklahoma, a misfit militia of separatists combine folk magic and firepower to build a resistance against the state. When their stockpile of guns is stolen and loyalties collapse, one bad decision will set off a war between the spirits of the land and the mutant monsters these people have become.

JDO drives this story with the lean, fast brutality of a throat-punch and the strange religious logic of a folk-epic. There are no easy heroes here.

Berserker Club is a savage collision of crime, body horror, and pulp spectacle, equal parts churchyard sermon and tokusatsu knockout. Fast, filthy, and unflinching, this book is an unlikely commentary on male alienation and religious devotion.

You can preorder it here.

Follow him on Substack here for cool updates like his writing diary.

Rios de La Luz

Rios de La Luz is working hard on a new novella (title TBD, currently calling it “Daughter of Rot”) set to be out in September of 2026, and a writing guidebook filled with extensive prompts called “Writing the Wild” will be released in July 2026.

Follow her on Tiktok & IG for more writing prompts and updates.

David Simmons

David Simmons recently had a new transgressive horror novel ERADICATOR drop via Apocalypse Party.

“David Simmons’ Eradicator is a sucker punch to the soul, evocative, alive, and screaming, a fantastic fever dream of hard-pavement reality masterfully blended with surrealism in all its beauty and terror. His keen insight into the social conventions that pull people apart and push them together is needle-sharp, his prose is precise and beautiful, and the horrors that engulf his characters are achingly human. You don’t just read this book—you feel it, and it’s electric.”—Mary SanGiovanni, author of Strange Stones

“When David Simmons is done, Baltimore will be a genre.” —Charlene Elsby, author of Violent Faculties and The Devil Thinks I’m Pretty

“Amazing.” —Paula D. Ashe, author of We Are Here to Hurt Each Other

You can cop it on Amazon here.

His short story “Cage Home” was recently published in House of Vlad Magazine.

Also, he has a new short story collection Fetty on the Switches dropping via Clash Books in 2026.

Follow Simmons’ updates on Twitter here.

E. Rathke

E. Rathke recently had a successful Kickstarter launch of his new novel THE ADVENTURES OF HORUS & MOTHERFUCKER. Eighty-one people backed his illustrated ultraviolent sword and sorcery novel, and it’s coming hella soon.

Violence, cannibalism, and miles of darkness, The Adventures of Horus & Motherfucker is Red Sonja by way of the Coen Brothers.

You can read the first three chapters on his Substack here. And subscribe so you can stay updated.

You can also listen to Rathke’s podcast WOLF, specifically the episode where Eddy, David Simmons & Grant Wamack discuss the cult classic horror film Evil Dead (1981) below.

Wolf

Episode 047: EVIL DEAD

Welcome to the new episode of the Wolf Podcast…

Listen now

8 months ago · 8 likes

Grant Wamack

“B-movie thrills and chills abound in this—disturbingly sensual? Sensually disturbing?—cryptid horror novel from Grant Wamack, who once again brings his unique sensibilities as a writer to bear on otherwise familiar territory, infusing it with new life.” - Joshua Chaplinsky, author of Letters to the Purple Satin Killer.

Grant Wamack dropped a new gory cryptid horror novel called THE SCARECROWS ARE WATCHING US.

Think Dog Soldiers meets Cat People.

Cop it on Amazon here or a signed copy from the author here.

Also, Grant Wamack and David Simmons interviewed each other at Zona Motel. Read that here.

And follow Grant Wamack’s writing updates on his substack here.

That obsession birthed Broken River Books, where we’ve been dropping genre-bending fiction since 2013. Now I’m carrying that same energy into a new space: Broken River Radio.

This podcast is dedicated entirely to the craft of writing. Each episode I’ll sit down with a writer I admire, whether they’re a novelist, poet, screenwriter, weirdo, whoever, and dig into the questions that matter:

• How do they structure their stories?

• What rituals keep them at the desk?

• What obsessions drive their characters and their prose?

• Where do they break the rules, and why does it work?

This is not a marketing podcast. It’s not about branding or algorithms. It’s about the grind, the frustration, and the joy of making fiction. The moments that make you keep going despite all the nonsense.

If you’ve followed Broken River Books, you know the kind of voices I’ll be talking to: writers working at the edges, breaking conventions, inventing new ways to tell old stories. If you’re a writer yourself—or just someone fascinated by how books get built—I think you’ll get a lot out of it.

My first episode is with my friend (and BRB author) e rathke (author of Howl and Glossolalia, and it went very well. I’ll try out ten episodes at first to see if it works. All of the episodes will be here on Substack.

Here’s what we get into in this episode:

The ‘Writing for Myself’ Lie
If You Don’t Read, Why Should We Care About Your Books?
Misdirection: How Great Writers Fool You
How Breakthroughs Happen After Frustration
Becoming Confident in Your Prose

Subscribe here so you don’t miss it. Episodes will land in your inbox along with my usual writing/collective updates.

Let’s get into the nuts and bolts of this thing together.

—JDO

First published in 2013 by Jeremy Robert Johnson’s Swallowdown Press, LDDRE found a second life under the new title Blood & Water on Michael Kazepis’s King Shot. Along the way it garnered praise from heavy hitters like Benjamin Whitmer and the Nerd of Noir. It got translated into French by the legendary Rivages Noir under the title Que la mort vienne sur moi and earned me a flight out to Frontignan in the south of France.

And then…I took it out of circulation. Again, I’m not really sure why. I have these episodes, I wouldn’t call them depressive, where I want to just erase everything and start fresh. Hopefully those are a thing of the past, because it’s been years where people couldn’t stumble on this little gem of a book.

You can order it here. The new cover was done by Kelby Losack. It aims to recreate the pen n’ pixel rap mixtape covers of the time. I love it.

Danny Ames is an underworld enforcer for the local meth dealers in his small Oklahoma town. When his brother disappears, he goes on the warpath, tearing the town apart in his search.

Arlo Clancy has made it his mission in life to keep his little brother out of jail. The pull of easy money and a gruesome discovery in a catfish den pushes them into the path of Danny Ames, which sends all of their lives spiraling out of control.

Low Down Death Right Easy is a gritty, tragic story of bad choices and violent repercussions.

"Brilliantly finds a balance between a classic noir novel, something slightly surreal, and something approaching a classic American realist work. There are scenes of intense violence and suspense butted up against curious moments of outlandish insanity, but overall this is a story that ultimately feels (for lack of a better word) 'believable.' J. David Osborne has got some fucking chops."--THE NERD OF NOIR

"Working class fiction at its best. It reeks of desperation, busted dreams, and hard times. But mostly, it reeks of literary talent. Whatever J. David Osborne writes, I'm reading. And you'd better too."--BENJAMIN WHITMER

Today’s the day. My novel Gods Fare No Better is officially out in the wild, glitching its way across the digital void and hopefully into your hands. It’s weird, fast, violent, funny, and full of anime-inspired boss fights and esoteric philosophical parables. It’s the wildest book out right now.

Here is the summary blurb:

Cyclone City is unraveling. A megacity built on ambition, now rotting from the inside—infested with warring cartels, techno-mystics, and assassins stitched together from spare parts.

Kentaro woke up without a past. No memories, no identity—just the faint hum of something monstrous buried inside him. The monks of the Dying World Clerics gave him shelter, a simple life of sweeping floors and weather control. But hunger and ambition claw their way back into his soul, dragging him out of exile—straight into a city that wants him dead.

Now, he’s hacking through cybernetic samurai, battling demonic creatures, and carving his way through assassins built from living myths. His katana whispers forgotten memories, his body pulses with a parasite made of stories, and the city’s fungal heart beats beneath the streets, watching, waiting.

As assassins and apostles clash, Kentaro finds himself tangled in a conspiracy that calls him deeper into the labyrinth of Cyclone City. And at its core, something monstrous stirs.

A mind-melting fusion of cyberpunk, animism, and body horror, Gods Fare No Better is a brutal, electrifying descent into a world where gods, demons, and mycelia fight for the future of a dying world.

Welcome to Neon Hell.

You can buy it from my personal website, which is more expensive. I’m calling it the “author support” option. You can also get it on the Zon.

Get the book direct from my store
Get the Kindle version on AMZ

Why This Book?

Before Gods Fare No Better, I had written a handful of slim novellas and a short story collection. I felt conflicted about what to focus on, what to write, because my attention was facing outwards. I had gone down the path of reading “important books” by revered authors, and so I thought that the ultimate goal of a writing career was to be “important.” You’ll hear people say this, that they want their books “to live on after their death,” to be invited into the canon of great literature by…somebody, I’m not sure, probably some sort of shadowy cabal.

This was total creative death for me. I had a fallow period lasting nearly a decade, where I hopped from job to job (moving furniture, trimming trees, grocery store clerk, etc.). Every time I had an idea for a book, a cool book, I would immediately overthink it to death. I only have so much time on this earth, I would say to myself. Do I want to spend time on this thing that may or may not matter at all?

A pretty exhausting way to approach this craft, to be sure, but it was a spiral I was stuck in until I rediscovered my love for Japanese cinema and anime, which I will get to a bit down the line. Long story very short, I finally had the lightbulb moment that I could just write whatever I thought was cool. It was a total creative rebirth! I was free to write the loudest, wildest, coolest book I wanted, and it didn’t matter what happened after that.

My main goal in writing Gods Fare No Better was to swing for the fences and write something chock full of things that I think are cool. I had the secondary goal, due to my renewed interest in craft, was to complete a book that had a beginning, middle, and end. Simple enough.

So what exactly do I think is cool? That brings us to the list. Let’s get into it.

1. THE FILMS OF TAKASHI MIIKE

When Miike was a young man, he wanted to race motorcycles. After seeing how good some of his buddies were, he realized he’d never cut it, so he enrolled in the Yokohama Vocational School of Broadcast and Film (because it was free). He never went to class, and because of this had the free time to be the only student to actually complete his final assignment. This landed him in the OVA industry, where he worked, according to him, every odd job that he could. Over the course of ten years, he’d learn the process of filmmaking through grunt work and osmosis. His first film, Eyecatch Junction, according to user “komsopoliit” on imdb, has “[an] overall atmosphere [of] a slapstick action-comedy, but there are a couple of rough scenes that really feel like they belong to some other movie. The film is fast paced and entertaining enough to engage the viewer from the start till the end.”

It wasn’t long before Miike began making Yakuza films, first taking over for other directors, then being given his own movies to make. The earliest movie of his that I’ve seen was Shinjuku Triad Society, which has the beginnings of his signature style throughout the ‘90s and early ‘00s: a murky, grimy visual style, extreme violence, and importantly, wild tonal shifts.

Filmmaking is not a balancing act, although some directors think it is. I don't believe in it. I like ups and downs. They're the best way to translate my feelings to the screen.

What I really love about his movies is their ability to veer wildly into different tones, often changing directions several times within a single scene. The above quote from Miike is helpful here: where many filmmakers attempt (and many viewers enjoy) a smooth transition from one scene to the next, and perhaps a gradual shifting (happy to sad, funny to scary, grim to cartoonish), Miike…just changes directions. This horror movie is a comedy now. Aaaand now it’s back to horror. Except now it’s a romance. And so on. To formalists, this might be irritating, a sign of “amateur filmmaking.” On that note, I have another good quote:

It’s not really important to make skillful movies. I think expressing yourself really well skill-wise, is not as important. I want it to be sort of raw and rough but new and fun to watch.

There you have my approach to Gods Fare No Better in a nutshell. While I am trying to get better at writing novels every day, I don’t really care whether anyone notices that I’m getting better. My goal is to make books that are new and fun to read first, with the technical stuff in the background. That’s for me, not the reader.

Anyhow, from the first moment I turned on Audition in my attic room in high school, I felt connected to this filmmaker like no one before. This was in the days of the Tartan Asia Extreme series that put out DVDs like Ichi the Killer and Oldboy. It felt like I was seeing someone both deeply serious about his films, but also loose and creative. I read his journal from the set of Ichi the Killer, and saw a guy who took every scene that he shot with a level of humble yet confident craftsmanship, who also knew when to call it a day. There’s a great story from when he was sharing a shooting location with Shin’ya Tsukamoto (I can’t remember which movies they were making). Miike had shot something like ten scenes in a day, went in to check on Tsukamoto, and found him still laboring over the same scene he’d started that day.

I think the ability to be loose and creative directly comes from getting the fundamentals down. Approaching a scene with calm confidence, you are free to play because you have constructed the foundation of the scene solidly. You can veer and shift without having to worry about the ground dropping out below you. You don’t have to take yourself seriously because you’ve done the work to become competent, even great at the fundamentals, which you practice every day. Beginner’s mind!

Here is my ranking of my ten favorite films of Takashi Miike. I love these movies very, very much, and because of that and his whole philosophy of creativity, I would name him my top inspiration for Gods Fare No Better.

1. Ichi the Killer

2. Gozu

3. Dead or Alive Trilogy (cheating, but this was GFNB’s biggest influence)

4. Agitator

5. Blade of the Immortal

6. Izo

7. Fudoh: The New Generation

8. The Mole Song

9. Zebraman

10. Yakuza: Like a Dragon

Other notable inspirational Japanese underground films: Pinocchio 964, Tokyo Fist, Versus, Love Exposure, Battle Royale, and Tokyo Gore Police.

Recommended reading: Agitator by Tom Mes

GODS FARE NO BETTER

2. THE COMICS OF GRANT MORRISON

The Invisibles is a gonzo, reality-warping comic series that reads like a secret history of the world wrapped in a punk manifesto. It follows a cell of anarchist freedom fighters battling shadowy authoritarian forces—human, alien, and divine—in a war that spans time, space, and consciousness. I’ve never read anything that pulpy and weird, sustained for that long, before or since.

The series ran for 60 issues, and in that time we are introduced to lovable characters and horrific villains, sacred occult texts and time travel, a massive psychic battle for reality that calls into question who the real bad guys even are.

After a weird but more straightforward beginning, this masterpiece dives headfirst into a kaleidoscope of characters and perspectives. It’s hard to say exactly who the “main character” is depending on what point you’re at in the story, but the most likely candidate is King Mob, the guy who looks like Grant Morrison and who wears a cool leather trenchcoat and has sex with hot people. That was Morrison’s intention, being a practitioner of chaos magic: he wanted to create an avatar of himself, but cooler. And it worked, at times a bit too well.

There’s a subplot where the Archons of the Outer Church (pure materialist bug creatures, “the bad guys”) capture King Mob and inject him with a drug called Key-23. It’s a psychedelic drug that makes the people under its influence believe that whatever word they read is a real thing. Like if I wrote “frog” and showed you the word, you wouldn’t see the word, you’d see a frog. What the bad guys do is put a sticky note on a mirror with the words “melting face” and show it to our hero, who believes his face is melting. Apparently, around that same time, the actual Morrison contracted a flesh-eating parasite on his face. So it goes.

That’s why the real main character of The Invisibles is chaos magic itself. This mode of ritual has fallen out of fashion since the time of this book, due to its perceived lack of coherence and the tendency for its practitioners to gloss over the details and sacredness of the gods and rituals they were appropriating. The man who I feel like brought chaos magic back from the brink was the brilliant Gordon White, who outlined a solvent philosophy and practice in his book The Chaos Protocols, and through his podcast and online community Rune Soup. I even went on the show years ago to talk about this very book!

The importance of chaos magic to me is in the balance between irreverence and reverence, sacred and profane. The idea that symbols are powerful, narratives are alive, and that we have the ability to utilize these forms for the benefit of others and ourselves.

When I first read The Invisibles, it felt less like a comic book and more like a transmission. Morrison was doing something spooky. Pages bled with sigils, hidden references, and weird ideas. I didn't understand half of it at first, but that didn’t matter. I could feel the hum of a deeper structure beneath reality, one that could be rewritten by language, belief, and will. That’s chaos magic in a nutshell. It’s not about robes or rituals. It’s about narrative. Intention. Reprogramming the self and the world through symbols and story.

Gods Fare No Better grew out of that same energy. A belief that fiction is not passive, but rather it is made up of living systems (stories). Characters can be gods. The Invisibles gave me chaos magic, and chaos magic gave me a framework where the absurd and the sacred coexist. The Invisibles showed me how to smuggle that worldview into something fast and fun.

3. THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN

The Book of the New Sun is a dense, dreamlike science fantasy epic set in a far-future Earth so destroyed that it feels medieval again. It follows Severian, an apprentice in the torturer’s guild who is exiled for showing mercy (it’s because he fell in love…more on that in the next paragraph). Cast out into a decaying world of forgotten technologies, cryptic prophecies, and cyborgs, Severian embarks on a journey that’s part pilgrimage, part meandering nonsense, and part metaphysical initiation.

Told in Severian’s own voice, the story is layered with unreliable memory, secret meanings, and theological undertones. There’s also the fact that the framing of this narrative is that Gene Wolfe received the manuscript from the future and has to translate it…so who knows what is a mistranslation? As Severian rises and falls through various roles—torturer, exile, lover (Severian literally never meets a woman he doesn’t get horny for), executioner, messiah—he encounters strange creatures, hidden powers, and ruins of civilizations long past. The deeper he goes, the more we begin to question not only who he is, but what kind of world we’re really in.

If you catch me on the right day, I might tell you this is my favorite book of all time. Not only is it awesome in terms of its language and imagery, but it’s the most re-readable novel of all time. It’s been described to death online as a “puzzle-box” and everyone who calls it that is absolutely correct!

I could write about this one at length, but I have done 4 episodes on the Getting Lit podcast about this series, and Matt Sini has compiled them all into an 8 and 1/2 omnibus episode here:

There Are Two Gene Wolfes Inside of You (Getting Lit Podcast)

4. CYBERPUNK 2077

The true origin of this book is in fact a video game. When my son was born, I was a stay-at-home dad. That was the peak of my video game playing. I got good at Sekiro, I wrote a long essay on Death Stranding, and I really got sucked in by Cyberpunk 2077.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a sprawling open-world RPG set in the gritty, neon-drenched metropolis of Night City, a place obsessed with power, glamour, and body modification. You play as V, a mercenary outlaw navigating a dystopian world of corporate corruption, gang warfare, and transhuman technology. After a job goes wrong, V ends up with a prototype biochip embedded in their head—one that contains the digital ghost of a dead rockstar revolutionary, Johnny Silverhand (played by Keanu Reeves). As their minds begin to merge, V must fight for control, identity, and survival in a world that doesn’t care if they burn out or fade away.

The presentation of the game is awesome. Night City is not necessarily a place you’d want to live, but it was the first time I found myself just kind of wandering the landscape in a game. It wasn’t the action that brought me in, it was the world. But why did I find it so compelling? I think, for lack of a better answer…it just looks awesome.

Then I got to the “Sinnerman” questline. It’s a disturbing, unforgettable arc where V gets wrapped up in the final days of Joshua Stephenson, a convicted murderer turned born-again Christian. Instead of serving out his sentence quietly, Joshua partners with a Braindance studio (basically Cyberpunk’s version of movies, GoPro live recordings) to record his own crucifixion—a hyper-commercialized act of penance he believes will inspire spiritual awakening.

The quest spans three missions—"Sinnerman," "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out," and "They Won’t Go When I Go." Players can either walk away or follow Joshua all the way to the end, even driving the nails in themselves if they choose. It's a questline soaked in religious symbolism, media exploitation, and existential dread. It forces V—and the player—to wrestle with questions about free will, redemption, and the price of belief in a world ruled by corporations.

And here’s the best part…it’s completely optional. It’s a digression that doesn’t get you anything. No special items, no reward. It’s just a story. You start out being hired by a man whose wife was murdered by Joshua, then follow him on a penance tour, going from house to house, apologizing to the families of his victims. Some forgive him, others don’t.

It’s literature, and it’s the first time I’ve felt that way about a video game. After I nailed his hands into the cross, I’d decided that a city like Night City is the perfect location for a novel…a place where something is always happening, and you can create whatever you want, tell whatever story you want.

So I invented Cyclone City.

5. TIE-IN NOVELS

I am fascinated by well-written tie-in novels. I have a theory about the current state of literature. I believe that genre fans largely do not care about the prose in a novel. They are interested in the power fantasy tropes, the monsters, and the ideas. This leads to a multitude of highly-successful books with…let’s say “not very good prose.” This turns off the reader who is looking for good sentences. But, importantly, this does not mean that this cohort of readers doesn’t want genre fiction. Their needs are simply not being served. They go to literary fiction because that’s where the good sentences are, outside of a handful of genre fiction outliers.

The tie-in novel, when written by a master, necessarily has to stick to strict IP-related plot and character boundaries. The novels have to be palatable to the non-prose genre reader, but the writers are given room to stretch their legs, leading to a rare Venn-diagram overlap that readers like me are looking for. And, importantly, an overlap that Gods Fare No Better inhabits.

Here are some of my favorites:

Evenson is one of my favorite living writers, hands-down. His book Last Days, about cultists who cut their limbs off, inspired me to write my first novel. I’ve met him a few times, and he’s always a lovely, friendly guy. His writing is nearly unmatched when it comes to language, and he brings it to this Dead Space tie-in novel and its sequel.

The tie-in serves as the origin story for the Dead Space universe. It follows Michael Altman, a geophysicist who discovers an ancient alien artifact known as the Black Marker buried deep beneath the ocean. The Marker emits strange signals—causing hallucinations, madness, and eventually violence in those around it. As Altman digs deeper, both literally and metaphorically, he realizes the Marker is tied to a terrifying alien force and a cycle of death and rebirth beyond comprehension. The novel blends corporate conspiracy, body horror, and religious zealotry into a grim tale of how apocalyptic cults are born.

Rafał Kosik wrote this standalone novel set in the gritty world of Night City. The story follows a group of strangers coerced through blackmail into executing a high-stakes heist on a Militech convoy carrying a mysterious container. As they navigate the treacherous urban landscape, the team must overcome their differences and work together, all while questioning the true motives of their enigmatic employer.

I really think this makes the best pairing with Gods Fare No Better. The multiple perspectives, the sparse poetic nature of the writing, and obviously the setting (which I lifted) make it a no-brainer.

NOTABLE MENTIONS: DOOM: Knee-Deep in the Dead and MARS ATTACKS: Martian Deathtrap.

6. AMBITIOUS NOVELS

When I was 18 years old, I briefly lived with my aunt in Orlando. She’d just moved into her house, and her guest room was completely empty. I had Infinite Jest in the center of the room, the only piece of furniture, and I left the big son of a bitch open to the last page I’d read. It was a real monastic look.

That book had a huge influence on me. I know at this point it has been talked about to death, and become something of a cultural hot potato, but I will forever remember that book as the first time I realized what books could really do. The sprawling, complex narrative combined with the deep truths about addiction and human psychology and alienation really stuck with me, and I’ve been chasing that dragon ever since.

I’ve always loved big event books. I was at the local Borders for the release of 2666, and purchased the three-book slipcase edition. I was there for the release of the partially-finished The Pale King, and I was there to buy Jerusalem.

While I realized that Gods Fare No Better is not on the level of these event books, I do feel very accomplished by it. I get the same feeling holding this book as I did when I held The Nocilla Trilogy or Blood’s a Rover. I’d love it if people got excited about books like that again.

I don’t want to leave out shorter books, though! I’m a big fan of Yuri Herrera, Brian Allen Carr, Samantha Schweblin, Cesar Aíra, Brian Evenson, and James Sallis. They’ve all had their influences on me in their own way.

7. ANIME & MANGA

An extremely broad category, I know, but it can’t be overstated how this had an effect on this book. I initially had a difficult time getting into anime. The stoic blandness of the characters juxtaposed with cartoonish overreaction just didn’t work for me. The way I unlocked it was to understand that all of the characters are aliens. After that, I found a whole world of cool shit that I lifted from liberally.

What I like about anime is its tishotenketsu four-act structure. Gods has three acts, but many of the sections eschew the typical three-act structure of Western art to adopt a more Eastern feel. I love the way anime and manga is able to put its characters through increasingly intense encounters, and to have them overcome it through sheer force of will. Of course movies like Ghost in the Shell, Cyber City Oedo 808, Wicked City, Akira, and Genocyber influenced the environment, architecture, and overall feel of the book.

But Gods Fare No Better owes a true DNA blood debt to GANTZ, BLAME!, and Berserk. From GANTZ, it takes the chaos of being thrown into meat grinder missions with no rules and no exits. From BLAME!, the infinite city, architecture as oppression, and the loneliness of navigating it. From Berserk, the rage, the gods, the body horror, the way a sword can carry grief. This book crawled out of that same pit.

8. RUNE SOUP

I covered this a bit in my spiel about The Invisibles, but there has not been a more influential source on how I think about life than Rune Soup and its sole proprietor, Gordon White. I first picked up a Gordon White book in a bookstore in Brooklyn, and was immediately taken with its no-nonsense approach to chaos magick, a system of occult practices that had largely fallen out of fashion at the time.

Everybody was really into “becoming an expert” at whatever religion they were hot on at the time. Gordon demonstrated how to get in, develop a working knowledge of how the systems worked, and extracting what you needed while giving back in your own way. It was the most practical, sensical piece of writing on magic that I’d ever read, and remains so to this day.

His website taught me how to do a lot of cool shit. Make sigils, for one thing, but it also taught me how to tie those sigils to “robofish” sigils, which has been more effective than I can express here. It taught me how to understand astrology, the PGM, telepathy, angel magic, aliens, geopolitics, our pharma system, and prayer.

No greater resource than Rune Soup dot com. Go get you a membership.

9. AIM TO HEAD MIXES

I listened almost exclusively to this kind of shit while writing this book.

10. HARAWAY & TSING

The way I look at the world has been most strongly influenced by two books: Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World.

Staying with the Trouble is a radical rethinking of how we live and die on a damaged planet. Haraway rejects both dystopian despair and naive hope, arguing instead for “staying with the trouble”—remaining present in messy, entangled realities instead of seeking escape. She proposes the Chthulucene, a speculative age defined not by human dominance, but by multispecies collaboration and co-evolution. Haraway urges us to “make kin, not babies”—to form alliances across species and systems, embracing complexity, compost, and companionship as ways forward. The book blends science, feminism, science fiction, and philosophy into a call for experimental, responsible, and imaginative living in the ruins.

The Mushroom at the End of the World is an anthropological exploration of survival in the ruins of capitalism, told through the story of the matsutake mushroom—a prized delicacy that thrives in disturbed, human-damaged forests. Anna Tsing uses this fungal economy to unravel how life goes on in fragmented, precarious conditions. The book blends ecology, global trade, and personal narrative to show how interspecies entanglements—between humans, mushrooms, forests, and economies—offer alternative ways of imagining value, collaboration, and resilience. It’s about living without guarantees, about noticing what grows in the cracks, and how we might build worlds from salvage rather than conquest. (There’s a rant that the main character gives in GFNB that is a direct lift from this book.)

The magic in Gods Fare No Better is rooted in the entangled thinking of these two philosophers. Like Haraway’s call to imagine symbiotic futures through “making kin,” the magic here isn’t clean or hierarchical—it’s messy, fungal, improvisational. It spreads through Yarn, a living story-network that rewrites bodies and memories, not through domination but through contamination and collaboration. Tsing’s ruined ecologies echo in the way this system thrives on waste, trauma, and collapse—magic as scavenging, as survival, as post-apocalyptic kinship.

IN SUMMARY:

If you’ve made it this far, thank you.

Gods Fare No Better is the book I’ve been trying to write my whole life. It’s stitched together from everything I love—Cyberpunk 2077, Miike and Tsukamoto films, The Invisibles, chaos magic, anime, philosophy, and whatever that thing was growing behind the fridge in my first apartment.

Several of my friends have told me that it’s the most “me” book that I’ve ever written. And that’s the highest compliment, what I think we should all strive for.

It’s about assassins, gods, death cults. It’s funny. I hope it encourages people who wouldn’t otherwise read to do so.

I hope it sticks with you.

Grab a copy here.

art by Haoning Wu

LITURGY
by David Simmons

Reverend Colethia says, “You’re here because you’re all tangled up. You don’t know why your spirit’s in the wilderness. You don’t know why your spirit’s in the valley.”

She walks across the pulpit less than an inch over five feet but here she is a giant. Her brown piano hands are arthritic yet strong, bumpy knuckles cracked and wrinkled. Like Jimmy Dean sausages. If I were to make this comparison out loud to another member of our congregation, they would suck their teeth, shake their head from side to side, sigh, and regard me with abhorrence like a house centipede.

Reverend Colethia walks back and forth. She is like a white tail deer. “Divine reality is compassion, it’s love,” she says. “This worldly reality is chaos. Disorder. In this era of technology and social media we find ourselves influenced. Influenced by these worldly societal norms. But that’s not God. That’s not Good.”

Someone says, “Mmhmm.”

A voice from the back pews shouts, “I know that’s right!”

Reverend Colethia smiles and nods. “Yes. Some folks even make money off this social media. Influencers.”

When she says influencers she lathers up the word with disgust and holds it in the air, wringing it out, letting her distaste drip off the S at the end of the word.

“And they influencing us, alright. Feeding us images. How we supposed to look. Our nails our hair our weight and on and on. We get so caught up on the external that we lose sight of our authentic self!”

She holds her right hand up, palm facing us, her head turned to the side. Eyes closed. Mouth closed. Brow furrowed.

“Let’s reflect,” she continues. Pacing. “How did we get here?”

Someone says, “How’s that?”

“How indeed. Well, you see, we are spiritual beings and we have forgotten that the one true influencer is God the Omnipotent, God the Good. We have forgotten that the primary cause of suffering is forgetfulness. That’s right. Forgetfulness. Say it with me. We’ve given others power and dominion over our lives and affairs. This is what we do when we allow others to influence us. When external forces out here try to pull us astray, that’s when we got to retreat to the secret sanctuary, the secret sanctuary of the true influencer, the Godself. But it takes work. Lord, do it take work.”

Brother Ezekiel’s deep voice booms, “It works if you work it!”

Reverend Colethia smiles bright white veneers. “It works when you work it. Ain’t no ifs about it, people.”

Brothers and sisters all around me clap. Behind Reverend Colethia, an armoire of sorts, a cabinet built into the wall stands tall and imposing. The cabinet is made of red oak and engraved with intricate patterns, some that I understand, more that I do not. This cabinet is and always has been our Ark.

“That’s why we have to honor tradition. The customs. The steps. That’s why we have to make sacrifices. To keep us in His house. To keep us in that secret sanctuary.”

The Ark must be fifteen feet or more. The doors are slabs of solid oak. Like an armoire containing the wardrobe of a giant. If I stare at it, letting the muscles in my eyes relax, it begins to appear as if it is vibrating, but I know that this is just a trick of the light.

The Reverend returns to her station behind the lectern and interlocks her fingers. “People have such different notions of order. And then you have these axioms, these phrases, see. First things first. You ever heard that?”

We all say oh yes and verily.

“You hear that all the time. Aphorisms. Keep the main thing, the main thing. That’s one of my, that’s one of mine. Stay focused on the main thing and everything else will follow. Otherwise you’re gonna have an inharmonious time.”

The sound of a push bar door slamming open cracks the room in half. Reverend Colethia looks up, squinting. A corpulent child, seven or eight years old, comes running down the aisle, wheezing and wiping his forehead. He comes to a stop and pulls up his pants, scooping up his stomach and inserting it into the front of the pants first. He pulls his shirt down over this, smoothing it out with his moist palms.

Reverend Colethia says, “This young man is in a hurry to get the spirit, ain’t he now?”

We laugh at this. Grandma Grace comes barreling down the aisle, also wheezing. “Get back here, boy.”

“No!” the boy shrieks. “I don’t wanna! I don’t wanna do it.”

The Reverend smiles at us, then turns to us. “And now, children, stay with Him. Live deeply in Him. Then we'll be ready for him when he appears, ready to receive him with open arms, with no cause for red-faced guilt or lame excuses when he arrives.”

She leans down and plucks a blossom of lint out of the boy's curls. Grandma Grace has made it to the pulpit where the Reverend and the boy are standing. The front of the boy’s trousers go damp. Urine flows freely from the cuff of his pants, pooling in front of the first pew.

The congregation gasps sharply.

Reverend Colethia says, “Now people, please. Have grace. Have patience. Have compassion.”

Grandma Grace scoops up the sodden boy and carries him down the aisle, tucked under her beefy arm like a rolled-up carpet. Brother Ezekiel walks behind them with a mop, swabbing the hardwood left to right, right to left.

“Let’s have a moment for song,” the Reverend says, always composed.

Three large women who I know to be sisters take the stage. All finished mopping, Brother Ezekiel provides the women with cordless microphones.

The women sway and sing for us.

We sway and sing along with them.

When the song is over, Reverend Colethia clears her throat. “Please rise,” she says.

And we do.

“I want you to repeat after me,” she tells us. “I am crossing my symbolic River of Jordan.”

I am crossing my symbolic River of Jordan.

“I’m leaving behind old beliefs and negative thoughts.”

I’m leaving behind old beliefs and negative thoughts.

“With arms this long there’s nothing that is not within my reach.”

With arms this long there’s nothing that is not within my reach.

A great rumbling comes from the Ark

Grandma Grace returns with the boy tucked under her arm. He’s unconscious. He wears different clothing now; a white gown that brushes the floor around his feet. She sits him down in front of the Ark where he remains there sleeping, fluttering eyelids revealing thin strips of white.

Reverend Colethia wipes her forehead with the back of her fist. “I dismantle these bricks that make up my Jericho Wall. These bricks of self-doubt and limitation. These bricks of fear. For I am an heir of God!”

Reverend Colethia opens the Ark and immediately we are greeted by the Very Long Arms. The wiry, muscular appendages burst forth. Splinters of wood chip off the edge of the cabinet doors. After today’s service is over, Brother Ezekiel will need to sand the Ark down and patch it with epoxy. The Very Long Arms embrace the boy, each finger on each hand long enough to wrap around the boy’s chubby torso. The right hand palms the boy’s bottom, the glorious, spindly fingers wrapping around his hips and abdomen. The left hand holds the boy’s shoulders; the fingers fold over his chest, ensconcing him in all the Good and Omnipotent glory. The boy is awake now. He starts to cry because he knows no better.

“Base every thought and feeling on The Truth!” Reverend Colethia roars. “Say it with me: Base every thought and feeling on The Truth!”

We say it with her.

Base every thought and feeling on The Truth!

All of us, with the exception of the boy’s mother. The Mother of the Offering stands before the pulpit in the first pew to bear witness. Her hands are clasped in front of her and they shake.

“Base every thought and feeling on the truth that there is only one power!” Reverend Colethia’s eyes rage like wildfires. “One thought! One presence! And what’s that? Who’s that?”

The Good One! The Omnipotent One!

We are chanting. All as one. All of us but the Mother of the Offering who massages one hand with the other hand, wringing both hands, holding back tears, for she is so honorable and pious. The rest of us throb like an organ. The air inside the temple has become hot and thick. The taste of it on our tongues is acrid like burning plastic. And, verily, it is good.

The Good One! The Omnipotent One!

The Very Long Arms hold the boy lovingly. The right hand uncoils from the boy’s bottom and strokes his face with the Immaculate Forefinger. The Immaculate Forefinger is the length of the boy’s skull. Although I have never personally felt the touch of the Immaculate Forefinger, I imagine it to be similar to the skin of a puff adder. Something that looks shiny, glossy, wet, but in reality, is dry to the touch. I imagine this is how the gray skin of the Very Long Arms feel. Smooth. Rough, even.

“Let go and let God!” screams Reverend Colethia, and with her encouragement, the Immaculate Forefinger on the right hand of the Very Long Arms slides from the boys forehead and down the bridge of his nose, resting for a spell, until the Holy Extensor Indicis swells, and the wrist snaps back, then snaps forward, plunging the fingertip into the boy’s right eye, twisting it down to the second knuckle.

The Mother of the Offering plugs a sob with a fist to her open mouth. Her eyes water. It appears as if she is trying to eat her hand.

The right hand of the Very Long Arms retracts, freeing the Immaculate Forefinger from the boy’s right orbit. Corded muscles wrap around the Very Long Arms like marine rope. Stretching taut. Swelling. The Holy Extensor Indicis swells once more and the Immaculate Forefinger dives–scaly coniferous fingertip-first–into the boy’s left eye. The Immaculate Forefinger twists then withdraws with a wet suck.

The Mother of the Offering chews her fist harder. The boy is clean now, ready for the world of God the Good, God the Omnipotent. He is renewed. His light is so brilliant. The right hand and the left hand of the Very Long Arms clutch the Renewed Offering, embracing it.

Reverend Colethia kneels before the Renewed Offering, before the Very Long Arms that embrace it so lovingly. She faces the Ark and shields her eyes. “What is a door?” she asks.

It always happens so fast. The Very Long Arms pull back into the Ark, taking the Renewed Offering with them. It’s almost instantaneous. One moment the Very Long Arms are embracing the Renewed Offering, and the next they are gone, the doors of the Ark closed and sealed. The Mother of the Offering is crying and you can hear this if you listen carefully. They are tiny sniffle sounds that punctuate the thick air of the temple.

I am inspired. I stand up and shout, “Base every thought and feeling on The Truth!”

Reverend Colethia nods her head as she rises to her feet. “That’s right, that’s right,” she says. She massages her toned calves. “My toes will be alright tomorrow, let us pray.” She gestures to her pointy high heels.

We, the congregation, let out genuine belly laughter at this.

Later that day, when the sun sits pink and fat until it sinks behind the highrises and anaerobic digesters, I remain behind to help Brother Ezekial patch the edges of the Ark doors with epoxy while the rest of our congregation goes home.

DAVID SIMMONS lives in Baltimore with his wife and daughters. Simmons is the author of the fantastically bizarre Ghosts of Baltimore Duology, where the supernatural and strange grapple with the ever-present past of East and West Baltimore. His work has appeared in Strange Horizons, the Washington Post, Brooklyn Vol. 1, Another Chicago Magazine, Hobart, Snarl, 3 Moon Magazine, Apocalypse Confidential, Tahoma Literary Review, Bridge Eight, Across the Margin, the Washington City Paper, and numerous anthologies. He is a regular contributor to Books to Prisoners, a Seattle-based nonprofit organization whose mission is to foster a love of reading behind bars, encourage the pursuit of knowledge and self-empowerment, and break the cycle of recidivism.

X @WholeTimeDavid // IG @toppdogghill

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Off past the buildings, where the machines ones moaned, I found Elsa bathing in puddles. She didn’t see me, and I felt like a pervert though she was fully clothed. She wore a loose flannel shirt, its sleeves rolled up, and tight jean shorts. It was intimate in the way fucking my brother didn’t seem to be.

She sang quietly to herself. It was a song I recognized because my mother once sang it to me and Abe. A sweet nothing kind of song about a flying cow.

A song deep inside my ears and lungs, still spilling out of me with every exhale.

The puddles were so shallow. She scooped up the water in her hands and rubbed her face, her arms, her legs, and feet. The sun clung to the horizon, but the air was hot and sweaty, thick, mosquitos surrounding me but never landing, never biting. The fireflies hovered round her antlers as they bobbed along to the songs she sang.

She washed her hair slowly, carefully. Like the water she used was clean. Not some runoff from the buildings or stagnant breeding water for mosquitos. Her singing changed. Thickened. And I knew she was crying.

Crying like all of us. all of us wanting, hoping that someone would save us. Make this halflit world bright, make the machines howl back to life, make this shitty life worth living.

“You okay?”

She gasped, her entire body jolting away from me. Her eyes were big and round and rimmed with tears. “What the fuck. Were you watching me?”

“No. Yes. Not on purpose.”

“You accidentally spied on me?”

I wanted to defend myself. Shame rose in me and embarrassment cowed me. But I was sick of myself. Sick of who I had always been. The shadow of my brother’s shine. “Those songs you sang—my mother used to sing them to me. To us. Abe and me.”

She just stared back at me. Her eyes still full of tears, but hard. Digging into me, flaying every layer of skin and muscle and bone. “You look like shit.”

“I was crying too.”

She snorted but not with derision. Measuring me. Breaking me to pieces and inspecting the bits that made me up. But nothing made me up. I was what was left over from making Abe. “Why are you so afraid?”

I laughed. I didn’t try to, but it burst from me. “I’m afraid that I’m wrong.”

Elsa raised an eyebrow. Thin and arched so delicately I imagined breaking it and laughed again.

“All this,” I waved my hand around us. “I’m terrified that this is all there is.”

“That’s stupid.”

“I’m going to run away. Going to find what’s past the dusk country.”

She began washing her hair again. “I can tell you what’s out there.”

I swallowed. Afraid to ask but willing to beg. Willing to do anything. Willing to humiliate myself again, if only she’d tell me. If only she’d touch me. My voice came like a whisper, “What.” My heart hammering in my chest. My sweaty shirt sticking to me.

“Just more people like you. Millions of them.”

“Why do you do that?”

She didn’t even turn to me. “Do what?”

“Hurt me.”

She laughed then, and I wilted. Cowed by her. When she turned to me, I flinched from the anger, the pain I saw on her face. “You’re pathetic.”

I struggled not to run, to flee from her. “Why? Why do you—what have I done to you?”

Her smile was like a knife in my spine, “You’re a drain on Abe. You leech from his life. All of his joy turns to mud in your mouth and you can’t help but vomit it back on him. You shower him with your self-loathing. You came here, spied on me, and hoped to find a kindred spirit in pain.” She laughed bitterly. “My pain doesn’t want your company, Locke. My pain wants nothing but release. So go run from this dusk country you’ve made in your head. Go run to the real world. You will find nothing but people like you who find only deserts when the sun shines.”

Choking back sobs, I turned around and left her there. Alone.

XI

The day mother disappeared was the last day I spent in the dusk country.

I opened her door to feed her, but she was gone. Even the scent of her was gone.

The weeks had dragged on. My brother fucking girls and boys all over town while I wandered the dried-up husks of abandoned industry. Every dream I had was of Elsa. Her body. Her touch. Her eyes. Her tongue coiling round me, pulling me inside. Swarms of fireflies forming into wings and she flew through the blackened empty skies, hunting me. Haunting me.

He tongue reaching into me, ripping out my lungs and heart, and consuming everything.

And then mother was gone.

Rapping on the front door pulled me away. I closed the door for the last time.

Chantelle and Lyla were standing there.

“Hi.”

Chantelle’s eyebrows were low. “Where’s Abe?”

I looked behind me. “He’s sleeping, I think.” Even as I said it, the moans started.

Chantelle shook her head and Lyla pushed past me. She opened the door to Abe thrusting into Monique while Bucky licked his asshole. The three didn’t even stop fucking.

Chantelle said, “Girl, don’t let him come inside you.”

“Hey girl,” Monique spoke through grunts and gasps. “What’s up?”

I couldn’t see Abe’s face, but I imagined he was trying not to laugh.

Lyla said, “That fucker got us pregnant.”

Abe said, “Shit. For real?” The tempo of the fucking slowed.

Bucky pulled his face away from Abe’s asshole.

Monique pushed herself back into him harder and said between moans, “Fill me up, boy. Get me pregnant too.” Then she turned to us and said, “Close the door.”

Abe only laughed, said, “Sure.”

Chantelle closed the door and they both stepped outside. I followed. Monique’s voice came through the walls, “Come inside me and fill this pussy up.”

Chantelle started laughing, “Crazy cunt.”

“You guys really pregnant.”

Lyla sighed, “Fuck.”

“So are Angie, Laura, Corine, and Val.” Chantelle’s voice was even.

“What about Elsa?” I said.

“That horned bitch?” Chantelle’s lips were tight.

“Antlers.” I said.

Lyla said, “Who gives a fuck.”

Chantelle said, “People say he don’t come inside her.”

My face flushed. “What you gonna do?”

Lyla put her hands on her stomach, “I guess I’m gonna have a fucking baby. When’s the last time someone had a baby here?”

Chantelle laughed. “Good question. Years probably. Since I was little, I think.”

I said, “Rodney’s only fourteen and he’s the youngest in town.”

“There you go.”

“Yall aren’t mad?” I said.

Lyla shrugged with her eyes. “It’s not like we didn’t know he wasn’t off fucking everyone and their brother or that he was coming inside us. It just feels weird.”

“Yeah.” Chantelle nodded. She pulled out a cigarette and I laughed.

“Haven’t seen one of those in a long time.”

Chantelle shrugged. “Found them.”

We sat there passing the cigarette back and forth between each of us, not really talking. The smoke felt like shards of glass in my lungs, piercing through me. My lungs filling with blood, making each inhale shallower, harder.

Monique brushed past us and said, “Can still feel his babies dribbling down my leg.”

Lyla laughed. “Won’t be funny when you have a baby squirming out your pussy.”

Monique shrugged. “Don’t know. Might be nice.”

I said, “How?”

She shrugged again. “Having something to love. Some reason to love.” She shrugged once more. “Feels like what’s missing.” She moved her hands to her stomach and held it. “Hope it’s true.”

Lyla and Chantelle held their own stomachs.

The three of them left together, talking about names.

A few minutes later Abe was moaning while Bucky grunted from deep in his throat. It was a while later that Bucky left. Abe came out shirtless and damp with sweat. He sat next to me and plucked some weeds from the concrete steps and tossed them aside.

“Mother’s gone.”

He inhaled audibly, held it in a moment, and let it go.

“You really like it here?”

He smiled bashfully. “Don’t know why I’d want to leave. Got everything I ever needed right here.”

“I don’t trust her.”

He dropped his head and rubbed the back of his neck.

“Elsa,” I said.

“I know it. I don’t get why you don’t get on with her. She only has nice things to say about you.”

My heart beat in sweltering blastbeats. “Why doesn’t she care?”

He raised an eye to me. “About fucking other people?”

I looked away.

He took my hand in his and laced his fingers with mine. “No one cares. We don’t belong to one another or anything. We’re just living, and the best part of living is fucking.”

“Don’t you want more?”

He laughed, a high lilting song. “Like what mom and dad had? Falling in love and rotting and disappearing? You always going on about how there’s nothing here. We got nothing but the rot and decay around us. Can barely find enough food to fill a day with. Fucking’s about the only thing that makes time go by. Otherwise it’s just darkness.”

I turned back to him and studied his perfect face. “We could leave. Just us.” I squeezed his hand, trying to make his heartbeat follow mine for once.

“Nah.”

“She’ll eat you alive.”

A wan smile opened across his face. “She’s about the only thing that makes me feel like life’s worth living.”

“She scares me.” I squeezed his hand again.

He let go of my hand and put it on the back of my neck, pulled me close. I leaned my head into his. The smell of Monique’s pussy and Chucky’s asshole were still on his fingers.

We stayed like that till the sun peered over the horizon and Elsa walked up to us.

She said, “What’s up, bitches?”

Laughter bubbled up inside me unbidden. She was so goddamn beautiful, her hair cascading behind her like a cape fluttering in the wind. Her antlers holding up the orange fingers of twilight. Fireflies stretching wide around her.

She kissed me on the cheek and uncoiled her tongue for Abe to suck on. The smell of her got me hard. Something wild. Alive. Like growth and a new world.

“I’m going for a walk,” I said.

Abe waved me off and led Elsa inside, but Elsa watched me over her shoulder. Her eyes burrowing into me.

The broken roads were filling with teenagers trying to catch what little light they could. I asked what they were doing, and they said going to the highway. I went with.

As we walked, they started clapping their hands together and pounding on their chests, stomping their feet. They started shouting in a kind of nonsense language. Random undulating vowels broken by sharp consonants. I joined in, fell right into that rhythm. Even started shouting with them. Shouting sounds without meaning. Sounds just to fill the empty sky. Sounds to prove we were there, even while the ground we walked on crumbled to the dust drifting through the air. Shouting and slapping till my voice was hoarse, till my feet callused and my hands were raw. Shouted and screamed and tore at the coming night till it was alive with the fireflies that swarmed the highway leading who knows where. It was as if we called them all into the night, as if we wrangled them from wherever they lived.

They gathered fireflies in jars. Hundreds of them. I even caught some in my hands and swallowed them just to have some light inside me. Maybe it could fill me up and make this dark and dying world bright and new.

They brought out their beetles and a dozen matches happened at once. An accidental tournament and I used my voice to announce each one, calling the shots, the moves, and they cheered with me, with the beetles.

And then we were running back to town, shouting differently. Not in any rhythm or to fill up the night, but just out of joy. Running as fast as I could, screaming and leaping, following the procession of jarred fireflies. I felt no pain. I thought of nothing. I was blissfully clear and empty like the life I had lived. A long life of nothing. Of waking in darkness and sleeping in darkness with only a few brief hours of slanted light. My body slipped through my hands and I stopped being me and just started being. My body caught in the motions, in the simple pleasure of living loudly in a world of silent decay.

I found myself in front of the dilapidated house I’d called home for so long panting and sweating. Elsa’s moans came through the walls.

I went inside not even trying to be quiet. Elsa’s eyes were on me right away. Abe was sucking on her antlers while fucking her. She just stared at me, mouthing Fuck and Shit but never my name. I walked into the room still panting.

Abe raised an eyebrow to me and slowed, leaning away from her. “Want her?”

My voice came clear and deep, like I spoke from the depths of those silos. It reverberated through the room lit by fireflies. “Why not me?”

Elsa just stared at me, the fireflies gathered round her antlers. I withered beneath that impassive gaze, her mouth slightly open.

She sat back and stared at me and Abe said, “What’s wrong?” Still naked, sweating, he stroked himself with one hand and her antlers with the other.

“It’s not fair,” I said. Shame struck me like a punch but I didn’t care. Couldn’t stop myself. “You get everything and now mother’s gone and daddy’s always been gone and and and…”

Elsa only stared at me.

Abe turned to the window behind him like answers could be found there. He cleared his throat and said, “We only got what we make of life. You got a lot here if you just slow down and look around.”

“He cannot love himself and so he believes none can love him.”

“Shut the fuck up!” I punched the wall, leaving a crack.

Elsa started laughing. Her eyes on me, digging into me. “He hates himself and wants everyone else as filled with hate. He seeks death.”

Abe frowned. “We’re brothers. I need you.”

But I saw only Elsa’s laughing face. Her husky voice tying itself to that voice that coursed through my whole life, and fury took me. I threw myself at her, raised a foot to kick in her skull, but Abe tackled me. He held me and said, “Brother, it’s all right. You’re okay. I love you. I need you.”

I pushed him off and away, kicked at him as I thrashed. When I got to my feet and saw his bleeding mouth, I felt bile rising in my chest.

I ran.

I just ran.

I didn’t think about where or what I would do. I just ran from her, from my brother’s blood. I vomited in the street and felt fireflies hounding me, hunting me, seeking to consume me. My body shaking, my thoughts scrambled. Dread. My insides coiled, and my lungs burned from running. In the distance, I thought I saw trees. Tears poured out of me and I sobbed. Snot dripping into my mouth as I tried to breath, openmouthed. Still running. Trying to get away. Hoping for somewhere with more light.

But her eyes were all I could see until I woke up far away from home, bathed in darkness burning my skin.

I woke to the sound of wet flesh slapping together. My dick already wet and hard from the dreams I had of Elsa. Of her mouth on me, of mine on her. Of me filling her up, falling into her, and being consumed by her. Of a thousand fireflies swarming round me, landing on my thin, threadbare flesh, and lifting me up into the air.

I slid off the couch and saw the faint glow of fireflies coming from the open door of the room Abe and I shared. I approached slowly, their grunting and moaning drawing me in.

I saw her face on my bed. Pained but pleased by it. Her lips made no sound, but they formed the word Fuck. She opened her eyes and saw me. She stared right at me, her expression unchanged. The rocking back and forth while my brother fucked her, the pleasant pain of having him inside her. His hands held onto her antlers.

I pushed the door open slightly wider and saw the way her breasts bounced back and forth. The sweat coating her like a second skin. The pulsing of a vein in her neck. She bit her lip, still staring at me with hooded eyes.

She pushed Abe away and turned around, so she was on all fours. Swinging her hair away from me, she kept staring. I saw Abe’s hand take her long hair and wrap it round his hand. With his other hand he grabbed an antler. While he thrust inside her, he pulled her head back and stuck an antler branch in his mouth. He sucked on it while he fucked her, while she stared at me, while the fireflies lit the room.

I was so hard I undid my pants, let them fall to the floor. I masturbated while she watched me watching her get fucked by my brother. Her eyes. Wide with pleasure. Her breasts bouncing to the rhythm of his thrusts, and I fell into that tempo. I could almost feel her through his skin, felt her pussy gripping me.

She pulled away and climbed on top of him. His feet hung off the side of the bed towards the door and she stared over her shoulder at me while she bounced on top of him. In the faint glow of the fireflies, I saw her lips grip him, felt like it was me. Watched her hips roll, saw her asshole winking at me. So close to climax, I slowed down.

Abe rolled her over, so he was on top again. He held onto her antlers while he grunted. She stared at me. He pulled out and stood. She dropped to her knees in front of him and he came on her antlers. Then he grabbed them, licked them clean.

I kept masturbating and she kept staring at me while my brother collapsed into bed. She turned her body towards me and spread her legs. She stuck two fingers inside herself and I came so hard. My vision funneled, and I felt like I was going to shit myself. It gushed from me in long hot ropes. Coming from deep in my bowels. I came so hard my ejaculate almost reached where she sat.

She crawled towards me then, crawling over my discarded semen. I kept stroking myself, my eyes locked with hers, begging for her mouth, her body. When she reached the door, she closed it.

I stood there, my dick in my hand in the deepest of nights. I don’t know how long I stood waiting. Walking outside, I masturbated quietly into the night. Tears shook my shoulders and when I slept I dreamt of her eyes. Her tongue. Her touch. I woke with pants wet with come.

IX

Everyone brought their beetles to the black meadow before the silos where a metal box sat. The seat of the tournament. A dozen beetles fought that day, many of them from Harrison’s brood, but the final was between Tommy’s Sunny and Chantelle and Lyla’s Skullkid.

Everyone was smiling and cheering and clapping hands together. Abe and Elsa were elsewhere, uncaring and indifferent to the beetle wars that gave meaning to the rest of our lives.

Chantelle and Lyla mewed to Skullkid in their hands and Tommy scratched at the deep acne scars in his cheeks. His red hair reminding me of the color that should have been everywhere but was instead nowhere.

When they set their beetles down on the metal box, everyone went quiet.

The silent factories loomed over us as the sun cast their thick shadows long over all us gathered. The shadow so cold that we shivered in our dirty, threadbare clothes.

Skullkid made the first move. Much smaller than Sunny but swifter too, he slid beneath Sunny’s massive tusks. Chantelle and Lyla cheered and the rest of us held our breaths.

Skullkid reared up, lifting Sunny on one side. All three of her legs lifted and Tommy screamed and we still held our breath until Sunny rolled over onto her back.

A single breath in dozens of lungs escaped as a cheer and Tommy fell to his knees and the first dead cross hit the ground with a dull thud. We screamed and lurched away and when we raised our eyes to the sky, a hundred crows fell, battering the earth and spreading black eyes and busted teeth, mouths spilling with blood.

We ate them all as a feast and no one asked where they came from or why they all died at once.

The sun just broke over the horizon where it would stay for the next six hours. Mother seemed to melt further into the couch. Her body deflating, like she was only the rolling layers of skin and flesh with nothing left inside. I went to her and told her I’d be right back. Her great head rolled forward, nodding, and no words came. Instead a hum rose from her chest.

I nearly cried.

All the while, Abe fucked Tommy, a redhead with acne scars.

Tommy had the best beetle I’d ever seen. Not the biggest, but the best. Some beetles just have it and Tommy’s beetle had it. He called her Sunny because she was pitch black and we all thought that was pretty funny. She wasn’t from Harrison but one Tommy caught on his own, though he never said where.

Watching Sunny fight was mesmerizing. She’d come at a beetle twice her size and she’d slip right beneath their tusks, going flat as a blade of grass, and then rising up with all her power, her tusks shooting up high, and she’d flip the beetle one way or the other.

First time I saw it, I screamed. Couldn’t believe it. Just screamed and howled and hooted with the rest, each of us damn near running in circles, unable to believe it.

I wandered towards the plants. Two huge silos in the distance. One of them shattered, as if a great mouth took a bite out of it. The streets were filling with teenagers. Everyone in the dusk country was around our age. I waved to them and they asked me where I was going. I told them, and they waved me off. They were formed into circles of conversation in the broken streets. When their voices became just noise I heard them clapping and stomping a beat. Someone smacked metal against metal and it rang through the dust filled sky.

It penetrated by skin and dug into my bones. The percussive clapping and slapping and clanging shifted my steps to land in tempo, to roll into the rhythm defined by the dusty punks of the dusk country.

The husks of the factories rose above me, casting their shadows long and thick. So thick it felt like oil or molasses on my skin. A crow cut through the sky and into the nearest building. I ran in and made my way up the stairs to the fifth floor, where I thought it flew in. I crept round the stairs and it stared at me, cocking its head. I picked up a hunk of concrete broken off from the wall or ceiling or whatever else. I whipped it at the crow, but it just watched it pass overhead. Cawing at me, it flapped its wings in my direction.

Moving slow, I came within a few feet of it and it didn’t move. It just kept cocking its head back and forth and cawing at me. Hunger tied my stomach in knots

“Don’t move.” I said.

It cawed at me.

My knees bent and ready, my hands parted to scoop it up, I took another slow step forward. My heart raced, and my eyes burned from not blinking. I took another step and another step. The crow just stared at me, even when I grabbed it in my hands.

It cawed, then cocked its head back and forth.

It was so solid in my hands. So alive. I shuddered, feeling the breath and life of this beautiful black bird. It didn’t struggle, and I could feel its heart beat beneath its coarse black feathers. In the halflight coming through the open walls, I searched for something to kill it with.

It cawed and though it didn’t struggle, I was afraid to let it go and lose it. So I just sat there, holding a crow, wondering how I forgot my knife, how I didn’t think this through, how I should have tried to smash its head open instead of catch it. While I thought through my options, I heard laughter coming from below and the sound of barefeet clapping against metal steps. Not sure what to do, I waited for them.

As they came closer, a voice became familiar. Abe leading someone to the roof.

“Abe! In here.”

The crow cawed in response.

The steps stopped. “Locke?”

“Fifth floor.”

The steps came slow and Abe’s face came round the corner. When he saw me sitting in the halflight, a crow in my hands, he nearly fell over laughing.

“What the shit?” he said through fits of laughter.

“What is it?” She came round the bend of the stairwell, her antlers reaching high into the empty room. Words caught in my throat and I hardened in my pants. Fireflies swarmed her antlers, making them seem to shine with a light of their own as she emerged from the blackness of surrounding night, like the bright dropped over her and latched on, clinging like new skin. So beautiful and delicate, like the bird in my hands. And I longed for those coarse feathers to be her silky hair, her angelic skin. For the black eyes of the crow to become hers, for her to see me. She wore shorts and a tanktop, her skin sheened by sweat.

“He’s got a fucking bird.”

“A crow,” my voice was tight but controlled, not giving me away.

She stepped past Abe’s giggling and crouched in front of me. The crow cawed and she cawed back. The crow recoiled at this, its feathers bristling, and its body began struggling.

She grabbed it in her delicate hands and took it from me. The crow struggled to flap against her grip and cawed repeatedly. A caw of fear. The dread rattled through its whole body. Through mine, too.

“Locke,” Abe said, “this is Elsa.”

“I know.”

“Oh, right.”

Elsa bit into the crow’s neck, silencing its caw. A shudder ran through my body and I fell backwards. She yanked her head back, blood flowing, and she spat its throat off to the side, then licked her lips and smeared the blood on her face with her forearm.

She held the crow by its feet and let it hang upside down, blood flowing from its ripped-out neck. When she looked at me, I recoiled like the crow had. Predator eyes, watching me, studying me, consuming me.

Abe wrapped his arms round her waist and kissed her neck. She let the crow fall to the floor and faced him. Putting her arms around his neck, leaving streaks of blood, she pulled him down into a kiss. They made out there for what seemed forever. Abe’s hand in her shorts, clutching her ass. I imagined my own fingers gripping her, opening her ass to me, slipping my tongue inside.

My teeth chattered and when they pulled apart Abe’s mouth had blood on it too. He said, “Let’s go up to the roof. Take the bird. We’ll have it for dinner later.”

They walked away, Abe’s hand deep in her shorts, reaching around from the back. His arm moved gently back and forth, in and out, up and down, and she walked bowlegged, pausing every few steps to gasp, her head lolling to one side and the fireflies following as they swayed this way and that.

I stared down at the dead crow and tears came to my eyes. I was so hungry, and I was going to kill it anyway, but waves of revulsion and fear and pity and anger built like a pressure behind my eyes. I picked it up by its feet, its head barely connected to the rest of its body. Thought about throwing it through the holes in the wall, into the night. Didn’t because I didn’t want to disappoint Abe. Didn’t want her to think me weak. I bit down bile and shook my head, followed them up the stairs.

The dead bird in my hands reminded me of another bird from long ago.

Blue.

The only color in the dusk country, or so it seemed at the time. A blue like nothing I’d ever seen before. A blue I wanted to turn into paint to cover the dusk country. Bring it new life.

When I reached to touch those blue feathers at our windowsill, it flew, launching away from me, only to be ripped from the sky by a group of crows. Ten of them ripping the blue bird to pieces while I watched.

Never saw another bird like that. Only our big black crows.

They sat tangled together at the edge of the building staring at the horizon hugging sun. Bloated and red, dripping like blood into the always empty sky.

Elsa sat crosslegged on the concrete floor and Abe sat on a metal box behind her. His fingertips grazed the antlers. Mouth open, eyes hooded, he ran his fingers along her antlers. He brought his left hand to his mouth and spit in it and gripped her antler and stroked it, his spit causing it to shine in the light of the fireflies swarming round them both.

I coughed, and he turned back to me. “Take a seat.”

I didn’t. I turned to the two silos. “What were those for?”

Abe turned to where I was looking, still stroking Elsa’s antlers. “What if none of these things did anything?”

“What?”

“You always think that we’re living in the wasteland of someone else’s life. But like what if none of these things were used for anything? What if no one put them here? What if these are the mountains momma used to tell us about.”

The words weighed on me. I stared at them, trying to find some significance in their shape, the way they fell apart, the way they hugged the black river.

Elsa said, “Past the edge of town are trees. They’re like blades of grass but big as a factory. They grow both deeper into the earth and higher into the sky and I think that’s worth loving.”

Abe nodded along like he knew it.

“What?”

Elsa looked out over the dusk country. “Trees know where they’re from and they remain where they are. They enrich the land of their home and even the skies.” She rolled her face towards me. “They love and so are loved.”

I turned away, looked down at the dead crow in my hands.

VII

That night we cooked the crow over a fire made from broken furniture and the refuse of a dilapidated house and the seat cushions from a car. Elsa ripped the feathers off its body with her teeth while I built the fire.

We sat on moldy seats ripped out from some cars parked nearby. The clearing was a square patch of asphalt broken apart by patches of weeds. True night had fallen and the fire belched black smoke that stung my lungs and eyes. When the fire was good and hot, we put a carhood over the flames, then threw the crow carcass on top. It sizzled, and grease ran out from its body, spitting out with a pop as it got too hot.

I sat on one side of the fire and Abe and Elsa shared a seat. Abe kept stroking her antlers. Her face made no expression at this, so it was hard to know if she enjoyed this sensation, if she felt anything at all. It got me hard though. Everything with her got me hard. Just the proximity was intoxicating. When I looked at her, I barely saw a person. Just desire. The shape of her body, the curves of her breasts, the lines of her neck and arms and legs. The way her lips were parted. The way her hands stroked Abe’s leg.

He was my twin and it was so easy to drift into the sensation that he must have felt. To put myself in his skin and imagine her touching my leg, touching my face. Feeling her antler in my hands.

She yawned and then put an arm round Abe’s bloodstained neck. He pushed his face forward to kiss her, but she backed up with a smile. He attempted again to the same result. Their smiles wide. Then she opened her mouth and her tongue uncoiled like caterpillar from a leaf. Stretching a foot long, it flicked at Abe’s lips. His smile stretched but he kept his lips closed. Her tongue danced over his lips before he finally opened them, letting her tongue inside. He sucked on her tongue, eyes closed, his fingers caressing her antlers as if they were made of butterfly wings. Fragile things.

Footsteps approached, and they parted, her saliva running down Abe’s chin. He wiped it away and turned to the newcomers.

“What up, boys? What you cooking?” Lyla’s voice was caustic, her lips permanently chapped. Chantelle was beside her wearing only a bra and jeans, the sweat and grime of digging for beetles obvious.

Abe said, “Locke killed a crow. Should be done soon.”

“Good on you,” Chantelle said sidling next to me on the seat. The heat of her made me sweat and her scent intoxicated me. Already horny, the musk of sweat and hours of work drove me crazy. I crossed my legs to hide my erection. Lyla sat on one of the empty carseats and stared at the sizzling meat.

“This is Elsa,” Abe said. “Elsa, Chantelle and Lyla.”

Elsa smiled wide. “Nice to meet you.”

Lyla raised an eyebrow to her antlers and turned to me. “Where’d you kill the crow?”

Chantelle said, “You know you got horns?”

Abe giggled, and I flushed. Embarrassed for some reason. For every reason.

Elsa said, “They’re antlers.”

“You wear them all the time?” Chantelle scratched her cheek, smearing dirt on her face.

“Don’t wear them at all.”

Chantelle turned from Elsa to Abe to me and then to Lyla.

Lyla just shrugged. Then smiled. “We just come from a beetle fight with Tommy.”

Abe said, “Who won?”

Chantelle said, “Who you think won? Sunny’s unbeatable.”

“But,” Lyla raised her finger into the air, “you won’t believe what our beetle did.”

Abe yawned. “You got a new one?”

“Skullkid,” Lyla said, “on account of the white on his thorax that looks like a skull.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a little felt box. She opened it and the beetle flew out.

“Little bastard,” Chantelle said, swiping him out of the air and shoving him back in his box. “You got to take our word for it. He’s always tripping to get away.”

“So Sunny topples Skullkid but then he rights himself. Didn’t stay stuck on his back like every other beetle.”

“Never seen anything like it,” said Chantelle.”

The fire cracked and the crow meat sizzled and Elsa only frowned at the beetle box.

Abe said, “Locke caught the crow up in one of the buildings. The one next to the silos.”

Chantelle threw an arm round my shoulders and pulled me close. My cheek touched her breast and my mouth was suddenly dry. My spit like paste in my mouth. She said, “That’s good shit. I haven’t had proper meat in—” she turned to Lyla, “When did we find that rat?”

Lyla said, “It wasn’t a rat. It was a rabbit.”

“Rabbits got big ears though.”

Abe said, “No, that’s squirrel. You know rabbits by their smell.”

Lyla said, “What do they smell like?”

“Like they drink river water.”

“Think it’s done,” I said. My deep voice wrapping round us, pulling attention back to the food.

Elsa grabbed it barehanded and tossed it onto the hubcap next to the fire.

“Shit, girl.” Chantelle’s voice was more accusation than astonishment.

Abe stood and kicked the metal off the fire, releasing a gust of black acrid smoke into the air. The fire burned low and Lyla got up, returned with a tire and put it in the fire.

“What’s that for?” I said.

She sat again, “Keeps the fire burning a long time.”

“Smells like shit, though.” Chantelle sighed. Her breath warm on my ear. Like an invitation, but I didn’t turn to her. Couldn’t. It was like I was locked up. Watching Abe, his body so perfect, his movements so natural. I was ashamed and embarrassed to compare myself to him, but couldn’t help it. He was so free, so effortless.

Everything was a struggle to me. Just being me felt harder than it should be to be a person.

We nodded at the burning tire like it had some secret to share while Elsa divided the crow into greasy pieces and handed them round the circle. She removed all the bones, though. Couldn’t tell how she knew to do it or even how she did it, but her fingers worked so swift and nimbly that she had a pile of bones and we had meat.

While we waited for the meat to cool enough to eat without scorching our mouths, Elsa sifted through the bones, separating them into two piles. When she was done, she said, “I’m going to tell Abe’s fortune.”

Lyla and Chanelle cocked their heads as one, leaning into one another. Abe ran his hands over her antlers.

She threw the bones into the dirt where they lay scattered and nodded. “One day you’ll be the father of all the dusk country.”

She gathered the bones and looked at Lyla and Chanelle and asked which one wanted their fortune first.

For Chanelle, she threw the bones and said, “Your sons will be taller than anyone ever born. A new race of giants who will build a new world here in the dusk country.”

For Lyla, she threw the bones and said, “When you die, the river will run clear.”

She looked at me but didn’t throw the bones again and I felt it like a knife in my stomach, ripping from side to side.

Chantelle smacked her lips as she ate, and Lyla talked about all the rest of the beetle tournament. Abe kept stroking Elsa’s antlers and Elsa stared at the burning tire. So did I, if only to try to tie her attention to me. The rubber peeled back like a cocoon and melted. Layer after layer of rubber. Chantelle threw a slashed-up seat cushion into the fire, kicking the flames up high.

I was very conscious of Chantelle’s body. Her hand touched my knee and ran up my leg. Her hand was so close to my crotch and she squeezed me there. I wasn’t sure if I wanted her to find my erection or if I was afraid she’d find it. Then she lifted her hand and put it round my shoulder, her fingers brushing lightly back and forth over the skin of my neck. It was the greatest sensation I could remember. My skin tingled, squirmed, and I burned. I felt my dick pulsing, knew I couldn’t last much longer.

“Where do you live?” Lyla said to Elsa.

“Here.” She waved her hand dramatically into the air. “All around. Sometimes I stay in the buildings.”

Lyla leaned back in her seat and stared at the empty sky. “I feel you. My parents disappeared a few weeks ago.”

Chantelle said, “I still stay in the house they raised me in. Near the end, my parents were like—you ever open up a chrysalis before its ready?”

Lyla frowned, her lips pulled back in disgust. “Don’t explain.”

“That’s what they were like,” Chantelle said.

Fireflies gathered round Elsa’s antlers and she said, “I don’t remember my parents. Don’t even know if I had any.”

“That’s like our dad,” I said. I was breathing hard, trying to keep from exploding in my pants.

Abe picked it up, “Our mom used to talk about him. She tells all kinds of stories about him.”

“She say he worked at the buildings?”

Abe and I nodded.

Chantelle laughed through her nose. “My momma used to talk all the time about how this place used to be different. Talked about a sun that wasn’t always setting.”

“Do you think it’s true?” Elsa’s voice came so innocent. I longed for her like this. Delicate, beautiful, sexy. I wanted to hold her in my arms. But it was the danger of her that twisted me inside. The things she did repulsed and enticed me.

Abe said, “Locke’s always trying to figure that out. He spends all day thinking about it.”

Everyone turned to me.

Chantelle’s body pressed against me. I stared at the shape of her legs, imagined my face buried in the heat radiating between them. I coughed and looked at the fire, then Elsa’s smile. Abe stroking her antlers.

I spoke to calm myself, to numb myself to Chantelle’s caresses. “There’s more to all this than just what remains. We got these big buildings and our parents tell us that someone built them, that people worked there, that machines lived there. But the machines are all dead. Everyone older than us is all gone or slowly disappearing. Our mother’s—it can’t just be stories. She believes them so hard. And all these cars. It’s not just some kind of, like, collective imagination.”

Chantelle’s voice was barely more than a whisper in my ear. “What is it then?”

“I don’t know. I think life’s different outside of the dusk country.”

Lyla said, “Dusk country?”

“That’s what he calls here,” Abe said.

“I like it,” Chantelle’s voice surged through me like a hot knife, filling me with lust. “It sounds pretty. Like a story.”

“Like a song,” said Lyla.

My body was so hot I felt dizzy. “I want to get there some day.”

“Where?” Elsa said.

“I don’t know,” I waved my hand, mimicking hers. “There—wherever, whatever the rest of this world is.”

Abe laughed. “Boy’s got all kinds of ideas.”

Lyla shook her head. “Why would life be different outside of town?”

Elsa said, “Have any of you ever been outside of town?”

Abe’s fingers traced her antlers lazily. “I like it here.”

True night descended, and the only sound was our talking, the fire crackling, and the wind moaning. Abe kissed Elsa and stood up. He reached a hand towards Lyla and she took it, standing up. He looked at Chantelle and motioned behind him with his head. They walked away hand in hand. Chantelle leaned into me and kissed me on the cheek and cupped my erection and bit my ear. I nearly came and she giggled, feeling the heat and the hardness of me. She unzipped my jeans and reached inside.

I sucked in a breath, trying to get away but her hot little hand wrapped round me, dragging me out. “It’s okay.” She lowered her head, her mouth, and took me inside.

Hot and wet and tight, my vision funneled and I felt the edge of ecstasy. The orgasm right there, waiting to tip over. And then she pulled away. Just that moment of contact, and then it was gone. She stared down at my dick in her hand, still wet with her spit, and she smiled. Turning, she jogged to catch up with Abe and Lyla. The three of them disappearing into the night.

Gasping, ready to explode, to erupt, I followed where she went. Over the fire I heard them climbing into a truck bed, giggling. My eyes touched upon Elsa’s and shame poured down upon me. Quickly, I stuffed myself back in my jeans. My teeth chattering. Tears clawing at the back of my eyes.

I stared at the fire until I felt her eyes on me. Elsa leaned forward over the fire. “Why didn’t you try to fuck her?”

“Chantelle?”

“She would’ve.”

I dropped my eyes back to the fire.

“What do you think of Abe?” Her voice was pleasant, carrying no insinuation.

“He’s my brother.”

She snorted and leaned back. I brought my eyes back up, tracing her body from her feet to her face, stopping on her breasts, their shape visible in the firelight. Grease spotted the tanktop and dried blood was still on the corner of her chin. She said, “I can hear you. The way your heart races. The way your voice falters. I can trace the roads of your thoughts and I see how you cower before him.”

She bent down and scooped up the bones, shaking them in her hands. Rattling.

Moaning and the sound of flesh clapping drowned out the fire.

She tossed the bones and stared at where they fell. Nodding, she sniffed and turned to the fire.

“What’s it say?”

She shook her head, the fireflies shivering over her antlers. “I see two paths for you.” She didn’t turn to me, as if she avoided looking at me. “There’s a path of love and a path of death.”

“Which one am I on?”

“Both, for now. Soon you’ll choose.” She wiped at her greasy mouth. “You’re going to pick wrong. I feel it.”

My anger flared and I kicked dirt into her bones. When she didn’t react, I said, “You don’t mind him fucking other people?”

“I told him to,” she said. I recoiled, and she laughed at my reaction. “You want too much, Locke, but you’ll get nothing if you don’t reach for it.”

I tried to swallow but my saliva was thick and gummy. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The moans became screams while Elsa stared at me, her gaze chipping bits of me away. I could tell it was Chantelle yelling fuck me repeatedly until her words became a vowel carried into a scream. I could almost feel what it was to be inside her, even as Lyla’s voice joined hers. I avoided Elsa’s tearing glare, her smile. I sat with the frustrated erection burning in my jeans.

Elsa spread her legs and leaned back, the fireflies forming shapes above her but I couldn’t read or interpret the signs. Elsa’s breath came heavy and it seemed to surround me, to bleed into me, and the night became so black that I felt it at the edge of shattering.

I stayed where I was, not looking at her while Lyla and Chantelle moaned. Felt her watching me, but I did nothing. Afraid to even move. Embarrassed by my erection, by my insecurity.

When Abe returned he was alone. “Let’s go home.”

My erection chafed against the denim of my jeans as I followed behind them, staring at Elsa’s swaying hips.

Mother was where we left her. Her body thinning and widening, spilling off the couch and layering the floor with her flesh. Elsa went to the kitchen and took a fistful of dried ants and flies and chewed them into a paste. Climbing over mother’s deflating, decaying body, the fireflies shedding light upon my mother, she held her mouth over mother’s head. Mother’s milky eyes blinked at me and Abe and then she tilted her head back for Elsa and opened her mouth.

The paste Elsa chewed poured slowly out of Elsa’s mouth and into mother’s.

When she was done, mother closed her eyes and said, “Thank you.”

“You should take her to her bed,” Elsa said after she climbed off the couch, off mother.

“Why?” Abe’s nose curled at the thought of touching her. Mine did too.

“It would be better for her there.”

We did. We sunk our hands into her loose flesh. Sticky and moist, her skin seemed to stick to the couch but also to us. Like old tape that had melted into the surface. Prying mother’s loose flesh from the couch with a slight tearing sound, we moved slow and gentle, afraid she’d rip to pieces in our hands. Pooling her flesh into our hands and arms and onto our chests, where it balanced against the rest of her body, we lifted her. So light, like her bones had hollowed. Like her skin was nothing but rolls of tacky fabric. She smelt sweet. Like something I had never experienced. Her teeth were rotted but the scent was pleasing. We lay her down in bed and she pooled out to cover the entirety of it, spilling over the sides. We covered her with the threadbare blankets and left her.

Abe and Elsa went into our room and I slept on the couch.

Lyla and Chanelle lay in the grey grass pulling it out one at a time and then tossing it into the air where no wind came to blow it away and the grass formed small piles before their faces. Sun was dipping down beneath the factories after its short skip across the horizon. Chanelle said, “That’s how it goes. One day you think you got the best beetle ever and the next day it’s just a dried up husk of nothing. Don’t matter that it took you a whole week to find just the right one with just the right pincers.”

Lyla said, “Everyone always thinks they got the best beetle.”

“Scarlet was a beauty,” said Chanelle, her breath sighing out like to empty her whole lungs. “Had a red streak is why I called her Scarlet.”

“Saw her.”

“Then you know. Thought she’d topple everyone’s beetles. Whole tournament would be us cheering her on.”

“How’d that work out?”

“Fuck off.” Chanelle turned to me. Rolled her whole body away from the earth as if to reveal herself to me. “Where’s your beetle?”

The way her dirty grey shirt clung to her dried my mouth. I shrugged. Found it always difficult to speak around her. “Don’t got a beetle.”

Lyla yawned. “What about Abe?”

“He’s got dozens. Everyone brings him a beetle all the time but he doesn’t train them or compete.”

“I know,” Lyla said. “Everybody knows. Why don’t you take one and use it?”

“They’re his.” I shrugged, feeling stupid and hot and clumsy.

“He’s your twin,” Chanelle said. “Aren’t yall supposed to share everything?”

Abe didn’t share though. Didn’t share Lyla or Chanelle when they came by for a fuck. Maybe he would if I asked but I never asked. Could never imagine being worthy of what was given to him so freely. To ask was to tell everyone, including myself, that I was nothing compared to him.

I said, “You don’t got a twin.” It came out harsher than I meant, like an accusation and an assault.

Lyla sighed and shook her head and pushed up to her feet, wiping the dirt away from her stained clothes. She didn’t say another word, just turned away and left.

Chanelle scooped up the pile of grass she’d plucked from the earth and held it in her fist. She watched Lyla go and said, “You’re lucky, Locke, but you don’t know it.” She bent down and scooped up the pile of grass Lyla had plucked and held it in her other fist. Turning to me, she said, “You ever wonder why you’re the only one with a sibling?”

Couldn’t speak or even think.

“That’s right,” she sneered. “All us all alone but you and you don’t even see that.” She shoved both fistfuls of grass into her mouth and chewed, turned away, followed Lyla.

Her emotions struck me like a blow and I couldn’t catch my breath until I got back home and Abe put his arm around me, asked me what was wrong.

Didn’t say anything. Just held onto him while we watched his beetles crawl over one another.

IV

The river flowed like sludge, its stink almost solid in my lungs. I threw a rock in there and watched it slowly swallowed by the current. It was the third hour of dusk.

Abe was using our room to fuck Harrison, the beetle collector. He had blond hair and a hairlip scar, which made him old enough to have been a child when doctors lived in the dusk country. His ears were pierced by bone and he tattooed his flesh with each new breed of beetle he discovered. Spent most his life out gathering them, discovering new ones or old ones. He even bred them, if you believe the stories he told. Sold his precious babies, as he called them, to anyone willing to trade for a chance to compete in the beetle tournaments.

One year, every single beetle competing had been bought from Harrison.

He smelled like dirt and mud but with a touch of that rotting sweet stink that all our parents had. Like he too was on his way to death.

No one grew old in the dusk country.

I followed the riverbank south, the way that led out of the dusk country. My feet carried me from the broken concrete and crumbling asphalt to places where grass grew like thorns. Brown and prickly against the soles of my feet. Sentinels lined the distance, calling me. The shade of some large creature or structure. Thin at the base and rising high like a pyre before stretching wide with dozens of arms.

When I could make out the brown of their skin, she spoke from the otherside of the river. “Leaving?”

Startled, I gasped audibly and nearly slipped into the black river. She stood, hair tumbling down, antlers rising high, surrounded by fireflies, a huge white shirt draped from her narrow shoulders. If she wore anything else, they were too short to be seen beneath the shirt. One of her shoulders slipped free from the mouth of her shirt and I could trace the hollow of her neck, the curve of her clavicle in the halflight of mid-dusk. Her skin so pale it seemed to glow.

She spoke through my silence, a wry smile on her face, “I’m Elsa.”

“I know.”

“You don’t look like him.”

I coughed just to make noise. “We’re not that kind of twins.”

She cocked her head to one side, her neck somehow holding all that antler weight. The fireflies followed the tips of the antlers. “What do you think you’ll find out there?” She gestured towards the sentinels.

“I’ve never seen a sentinel before.”

“A tree.”

I scowled, squinting at the sentinels. “Aren’t trees green?”

“How do you know that’s a tree?”

“What?”

“If you’ve never seen one.”

Her nipples were visible through the shirt. Two points in the white. Her legs were shapely, rounded with muscle. Her neck was so thin and long I could have wrapped my fingers round it. “What is it then?”

She started walking away from the trees. “I’ve been walking beside you for almost an hour and you didn’t even notice.”

I followed, the width of the river keeping me from her. Her hips swayed when she walked, pressing tight against the shirt. I could make out the curve of her body, the fabric tight over her ass. I stiffened in my jeans just watching her. “How do you know my brother?”

She turned to face me but walked backwards, heading back into the dusk country. “He didn’t tell you?”

I shook my head.

She raised her face to the blank, black sky. “He found me. I was buried beneath the rubble of one of the collapsing factories. The cars wailed for me. They begged the skies for help to save me and no one came. No one came for so long.” She lowered her face and met my gaze.
And then there was your brother.”

“That true?”

She smiled and I melted in the mocking heat of her regard. “We’re all lost here. Me most of all. He makes me feel found.”

“You didn’t grow up with us in the dusk country.”

“The dusk country.” She raised her face to the blank sky once more as if something could be seen or found there. “I like that.” She closed her eyes and took a breath. When she turned back to me, she said, “How do you know?”

I swallowed, wanted to point to her antlers. “I’d know.”

She cocked her head to the side again. “Want to see me naked?”

My mouth dried, and it hung open, struggling to say something. Anything.

She smiled and grabbed the hem of the shirt. Her lips parted slightly and her eyes hooded, her hips rolled back and forth beneath the shirt. She held it down and tight against her body, revealing the size and firmness of her breasts, the flatness of her stomach. She moved her right hand to her nipples and played with them, her other hand holding the shirt tight. She gyrated erotically, and my erection was painful against the denim. Pulling the neck of the shirt down and pressing her breasts together, her cleavage spilled out and I swallowed, my breath coming heavily.

Night approached as she teased me. The only sound was my breathing, the river flowing, and her theatrical moaning. The fireflies swirling above her, forming shapes like words from the cast off books that people once knew how to read.

Her voice was husky, almost like my mother’s, like that primordial sound reverberating through my whole life, shivering my bones. “Want to fuck me? Right here?” As she spoke she turned around and I could tell she wore nothing beneath the shirt. But the shadows hid her no matter how hard I stared. I was nodding, my eyes locked onto the shadow between her legs.

Her fingers ran over that shadow and she took in a shuddering breath, eyes closed for a moment. When they opened, she bit her lip and continued touching herself.

Desire was a dam bursting and I was so hard that it hurt. I touched the button of my jeans to slip them off.

She laughed and stood up straight. “Not tonight.”

I blinked, my lungs breathing shallow, my body at the edge of ecstasy.

She ran, her hair flowing behind her like a river dreamt clean. Her antlers piercing the night with bright, a thousand fireflies whirling round them.

I dropped my pants and masturbated. Her teasing mockery ringing in my ears, echoing beneath my clamped tight eyelids. It took only a moment and I came. I watched it shoot out of me in globs of black as they arced into the river.

Terrified for a moment, I stared down at my dick hard in my hand as more black oozed out. I screamed and didn’t bother to wipe myself clean, just tucked myself back in my jeans and ran home.

V

Abe was hot against my back. “You awake?”

“Yeah.”

“Getting up?”

“No.”

He shifted, cupped my body with his. His heart beating slow and gentle into my back. “You okay?” He massaged my shoulder. His hand so soft and delicate.

It was too much to tell. “Don’t know.” Tears clawed at the back of my eyes but I had no words for them all. I was a bottle bursting.

His breath was cold and stale, his cheek pressed on mine. His lilting lisp somewhat grating. “You got to relax, Locke. Life’s not so bad as what’s in your head. We just living. Can’t ask for much more than that.”

“Don’t you want to be happy?”

He exhaled abruptly through his nose. “Think anyone’s ever been happy? Think anyone trapped in their head all day’s ever been happy? Happy’s got nothing to do with how we living.”

His words were like rough stone dragged down the inside of my ear canal, my throat, my stomach. I closed my eyes tight. “What did we do to deserve this?” My words almost inaudible.

“Deserve’s got nothing to do with life, Locke. You say the dusk country’s a dead land. But, shit, we still living. There’s happiness all around you, boy. You just got to reach out and touch it.”

I had nothing to say so I said nothing. Eventually, Abe climbed over me. His footsteps taking him away, his muttered conversation with mother only just reaching me. Drifting in and out of sleep, I rolled over, away from the door.

“You want me to get you anything? Bucky said there’s fish in the river. Bet I could get you one.”

My only answer was curling tighter into a ball. Trying to fit into a womb. A womb that had to exist somewhere. A place of peace, of comfort. A place where life was more than just the moments between waking and sleeping.

I woke later, my head cradled in a warm lap. Skin on skin. A hand gently stroking my hair, my neck, my cheek. Afraid to open my eyes in case it stopped. It had been so long since I’d felt anything but dread, fear. Hopelessness. Embarrassment. Shame.

“He okay?” It was Abe’s voice, tinny in my ears.

“He’s just lost.” A girl’s voice, so close to me. Husky. One I recognized but couldn’t place. Reminding me of a day so long ago when my mother was human, when she held me when I was sick. I almost died, or so Abe told me. And I thought maybe I did die, a long time ago, but only kept on living on accident anyway.

“I’ll be out back. Bucky says he’ll trade fish for a blowjob.” Abe’s barefeet padded out of our collapsing home.

I was in a girl’s lap. So warm and soft. She stroked my ear, and then started humming. Humming a tune I recognized. Something from long ago. My childhood, maybe. Another woman’s voice back then humming me to sleep, to peace. Making me believe life could always be so good. My mother’s lullaby, the one that still echoed and rolled within me, lulling me to sleep on nights that never seemed to end.

Cracking. That’s what it felt like. Like I was cracking to pieces. Something made of glass inside me shattering. My heart, maybe. Shaking first. Just shaking. Then hands gripping me, pulling my face closer. My face buried in her lap while she held me tight. I could smell her. Only a layer of fabric between my hot breath and her lips.

“You’re okay,” her voice said. “You’re okay.” Hands stroking my back.

And then I broke to nothingness. Feeling so much that the bottle I was exploded and left me with nothing. Just an empty vessel, unable to feel anything. And I wept. I cried and cried. Open-mouthed sobs into her crotch, making the fabric wet and hot. Then my arms came up, gripped her lower back, pulling myself in tighter to her.

She held me. She just held me. And that was enough. Enough for a lifetime. Something I had missed so much yet had no name for. It had been so long since anyone but Abe had touched me with kindness, with affection. It overwhelmed me and I disappeared within that flooding emotion. I was lost to myself, to time. The dusk country left far behind. My mother rotting on the couch washed from me.

When I opened my eyes, and pulled myself back to myself, it was Elsa who stared down at me. “It’s all right. You’re gonna be all right.”

And immediately all I felt was shame. I rolled away from her, but she put a hand on mine on the bed. I didn’t look at her but felt her eyes on me. She said, “You had a lot to let go of, huh?”

I sniffed, wiped my face. Nodded. “No one—” I broke off, the words sounding stupid before they even reached my lips.

Her hand squeezed mine. “If you don’t give love, you won’t receive love.”

Taking a deep breath, a sob racked my lungs, vibrating through me. “No one’s ever just held me before. No one but Abe, I mean.”

“That’s really fucking sad.”

I burned with shame. Then Abe was at the door, smiling, holding a black fish without eyes. “Yall hungry?”

She stood naked on the abandoned highway into town. Twilight casting shadows from the greyed husks of the industrial plants looming over the road. Her hair tumbled brown past her knees. Thousands of fireflies swarmed her antlers like a beacon.

I held my breath, crouched behind a rusted pickup truck, the blood pounding in my temples. Swallowing hard and breathing slow, I stood. Ready to approach.

But there was Abe, my twin, emerging from shadows, naked and walking towards her. He stretched a hand to her and she took it, pulled him close. They embraced, the fireflies swirling round their lithe bodies. He led her to another abandoned pickup truck and helped her climb onto its bed.

Frozen there, I watched as she took my brother in her mouth, watched as she pushed him down and climbed on top. My mouth dry and my body shaking, I watched the way he stroked her antlers, how he stood while she knelt and came on her antlers, how he licked his ejaculate off those same antlers, how she kissed him afterwards.

The crotch of my jeans was wet as I crept away from them. A battle raging within my chest.

Tears and shame and rage and frustration.

II

The tenth hour of true night but it was hot as ever. Abe took his shirt off, his torso lean and hairless. Every muscle cut as if his body were marble and his life the artist’s hand. Even his hips formed a V leading into his jeans. His feet hung over the miles of night while he leaned back on his elbows. Sitting crosslegged, I stared out from the roof of the town’s manufacturing mausoleum. There were no stars or specks of light to freckle the night.

“I met a girl,” he said, his lilting voice gentle in my ears.

My face flushed, and my body tensed so I didn’t turn to look at him, hoping my voice wouldn’t give anything away. “Yeah?”

He laughed. His words lisped, “She’s not like the others. This one’s special.”

I nodded, still not turning to face him. “Tell me about her.”

His feet lifted, and he used momentum to swing forward, his fingers gripping the edge of the concrete building and his head came forward, twisting round to look me in the face. His careless confidence constricted my heart. I thought of how easy it would be for me to push him, how hard it would be to forgive myself. How I hated him. How I loved him. How I needed to escape but could never go on without him.

He smiled. “Want to meet her?”

“Now?”

He snorted. “Not now, dummy. Maybe tomorrow. At dusk.”

Relief was a warm knot in my stomach coming loose. Sweat made my shirt stick to my back. I stood and stretched and unstuck my shirt from my skin, turning away from the open night, the too-close edge of nothing beckoning me. The always starless sky a blank curtain of black. In all directions, the grey outlines of crumbling industrial concrete reached up from the earth. Their purpose unknowable. Their machines all gone or rusted inoperable. Everyone who knew their names, knew how to make them sing and dance and buzz, just a memory echoing in the vast empty rooms and hallways.

“Do you ever miss them?”

Abe was standing next to me, staring out at the same emptiness but seeing something else. “Who?”

“I don’t know. Whoever was here. Whoever did all this.”

His hand on my shoulder was clammy and strong. Taller than me by several inches, he pulled me close and I leaned my head on his shoulder.

His voice was delicate, and he sang a warbling melody, “I sleep with no voice and wake with no name. The echoes can’t give me no pain.” His voice was terrible, tuneless.

He dropped his hand from my shoulder and took mine in his. We walked hand in hand from the roof through the broken stairways, through the vast empty rooms numerous as the combs to a hive. The dust danced over the concrete and swirled in the wind, in the faint light from the fireflies. Fissures ran through the floor of the bottom of the factory. Grass and vines and weeds snaked their way from the world outside, colonizing the industrial waste of abandoned humanity.

The door was rotted to the point it was only scraps of wood on hinges. We walked the miles home hand in hand. We followed the cracks in the roads, one of us on either side, tethered by fingers weaved together. His heartbeat faint but a part of mine. One heart in two bodies. His beautiful and perfect. Mine made from the leftovers of what it took to make a person. His limbs long and easily muscled. His body slender and lithe, a vulnerable strength to him. Like he could be blown away by the dusk country winds or could swing his momentum with enough strength to lift the rusted husk of a car. His face was almost feminine. High cheekbones, wide nose, deep black eyes, full lips, perfect teeth.

I was his opposite in every way. Short and stocky and ungraceful. My square head and wide eyes. But my voice was a deep baritone, sonorous and forged in the decay of the dusk country stretching round us while his was light and breathy and lisped.

The streets were empty. Our barefeet clapped against the depths of true night. Home was a dilapidated pre-fab house stacked among hundreds, most of them empty. The door swung open at Abe’s touch and he said, “We’re home.”

Mother was a lump on the lopsided couch. Her face just a shadow in the darkness of night but her massive body spilled out like rolling hills cascading. She terrified and disgusted me and yet I loved her for what she had once been in those days of childhood, when life and love seemed possible. I heard the slide of a door and then the faint light of bottled fireflies. Abe handed me a jar and I brought it to mother.

Her mouth hung open and her milky eyes stared through me. Her pupils no longer the deep black of life but a pale shade over white. I put the jar on the table in front of her and touched her cheek. Flesh like moldy dough, I feared it would collapse or slough off against my fingers. She blinked several times, slowly, and focused on me. Her pupils darkened and I told myself she saw me. The sweet stink of decay emanated from her, like her body was a garden of rotting vegetables.

“Duncan?” Her husky voice swelled within me as it always did, throwing me back to those days before memory, before loss and rot. A voice that was the sound of my whole world.

“No, it’s me. Locke.”

She raised a shaking hand and gripped mine. Soft and without power, like her skeleton had softened or dissolved inside that yielding flesh. “Duncan, I’ve missed you. I saw the moon and thought of you.”

I blinked back tears. “The moon’s—”

Abe said, “The moon reminds him of you too, momma. I heard him calling your name.”

Mother’s throat clicked and her huge body rippled, and she leaned back into the couch collapsing and creaking beneath her. A tear made it through the crevices of her face.

Abe touched my shoulder. “Come on.”

I left the jar of fireflies there beside her and followed the faint light in Abe’s hands.

Abe threw himself into our mattress, kicking up dust. I climbed in beside him, let the night swallow us. My thoughts raced. Thoughts of the man who I’d call daddy. The mother slowly decaying along with everything else. The girl with antlers and the hundreds of girls and boys who trailed in Abe’s wake, who spread their legs for him, who moaned love songs into the night.

“You awake?” I felt his voice vibrate through the mattress, through my skin pressed against him.

“Yeah.”

“Tell me a story?”

“What you wanna hear?”

He shifted beside me, his body coiling in on itself. “Something beautiful.”

The cracks in the ceiling were just large enough to see through but the sky was only blackness. The faint glow of the fireflies revealed only outlines of our room, casting a faint sickly glow. I rolled over to face them, my back pressed against Abe’s. I imagined this is how we were in the womb. Reluctantly pressed together. All that’s desirable in a man pouring into him, while I leeched what I could to make myself whole. Somehow I stole enough to have the voice that belonged to him. The rich and unforgettable one that would fit inside his lungs and mouth so well, completing the image of a human perfected. But the voice was mine and Abe couldn’t sleep without it, because it was his too.

I stared at the fireflies rattling against the glass chaotically. “Years ago, the dusk country was alive. The hum of machinery was everywhere. The sun came up and stayed up for hours. It went so high that you could look straight up and it would be there for a whole hour before it fell back down. Mothers and fathers went to the buildings and made the machines sing. Children gathered together in the sunlight and played games. They didn’t just collect fireflies. They collected spiders and butterflies. They traded them, not as a commodity, but like treasures. They didn’t need to dig in the mud and the dirt for beetles but traded their precious gifts for a beetle destined to be champion and everyone would gather around to watch the beetles fight. The streets weren’t full of dust and grass didn’t break them up. No, people got in cars and made them move. They moved as fast as you can run, and no one got tired. There was food everywhere too. People ate more than insects and plants. Even the river flowed clean. The dusk country was a town made of light. Even the streets had light. And night would come but there were stars. Like a thousand fireflies but way up in the air. So high you couldn’t even reach them standing on a building. And there was a moon. It was like the sun but smaller. Night lasted only a little while before the sun came back. The best part was seeing people smile. Seeing people everywhere, smiling. Just smiling for no good reason. Just smiling because the sun was shining.

“You know what the best part was?”

“What?” his voice only a whisper.

“People didn’t just disappear.”

We dominated several events and festivals (too many to recap, lowkey). Simmons don’t leave Baltimore but he’s been steady slanging locally, on some keys-to-the-city type shit. Grant been all up and down the Golden Coast spreading his dark mystic poet aura. And let’s not forget how we killed the game at AWP, five of us piled up in the worst hotel in Kansas City breaking sales records at the festival most notorious for being an overpriced circle jerk. Selling several hundred books at such an event just proves there are readers everywhere fiending for what we got.

But without further ado, for the sake of keeping up with the train that never slows down, here’s a breakdown of what each of us got up to this year:

Kelby Losack

This been a big year for Agitator and whipping up new shit. Kelby’s been stretching the plot and character arc muscles to drop some Walmart noir with mainstream appeal. Expect a cyberpunk YA joint and a neo-western gangsta epic from the most inimitable hoodrat in literature in 2025. Also working on re-releasing Mercy and Letting Out the Devils since Amazon banned him from their publishing platform (if you know you know).

Meantime, in 2024, Kelby dropped his eighth book and first short story collection, God Is Wearing Black. Cop that joint HERE.

Rios de la Luz

Rios has been steadily killing the promo and craft talk game on TikTok and Instagram. Itzá keeps making big waves and there has yet to be a festival where An Altar of Stories to Liminal Saints doesn’t sell out. Rios has also been hyperactive leading workshops this year, with another coming up you don’t want to miss out on if you’re someone interested in generative group writing experiences or sharpening your writing craft. From her IG:

About WRITING THE WILD

Want to write with other creatives? Want inspiration for new poetry, prose, or flash fiction?

WRITING THE WILD will focus on exploring the wilderness in our imaginations, non-linear paths into a story, mixing nature into writing to paint vivid imagery, exploring ways to add magical realism into our work to give stories more depth.

This workshop is generative, meaning, we write together within time limits of 7 to 20 minutes per prompt.

All participants will receive a packet with all of the exercises shared plus extra prompts to go back to later. The class is open to 15 writers.

All classes are recorded and recordings will be available for 30 days.

WHEN: March 8th, 2025
WHERE: Online
TIME: 9:00AM PST to 1:00 PM PST
COST: $40 to $60
(Sliding scale)

If cost is an obstacle, there are 2 free spots available. All you need to do is DM me or comment on this post and I will message you with the info to register.

J David Osborne

Dying World and War In Heaven, the first two entries in JDO’s series of cyberpunk gore parables, have been revamped on the low. Sometimes the third book into a series is when things really click. That said, Gods Fare No Better is finna drop in the appropriately grand way it was always meant to in 2025. This will be the largest Broken River joint yet, currently sitting at over 100,000 words.

Anyone who’s been following Agitator or his guest appearances on podcasts this year is probably already aware of the developing lore of JDO. For those still sleeping, here’s an extensive and exhaustive list of all podcast appearances from both Osborne and Losack since Agitator originated. Get woke.

E Rathke

For the intro season of the Wolf podcast, Eddy took a deep dive through the cyberpunk godfather William Gibson’s catalogue. Catch up with that series—featuring most of the Broken River crew and other great guests—HERE.

A new Rathke joint graced the pages of Cosmic Horror Monthly’s April issue. You can read “A New World” for free HERE.

The most prolific Broken River boa was steady dropping essays over on his newsletter too. Just a sample of the top hitters:

Wolf

King Country: It

More of King Country…

Read more

2 years ago · 25 likes · 26 comments · radicaledward

Wolf

The Boy and the Heron

What’s perhaps most interesting about The Boy and the Heron to me is that Hayao Miyazaki is 83 and still innovating even while he remains defiantly in the 20th Century tradition of hand drawn animation…

Read more

2 years ago · 28 likes · 14 comments · radicaledward

Wolf

of Rowling and Cormac and what it means to cancel

Last year, I reviewed each of the Harry Potter books. I’m very lazily turning these into a book by adding reviews to the movies. I may also add the Fantastic Beasts movies because why not. Let it become a book about all the Wizarding World…

Read more

2 years ago · 29 likes · 11 comments · radicaledward

Wolf

BERSERK: The Golden Age Arc (Chapters 9-17 and then 1-94)

To view this whole essay, you’ll need to click over to the website. It went rather long so it no longer fits in an email…

Read more

2 years ago · 6 likes · 6 comments · radicaledward

David Simmons

It’s been announced—our boa got a novel dropping with Apocalypse Party in 2025. It’s somehow simultaneously his most commercial and his strangest book-length joint yet, like if Takashi Miike did American Psycho, but with that secret Simmons sauce. The voice of this one is so strong, y’all ain’t ready. Instant classic incoming.

Podcast appearances
Rock Paper Write
Horror Makes Us Happy
Wolf (talmbout Johnny Mnemonic)
Plus, a whole lot of hopping into the Agitator booth. Like, a whole lot.

Short stories published
“Percocet Helps” (Hobart)
“DOGGSHIT” (Rejection Letters)

And let’s not forget, ya boa dropped a lor short story collection zine with BRUISER. Cop Foul Black Rookeries HERE.

Grant Wamack

Grant been throwing combo hits this year, dropping the crime/horror hybrid Bullet Tooth and following up with The Frolicking, an Easter-themed acid trip nightmare. And if you’re privy to his Literary Loud newsletter, you know he’s got some bleak and drippy ish on the horizon.

For even more on the collective, check us out at brokenriverbooks.com

Subscribe now

Hey everyone! JDO here.

I haven’t posted in a bit because I’ve been writing my ass off.

Hello to all the new subscribers. I keep getting dings in my inbox when you all sign-up, and I think damn I should write a post.

But then I work on books, or play with the kid, or go to work. Such is life.

I’ll keep this short and sweet, because I was working on my Ronin Trash outline and had a revelation about why the outlining process is so valuable. It’s not anything I’ve seen in any online how-to thing that I’ve ever read.

Most times I’ve seen outlining pitched, it’s because it’s good for productivity. You’ll get your book written faster if you have a map. You won’t get confused and make amateurish mistakes. Etc.

BUT my experience is that outlining is valuable because it is very fun.

I already work at a job for money. If my eventual goal is to replace that job with full-time writing (some day…ten years? twenty years?) then obviously writing has to be more fun than going to a full-time job. Otherwise, why do it at all?

This led to many years of writer’s block. If I’m being honest, it’s because I wasn’t having any fun writing.

You’ve probably heard someone say “I like pizza, and I like ice cream, but I don’t like ice cream on my pizza.” I think of it like lemon broccoli and ice cream. Outlining is lemon broccoli. Prose writing is ice cream.

I wasn’t having fun because I was mixing those flavors together. In discovery writing, trying to do it all at once, the whole experience sucks. Unless of course you’re the type of freak who likes ice cream on broccoli. Everyone’s mileage may vary.

I’m telling you it is so fun to make character sheets, background lore, scene-by-scene breakdowns, and magic systems. But it is a completely different kind of fun than writing sentences. Turns out I love them both.

If I separate them.

To have a bird’s-eye view, unencumbered by the need to make the prose sound good, I am free to construct and craft, to free-associate, to make connections between plot points. I can follow my character through their progression and feel how each scene ties in thematically with the book as a whole.

That’s very different from the boots-on-the-ground, stepping-into-the-booth feeling of prose writing, where you’re listening to the syllables and watching the colors of metaphors float in your mind like sunspots and seeing the potholes in the freeway and hearing that crackling dialogue coming off your characters or smelling what a dead demon smells like or hearing a katana come free of its sheath or feeling what it’s like to watch your best friend lose themselves to fentanyl.

Two different types of artistic satisfaction, separated by phases in the novel writing process.

And by the way…you do produce shit faster and cleaner than the alternative, if that kind of thing is important to you.

WRITING SHIT:

I’m done with the outline of Ronin Trash. This will be my best novel to date. It’s the one that grabbed my throat and wouldn’t let me go til I worked on it, the one that I think about at work and sometimes when I should be thinking about life things. Time-travel demon slaying with low-down Oklahoma peckerwoods and samurai swords AND, surprisingly, considering its pulpy bestseller structure, it contains the exact same thematic question I explore in the Black Gum Quartet and Low Down Death Right Easy. I guess we keep going back to that well!

Speaking of those books, I’ll be re-releasing 2013’s Low Down Death Right Easy with a new cover along with its sequel, Low Down Death Right Easy 2: Plainswalker in the fall. The sequel is coming eleven years after the original, and we continue to follow Danny Ames and Arlo Clancy, but in a world that’s been overrun by zombies. So yeah, a sequel to a slightly-weird but mostly straightforward crime novel is a zombie apocalypse book. A strange choice, but it’s what I wanted to do. (This is going to be what Elkhoury was supposed to be, for Kickstarter backers).

And Black Gum, A Minor Storm, and Tomahawk will be packaged with the fourth and final novella Wolf Like Me as The Black Gum Quartet around the same time.

Ronin Trash will likely drop at the end of the year, along with Neon Hell, the next Gods Fare No Better cyberpunk book. If you read War In Heaven, you’ll know that Neon Hell is going to be cyberpunk ninjas versus Sadako from The Ring, and it has a bad guy called The King of All Tears (shoutout The Invisibles) who’s a living cross made out of centipedes.

So we’re cooking!

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Today I had a thought about writing that I wanted to share with you:

The amount of work I produce is equal to my level of interest in the work. If I am telling compelling stories, I will write those compelling stories. If I’m blocked, it is probably because some deep part of me understands that the story I’m trying to tell is off in some way. Boring, convoluted, perhaps ultimately meaningless.

Imagine you’re talking to a coworker. They ask you how your weekend went. “It was fine,” you say. Now, it might not have been fine, but you’re not really telling them the weekend was fine. You’re brushing the conversation off, because you know that it’ll take about ten minutes to summarize, and ultimately, nothing that happened over the weekend is interesting enough to take up that much life.

Boring weekends can be beautiful. I just had one. But I won’t bore you with the details. It was just nice, for me and my family. It was fine.

Now imagine that your car was attacked by a buffalo. Or your house was broken into. Or your tires all went flat. By varying degrees, you’re going to tell a longer version of those stories. It doesn’t have to be negative, either: you’d probably talk about a big win at the casino, or meeting a celebrity, or completing a major project.

Realistically, you’ll more than likely talk about the stories you watched on TV or read about in books. That’s because all of these things are more interesting than the sublime mundanity of your day-to-day.

So, would it be fair to say that a writer’s block stems from a kind of “fine weekend” of the future? One truncates and waves off a fine weekend for lacking any compelling story, one truncates and waves off a writing project for the same. Except in the case of the latter, we have the opportunity to mold the heavy, pressing lack of story into story. How?

2

I became interested in novels for the beauty of their prose, their cleverness, style, and voice. For most of my life I listened almost exclusively to rap music for the same reason, because the best of them can put words together like no one else. I was crazy about language, obsessed with semantics, in love with being carried along by the rhythm of the sentences.

Over time, however, I became bored with these hazy, beautifully written fever dream novels. I found myself finishing fewer and fewer of them. I’d get sucked into their world via the strength of the author’s voice, then lose interest about three chapters in.

What I was missing was a good story.

This week I produced 5,000 words of my new novel. That’s not bad. A little under half of what Stephen King produces during any given week. But I’m not hung up on that so much, anymore. The actual number of words doesn’t matter, because it’s not about words per day. It’s about how many days in a row you can stack. And I wrote every day.

It beats the zero words a day I had suffered through for nearly a decade. That shit is painful. You know you have a story to tell, but you just can’t do it. I needed a solution, and after about a year of research, I found one.

Outlines have taken me a long way from where I was even a year ago, when I was producing one short novella a year. This is because with even a small outline, you have a sense of where the story is going, and that makes it easier (and more fun) to tell. You know that big action, surprising twists, and great characters are waiting for you to spin them into life.

With an outline you know that your book is not boring, because you have arranged every scene into a handful of simple stimulus/response prompts that signal a change in the protagonist. You know your book is not convoluted, because it’s right there on two simple pages. And it has meaning, because you found the meaning once you summarized the book in its totality. That meaning begins to fractal out to the acts, chapters, sequences and sentences.

For those of you who still push against outlines: you still get to improvise. A lot. How are the characters going to talk to each other? What does the building the MC lights on fire look like? What strange creatures will appear? All of these things and more you get to discover for yourself, in the actual writing. Which is why a modest outline is in fact “discover writing” squared. It’s the best of both worlds.

3

I’m hosting an outlining workshop over Zoom in about three weeks. During the workshop, I will speak about my theories about the outline, and why I believe it to be one of the most important tools in the writer’s toolkit.

By the end of the workshop, you will have a two-page outline that you can use to get started on the writing. You’ll have a valuable skill that you can carry with you for the rest of your writing journey.

Every outlining course that I’ve taken has been so left-brained that I couldn’t find my way into it until I forced myself to sit down and figure it out. What I found, filtered through who I am as a discovery writer, is decidedly right-brained. I believe we’ve been thinking about this whole thing the wrong way, and I believe this workshop’s method can get some truly creative people, the kind of people we need writing books, to produce those books at a rate that puts them in the conversation.

Come hang out. It’s $100 for four sessions over two weekends. There are ten seats, but I announced it to the Agitator Discord and IG first, so now we’re down to five. DM me for more info on the course and how to sign up. Looking forward to seeing you there!

-JDO

Doing a lot of research, I came to a realization about how a lot of media (books, video games, and manga) I enjoy tend to begin their long-form stories. I’m calling it World, Rules, Naked and Afraid. Not the catchiest phrase, but it fits.

I’ll share some examples with you here.

In The Will of the Many, Chapter 1 finds our protagonist, Vis Telimus, working at a prison. He used to be a prince, before the brutal imperialists of the Catenan Republic invaded his home and killed his family. Now he’s biding his time, waiting for his chance for revenge, splitting his days between the orphanage where he lives, his job at the prison, and nights spent bare-knuckle boxing.

We discover in Chapter 1 that the prisoners Vis oversees are strapped to “sappers,” cold marble slabs that drain their Will and leave them zombified, in a nearly-sleeping state of living hell. The Catenans use Will to strengthen their upper classes, making them strong as twenty men, in addition to powering the world of Hierarchy’s versions of airplanes and cars.

A mysterious visitor arrives and asks to speak with a prisoner. We learn his rank, and through this, we learn how hierarchy works in this world in general. The Roman-sounding titles do a lot of heavy lifting, allowing us to assume these people are dressed like Russel Crowe in Gladiator, or some variation thereof.

We have the world. We have the rules. Now it’s time to make our hero naked and afraid, which he does by getting literally naked during his bare-knuckle bout with someone 20 times stronger than him.

The way I’m using “naked and afraid” here doesn’t have to mean your hero is literally naked, or literally afraid.1 Vis is naked, but not afraid. In some cases, your character might be afraid, but not naked. It is a vibe through which the reader is able to see the bottom of the well from which the hero begins their journey, the odds that are stacked against them, and their will to overcome.

Recently I’ve been thinking this is a perfect way to begin a story. I’m only a quarter of the way through The Will of the Many’s 240,000 words, but I’m loving the experience. I’m hooked on the book. It got me right from page one, where I was immediately introduced to both the World and the Rules. The Naked and Afraid bit came two short chapters later.

I have more examples. At the beginning of Dark Souls, we’re treated to a cutscene that briefly touches on the lore of the world. If you’ve played DS, you know this is as close to an exposition dump as we’re going to get:

In the Age of Ancients the world was unformed, shrouded by fog. A land of gray crags, Archtrees and Everlasting Dragons. But then there was Fire and with fire came disparity. Heat and cold, life and death, and of course, light and dark. Then from the dark, They came, and found the Souls of Lords within the flame. Nito, the First of the Dead, The Witch of Izalith and her Daughters of Chaos, Gwyn, the Lord of Sunlight, and his faithful knights. And the Furtive Pygmy, so easily forgotten.

With the strength of Lords, they challenged the Dragons. Gwyn's mighty bolts peeled apart their stone scales. The Witches weaved great firestorms. Nito unleashed a miasma of death and disease. And Seath the Scaleless betrayed his own, and the Dragons were no more.

Thus began the Age of Fire. But soon the flames will fade and only Dark will remain. Even now there are only embers, and man sees not light, but only endless nights. And amongst the living are seen, carriers of the accursed Darksign.

Yes, indeed. The Darksign brands the Undead. And in this land, the Undead are corralled and led to the north, where they are locked away, to await the end of the world... This is your fate. 2

The game then opens. You are an Undead, and you are rotting away in a pit. A knight (?) or jailor (?) opens your cell, and you’re off on your adventure. We have the World, and now we are learning the rules in real time. You’re picking up a weapon, learning the basics of combat, maybe (hopefully) finding some cheap flimsy armor. Then, as you are running around (naked, if I remember correctly), the floor drops out beneath you and you are faced with this guy:

The Asylum Demon isn’t easy at this stage of the game, but then again nothing about the game is easy.

World, Rules, Naked and Afraid (you’re actually both naked and afraid in this one).

Sticking with the From Software example, Sekiro opens in a similar way. We open on two samurai fighting it out. It’s brutal and gives a good example of the types of fights in store for you. We’re introduced to Wolf, our protagonist, a child orphaned on a battlefield. His adoptive father points his katana at the boy, and Wolf grabs the blade by the pointy end. So we know he’s being adopted by a powerful shinobi, and that he’s tough.

Then, the game begins and Wolf is (you guessed it) in some kind of prison at the bottom of a well. There’s no Asylum Demon equivalent, but the Naked and Afraid feeling is exacerbated by the game’s excellent chilly winter quality, the puffs of breaths and sheets of ice.

Here’s a video of me being pretty decent at Sekiro for no reason. I couldn’t get the jump timing down, but overall not bad (got the Corrupted Monk eliminated in one try this run through the game).

Now that I think about it, this is a lot of video games. Manga, too. Chainsaw Man does it. In Chapter 1 we’re introduced to Denji living a life of indentured servitude to a gangster. He lives with his demon chainsaw dog, so we know demons are real in this world. Then we see our hero betrayed and torn to pieces, only to have the demon chainsaw dog merge with him and turn him into the Chainsaw Man we were promised in the title. World, Rules, Naked and Afraid (or in this case, dismembered and afraid).

It seems to me that these three elements are the most important to start off with in your story. I used to believe that character came first, that we really needed to get a firm grasp on who this complex person really is before the action starts, but now I’m beginning to think that “outnumbered, outgunned, but determined” is a perfectly solid place to start. Characters can develop complexity over time.

It’s possible I was pulling too much inspiration from film, which only has two to three hours to tell a story, whereas introducing a character quickly and sometimes wordlessly doesn’t necessarily translate well into a long-form word-based medium.

There is one hugely important aspect to keep in mind. We don’t want to do big exposition dumps. The goal of Chapter 1 should be to establish the world, the rules of that world, and the protagonist’s (more than likely lower-class) position within that world and its rules, but I don’t think it’s a great idea to literally say “here’s the world, here are the rules.” Although I suppose you could do that if you wanted to.

As with everything in writing, making something good takes practice and beginner’s mind every time you approach the page. A strong understanding of how to tell a story has to meld with a keen eye for cleverly inserting relevant details at just the right moment. That’s why this is so much fun. I get excited to sit down and write every day the way I used to get excited about turning on the Playstation. It’s a game.

Have fun with it.

All right, enough writing about writing. Back to writing about demon slayers and magic. This new book is gonna be a lot of fun to read. World, Rules, Naked and Afraid.

What is Broken River Books?

BRB started in 2013 as a small indie press. Our first five titles were The Least of My Scars by Stephen Graham Jones, Gravesend by William Boyle, Street Raised by Pearce Hansen, Peckerwood by Jedidiah Ayres, and XXX Shamus by Red Hammond (a pseudonym of Anthony Neil Smith).

Over time we published over fifty books, including Zero Saints by Gabino Iglesias and Graveyard Love by Scott Adlerberg. We also published work from Benjamin Whitmer, Nick Mamatas, Steve Rasnic Tem, and James Sallis.

However, eventually I realized that there wasn’t much I could do for these great books that I was publishing. We didn’t have much of a budget, but we had good looking covers, nice interior design, and I had good instincts as an editor. I thought it made more sense to give the authors more control over their own books, considering I couldn’t hold up the publishing end of the bargain (promotion being the major blind spot).

Think of it this way: if you’re going with a small press, but YOU as the author have to pay for promotion, publicity, etc., and YOU have to do all of the work…how is that different from self-publishing? The legitimacy of the brand is mostly what a press like Broken River was bringing to the table. So I pitched five of my closest friends (and great writers) with the idea: what if we became a collective instead?

Broken River has a powerful energy, so I told them that, if they wanted to, they could start self-publishing their stuff under the BRB banner. I’d be there for quality control, editing the books and making sure the covers looked right, but each of the six authors would have complete control over their finances, promotion, publicity, and careers. I don’t take any royalties from their work, but I also don’t put any of my own money into their novels. It’s theirs.

The rising tide raises all ships. So when David Simmons does a reading in Baltimore, we split the cost of the table, send him books, and he pushes Broken River. When Kelby goes to Ghoulish Fest in San Antonio, we split the cost of the table, send him books, and he pushes Broken River. When we go to AWP…you get the idea. This allows us to divide and conquer, doing live events all over the country, going on podcasts and writing guest blogs, all under the banner of Broken River. Each author is obviously interested in selling their own books, but we work for each other as well. It’s a good system.

This has created a system of loyalty and brotherhood that feels unbreakable at this point. We all have Broken River tattoos, and we all love each other and encourage each other and read each other’s shit and offer suggestions. It’s a collective. It’s the wave of the future of publishing.

What Kind of Books Do We Publish?

Every author on BRB is encouraged to pursue what makes them happy. For example, I started off in the Bizarro Fiction movement, then pivoted to crime fiction for a while. Then I started watching a lot of anime and playing a ton of Cyberpunk 2077, in addition to developing an occult spiritual practice, so now I write anime-inspired animist cyberpunk.

Kelby wrote hoodrat crime fiction, but now he’s writing cyberpunk and working on Gulf-Coast crime TV shows and movies. Eddy is a beast, the most writer of the group, and he writes everything from Ursula K. Le Guin-style folk horror to Star Trek-inspired episodic fiction to language-heavy polyphonic narrative fiction.

David Simmons writes hilarious crime-inspired weirdo books about Baltimore, a city that he loves more than people. Picture The Wire by way of Bloodborne and you’re beginning to get the idea. Drug dealers in mech suits fighting kaiju, huge stone golems, people in gimp suits drilling holes in their heads…but also sharp commentary on redlining and the sinister presence of Johns Hopkins.

Grant writes everything from Chicago-based crime fiction to cannibal horror to Jordan Peele-style analog horror to Desperado-style cyberpunk (we’re all going through a cyberpunk phase, if you haven’t noticed).

Rios writes border-based magical realism. Her books are written as spells. People receive beating hearts in the mail, demons emerge from rifts in small towns overrun by cults, families of water witches combat evil men in sacred border towns. She calls her newest collection her “post-partum” book, full of tales about motherhood and the body. That one moved like hotcakes at AWP.

We are a blender of all of our influences. Sometimes our books overlap in genre, but what binds BRB together is the love we have for each other, and how our hours of group chats and phone conversations cause our works to bleed together and take influence and inspiration from each other. It’s an organic, living creature, now. Broken River is Broken River.

AWP Recap/Diary

I sold out of all my books. So did Kelby and Rios. Eddy sold out of almost everything. Grant sold out of of almost everything. The energy was flowing and we were connecting. When we left Kansas City, everyone had a big smile on their face. We could all feel the good vibes.

I teach 11th grade English, and I had to work on Wednesday. I’m currently reading Jurassic Park with the juniors, so I read the Dennis Nedry chapter six times, went to a professional development meeting, then loaded up the truck and headed out to Kansas City. Kelby, Rios and I got in about one in the morning, but we couldn’t sleep. The Hotel Lotus’ A/C didn’t work, so the hotel room was cramped and hot. We were running on fumes on Thursday, but that didn’t stop us from having a great first sales day, moving about ninety books from 8 to 5.

Luckily Kelby had the foresight to bring Gatorades and snacks. We munched on convention center pizza and called people over to the table. The trick to selling books is to ask everyone. There is no telling who is going to vibe with your books, so you can’t pre-judge the people who pass by the table. Oh, they probably won’t like these books. How do you know? Ask them if they like weird books, talk to everybody, and see what happens. Your audience is not limited by age, gender, or race. Demographics are a trap. We vibe with people, not demographics.

This method proved to be very successful. Maybe 80% of people we asked stopped by the table, and a good number of them either bought a book, signed up for the newsletter (hello), or both.

We ate barbecue at Arthur Bryant’s. It was delicious. The restaurant was smoky, and we left smelling like a rack of ribs. Bellies full and a little punch-drunk from lack of sleep (and Bud Light), Kelby dropped Rios and I off at our own hotel, the American Inn. This somehow proved to be an even worse hotel. We walked in and got hit with a blast of ambient weed smoke that turned into cigarette smoke as we made our way down the absurdly long hallway to our room. Flickering lights, screams from behind the heavy doors, shady characters flitting from room to room…the American Inn gave off Jacob’s Ladder vibes. Once we got to the room and saw the stains on the pillowcases and the orange needle cap on the floor, we called Kelby back to rescue us and spent another night in The Hotel Lotus instead.

Another important lesson: factor a nice chain hotel into your convention budget.

@brbjdoI receive instant karma for dogging on my hotel. #awp #writertok #authorsoftiktok #badhotels

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The good news was that we got a better night’s sleep and hit AWP on Friday with more energy. We sold about the same amount of books, but at that point we were in a groove, the five of us slipping into a natural rhythm, picking up on the varied energies of the people who approached the table, working as a unit to move each other’s books based on what the customers told us they liked bookwise.

We ate at Rudy’s. I had their Aztec Enchiladas and a 22 oz Pacifico with lime. Full and happy, Kelby once again dropped us at a hotel, this time the Hilton Garden Inn. It was nice. Rios and I watched Deadpool 2 and slept for nine hours.

Then, on Saturday, we cleaned up. I sold out of the rest of my books. Rios sold out. Kelby sold out. Etc. etc. Great success. Now we’re back home, and I’m off school once again because it snowed. Nice little five-day weekend, even though it went by in a blur.

@brbjdoAWP Kansas City bookselling tour diary. We sold a ton of books! #writersoftiktok #authorsoftiktok #awp #author #bookselling #authorlife

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I would have liked to attend some readings, but none of us had the energy to do so. I brought my Black Magic 4k PCC with a 25mm lens, and Kelby and Eddy spent their time away from the convention shooting short films, making the most of the weird Hotel Lotus. Grant had dates to go on. Rios and I slept. Maybe next year in LA we’ll set up a reading. Kelby and I do live freestyle storytelling, kind of a MadLibs deal where we come up with an entire short story, novel, or script in thirty minutes based off of random prompts from the audience. So that might be the theme of our reading. We will see. I liked all the pics of the readings. Seemed like everyone killed it.

Shout Outs

We met a ton of cool people at the con. I will list those presses/publicists/authors now. If I left anybody out, I’m sorry about that. Like I said, it was all a blur! Go check these folks out:

Atmosphere Press
Split/Lip Press
Charlene Elsby (the chat has been buzzing about her work for the past month)
Mindbuck Media Book Publicity
Brian Evenson (my favorite author)
Anthony Neil Smith (one of the original BRB authors and great guy)
O F Cieri
Kevin Maloney
Tobias Carroll
Bernard Welt
Feminist Press
Bull Lit
Muse Literary (shout out Kadeem Locke)
Milspeak Books
Dynamo Verlag
Defunkt Press (shout out Matthew Tavares)
Kaya Press
Midnight Chem
Fugue Journal

What is this newsletter?

You’ll receive information about current releases, but mostly this newsletter is a document of all the things I learn as I attempt to up my writing game. Craft talk, essays on books that I’m reading, that kind of thing. I don’t post unless I can give you some kind of value. It’s not an ad space.

Thank you for signing up! I hope to see you all again in LA.

I hate the term “pantser.” For those of you who’ve never heard it before, it’s meant to refer to people who make up their books as they go along, without notes or an outline. It comes from the term “flying by the seat of your pants,” which originated in the early days of aviation, when some pilots would take off without the proper instruments to guide them.

Fast forward to the 21st century, and we have “pantser,” a goofy Reddit term for people like me. People who, for some reason, have nonsensically rejected the idea of the outline in favor of “just kind of winging it.”

I’m not sure why I’ve always written books this way. Maybe writing feels like more of an adventure when you don’t have a map. Maybe I thought venturing out into the white space of an unwritten novel without any help felt cool. Or maybe (and most likely), writing an outline just felt like too much work.

Why spend the time on an outline when you can just write the fucking novel? Fuck an outline, fuck that, I’m going to sit down and write the book, just dog it out, and then it will appear and be good, and I’ll repeat that process over and over for the rest of my life, the books I’ve written stacking up around me like empty takeout boxes in a hoarder’s double wide.1 An outline would make the process of novel writing take longer. All these years later, with so little work to show for my time “being a novelist,” all I can really do is laugh.

2
I recently got a new phone. I saw it as a fresh start. I did not port over any of my contacts or photos. I don’t need those numbers anymore. I don’t need those pictures anymore.

In my determination to turn my phone into a tool that I use instead of a tool that uses me (lol) I began to consider it as a word processor. I do all of my writing on my laptop, but several of my friends don’t. Kelby Losack and David Simmons write on their phones, and their shit is very good.

I scrolled through the app store and read reviews of the different programs. Scrivener, Ulysses, Plotr, you’ve all seen these apps. I downloaded trials of the ones that I could and began testing them out. I kept none of them, but walked away with a valuable insight: outlining is actually good.

During my Scrivener trial on my Mac, I searched for tutorials. How can you actually make this shit work? I stumbled upon this Youtube video, which I found helpful:

Again, I didn’t keep any of these programs. I read the reviews of Scrivener and discovered that it has major syncing issues. Ulysses just seemed like the Notes app with a few bells and whistles. I have enough subscriptions as it is. But this video in particular cracked outlining wide open for me.

3
The first and most important point is that the act of outlining is a creative act in and of itself. It is not simply adopting the structure of someone else’s work for your own purposes. As I’ve said in previous posts, there is a rhythm and music to sentence writing, but there is also a rhythm and music when you pull back and take a birds’-eye view of your novel.

I first noticed this while working with students. I host a writing club after school three days a week. My students and I are developing a visual novel. We spent weeks outlining this thing to within an inch of its life, because the kids wanted to put off the actual writing as long as possible. I was annoyed, being a “pantser,” but in this case, the teacher became the student.

For starters, the process of outlining was fun. Writing ideas up on the whiteboard, erasing them, bouncing off of everyone in the room, that was a great experience. We were telling a story together. You could really feel the energy of the outlining process.

Secondly, when it came time to live-write the script in a shared Google Doc that I projected up onto the big screen, everyone knew where the story was supposed to go. This led to more creative freedom when we were bouncing the actual nitty-gritty writing of the script back and forth. When you all share an understanding of where something is going, it allows you to play more freely on a scene-by-scene basis.

Of course, you can’t go completely off the rails, but there’s comfort in that, too. You can get as wild as you want within the predetermined structure, secure in your knowledge that you aren’t going to derail the whole thing and have to start back at square one.

4
The podcast format for Agitator was getting a bit stale. Kelby and I agreed to watch Miike’s Rainy Dog, but upon watching it, we both found that we had nothing left to say. We might not be film reviewers, or cultural critics for that matter. How many times can you express that you liked something, and explain why in the same way you’ve done for a hundred episodes, before that gets stale?

So we decided to turn the show into a live story-writing podcast. Each episode, Kelby and I come up with an outline for a story or a novel, live on the show. The first episode of the new format felt great. I experienced that same feeling of fun that I had with the students. There was something here.

Could this only be experienced with a partner, or a group? Was this something you could do on your own?

Absolutely.

I began outlining a novel I’d been thinking about, and after a few days, seemingly without trying at all, I had the whole book in front of me, ready to go. I do want to add index cards next, to really nail down every scene, but I now consider this process to be a part of writing itself.

5
You don’t need software to do this. All you have to do is open up a document in Word, or whatever processor you use, and label it as “pre-production.” Then you begin to write. You’re looking for the beats of the story, the character details, proper nouns, settings, motivations.

You’re just casually writing. Planning. Figuring shit out.

And then you watch it bloom outward from there. Text appears above and below the line that you just wrote. You create a filing system all your own, a folder full of reference articles and pictures, and you begin to grow a novel.

Surprising maybe no one, you start to actually write sentences as well. You can’t help it. Lines start coming to you, because you’ve activated the Great Swirling Thing of creativity, and before you know it, you’re typing entire paragraphs of prose, filing them for later.

It’s…really cool.

6
The act of writing prose is a limited resource if you’re really tapping in. I don’t know how else to put it, but you just kind of run out of steam at a certain point. You have to regenerate.

You don’t want to spend any of that energy on the details. You want to know where you’re going. You’ve got an hour or two tops of writing your ass off before you deflate and have to eat some soup, take a walk, be a human.

The “actual prose writing” is kind of like a kamehameha, or a wind sprint for the non-nerds out there. It is a concentrated burst of energy. You can do it once, then you need to recover. But you don’t need to recover from “outline writing” the same as you don’t need to recover from “text message writing” or “Facebook post writing” or “Substack writing.” Because they’re not the same thing.

My definition of “outline writing” is any writing that isn’t prose. Making lists, coming up with titles, ranting at yourself, figuring out what scene comes next, structuring, pondering, researching, acting, filing, archiving, building. It’s all you talking to yourself instead of some potential reader. You’re figuring things out. If you write for four hours, only an hour might be spent on prose. But if you’ve switched modes to casual outlining voice for those first three hours, you’ll have a nice stretch of story laid out in front of you that you can now bring to life.

You’re only getting an hour of solid prose writing before you run out of gas anyway…why not give it some direction?

7
This whole time, outlining was right there in front of me. I rejected it, I think, due to a fear of time passing. The dark truth of it all is that I wanted my books to exist as quickly as possible, so that I could get back to the business of living. I wanted to read and watch anime and talk shit with my friends.

But as I get older, I’m finding more and more value in work, in spending time doing something that I care about, and over time having something to show for it. Outlining appeared at this moment for a reason: because I’m ready for it. I’m beginning to understand, at the age of 37, that novel writing is a long process with no real shortcuts.

My brain isn’t big enough to hold an entire novel. I can’t structure it, build the world, develop characters, keep track of theme, pace it AND write banger prose at the same time. I recognize my limitations.

It is so, so beautiful to recognize your limitations. Once you let go, you see how much fun you’ve been missing out on. You see how important and joyful it is to work at this craft instead of expect it to work for you.

Working for someone else sucks. Half-assing your art sucks. Working at your art fucking kicks ass.

You start to understand what Michael Crichton said when he told Charlie Rose that he wasn’t a good novelist, but that he worked hard at it. It’s actually better to work hard at something, rather than just “being good at it.” It feels better. The downtime spent playing video games and watching anime and reading and painting with my son feels better, because I’m not frustrated with my personal genius’s stubborn reluctance to manifest itself with no effort on my part. Instead, I channeled it. I started doing the work myself, and let the genius show up to lend a hand.

And don’t forget…all of this is actually fun. Really, really fun.

It really works. If you’re on the fence, try outlining for a month. See if you find your way in, too.

It’s getting a bit hazy, because I read the book a few weeks ago and didn’t write this note down, but something that stuck with me about The Bestseller Code was its insistence that a writer stick to their topics. Or maybe it’s themes. The book isn’t very clear on what separates a topic from a theme, but let’s condense the two into “what the book spends time on” and call them “topics” for now.

Bestsellers tend to zero in on one major topic, with one subtopic, and MAYBE a few others. That major topic is “human connection.”

If I’m misremembering this, I prefer it the way that I misremember it.

All successful novels devote a significant fraction of their length to “human connection.” Which basically means “characters hanging out.”

I’ve been talking about this with the great e rathke over the phone for the past year or so. Novels, unlike movies, are about hanging out. When you pick up an 800-page fantasy novel, those 800 pages are not going to be spent on relentless plot and action. No, there is going to be a lot of hanging out. Characters questing together is 90% them talking, stopping at inns, drinking mead, and camping out under the stars. This is, I’m beginning to believe, what the novel does.

Jack Mason of The Perfume Nationalist has done some great episodes about what he calls “the great shopping and fucking novels” of the 1980s. I encourage you to subscribe to his Patreon. I’ve been fascinated by his commentary on these novels that absolutely tore up the bestseller charts when they were first published.

People love reading about characters hanging out. One of the bugbears of The Bestseller Code was Fifty Shades of Grey. At first, it seemed like this novel shouldn’t have been successful, because maybe surprisingly, most people actually don’t want to read about S&M sex. What the algorithm found, though, is that a full third of that novel is devoted to its protagonists hanging out, talking, and going through the ups and downs of their relationship.

So you’re going to want to figure out your plot and want to nail down how your protagonist changes over the course of your novel, but you must, MUST leave room for them to shower, eat, watch TV, and talk on the phone. It’s what makes a novel a novel.

Let’s shift focus from the novel to video games, because I believe it is the video game that is embodying this artistic principle of hanging out more than film or TV (except for the sitcom). Let’s talk specifically about the Yakuza series, developed by Toshihiro Nagoshi.

I could write forever about the Yakuza series, and maybe one day I will. For the purposes of this post, I’ll give you the short version: Sega became a third-party developer after the failure of the Dreamcast and the $47 million bomb that was Shenmue, and took a chance on Nagoshi’s pitch for a GTA competitor. At the time the original game was greenlighted, it broke the mold with its violence and with its decision to place the taboo Yakuza front and center in a video game. 23 games later, this seems like a no-brainer, but it was a risk at the time.

What made Yakuza a competitor with Grand Theft Auto was the developers’ intuition to do things differently from GTA. Whereas in GTA you can beat a hooker to death, shoot the responding officer in the head and steal his car to escape the scene of the crime, Yakuza did not allow any of this kind of off the rails wish-fulfillment fantasy.

Instead, they decided to go deeper. Every game takes place (mostly) in Kamurochō, which is almost a direct recreation of Shinjuku’s Kabukichō district, but you can only visit a few blocks. But where GTA, Cyberpunk, and Red Dead have scope, Yakuza focuses on depth.

Within those few blocks, you can visit arcades and play all the games on offer, get involved in competitive toy car racing, become an underground bare-knuckle boxer, take selfies to win a “best smile” competition, and on and on. You can really explore this district, and people who enjoy Yakuza often dig it for these minigames, not in spite of them.

The Yakuza series is, for a video game, fairly mundane. It has all the elements of a winner: compelling plot, great writing, strong character development. But it’s in the smaller moments of the game (that in fact make up most of the game) that the series really shines. You get to know people. You help them. At times, the side quests can get a bit boring, but you accept that boredom as part of the holistic goal of immersing yourself into the world. More than any other game I’ve ever played, I feel like I’m living in that game.

Compare that to the Doom remake, where it’s nonstop gore and action and Mick Gordon’s incredible soundtrack blowing out your eardrums. Instead of sensory overload, Yakuza opts for a more immersive experience. So, once you complete the game, you get a feeling similar to having completed an 800-page novel: you spent 20-30 hours on it, got to know the characters, and really lived within it for that time.

In short: you hang out in the world of Yakuza, and people love that about it.

In your novel, feel free to let your characters live. Keep in mind that there is a plot, there is pacing, and that you need to write accordingly. But one thing after the other becomes just that. Let them slow down, putter around, go on side quests. Your readers will follow you.

Recent Reading:

I tore through Bret Easton Ellis’s The Shards in about four days in order to record this Agitator episode with Rare Candy’s Gain of Fiction book club. These days, I like to approach reading from various mediums at once. I purchase a book on Audible, then get the book on Kindle or paperback. I like this hybrid method, turning the book on while I’m washing dishes or driving to Walmart, then reading it in bed.

The Shards is definitely Ellis’s masterpiece, and fully embodies the hangout principle. At least 1/3rd of the book is devoted to rich white kids hanging out at prep school, pool houses, and parties in their absent parents’ empty mansions. The narrative is delivered in Ellis’s wonderful, compelling voice, which comes through on the page almost as well as when you listen to him narrate it for you. The book is very silly, high melodrama and also actual drama, and I loved every second of it.

Next up for me is Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama. I’m about a hundred and fifty pages in and enjoying the dry political Machiavelli police station stuff. This book devotes as much space (if not more) to whether the protagonist can do his job and please his boss as it does to the fact that his teenage daughter has gone missing. That neurodivergent focus gives the book an alien, sinister feeling that I’m enjoying.

Currently watching:

Just started season 2 of Jujutsu Kaisen, and it’s just as good as everyone says it is.

Currently working on:

A couple books.

Happy writing!

I love writing sentences. The joy of writing, for me, is in slowly pecking away at sentences until they’re just right.

I don’t love figuring out plot, or pacing, or theme. Large-scale, book-length structural stuff doesn’t do it for me.

However, I would need to study and understand these things if I wanted those sentences that I love so much to have a home.

Elle Nash (whose new novel, Deliver Me, is one of the best of the year) talked me through some issues I was having with my writing, and recommended that I read The Bestseller Code and The Plot Whisperer.

TBSC might put you off at first. Two writers/editors fed a bunch of bestsellers into an algorithm and figured out the commonalities between them. They also managed to get the machine to be able to accurately predict which books were bestsellers and which ones flopped (to the tune of about 70% accuracy, iirc).

The book shares the similarities in structure between Fifty Shades of Grey and The Da Vinci Code. If you place the rising and falling action on a graph, those two novels sync up into nearly identical sine waves, with the point of deviation being the ending (50SoG has a bummer ending, TDVC has a happy ending).

In their interviews with booksellers, the authors report that the wild success of both these novels followed a similar pattern. Readers were almost bashful when buying them, having to admit that they knew it was bad writing but that they couldn’t put it down (and therefore had to purchase it). Readers of this blog will know the question of “good writing” and “bad writing” fascinates me. TBSC offered an exciting puzzle piece: the same way I can hear the music of a sentence, there’s a larger, ambient music to the flow of plot. Which I couldn’t hear, because I didn’t tune my ear to it.

The Plot Whisperer is similarly unromantic about how stories are constructed. But I’d highly recommend checking both of these books out if, like me, you need to beef up your toolkit. At this point, I can now dream up songs of plot and theme in the shower, in addition to individual sentences.

Writing novels is easier when they’re being written on these two tracks, listening to the micro- and the macro-level music. It is hard to construct a novel sentence-by-sentence, with no over-arching song to compose.

Speaking of the joy of tinkering, check out this episode of ManBen, the Naoki Urasawa-hosted exploration of manga writers/artists and their processes. In this episode, he talks to Shin’ichi Sakamoto about his digital drawing style. I loved watching him sit in his dark cave, making his assistant put on dresses for reference, spending hours detailing a character’s hair, and adjusting the positioning of a character’s eyes over and over. It’s that kind of insane meticulous behavior that I really identify with.

Also, Sakamoto’s Innocent is incredible. His very gory, very gay story takes place during the French Revolution, following a family of executioners grappling with the ethics of what they do for a living. Absolutely gorgeous art, and gripping storytelling. I’m on Chapter 30 at the moment, and I’ve been disturbed and moved by the over-the-top drama of this series. It hasn’t been translated into English officially yet, and the fan translation is clunky (as most fan translations are), but I’d highly recommend it. Or, if you speak Japanese, French, German, or Russian, you can purchase those editions for official translations.

Expect more of these in 2024. Substack will be the home for all of my nonfiction writing, where I’ll pass on the things that I learn as I learn them, and the good shit that I read as I read it.