What is There to Say
Her father stands at the kitchen sink, one long hand holding the wet wound on the back of his head. In the other is a serrated knife. His gray hair is blood-soaked, and there is a dark stain growing on his shirt collar. She asks her father about the wound. She asks him about the knife.
Without turning around, he says, It kept scratching around in there. He says, What else was I supposed to do?
In the sink, slick with blood like a deformed newborn, is her father’s homunculus. It steadies itself against a used coffee mug. It’s a rough-hewn thing, the idea of a man, not even tall enough to touch the faucet.
Read more in F(r)iction, Issue 8
Lars Breaxface, Werewolf in Space
All 60 chapters of the novel-length serial Lars Breaxface, Werewolf in Space, which ran from June 2015 to April 2017.
"Exiled from his home planet after exposure to a lycanthropic virus, orbit-salvager Lars Breaxface roams the cosmos as muscle-for-hire, the ultimate lone wolf. But when he meets a mysterious stranger in the far reaches of space, the wolfman finds himself in the middle of an alien plot he doesn't understand, breaking a lot of faces. With the galaxy hanging in the balance, can Lars tame the beast? Or is he only capable of super apocalyptic werewolf mass destruction?"
Read more at JukePop Serials
Arcane (Graphic Novel)
A 5-part graphic novel series in collaboration with artist Ross Kennedy of Armature Tattoo Co.
"It’s been ten years since the city’s super-powered heroes fell upon each other in madness and destroyed half of the metropolis. In the aftermath, the five lost their power, no longer able to channel the mysterious Source. Some have hidden themselves in anonymity, working to rebuild the city they left in ruins; others have quested for other kinds of power. Now, after a decade of hiding, Arcane finds himself pulled into a war between the Central Restoration Authority, a fascist bureaucracy holding the city under martial law, and the fanatical Crusaders, a militant cult worshipping the heroes’ former leader, Michael, as a god. But Arcane has a secret: he has found a new way to tap the Source for power. As he uses its energy to save his estranged daughter, Riley, the others also begin to feel their powers coming back, and another battle between the heroes looms. As the Authority moves to crush the Crusaders and tighten its iron grip, Arcane must stop both sides from destroying the city a second time."
Buy Act 1 at Armature Tattoo Co.
From the Archives: Interview with Brandon Getz, author of “White People”
JP: I wanted to ask how you would classify this story. This didn’t feel like genre, but it can’t really be classified as straight literary fiction. It felt like genre that was totally dismissive of the fact that it was genre fiction. Or is this just an irrelevant question?
BG: First off, I don’t want to be dismissive of genre fiction. I think genre fiction versus literary fiction gets a bad rap. People in literary circles kind of turn their noses up at it, as though it’s all sword and sorcery and rayguns and monsters and it doesn’t have any artistry. A lot of what I write is what Michael Chabon would call writing along the borderlands. It’s this stuff that overlaps. And it wasn’t uncommon for literary heroes of yore. I mean, Edgar Allen Poe – he basically invented science fiction, horror and the detective story. And he’s taught in our high school English classes. Dickens and Henry James wrote ghost stories. It was only in the Raymond Carver celebratory era that this attitude exists. And I love Raymond Carver too, but I think there’s been this idea going about that those tropes of horror or science fiction or fantasy are a separate thing. I don’t think that’s the case. I think you need to write a good story. And all those traditions have good and bad writers, and all those traditions have tropes that you can play with and use to create really cool and interesting stories..
Read more at After Happy Hour Review
Memo to the X9 Sales Team
Good morning, everybody! Happy Monday! I just want to address some of the questions and concerns that have been floating around our little office regarding the new X-series model, the best we’ve ever offered here at Safe-D-Tech LLC: the safe and indestructible X9! I want to assure you that the concussive disabling system, though it struggled a little in the beta phase, has been 100% redesigned and is functioning to its maximum potential. I know we’re all very sorry about what happened to Roger in the Testing Lab (I know I am!). There’s a card for his family at the security desk, and we encourage everyone to sign their name and a brief message to his wife and kids. We are very sorry for their loss.
Read more at WORK Magazine
Unedited Raw Material from Tripping on Mushrooms in Spokane, WA, April 2010 (Poem)
(Jessica is on the floor. Seems like a good idea to establish the reality of Jessica on the floor in the red glow of the Christmas-tree lights. I will parentheticalize this sentence so that it doesn’t make it into the rest of the poem. It can be part of the diary, the DVD Extra portion of the poem, as if poems have McDonald’s DVD Supersize menus. I just said to Brendan that I was parentheticalizing the prose. I would not read this in public.)
Read more at Uppagus, Issue 19
The Collector
The old man couldn’t remember when the severed hands had first appeared. For years, they had arrived unbidden, usually in the morning, their wrists showing all manner of cleavage, from the neat slice of a well-sharpened knife to ragged remains by the jaws of exotic predators. On some indecipherable and arcane schedule, usually on a Tuesday, the old man would find a hand on his doorstep, neatly splayed on the welcome mat, next to his morning paper.
Read more in Sanitarium Magazine, Issue 46
