I think my brain is not okay. I don’t mean to suggest I’ve got actual worms up in there, but the Current Era combined with Holidaytimes has really just turned my skull into a malfunctioning music box. First, I whiffed on ever doing a Terribleminds Gift Guide for the year — I blame this in part on the fact Thanksgiving was later than usual, and by the time I was like, “Yeah, let’s do a gift guide!” it was way too late to make that actionable. Second, I’m now tasked (by myself) to offer up the Books And Other Stuff I Liked In 2024, and when I go to access that file folder inside my head-computer, I just get a series of pop-ups and janky ads.
I suspect this is in part because my brain is choosing to live implicitly in The Present. It’s trying not to look too close in the past, lest it accidentally traipse across one of the various news-related landmines there. And it’s definitely not looking forward because that feels like time-traveling to the inside of a black hole. So mostly my brain is in goldfish mode. It exists in this moment and blinks blissfully inside its glass uhhh — and here I’m going to note it took me about 60 seconds to conjure the word “fishbowl.” I was like, “well, aquarium, obviously, but that’s not the right image. It’s like, there’s this glass orb where you put a newly-acquired fish? A fish orb, a fish jar, a spherical fish apartment, a goldfish palantir,” before finally landing on oh right —
Fishbowl.
Brain not okie-dokie.
It’s fine. It’s fine! I’m sure it’s fine. Everything is fine and nothing hurts!
So, here is a list of some of the things I liked in 2024.
This list will be far from exhaustive because, again, my brain is just moths and dust, I fear. (Further, on the topic of books, it gets weirder because I read a bunch of 2025 releases in 2024, and do I mention those here? Or not? Or what? I may! I may not! Even I don’t know what I’ll do!)
Let’s begin.
Books
Right out of the gate, I think my favorite read of the year was Premee Mohamed’s The Butcher of the Forest. It’s perfect. She’s an astonishing writer. Everything she writes is great, but this is one of those books — like Sara Gran’s Come Closer — that I know I’ll read again and again. It’s eerie and empathetic and pointed and uncanny and written in such a way so as to not be full of itself, to be fully accessible to any reader, while still being both small and profound in equal measure. It’s a treasure.
Actually, it’s been a damn fine year for novellas — M.L. Rio’s Graveyard Shift and Delilah Dawson’s Guillotine both come to mind. DARK, SINISTER SNACKS, these books, and you need them. Oh! Oh also: When Among Crows, by Veronica Roth. I read that in… January last year? So it counts.
Other books of note: A Mask of Flies by Matthew Lyons is fucking great. Paul Tremblay rocked Horror Movie, a filmic head trip through the remake of a purportedly cursed film. Gabino Iglesias’ House of Bone and Rain is some dark, powerful, vengeful stuff. CJ Leede’s American Rapture is an absolutely A+ unique take on the apocalypse, and honestly pairs really well with Clay McLeod Chapman’s upcoming Wake Up And Open Your Eyes. Oh! And At Dark, I Become Loathsome, by Eric LaRocca.
Weirdly, I read both the Chapman and the LaRocca on vacation in Portugal this past year, and also, I’m going to be doing events with them both next month — Chapman and I at Doylestown Bookshop on Fri, Jan 10th at 6pm. And LaRocca I’m joining in NYC
In nonfiction I really, really loved A Natural History of Empty Lots, by Christopher Brown. That and I also read Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, which is not new, but was very important to me this year, both personally and in the writing of Staircase in the Woods.
I know I read other books this year, right?
Oh! I know. I read my first proper Stephen King in a long time — I am, like many, a student of his earlier works. Sadly, though, I’m less studied when it comes to the stuff he wrote in the last 10-15 years. I read Fairy Tale. I liked it a lot. Took a while to get going to where it was going but even there, you’re just happy to spend time in the world of his writing. I have deeper thoughts that maybe I’ll get around to sometimes in the future.
Did I read more this year? Surely. Do I remember what those books were? Not at the moment. Forgive my porous mind. Onward.
TV
What We Do In The Shadows ended, and it was perfect. Shrinking and Bad Monkey continue to prove that Bill Lawrence knows what he’s doing (see also, Scrubs, Ted Lasso, Cougar Town). The Penguin was surprisingly excellent. Diplomat season two was not as strong as the first season but I still loved it a lot. Was Shogun this year? Amazing, obviously. Ripley had a whole different vibe than the film, closer to the book, and I found the black and white cinematography of it truly stunning, one of the most stunning shows I’ve laid my eyes on in recent memory. Arcane, also, totally beautiful. I needed time with it to remember what the fuck happened in season one, but it’s really staggering in terms of how well that animation looks, how perfect the action scenes are, how not video gamey it is even as it’s very video gamey? It’s something special.
Oh and maybe my favorite thing?
True Detective: Night Country. The best. Give Issa Lopez all the things. The money, the awards, the laurels, the high-fives.
I very much did not like The Bear S3, and I generally love that show. Hm.
Movies
Were there movies? Did I watch them? *grits teeth, takes a bumpy ride in the time machine*
Longlegs, Alien: Romulus, Challengers, Dune Part Two, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, Babes, My Old Ass, Problemista, The First Omen, Late Night with the Devil, and what else?
Oh wait, no, I know — my two favorites this year:
Love Lies Bleeding, and Monkey Man.
There were other movies, I’m just not calling them my favorites of the year.
Moving on.
Games
Balatro is easily the most addictive game I played this year. So addictive it may have just eaten all the other games.
Favorite game overall might be Rise of the Golden Idol, which is just a delight.
Alan Wake 2 was amazing, though I think that came out in 2023 initially.
Thank Goodness You’re Here was incredibly funny and clever. Not necessarily a great “game” in the sense of “contains puzzles and various challenges,” but was a delight to go through and experience.
Pacific Drive was rad.
Animal Well consumed my life for a while, and I felt like it was nearly perfect in understanding how to create a challenging game that still builds you up to those challenges well? A game that hard that never feels frustrating is aces.
Very much wanted to love both Star Wars: Outlaws and Veilguard, and very much did not love them. Liked both. But neither really sang and I tapped out of Outlaws (though I’m told I should go back and try again) and Veilguard just feels like a weirdly watered-down Pixared version of a Bioware story. It’s good. But it also feels very video gamey — the maps don’t feel like maps, they feel like “levels,” and you’ll come upon an area of glowy, patiently-waiting bad guys same as you would in, say, Halo. The whole thing just isn’t coming together for me, but a lot of people I know love it, so maybe it’s just me.
Music
This year, loved new music from St. Vincent, Jack White, the Linda Lindas, Phantogram, The Last Dinner Party, Carter Veil, Louis the Child, Sprints, Sleater-Kinney, Rosie Tucker, Remi Wolf, Oceanator, Amyl and the Sniffers, Crobot, Childish Gambino, plus holy shit there was new Poe this year? Poe. POE. Just a little bit — all tied to Alan Wake 2, but hey, I’m a man thirsty in the desert, I’ll take whatever drops of water I can touch to my tongue.
I think one of my favorite and then saddest discoveries was Mama Zu — it’s like, “Wow, she’s great, I love this,” *googles* “oh god she died??” Crushing discovery of such a vital talent just showing up and then being gone from us too soon — sad for us, for her friends and family, fuck.
Your Turn
Okay. Flood the comments — what’d you like from this past year? Recommend me something. A song, a book, a game, whatever.
Just a quick head’s up — if you want signed, personalized books of mine from Doylestown Bookshop, the 12th is the last day to order. We’ve passed the point of them being able to guarantee holiday delivery, though you can definitely pick up in store. (They can still be sent, and maybe they’ll arrive by the day, but the vagaries of the post office and winter weather make that uncertain.) You can ogle the list of books available from Doylestown here.
So, it has come time to reveal the wonderful cover of a new collection by one of my favorite authors — I wrote about how I am ride or die for Premee Mohamed here at the blog, and this collection, which I’m reading now, only proves why. Her work features such deep empathy, there to ground the big, gnarly ideas contained within. You’re going to want this, so let’s just jump right into the cover reveal for her next collection, coming out with Psychopomp in February: One Message Remains. — cdw
One Message Remains was deserving of a cover as unique as its words. Artist John G. Reinhart has accomplished that here, with something dreamy and otherworldly. Christine M. Scott’s clean cover design makes for a nice balance. Gaze upon it!
EXCERPT — One Message Remains, by Premee Mohamed
My dearest wife,
Major Lyell Tzajos frowned at his letter, if you could refer to it as such at this stage of development. So far it was just a salutation. And a slightly awkward one, no? At home, he didn’t call her “wife” any more than she called him “husband.” He crossed it out and wrote below it:
Dear Mariye,
Then he paused again, the pencil-tip resting against the gridded paper of his army-issued notebook. Something in her last letter had angered him, something he wanted to refute at once, but he had mistakenly left the letter back at headquarters six weeks ago. He shifted uncomfortably on the low equipment chest on which he had unwisely chosen to rest, the cold metal draining heat through his trousers, and stared out at the horizon, or where he thought it probably was; here, it was rarely a line dividing earth and sky, only a place where the fog changed color, like partly wetted paper. Ah! Now he remembered.
He wrote,
Of course our mission is not a punishment. Where did you get such a scurrilous idea, and why are you repeating it to me like any town gossip? If it was from the Tribune, then I order you to cancel our subscription to that rag at once. I have had enough of letting you “sweet-talk” me into allowing you to keep it. It shows great disrespect. Our mission happens to be an honor. For the sake of accuracy, allow me to clarify what we are doing here and wh
“’Scuse me, sir.”
Tzajos looked up as his second-in-command, Captain Yather, approached in a kind of sidewise scuttle, like a land crab. Yather was a tall man at home and conspicuously tall here, and had taken to various contortions to seem less threatening. Tzajos reminded himself to have a word with the man later: it was unseemly, even if it was not technically against regulations. “Captain?”
“We got a, uh. You know. Locals.”
Tzajos accepted the pair of field glasses Yather handed him: yes, not more than fifty or so yards to the northeast of their site, a handful of figures in the fog. “Well,” he said uneasily, “I suppose there’s no law against watching us work.”
“Nossir,” said Yather.
Tzajos hated this kind of thing, hated even more that his hands were trembling as he returned the field glasses. The men were watching him now, all paused in their work, seeing what he would do. Their eyes on him like hands, reminding him of the unfriendly nudges and shoves he’d gotten last time he was in a pub in the capital, spilling his drink. Oh ho ho, let’s see what the pencil-pushing little prig does now. Tzajos was a compact, tidy-looking man, well within the acceptable height and weight range for the draft, but something about him made him seem not only small but cropped, as if he had been trimmed to reduce even what meager portion nature had given him. The men often appended little to the jibes they thought he could not hear.
He tightened his jaw. “However,” he added, “one may infer they’ve been approaching us for some time, unseen. Therefore perhaps with hostile intent.”
“Could be, sir.”
“Take a couple of men and frighten them off, captain,” he said loudly. He did not dare look around to see the faces of the men; even the suspicion that they were laughing made him blush, which would be painfully conspicuous with his fair skin and hair. “Go on. Use the flares. Or no. Wait. Live ammunition, if you please.”
Yather hesitated, then turned to the young soldiers behind them. “All right, you lot, tools down a mo.’ Volunteers? Yes, you’ll do. With me.”
In mere moments, the three men were immersed in the fog, invisible, their footsteps silent on the grass. Tzajos held his breath and hated himself for it: a silly little man, yes, just as they muttered under their breaths, a silly little posh prig with a la-dee-dah accent and a fussy little mustache who had no right to command this mission… He swallowed, flinched, rammed his hands into his trouser pockets as the flares went off, even though he had approved their use.
A crackling roar from the tiny cartridges, magnified and deepened by the fog. A sphere of pink light. The sound of unseen birds winging away. Then faint shouting, and a couple of small-caliber reports. As always, even the sound of the guns made him feel light-headed. He had no idea how he had survived basic training. How long ago it seemed, five years, the start of the war…
Yather and the two privates returned, squelching across the wet turf. “Drove ’em off, sir. No contact. Had the men fire into the air.”
“Thank you, Yather.” Tzajos raised his voice for the benefit of the others and added, “No harm done if you had though, eh? Dragonish hides as they’ve all got?”
No one laughed. Tzajos had heard the men make a variation on this joke a thousand times since they’d started; what had he gotten wrong? He swallowed again, hearing his throat click, and added, “Right. Well. Are we…are we ready to proceed again?”
“Mule’s workin’ again, sir,” someone called—one of the mechanics, spackled in grey mud from head to toe, like a gargoyle. The Mule was what the men called their temperamental pneumatic excavator, since enlisted men (Tzajos had begun to realize) gave a nickname to everything from their mess kits to local landmarks. He, meanwhile, stubbornly continued to refer to it using its asset name.
“Very well,” Tzajos said over the rattling hiss of the engine getting up to steam. “Permission to resume.” That was the mission plan, that kept things organized and efficient, he had drawn it up himself: one sector opened up as the next was recovered, followed by closure concomitant with the next sector being opened up. No idleness, every man-hour accounted for! They were not in this foreign land on holiday!
Tzajos looked around for the Teleplasm Recovery Unit in its heavy brass case, finally locating it next to the excavator, also covered in mud. “Private! What is the meaning of this?”
The mechanic wriggled out of the coal compartment and made an effort to clean his face somewhat. “Sir?”
“The recovery unit.”
“Oh! Well, she were acting up last night, sir, so I gave ’er a check this morning—”
“What was the issue specifically? Did you complete the formal inspection checklist?”
The mechanic frowned, mud flaking from his forehead. “No sir, on account of that’s an official task of which I myself was not assigned to do.”
“Then why did you ‘give it a check,’ private?”
“She…she were acting up. Can’t have things acting up.”
Tzajos picked up the case, grimacing at the filthy handle. He would never understand these men, never. What was the compulsion to simply fiddle about with things unless you had official orders? You could be written up for that. He himself tried to model ideal military behavior, never as much as touching the equipment unless it was part of the mission plan.
Somehow the fog had grown even thicker; visibility was down to a few paces. Tzajos slid his boots rather than walking as he neared the excavation, letting it appear gradually, its edges claggy, grey, more like cement than soil. Next to it lay the cut turf they had rolled up like a medieval manuscript, ornamented appropriately with wildflowers, sprouting herbs, the grasping white fingers of roots. Remarkable, really. The tenacity. How anything managed to grow in this stuff. Bit like the people.
Tzajos set the unit down carefully, grateful to be relieved of the burden, grateful also that over a month and a half of constantly hauling it around (as the commanding officer, he was the only one approved to use it) he no longer grunted or whimpered when lifting it. He did not feel materially stronger, but something had been quietly compensating in his arms or back, and he thanked it. Bone gleamed out of the muck, first revealed then polished by the Mule’s pressurized hydro-vacuum hoses. A successful find; but as this corroborated the official sector map he had been using, he felt vindicated rather than gratified to see it confirmed.
“Mark it,” he said to Yather. The captain dug the map out of his satchel and squatted on his haunches, head still level with Tzajos’s ribcage, and glanced around for the bright red flags of their distance markers. Very good; Tzajos had stressed upon all the men the importance of those markers, of placing them deeply in the turf, and it seemed to have sunk in at last. You had to be precise. No sense doing half a job.
“Marked,” Yather said, showing his notebook page.
“Thank you. Right. Distance, please.” Tzajos stooped next to the excavation, opened the case, activated the device, and waited as the internal engine hummed up to pressure. It sounded all right; what had the private been talking about? Perhaps slightly rougher than usual, but it was barely perceptible and might easily have been a result of sitting there in the mud, instead of its elevated leather frame. Hmm. Maybe he should write the man up, after all. It would be a lesson to the rest of them.
When the indicator needle hovered at fifty pounds per square inch, Tzajos flipped the switch and held the funnel steady as whatever remained of the dead men’s teleplasm rose from the bones, entering the collector receptacle in a thin violet fog. Strange to look at it, see it the same as our own, isn’t it. You’d think it would look different. But then, so many peoples of the world. Maybe not enough colors to cover them all. Or not able to perceive the difference…well, the army tested you for color vision before you could join, and—
Tzajos did not hear the bang, only the echoes of it returning to him muffled and soft in the fog, and he did not see the flash, only feel its dazzling imprint as he blinked again and again, unable to stop his eyes trying to recover their vision. Gradually he became aware of Yather pulling him up, calling his name.
“I’m all right, I… What happened?”
“Not sure, sir. Sounded like one of them stunners went off, except smaller. Like a cherry-bomb.”
Tzajos rubbed his left ear, which was still ringing. Fortunately he had dropped the recovery unit at the edge of the excavation instead of into it; the unit did not seem to have sustained any damage, and indeed was still running. He picked it up, wary of a repeat of whatever had happened, but the indicators appeared normal and even the engine sounded normal now. Perhaps it had not been the unit at all; perhaps he had simply had a funny turn and blamed it on the thing.
Right on schedule, the status light turned from amber to green, and it unceremoniously jettisoned the sealed cube of teleplasm from the nacelle, which Tzajos was used to by now, catching it deftly before it fell into the hole. He labelled it with a grease-pencil and put it in his satchel, hearing the celluloid edges clunk dully against the others collected this morning before the Mule had broken down. A bag full of achievements, each carrying him closer to the end of the mission, to promotion, celebration, veneration.
“Effects, sir,” said one of the privates inside the hole, handing Tzajos a black bag. He accepted the cold, sodden package between thumb and forefinger, and murmured something about getting back on schedule.
With practiced distaste, he ungimmicked the complicated ties and folds, opening the thick oiled leather to reveal a mass of papers barely damp on their edges. This too no longer surprised him; nearly all of the dead soldiers had been buried with journals, letters, books, pocket watches, and rings in bags like this—things that any reasonable man would have insisted be sent to their families postmortem. Instead the dead clutched them tight, in graves so shallow that any passing wildlife could easily root them up and scatter their remains. A beastly practice in every definition, Tzajos thought. Like dogs burying a bone six inches down, uncaring of what happens to it next, because dogs don’t know what a future is or how to think about it. At least they hadn’t been in mass graves, as everyone had expected.
At any rate, as the commanding officer, it was his responsibility to ensure everything was read, cataloged, preserved, and transported back to headquarters in order to correctly match physical and teleplasmic remains to names of the dead. The burden of superiority!
He opened the topmost item, a thin green notebook like the kind given to schoolchildren, and glanced at the first line in its clumsily curled printing—They say the havuvara have weapons that the world has never even HEARD of—then put it back in the bag. More efficient to batch everything together and read it all at once after the day’s work was done, as he usually did.
As per regulations, the men worked until sunset, then retired to the steam-tracks for the last tasks of the day, wearily traversing the ladders bolted between the high rubber treads, occasionally cursing or slipping if exposed anatomy touched the hot metal of the engine or steam-lines. Twilight dyed the grey soil a vivid blue. Cubes: arranged in spark-proof wooden crates. Bones and teeth: bagged in sanitary cellulose sacks. Sacks: labeled in three locations, stored in individual waterproofed cardboard boxes. Boxes: labeled on all sides.
“The least we can do for the poor beggars is a proper job,” Tzajos said to Yather as they finally trudged up the steps of their transport and settled into the damp, sooty cab. “The very least. I always think—not even at the political level. But as humans. The least we can do is offer assistance to a defeated enemy.” From the back, just audible through the grate separating the compartments, he could faintly hear the men talking, singing, some already snoring. Was the interpreter in this one?
Tzajos squirmed around in his seat as Yather started the engine, raising his voice over the noise. “Calamuk! Are you back there?”
The interpreter climbed over the other men and brought his face to the thin metal grate: a thin face, ruddy brown, dark blue eyes encircled by matching dark blue smears of exhaustion. “Sir.”
Tzajos said, “What does havuvara mean, lieutenant?”
Was that the shadow of the grate flickering across the man’s eyes, or something else? After a moment he said, “Who said it?”
“A dead soldier. In his journal.”
Again the pause. “A kind of insect, unwanted. You would say roach or cockroach.”
“I see.” Tzajos dismissed the man and drummed his fingers on the console, raising the faint odor of wet leather. He prided himself on his mastery of the enemy tongue—Dastian was a devil of a language compared to the ones he had studied in university. Not so much the vocabulary, needing only rote memorization, but the way everything shifted depending on the speaker. An unattributed word had, essentially, no useful meaning. What on Earth kind of language was that? In his own tongue if you said “roach” it always meant “roach,” no matter who said it or when, dead or alive, no matter whether it was printed in a book or scribbled on a wall.
Anyway. Let the dead boy call them whatever he wanted. Heavens knew armies the world over had nasty terms for the enemy, always had, always would. He was dead, virtually all the Dastian soldiers were dead, Eastern Seudast was crushed, pacified, and occupied, end of story. Soon enough their language would die too, replaced by Treotan. Once the schools were up and running, once you trained the kids to be properly ashamed of speaking the tongue of the defeated, to tell their families not to speak it at home…might take a few generations. What of it?
What happened next to this place really did not matter to Tzajos. He would be far from here, lauded for this mission of mercy, the unexpected kindness of the triumphant nation showing that they really did care—that they had come to recover all these remains and treat them with proper respect, and give them back to the Dastians instead of leaving them to languish in battlefields far from their homes. And he would be promoted, commended… That was one thing. The extra money, the stripes and dots, those were one thing. He would be respected. That was the other thing. That mattered. When he was back in civilization again, instead of in this raw and weeping wound of a land, he would be treated with proper respect. For once in his life. For once in his entire life.
How many of the men had seen him faint near the hole today? He hoped only a few. At any rate, at least it wasn’t another equipment malfunction; the Recovery Unit had worked flawlessly for the rest of the day. They had been plagued by difficulties for the entire mission so far, and there were still six months (six months!) to go. The unit of twenty included two mechanics; perhaps he should have requested more before setting out.
As if reading his mind, Yather said, “Might need to allot an extra day at the next village, sir, if it’ll fit in the schedule. Ruran tells me there’s so much mud up in the works that the only way to get the Mule and some of the steam-tracks workin’ properly again is to disassemble the engine compartments and suchlike, clean everything out, and put it back together.”
“A day? I suppose we could manage a single day. I did build some contingency time into the schedule.”
“It would be much appreciated, sir.”
“Ruran… He’s the bigger one, yes? With the red hair?”
“No, sir.” Yather’s tone was only lightly reproachful. “That’s the other mechanic. Garawe. I can see how you’d get them mixed up, though, as they’re usually workin’ on the same thing. Ruran was the one you were talking to this morning.”
“Of course.” Tzajos blushed again, glad no one could see it now. He and Yather had met at headquarters six weeks ago, just before mobilization, and yet the captain had instantly gotten to know all the men, while Tzajos, who had reviewed the detailed personnel folders a half-dozen times, still could not keep them straight. He hated that about himself because it was something he could not change no matter how diligently he studied. And when was the last time study had not solved one of his problems?
Tzajos glared out the windscreen at the landscape bumping and rattling around them, minimally illuminated in pale gold by the steam-track’s headlamps. Grass, flowers, bushes, mile after mile of undulating, undeveloped meadow. He glanced into the rear-view mirror to gauge the dark and wavering track of mud they’d left behind them. Well. It was spring; that would grow over in no time.
He was looking forward to summer, and drier conditions. The equipment they’d brought was all meant for civilization, which was to say back home in Treotan, which was to say paved roads, or at least dry soil. What a lot of setbacks they’d had so far! Broken-down machinery, minor injuries, prying locals, one brief but disastrous bout of food poisoning, incorrectly stowed equipment meaning a day-long backtrack to a previous site, fuel shortages, inoperative cabling stations, biting flies…nothing really worth writing home about, he admitted, but they simply never stopped. And look at this: one of the sodding little local lizards, blue and brown, right here in the cab! No doubt preparing to empty its parasite-infested bowels onto Tzajos’s shoulder. He glared at it; it glared back.
On the other hand, the successful overcoming of these setbacks would look good in his official report and (if he was being honest) the book he intended to find a publisher for when he returned. Their mission was noble, and only made more noble by these travails, that was the spin he’d put on it. It would sell like hotcakes. And it would show people back home what it was really like out here in the theater of war, never mind that he had not been in active combat. He’d sort that out later. A few evocative details would suffice.
One feels as if one were on another planet, he imagined himself writing. In a nicely-appointed office in a house—not the sitting room back in his pokey little flat—on one of those new-fangled type-writers that cost six months pay. It must be bright red enamel with gold trim, like the demonstration machine that the pretty girl typed on at the stationery shop to draw buyers in.
There are no streets and no street lamps, no sign-posts, no bridges, dykes, houses, inns, barns, fences, in short, not a single sign of civilization for dozens of miles at a time. One night we traveled quite literally from dusk till dawn (they had, too; since there was nowhere to stop, they simply had to switch out drivers every few hours) without seeing anything created by human intelligence. Only grass and sky. Nine hours of pitch darkness emphasized rather than diminished by the wobbling orbs of the head-lamps in the infernal, neverending mist, and he thought they were all going to go mad before morning. He, for one, nearly cheered when he finally saw the tiny specks of candlelight in the distance showing that the village on their map was real, did exist, was not a phantom created by some bored cartographer back home, and was only a few hundred miles off from where it was supposed to be.
Or a phantom created by the villagers themselves, an illusion… Tzajos was a modern man. He did not believe in magic; he knew that there had been a period in the long-ago past when people of his nation and others took it seriously, because they had no other explanation for natural phenomena. In Treotan, magic was supposed to be a gift of the gods; here in Seudast it was said to come from the land itself, like a mineral dissolved in the soil or something. Either way, it was just an idea. Not real. But after that terrible night if you had told him that magic was real, and that the Dastians practiced it, and were using it to hoodwink him and his men, he would certainly have believed it, and with his whole heart.
He shuddered, then comforted himself by imagining the writing, again on the imaginary type-writer, his manicured fingers (yes, he must get a manicure when he got back—the moment he got back) on the heavy, curved keys. War, this future Tzajos typed, has a way of changing the beliefs and morals of weak-minded men. However, those of a more upright and circumspect bent, such as officers, are aware of this effect, and make every effort to combat it in themselves and in the men they command.
Such as officers? Such as myself. Well, never mind. The book had to wait till he got back and could tell the full story of the mission, start to finish.
Pageantry, pomp, pretense, and peril—”The General’s Turn,” originally published in The Deadlands, drew readers into the dark world of a ceremony where Death herself might choose to join the audience…or step onto the stage.
Award-winning author Premee Mohamed presents three brand new stories set in this morally ambiguous world of war and magic. In “One Message Remains,” Major Lyell Tzajos leads his team on a charity mission through the post-armistice world of East Seudast, exhuming the bones and souls of dead foes for repatriation. But the buried fighters may have one more fight left in them—and they have chosen their weapons well.
In “The Weight of What is Hollow,” Taya is the latest apprentice of a long-honored tradition: building the bone-gallows for prisoners of war. But her very first commission will pit her skills against both her family and her oppressor.
Finally, in “Forsaking All Others,” ex-soldier Rostyn must travel the little-known ways by night to avoid his pursuers, for desertion is punishable by death. As he flees to the hoped-for sanctuary of his grandmother’s village, he is joined by a fellow deserter—and, it seems, the truth of a myth older than the land itself.
Premee Mohamed is a Nebula, World Fantasy, and Aurora award-winning Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction author based in Edmonton, Alberta. She has also been a finalist numerous other awards, including the Hugo, Ignyte, Locus, British Fantasy, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Crawford. In 2024 she was the Edmonton Public Library official writer-in-residence. She is the author of the Beneath the Rising series of novels, as well as several novellas. Her short fiction has appeared in many venues and she can be found on her website at www.premeemohamed.com.
If you’re not a person who agrees that we are living through some spectacularly stupid and nasty shit, then I suppose this post isn’t for you. You think things are some variant of normal, and I celebrate you for that. I wish I could live in the soft, sweet spam-blanket of blissful unawareness! A place where all things are and have been as they should be. A place where the words it’s fine, don’t worry about it echo around you, and you believe it, and everything is melting rainbow sherbet and ultraprocessed optimism.
I am… not there with you.
I think things are bad. I think they are dire. I am scared and worried for a lot of people and for the very country in which I live. While I don’t know that the times are precisely unprecedented, I think they are a truly absurd version of past events, reskinned and freshly costumed. (It’s like being killed by a bear. Lots of people have been killed by a bear, and so that’s not at all unprecedented. But in this case, the bear is wearing a thong and he beats you to death with a dead, wet owl. The problem and outcome are the same — bear attack, death — but somehow, it all feels so, so much stupider.)
So, I’m feeling, y’know, pretty cynical. And I know that there’s this increasing counter-call of “don’t give into cynicism!” but also, I’m definitely gonna give into cynicism, at least for the moment. I think cynicism is actually a pretty natural response! We are at the whim of a lot of complicated problems invoked into reality by a cabal of shitty villains and I think a lot of the things we hoped to see getting better have not yet gotten better. Sadness and anger and distrust are not an unusual way to feel given everything, and I think we should feel free to resist anyone who tells us to not give into cynicism, to just smile more, to fist-pump in the air like we’re at the end of the Breakfast Club. Shit’s fucked up, and it’s okay be like, “hey, shit’s fucked up, and I don’t know how we get this shit unfucked, er, up.”
And that doesn’t mean being hopeless, or spewing doom everywhere, or thinking we cannot improve things. We can. It just sucks, and it’s going to be hard. Cynicism does not also mean absolute despondency (though to be clear, I’m also not going to blame you for being despondent, either, c’mon). I just think it means a level of rough-edged, hard-worn weariness. It’s not giving in or giving up, it’s just, well, a long sigh and a dark little spot inside yourself that recognizes certain grotesque realities.
It’s not just the Current Political Situation, either. It’s AI, it’s billionaires running everything, it’s the uncertainty of everything, the chaos all around.
Anyway. This post isn’t supposed to be about all that but here I am, on a grim little tangent. The post is supposed to be, hey, once more I got people asking me, hey, how the fuck am I supposed to write stories and make art given all this bullshit, and like, whoo, woof, I– I mean, I’ve written this post like, how many times over the last eight years? Between the first time that fucking guy got elected and the pandemic, it’s definitely been a recurring theme in our creative lives, right? I’ve written about it a bunch of times and in addition, I wrote a whole goddamn book about it. (Crude, ill-conceived sales pitch: it’s called Gentle Writing Advice. Order it from my local bookstore, if you like.)
Point is, I hear you, and I feel it myself. How do we persist in the midst of this nonsense? There’s a distinct swimming upstream feeling, except it’s not just a stream, it’s run-off from a sewage processing plant. It feels difficult to make art, to tell stories, to not be distracted by all the awfulness, to feel like it matters at all, and normally I’d come at this with a kind of… high-minded approach, some advice that’s about, well, okay, art is resistance, storytelling can change the world, and the world needs you and your art and —
And that’s all true but I’m just not there. That’s not my headspace.
Maybe it’s not your headspace, either.
Because, to be clear, I need the answer, too. I need the advice. I just had to finish my next middle grade (and I did it, just last week, go me, time to eat a cookie). And I’ve got more books in the pipeline.
So, what’s my advice to me?
Here’s where I’ve landed, and maybe this helps you, maybe it doesn’t.
Fuck it.
And fuck ’em.
That’s it. That’s what I’ve got.
(Well, that and the twin practices of disassociation and compartmentalization.)
Fuck it, because I’m not going to let all this stupid clownshoes bullshit stop me from writing. And fuck ’em, because I know for sure the clowns don’t want me to keep making stuff. AI? Fuck it. Billionaires? Fuck ’em. Things have been bad before, will be bad again, and art keeps getting made, so I’m gonna be one of the ones to make it. And I hope you will too. Join me, if you will, in this grim, clench-jawed, teeth-biting-on-teeth determination. An era of brute forcing the words to happen. Blood from a stone by smashing it against the temple of whoever tries to stop you. Salt on your tongue and sand in the eyes of your enemies. That’s the attitude that I need right now. That’s what’s going to get the stories told. Maybe you need it too.
So join me —
Scream it loud.
Fuck it.
Fuck ’em.
Let’s write.
Okay. Necessary reminder: if you want books of mine ordered for the holidays for you or your friends or your family or the eyeless, vibrating shape that lives under your bed — Doylestown Bookshop has you covered. Go there, order whatever, let ’em know you want it signed and personalized. Orders of Black River Orchard get you your own unique apple variety handwritten into the book, plus you get a cool evil apple sticker. You can also pre-order Staircase in the Woods, out in April, for other goodies.
Sorry for the promo, but you buying books is how I don’t die!
First up, Staircase in the Woods has a new preorder link at Doylestown Bookshop, since they switched over their ordering system. Pre-orders already made still count, but going forward, this is the new link here. Note that by preordering through my local, they’ll ship directly to you; I’ll sign it and personalize it to you, a loved one, or a cherished foe; you’ll get a COOL STICKER from Natalie Metzger; and a unique inscription that — well, is unique to you. To tell you what it is is a bit of a spoiler, so I’ll spoil it here with some ROT13 code that, if you wanna know, you gotta decipher:
V jvyy anzr va gur vafpevcgvba n havdhr ebbz whfg sbe lbh va gur Ubhfr Orlbaq Gur Fgnvef
Also, Black River Orchard is now on sale for $1.99 at all the electric bookmonger sites. That includes: Amazon, B&N, Kobo, Apple, etc.
Note though if you want signed, personalized copies of Orchard, I can do that also through Doylestown Bookshop — and I have a new batch of evil apple stickers to go along for the ride, plus your very own evil apple variety named in the book. FUN FOR THE HELLIDAYS. I mean holidays. Shh.
Hell, I can sign and personalize anything you order through Doylestown. Got kids? Monster Movie! and Dust & Grim! Are you a writer who is feeling abject horror at the state of the world and don’t know how to proceed? Then Gentle Writing Advice is all yours.
AHOY HELLO HEY. We have a pair of winners for the giveaway — and I know, I was only doing one winner, but now, I’m gonna do two. I mean, gosh, there were so many entries. I feel obliged!
The only trick is, the first winner will get a copy of Staircase + some of my other books, and the second winner only gets the other books, as I do not have any additional copy of Staircase to give, sadly.
So, the winner who gets The Staircase in the Woods plus other books–
Kris Silva! Who recommended the anthology Never Whistle at Night.
And the second winner, who gets a box of books (but without Staircase included) is:
Debra W! Who recommended The Mirror, by Marlys Millhiser.
Congrats to the two of you!
You should each email me at terribleminds at gmail —
