Hello to you on this fine Thursday. Here are some new things about me you might like to know.
Awards Shortlists
My short story “A Balanced Breakfast” was shortlisted for the Brave New Weird Awards from Tenebrous Press! “Breakfast” is the cereal-box demon story that’s really about loneliness and lung transplant. It’s pretty good.
The anthology the story was from, Soul Jar, edited by Annie Carl for Forest Avenue Press, was shortlisted for the Bram Stoker Awards, though it ultimately didn’t make the final ballot. That’s still really cool, though. I’ve never even been tangentially related to a big award before.
Eat the Rich Kickstarter
I and my publishing outfit, Atomic Carnival Books, are putting together a new anthology: Eat the Rich. The book’s going to be a collection of short stories about monsters and other assorted maniacs munching on the ultra-wealthy. Because sometimes you can judge a book by its cover.
If there’s a problem in the world — literally any problem — you can bet there’s a billionaire behind it somewhere, exacerbating untold suffering for their own personal gain. War, famine, pestilence, and death aren’t so much apocalyptic horsemen as line items and write-offs, holes collected on a punch card where the fifth atrocity is free.
We, the non-rich, are wildly outclassed, millions of us cobbling together less money for a righteous cause than what some gold-leafed CEO wipes their ass with. Lasting change can feel like a Sisyphean task, and uncoupling society from capitalist classism, from corporate greed, seems damn near impossible this far into the future.
Honestly, some days it feels like our only recourse is to, quite literally, Eat the Rich.
Eat the Rich, from Atomic Carnival Books and editor Eirik Gumeny, is a new speculative fiction anthology of billionaires (and other rich assholes) being eaten. That’s it, full stop. A collection of carnivores, cannibals, kaiju, cryptids, and creophagous compost committed to consumerist chaos and capitalist comeuppance.
We may not be able to actually fix the world with this book, but goddamn if we’re not going to feel a little better after.
You can back the Kickstarter by clicking here.
That’s it for now! Hope things are going well for all of you, too.