It’s an IndieNext pick for May, and a LibraryReads pick for May. Ahh!
I’m very excited for it to be out in the world.
I’ll post the book’s more official blurbs/reviews later, but for now, if you remain unconvinced, here’s a scattering of comments from early reviews from readers over at Netgalley and beyond:
“The Staircase in the Woods is a symphony of shadows, a haunting and unforgettable journey into the heart of fear. Wendig’s ability to conjure a palpable atmosphere of dread, combined with his talent for creating characters that are both deeply human and profoundly vulnerable, makes this an absolute must-read for anyone who craves a story that will linger in the darkest corners of their mind. Prepare to be captivated, disturbed, and utterly enthralled.” — Kori S, reviewer, 5/5
“The Staircase in the Woods isn’t just a story—it’s a sensory overload, a dark meditation, and a sprawling tangle of emotions you’ll feel long after you’ve closed the last page. Chuck Wendig takes a strange and chilling idea—a staircase in the middle of nowhere—and builds a whole universe around it, brick by unsettling brick.” — Tessa P, reviewer 5/5
“Eerie, beautiful, and utterly gripping, The Staircase in the Woods is Chuck Wendig at his best. A haunting mystery wrapped in folklore and fear, it draws you in with lyrical prose and leaves you breathless with its emotional depth. Strange, dark, and unforgettable.” — Trina B, reviewer, 5/5
“Chuck does it again. Another phenomenal book. This one has some House of Leaves in its DNA. Some FNAF. Lots of Chuck — and everything you’d expect from him. The characters are so good. The plot is awesome, full of twists and turns. And the emotional core of friendships lost after time + tragedy ties it all together. Love it. You should read it.” — Jeffrey W, librarian, 5/5
“Chuck Wendig’s novel reads like a cinematic fever dream, equal parts horror and elegy. This isn’t just a ghost story. It’s about the divide between childhood and adulthood, the secrets we bury and the truths we carry—often alone. It’s about the damage done in homes that looked perfect from the outside and the roles we adopt to survive what’s happening inside… Because at the end of the day, this is a story about truth. The ones we hide from others and the ones we hide from ourselves. As kids, we take on roles—athlete, brain, comedian—to protect ourselves. But eventually, if we want to live freely, we have to strip away those masks and face what’s really there. In the dark. At the foot of the stairs.” — Stella G., reviewer, 5/5
“What happens from there simply can’t be described to any justice without reading the book. This book is going to haunt me and give me what I am anticipating to be the worst book hangover that I can remember. I read this in one sitting and became so invested in these complex and layered characters that I could not wait to learn their fate.” — Reviewer 1316058 5/5
ANYWAY, hope you’ll check it out. Also today is my birthday so you’re obligated to buy me a present by buying yourself a present. And this present is this book. It’s just Birthday Law, I don’t make the rules, I only uphold them.
Jerry Campbell just wants to be left alone. Grief-stricken over the death of his wife Abigail, the elderly widower and recent retiree is desperate for a change of scenery. When his realtor suggests a new home in Fairview Acres, a retirement community in the Poconos, Jerry figures it will be a nice place to spend the rest of his days in solitude.
Until he moves in.
Weird neighbors. Nightly block parties. Strange noises across his rooftop at all hours. Worst of all is Arthur Peterson, chairman of the Fairview Acres Community Association, who seems obsessed with coaxing Jerry into participating in neighborhood activities.
At first, Jerry shrugs off the incidents and eccentricities, telling himself he doesn’t want to be the guy who complains about everything—but that all changes one evening when Katherine Dunnally appears on his doorstep with an ominous warning: “You need to leave. The worms…they dance at nightfall…”
His neighbors all say Katherine suffers from a form of dementia called Sundowner’s Syndrome, but as the weeks progress and the strangeness mounts, Jerry begins to suspect there is something else going on in his neighborhood. Something that has to do with the huge stone in the community park…
Heartfelt and unsettling, Todd Keisling’s latest novel, The Sundowner’s Dance, propels readers through a terrifying exploration of grief, dementia, and perhaps the greatest horror of all: growing old.
The story always knows, and sometimes you really have to get out of your own way to let it call the shots.
I’m one of those “plantser” sort of writers—I plot a beginning and ending, but pants everything in between. And let me tell you, when I started the story that would eventually become The Sundowner’s Dance, I did not want to write another novel. I’d just finished rewriting a doorstopper called Devil’s Creek and wanted to focus on nothing but short fiction for a while. This story, originally titled “Beneath the Eye of the Moon,” began its life as a novelette. All the dots were there, I just had to connect them—but around the 11k word mark, I realized this story wanted to be longer. Needed to be longer. So, I shelved it for about four years and wrote Scanlines instead. I won’t recap the whole process here. In a nutshell, I resisted this story every step of the way, until it became clear to me that I couldn’t anymore. Lisa Dunnally was the catalyst—the daughter of one of the protagonists. She showed up on Jerry Campbell’s doorstep one day, forever altering the course of what I thought would be the final act of the story, and added some much-needed dimension to her mother, Katherine. I realized I’d been holding the story back in my refusal to let it become what it wanted to be: a full-length novel. The experience taught me tough lessons in storytelling. Sometimes, the story knows better than we do, and it’s not the writer’s job to create so much as it is to record.
Dementia and Alzheimer’s are horrible, but “Sundowning” is worse.
I’m no stranger to dementia. My granny experienced it in her final years. Hallucinations, mostly. Irritability. Mood swings. I’d heard of “sundown syndrome” before writing this book, but I didn’t know what it entailed. Once the term found its way into the story, I had to do my diligence and research the topic so I could speak on it with some authority. For the story’s purposes, there’s an “illness” (for lack of a better term) that presents effects of dementia, and often in reverse of sundowning—the victim becomes a different, better version of themself at night. However, the real thing is worse. It occurs in the mid- to late stages of dementia, often triggered by insomnia and over-stimulation during the day, and wreaks havoc on a person’s psyche. Sundowning patients have good days and bad days, but every night is a bad night. They begin seeing and hearing things that aren’t there, suffer from body aches, everything irritates the shit out of them, and more. Imagine that you can’t tell the difference between reality and your dreams. Familiar faces look foreign to you; some even look scary to you. And you are certain that someone, somewhere, is out to do you harm. When you do finally sleep, your circadian rhythm is broken to the point of only allowing an hour or two here and there. You’re basically trapped in your malfunctioning brain. I can think of nothing more terrifying than that.
And then there’s cancer.
I was in the early stages of the second draft when my wife discovered a lump in her breast. She had it checked out and was scheduled for a biopsy. Then we waited. And waited. We tried to get things in order just in case. Both of us have lost family to the Big C. We’ve seen what it can do to a person. She’d lost a lot of weight in the months leading up to the discovery, and I think we both assumed the worst. Life was in limbo, and though rewrites were the last thing on my mind, I stuck with it because what else am I going to do, you know? I lost a lot of sleep. Spent a lot of nights at my laptop, spiraling to dark thoughts and possibilities. What would I do without her? How would I go on? We’re both neurodivergent in complimentary ways, handling things the other usually avoids, and the prospect of spending the second half of my life without her was the scariest thing I’ve faced. Like I said, I’ve lost family to cancer, but this hit differently somehow. It felt more personal, and I found myself grieving for her even when she was in the room. That was the longest two weeks of our lives, and I’m happy to say the lump was benign. As of her last checkup, she’s free and clear. But my god, the anxiety in the interim saturated my soul and wouldn’t let go. So, I channeled it into Jerry, the protagonist, who is a widower still grieving for his wife two years after her passing. He’s facing my personal fear: how to continue after such a loss.
Sometimes your characters have to blow something up, and I’m probably definitely on a watch list.
I don’t know a single writer who doesn’t have a suspect search history. For my novel Devil’s Creek, I had to research homemade meth production and cult mentality. The Sundowner’s Dance took me down a different online rabbit hole: homemade explosives. Ammonium nitrate, sometimes referred to as ANFO (ammonium nitrate fuel oil), the stuff farmers use to fertilize crops, is highly explosive. It’s what Timothy McVeigh used to perpetrate the bombing in Oklahoma City back in ’95. Like my research into meth production, I discovered the instructions on how to create a bomb (by accident, I swear) using ANFO. So, yeah, I’m on a watch list somewhere. Then again, who isn’t?
We need more elderly protagonists.
I grew up among the elderly, and was partially raised by my grandmother and great-grandmother. I was around for conversations involving prescriptions, elder care, and insurance headaches. I’ve witnessed strokes and their after-effects, and the depression that settles in as one realizes their body is failing them. Life doesn’t end at 65 and people don’t disappear when they retire. They go on living in partial invisibility, only visible when they become an “inconvenience,” seemingly separate from the rest of the society as they exist in their so-called “golden” or “twilight” years. I feel this whole facet of life is underrepresented in horror these days. Maybe it’s the social discourse pitting generations against one another—Boomers and Millenials, etc.—that’s made us hesitant to tackle the subject; or maybe it’s that we’re afraid to face the prospect of aging ourselves. But that’s the beauty of it, I think. Aging awaits us all. We can’t escape it. It’s ripe for horror based on these facts alone.
TODD KEISLING is the two-time Bram Stoker Award®-nominated author of Devil’s Creek, Scanlines, Cold, Black & Infinite, and most recently, The Sundowner’s Dance, among several others. A pair of his earlier works were recipients of the University of Kentucky’s Oswald Research & Creativity Prize for Creative Writing (2002 and 2005), and his second novel, The Liminal Man, was an Indie Book Award finalist in Horror & Suspense (2013). He lives in Pennsylvania with his family.
Zombies are all around us—insect zombies, that is. Zombifying parasites reproduce by infecting victims and rewriting their neurochemistry, transforming them into the walking dead. Ants, crickets, caterpillars, and other hosts helplessly follow a zombifier’s commands, living only to serve the parasite’s needs until death’s sweet release (and often beyond).
“Rise of the Zombie Bugs” explores the eerie yet fascinating phenomenon of real-life zombification in insects and other invertebrates. Zombification is one of nature’s most unsettling survival strategies, with zombifiers evolving over millions of years to become deft neuroscientists capable of reprogramming host behavior. Victims of their manipulation are found worldwide—from Brazilian rainforests to European meadows.
Why is a bug’s world full of zombies, and could parasites that zombify invertebrates evolve to do the same to people? “Rise of the Zombie Bugs” offers a chilling yet enlightening look at the hidden world of mind-controlling parasites. It’s a must-read for anyone curious about the true terrors lurking in nature’s undergrowth and the unnerving beauty of evolution’s darker side.
Parasitic worms turn snails into disco-eyed zombies.
Have you ever seen a zombified snail, its swollen eyestalks pulsing in a mesmerizing display of patterns and colors? Researching Zombie Bugs introduced me to parasitic flatworms in the genus Leucochloridium; when these worms infect a snail, they produce larvae-stuffed broodsacs that grow inside the snail’s body. Sausage-shaped and striped in shades of green and brown, the broodsacs migrate into the snail’s eyestalks. When they vigorously undulate there, they look like creeping caterpillars.
Leucochloridium hatches and matures in snails, but reproduces in birds. In addition to making caterpillar-like broodsacs, the parasites manipulate snail behavior so that the snails wander out in the open, where they’re more likely to be spotted by predators. When a bird pecks off an infected snail’s eyestalk and swallows the broodsac, the worms end up exactly where they need to be in order to reproduce—inside a bird’s gut.
In fact, lots of behavior-manipulating parasites cause wandering or light-seeking behavior in their hosts (hey, remember those fungal-infected sleepwalkers in Wanderers?), particularly during the late stages of infection. Zombifying fungi, worms, flies and viruses all benefit from their hosts’ walking, hopping or crawling under their own power, to find a spot that’s ideal for the parasite’s reproduction.
“Find Familiar” is an excellent D&D spell and very good writing advice.
One of my favorite wizard spells in D&D—”Find Familiar”—also turned out to be helpful guidance for writing a popular science book. When I started researching Zombie Bugs, much of the science was not familiar to me. So I read dozens of scientific papers. I spoke with entomologists, mycologists and parasitologists. I visited museum collections. I organized chapters based on who was doing the zombifying and how.
It was a lot to sort and process! I wanted to start the book with the origins of zombification, how it works, and what studying zombie bugs reveals about human brains and behaviors. But the scope of those questions felt overwhelming, and I couldn’t find an entry point for that first chapter.
So I set it aside and started a different chapter, about something that was more familiar to me: fungus-infected zombie cicadas. The fungus Massospora cicadina grows inside adult periodical cicadas, until their butts fall off to reveal a yellow plug of tightly-packed spores. Massospora also doses its hosts with a type of amphetamine that causes hypersexualized behavior, so they spread zombification like an STD. I actually found one of these drug-addled zombies in Princeton, New Jersey, during the Brood X periodical cicada emergence of 2018, and being personally acquainted with zombie cicadas made me more confident about diving into that chapter.
Re-creating the scene from that day in Princeton—the spring sunshine, the crunch of cicada exoskeletons underfoot, the surprise and thrill of finding my first zombie—was a joy to write. And once I had that under my belt, finding my way into the next chapter (and the one after that) was so much easier.
If you kick really hard, you can avoid being zombified.
Cockroaches are survivors. Still, it surprised me to find out that they have a special strategy for surviving zombifying attacks by jewel wasps. Female wasps sting roaches in the head, delivering a venomous cocktail that makes the roach as docile as a puppy. The wasp then leads its stung, passive roach to her nest. She walls it up inside with a hungry wasp larva, and the roach ends its life as a Happy Meal.
But unlike most insect victims of zombification, roaches often fight back and defeat their zombifiers! Researchers at Vanderbilt University’s Catania Lab captured high-speed footage showing that roaches defended themselves against zombifying wasp attacks with vigorous kicks. In about 63% of such attacks, the roaches escaped unscathed (unless they weren’t fully grown, in which case the wasps were able to zombify the roach youngsters 100% of the time).
Zombies? The CDC had a plan for that.
More than a decade before HBO’s The Last of Us introduced TV audiences to the Infected —zombies created by a fictional variant of the zombie ant fungus Ophiocordyceps—AMC’s The Walking Dead captivated viewers with its more traditional decaying zombies, created by an unspecified virus. Much to my delight, I discovered that the success of The Walking Dead inspired the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to launch a “Zombie Preparedness” campaign in 2011, which I was able to track down online because the internet is amazing. (Seriously, go look this up. There were posters! There’s a downloadable comic!) Obviously, the CDC wasn’t hinting at an imminent zombie apocalypse; they were using zombies as a way to get people to think about pandemics and disaster preparedness. At the time, CDC director Dr. Ali Khan wrote, “If you are generally well equipped to deal with a zombie apocalypse you will be prepared for a hurricane, pandemic, earthquake, or terrorist attack.” When the CDC launched this campaign, it was so popular that it temporarily crashed the agency’s website (they finally retired their Zombie Preparedness materials in 2021).
Since then, researchers have created mathematical models of hypothetical zombie outbreaks to study the spread of infectious diseases. Healthcare workers in hospitals and with the Red Cross train for high-pressure medical emergency scenarios by treating “patients” during staged zombie attacks. There’s even a scientific conference called the Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Meeting, where experts from different disciplines meet to talk about a range of science topics related to zombification. The pervasiveness of zombies in pop culture has some unexpectedly practical real-world applications for science, medicine and public health!
A deep dive into Alien‘s backstory led to a gut-wrenching discovery.
If you’ve seen the movie Alien, the chestburster scene is probably seared into your brain. As soon as I learned about the original chestbursters—wasp larvae that hatch and grow inside zombified caterpillars, then chew through their host’s skin and pupate inside cocoons on the caterpillars’ backs—I knew that they deserved their own chapter in Zombie Bugs.
I’d heard rumors that the Alien filmmakers based their chestburster on these parasitic wasps, but though I combed through interviews, I couldn’t track down a solid connection. What I did discover was that Alien screenwriter Dan O’Bannon found inspiration for the chestburster from his own experience with Crohn’s disease, a gastrointestinal disorder that causes excruciating gut pain. It has no cure, and it eventually caused O’Bannon’s death in 2009.
While I was researching O’Bannon, I found something else that stuck with me: a scan of a sketch that he made before production began, of the xenomorph’s larval facehugger stage. His illustration wasn’t as terrifying as the film’s facehugger; the drawing, which looked like an angry cartoon crab, was actually kind of cute. As a writer working on her first book, I found reassurance in that derpy concept art, knowing that it would eventually transform into something unforgettably horrific. It reminded me that first drafts of anything don’t need to be perfect. They just need to be done.
Mindy Weisberger is a science writer and editor at Scholastic, Inc. and has written about science for CNN, Scientific American, Live Science and Space.com. Her writing covers parasites, new species discoveries, weird animal behavior, strange medical cases, paleontology, climate change, archaeology and space exploration. For more than a decade, Weisberger produced, wrote and directed media for the American Museum of Natural History, and she scripted and co-hosted the science podcast Life’s Little Mysteries. She lives on a cliff in New Jersey with her husband, two cats, and too many ukuleles.
John Wick meets Johnny Mnemonic in a nail-biting cyberpunk technothriller about a courier on the run from his own Guild
Corporations fall, gangsters are killed, but no-one messes with the Couriers Guild.
When Armand Pierce first became a courier ten years ago, he had an attaché case connected to a titanium cuff grafted into the bones of his wrist, and took an oath: the delivery is everything. He can run, fight—kill, if he needs to—but the package gets where it’s going. It’s the Guild’s guarantee, and since the internet went down in the Cyber Wars, all business, legitimate or otherwise, depends on it. Otherwise, he dies.
So Pierce knows he’s in deep trouble when he arrives at his latest destination to find his payload missing, his case mysteriously empty. Something strange is going on: something that’s already cost three couriers their lives, and threatens to upend the global order. And Pierce had better get to the bottom of it, before the Guild, catches up to him.
The Ideas Aren’t Ready Until They’re Ready
Writing The Price of Everything was a more educational experience than any other book I’ve written. Partly, that’s because it simply took me so long to write it.
Some of the ideas for the book had been rattling around in my brain for well over a decade. I thought then and I still think today that they are fascinating and compelling. But the stories I first tried to write them into were not. They didn’t do the ideas justice. They were lame.
But I didn’t give up on them, or at least not permanently. And I’m glad I didn’t. Whether it was because I was becoming a better writer, or the world was changing in ways that made the ideas more relevant or compelling, or simply because the ideas themselves needed to mature, not in a decrepit, falling apart, death is inexorably approaching and my knees are killing me kind of way, but, you know, to become wiser and more distinguished. What I’m trying to say is, I learned that sometimes an idea simply isn’t ready until it’s ready.
The Book Isn’t Ready Until It’s Ready, Either
While some of the ideas in the book have been in my head for decades, some of the words have been on the page for almost as long.
I started writing the first draft back in 2015 (and as an outliner, that means I’d already been working on it for some time). Now, to be fair, in that time I also wrote four other novels (and another almost completed, plus a couple more ghostwritten), as well as several screenplays and a bunch of short stories. But this book required a lot of revisions, even reconceptualizations.
My wife and I jokingly call The Price of Everything “my most celebrated work” because of how many times I declared it finished (drafts, edits, revisions) and insisted we toast its completion. Only to find out it wasn’t done.
And then I’d get back to work.
It was hard. I mean, I know how important it is to kill your darlings sometimes, but we’re talking several generations of darlings, entire extended families of darlings. And these weren’t just personal favorites: they were objectively legitimate darlings.
But they didn’t fit. They didn’t work. Not in this book, or what this book was supposed to be. And so they had to go. (Truth be told, I saved them all; you don’t really have to kill your darlings, you just have to lock them in the basement.)
Sometimes Slow Can Be Better
I have always strived to be a fast writer, to be productive. Maybe even prolific (I mean, not like my pals Chuck Wendig or Jonathan Maberry—give me a break, I’m only human). But working for so long on this book, on so many iterations of it, has shown me the benefits of taking such time.
I’ve always been an outliner, always depended on knowing where I was going when writing a story. (And yes: however many revisions there were, that’s how many outlines there were.) But over the years I’ve come to appreciate almost as much the way outlining helps me get to know my characters intimately before I start writing that first draft, instead of getting to know them along the way.
A similar benefit accrues from working on a book for so long. As I said, I worked on many other projects while I was writing this one, but The Price of Everything was always in my head—maybe not front of mind, but in there. And the whole time it was, I was gaining a deeper and more nuanced understanding of those characters.
Part of the premise of The Price of Everything is that, with the internet cratered by cyberwar, the economy once again runs on cash. A guild of elite couriers moves the new super-high-denomination currency around in attaché cases chained to titanium cuffs grafted onto the bones of their wrists. The couriers swear an oath: The delivery gets where it is going or they forfeit that hand, and effectively their life. I think it’s a fascinating premise, but I had to live with the idea for some time before I grasped how deeply disturbing and metaphorically relevant it was: an economy so inequitable that young people agree to be disfigured—and potentially even forfeit their lives—in order to protect some billionaire’s money.
Writing all those different iterations helped, as well, giving me the opportunity to see these characters in different situations, different worlds or timelines or dimensions. It gave me a much deeper understanding of them.
The same is true of the themes of the book: wealth disparity, the rise of American oligarchs and the billionaire class—and how that has exacerbated our failures to confront climate change. The longer I and the book were allowed to steep in these themes, the more they became intrinsically interwoven into the story and the characters. Unfortunately, as often seems to be the case when one is writing dystopic fiction these days, the world has leaned into the story. Good for the book; bad for the planet.
I Am Stubborn AF
Something else I learned in writing this book is about me. For better or for worse (and there are definite downsides to it, believe me), I am tenacious. Or maybe stubborn. Very likely both. At many times during this book’s long road to publication there were very good reasons to put it aside forever and say, “Well, I tried.”
There are many costs to writing a book, including opportunity costs—millions of other things you could be doing, including writing other books. I’ll never know what else I could have written in the time I spent writing this one, because I was too stubborn to give up on it. But I do know this: I love this book. I love how it ended up and how it got there. And I hope readers will love it, too.
One More Thing…
As always, I learned a lot while researching this book. Here’s one little factoid that raises all sorts of questions: Of all the pieces of paper US currency in circulation, the most common isn’t the single (14.9 billion) or the twenty (11.1 billion), but the hundred dollar bill. There are 19.2 billion C-notes in circulation, more than any other denomination.
Jon McGoran is the author of ten previous novels for adults and young adults, including the YA science fiction thrillers Spliced, Splintered, and Spiked, the science thrillers Drift, Deadout, and Dust Up, numerous short stories and novellas, and licensed work for The Blacklist, The X-Files, and Zombies vs Robots. A freelance writer, writing teacher, and developmental editor and coach, he lives outside Philadelphia with his wife Elizabeth, a librarian. For more, visit www.jonmcgoran.com
Barry Gray isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, but that hasn’t stopped him from becoming the middle-aged CEO of Atlas Wake, the corporation behind the most addictive energy drink in the world. After an awkward date, Barry is “X-ed”—a fate worse than getting canceled…just days before the company’s biggest beverage launch. The reason? An ancient social media post.
As the Atlas Wake executives scramble to find a replacement for Barry, they stumble upon Lo, a sardonic barista with no social media history. Lo eagerly steps into the CEO role, anticipating stacks of cash, only to be jolted by a shocking discovery about the company’s new energy drink — it’s causing people to explode.
Fearing his new life as a social pariah, Barry is rescued by the Brotherhood of the Resigned, a group of X-ed outcasts hiding in the sewers. They believe Atlas Wake is part of a giant conspiracy in which Lo is now entangled. Stories collide as our crew faces a corporate-dominated world on the brink of destruction in this darkly humorous, dystopian tale of power, deceit, and survival.
THEMES CHANGE
“What if canceled individuals were forced to live underground like mole people?” This was my initial idea for SITUATION NOWHERE, and it made me laugh a lot. I thought maybe I was writing a satire on “cancel culture.” (I know.) But after several chapters, I realized the topic was just the starting gun, an inciting incident.
I’m going to write a sentence that is going to make us all cringe a little bit. But it’s the truth…
The novel started taking a life of its own.
I know! I hate myself for writing that. “Oooh, Bobby, your book started talking to you? HOW PRECIOUS!” But it did! And it turned out the book was annoyed at lots of things! AI art, late-stage capitalism, corporate consumerism, the list goes on!
Sure. I could have told the book to shut up. I had an outline, after all! It should obey me! But I was having too much damn fun writing the thing that I let it take over. No regrets.
AI ART IS NOTHING TO FEAR
Let me not mince words. I believe big tech has slowly, methodically devalued art. The arrival of generative AI only exacerbates the perilous condition we’re in. In my book, all of this is played for maximum absurdity, but in writing it, I realized AI “art” is something I no longer fear. Sure, I still think it’s for losers! Folks who don’t want to put in the work. But I’m not upset about it. No large language model can write how you or I write. (I’m pretty sure LLMS are not ingesting childhood trauma!)
Yes. AI “art” will further decimate the job market for artists, and we’ll need to find a new model that works for us. But AI “art” itself has limited value. Why would anyone pay money for purely synthetic work? It’s the human fingerprints that make art worth enjoying. If anything, human-made art will become more valuable in the age of “AI slop.”
EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE AND FUNNY?
There are plenty of things that keep me up at night. I have existential dread like you wouldn’t believe. But I’ve always found solace in comedy. I wanted my first book to be propulsive and entertaining, a book with things to say! A mystery to unpack!
Most importantly, I wanted it to be funny until the last line—a balm for these chaotic times. I always hoped people would find comfort in the book, but I didn’t realize that writing it would be a much-needed tonic for me. It kept me sane and laughing; sometimes, that’s all one needs to get through this life.
FINDING TIME TO WRITE SAVED MY SOUL.
I became a dad during the pandemic. At the time, I had no idea what the future held. I had directed two feature films and wondered if I would ever direct again. In this creative void, short stories began to pour out of me, eventually coalescing around this novel. I ultimately had to return to office, and my free time drastically shrank. Before the pandemic, before becoming a dad, I could get by finding jobs that could work around my writing schedule. But now it was different. I had to find the time.
I decided the only way was to wake up extremely early. Before the family was up before the day job started…If I could just squirrel away one hour, I could quickly write a first draft and chip away at this thing. (At night, I would edit.) Eventually, piece by piece, the book came together. Was it easy? No. But it is possible. I would argue that having limited time zeroed in my attention. There was no scrolling on social media and no wasted time. I had my hour, and I was flying. And brother, it was fantastic. To have this secret thing while the world seemed on fire. It was a blessing and saved my artistic soul.
CHASING TRENDS NEVER WORKED FOR ME
In the film business, I was fortunate to direct something I wrote. But after that initial success, I began chasing trends. Writing screenplays that weren’t me. I wanted to make a living! The great irony is that the only work that has gotten me any attention has been deeply felt idiosyncratic weirdness. I viewed the pandemic and fatherhood as the great reset button. There was no more time for chasing what I thought people wanted. I needed to listen to my gut.
I also wanted to hold myself accountable. On a film set, you can point blame at myriads of things that can go wrong. “If only we had three more days to shoot,” etc. I was tired of pointing fingers! I wanted to write something that I was solely responsible for. Something I could be confident in saying, “This is me!”
I needed to get out a big scattershot satire with tons of goop. For better or for worse, that’s me. I loved writing it. It saved my life. And now it’s your problem.
Bobby Miller is a writer and filmmaker from New Jersey who lives in Los Angeles. His films have premiered at Sundance, SXSW, and Fantasia. His fiction has appeared in Maudlin House, Expat Press, and Bending Genres. SITUATION NOWHERE is his debut novel.
When I was in college in North Carolina, I flew home to Pennsylvania for the holidays. My mother and father were going through a divorce at that point (a divorce that should’ve happened many years before), and so my father had decided I had to spend my holiday weekend staying with him, not her, and given that he was paying for the plane ticket and such, I agreed. He was supposed to pick me up from the airport, but he didn’t.
His friend did. A guy I had maybe met once or twice before. I met him, went to his car, and once on the road this guy, a relative stranger, gave me shit because he was trying to hit on flight attendants in the airport and I “interrupted” him getting laid at the airport. (Note, this is pre-9/11, when you could just free range it through the airport even if you didn’t have a flight. And I guess this guy was thinking he could Get Some at the Airport Applebees counter, or some shit.)
When he told me this, I smelled the alcohol on his breath. And then I noticed his driving was, ahhh, not good. I realized he’d been in the airport, not just hitting on flight staff, but drinking. He was drunk. I was in a car with a drunk driver. And at that point, my options were minimal. Wrestling control of the car away from him would’ve probably crashed us. And he was certainly trying to crash us anyway, weaving in and out of traffic. Best I could do was buckle the fuck up and try to be calm enough so as not to rile this guy, who seemed like he was not the most stable individual.
Living here in America right now feels like that time.
Stuck riding shotgun in a car with a drunk driver.
It’s hard to focus. It’s hard to focus on the things in front of me, that I need to do. It’s hard to focus on the news, because it’s not just one thing, it’s a hundred things, news like fire ants, like you stepped on their mound and here they are, swarming, and each ant feels meaningless in the context of all these angry fucking ants. Looking at my phone or computer or any connected device feels like tonguing a broken tooth–an electric jolt of pain but one that feels paradoxically satisfying, like if I poke the bad tooth, maybe I’m fixing it, maybe poking it makes it fall out and the pain will go away. Which I know is fucking stupid so then I stop doing it — stop looking at the phone, stop poking the tooth. But there’s a little rat scratching in the back of my head and it makes me wonder, what are you missing, what aren’t you seeing, remain vigilant, constant vigilance, there’s a great wave coming, a wall of fire, a meteor, a swarm of wasps, better look, better click, and then I look, and am rewarded. By some definition of that word, “rewarded.” My anxiety is rewarded because things are bad, and things are happening constantly. You take three hours off your Diligent Watch, twenty horrible things have happened. ICE stole your mother. Trump threw the fact-checkers in a pit. DOGE fired all the people who watch for plane crashes and tornadoes and pathogens in your food. Elon Musk smuggled a xenomorph aboard a SpaceX flight. RFK Jr is hiding a zombie bite. It’s all happening. It’s all coming for you all the time always.
It’s hard to have hope. Hope is a thing with wings, the poet lady said, but its wings have been clipped and it thrashes on the ground looking for a way to get up, get out, go go go, but it can’t, so there it is, in the dirt, thrashing.
Hope persists, though. Hope maybe isn’t the thing with wings but hope is the stubborn green thing, its stem-and-leaf pushing up through what seems to be limitless concrete. It finds a breach and it pushes. Pushes and pushes. Grows and grows. Hoping no one steps on it or sprays it with weed-killer.
Sometimes you kinda forget. That it’s all happening. Okay, maybe you don’t forget, not exactly, but it drifts to the back of your mind where you can’t hear the chimpanzee screams and the clamor and the banging of drums. And in those moments, normalcy occurs, unbidden, uninvited. A gentle soft settling into an old feeling, life like a nice pair of sweatpants. Family dinner, a funny show, birdsong. Some emotionally-dysregulating version of Severance: your innie descends into the chaos mines, reading the news, feeling the fear, making plans, enduring calamity. Your outie makes dinner and tells jokes and dances to the playlist you built. Then the phone lights up, the elevator ding, and the innie rushes back in to see how flu and measles have combined to form the superbug, flusles, or how all the turtles are dead now.
You know there’s ice cream and you know you shouldn’t eat it because a part of you desires to be in better shape. When the Secret Police come for you, you’re gonna have to run, and you can’t do that with a Body by Jeni’s, no, no, you must be lean protein, a gazelle to flee their nets, but also, it’s ice cream, and you crave joy, some joy, any joy, and who knows, we might not even have ice cream in a year, they’ll outlaw it, or tariff it so it costs $50 a pint, or your flavor choices will be Listeria or Ivermectin, so you say fuck it, and you eat the ice cream. Each spoonful is a little vacation. But later you feel bad and you wonder if the trade-off for joy was worth it when they catch you and throw you in the SuperDoom prison they built on the fucking moon.
Yesterday I saw a bag of chips at the store that was $14.99. Beef tallow potato chips. This wasn’t Erewhon. The bag of chips was small. Things are stupid.
Maybe it’s like turbulence on an airplane, you think. Just a bumpy unpleasant awful experience you gotta get through. But when turbulence hits it’s not because the pilot is a guy who doesn’t “know planes,” when turbulence hits they don’t disappear the ninth row people out the airlock because they “look different” and are “probably causing the problem.” Planes don’t have airlocks, do they? Whatever. My brain is spray cheese.
Maybe it’s a vaccine, you think. Maybe we need this ugly dose of What Can Be in order to avoid What Could Come. Then again we had four years of it the first time and somehow, immunity didn’t take. Maybe we fucked that up and now it’s a drug-resistant socio-political superbug. Or maybe the medical metaphor is wrong and the dude is just the antichrist. I wasn’t religious before but he’s enough to make me believe.
Maybe it’s good to look to history, you think. History goes in cycles. This is not the first Very Stupid Very Bad Time in history, and it will not be the last. Yet humanity continues on. A comfort! Then you think, yeah maybe it shouldn’t have because we seem incapable of learning from history. Sure, reading history is fascinating. But living it fucking sucks. The lesson is, we didn’t learn the lesson. The fuck do we do with that?
Sometimes I think it’s climate change. That we’ve boiled the planet thanks to capitalism and it’s boiled our brains. And our brains are already a soggy dish sponge full of lead and microplastics anyway.
Late-stage capitalism is fun to say until you realize it’s the same thing, mostly, as late-stage cancer. A disease that has progressed so far you can’t stop it now, you can just ride it out and find peace before *fart noise*
Yeah, it’s like being a passenger in a drunk driver’s car. It’s also like working in an office building where new management just took over, and they’re a bunch of old braindeads and young dipshits and all of them are running around with sledgehammers and cartoon bundles of dynamite, knocking down load-bearing walls because “it’ll open the place up.” You think you ought to go work somewhere else but they also took over those buildings, too. They’re everywhere now, like termites.
It does feel really stupid. It’s callous and it’s evil and it’s craven but it’s also very, very stupid. Clown-show, clown-shoe, clown-shit stupid. It’s like, at least once a day I’m all, these guys? THESE guys? THIS is what’s happening, and THESE fucking guys are doing it? Are you fucking kidding me? You couldn’t write this as fiction. It’d be too on-the-nose. Satire written by a concussed eight-year-old. Reality written by ChatGPT.
Writing is hard right now. Releasing a book is hard. Promoting that book is, say it with me, hard. It’s not trivial but it feels trivial. Like performing a puppet show in the town square as the town burns down. It feels good to do it and you want others to feel good while reading it but you also know feeling good right now also feels somehow bad, and maybe that’s one of the most fucked up things of all. They didn’t take joy but they took the joy of feeling joy away, made it feel wrong and strange. Turned happiness into a hot stove.
Still, I write. I gotta write. Pay the bills but also because it’s an escape in its way. I like to say it’s an act of resistance, and maybe it is, because they certainly don’t want me or you or anybody doing it. They want to censor and steal and feed it all into the wood chipper of AI so it can sloppily spill all that artbarf out onto the floor and then they hire us back at half-rate or less, so we become the ones not making the art but instead scooping up the artbarf and pushing it into some kind of shape, some kind of digital particleboard. Like Dreyfuss in Close Encounters, smooshing his mashed potatoes into the shape of a mountain. This means something. But it doesn’t mean anything.
Sometimes it feels like the pandemic. But that was better, in a lot of ways. Because we were all together in it, at least at first. Singing for health staff and staying home and whispering sweet nothings to our collective sourdough starter. But then we stopped singing and we politicized staying safe and we stopped feeding our sourdough starters and now the ghosts of those sourdough starters are really fucking pissed at us. Honestly maybe they’re the ones doing this to us. Maybe we stopped tending them and then they died and now they’re seeking revenge on us. Maybe this is a metaphor for democracy. We should’ve tended our democracy yeast goo better.
One weird thing that gives me hope, real hope, is that for the last eight-plus years, I could drive around this area and I knew, I knew there were houses that you could count on to have all the TRUMP SHIT out. The banners and flags and crazy-person signs and rah-rah-rah, Dear Leader, Dear Leader. I drive around now and those houses, almost all of them, have taken down their Dear Leader shit. Maybe it’s because they know it’s not popular but I think for some of them it’s because they’re finally starting to see. Eight years of cult propaganda on their lawns, gone. I drove up through Pennsyltucky last weekend, a good hour’s drive, a drive I’ve made before. And I knew I was going to see a lot of gloaty-bloaty Trump shit on their lawns, porches, houses. I saw one. One house with signs out. The house was condemned. Half of it, falling down. Junk all over the lawn. Nobody lived there anymore, by the look of it. And even if they did, they didn’t.
It’s that. It’s the protests, too. Big protests. Just getting started. People are mad. Big mad. There’s a feral Philadelphia energy afoot. I do like it.
So that’s where I get hope. People are waking up. They should’ve woke the fuck up a while ago, but we started to pretend woke, being awake, was a bad thing, when it’s really the most important thing.
Onward we go. Upward, we hope, but let’s remember, the wings are clipped. So it’s probably flat or even downward for awhile. Sometimes sharp drops, other times a spiral. Like a flushing toilet.
The postscript to the drunk driver holiday story is, I got back to the house alive, the driver managing to keep on the road. My father was at home, also drunk. Probably too drunk to have picked me up. We had a bad, bad couple days after that. And before Christmas I fucked off out of there, wrote him a note that said fuck you, I was gone, and he could do whatever he wanted to do with that, cancel my plane ticket or cut me out of the will or whatever. At the end of the trip, he called me and told me he’d take me to the airport. He was nice in the car. Not drunk. Told me how bad drunk driving was and I should never do it — after all, my sister had been hit by a drunk driver a few years before, and it fucked up her leg permanently. He told me this with what seemed to be no awareness that he had sent a friend to pick me up drunk, but I also knew he was telling me it because he damn well knew he had sent someone to pick me up drunk. Sometimes we learn lessons, other times we don’t learn shit and stuff just happens, but we pretend we had it figured out all along and we hope everyone just forgets.
