Today, I’m talking to , editor of The Arcanist Fantasy Publishing, one of the hosts of Rogues in the House podcast, and author of numerous books and short stories. We’re talking about his current crowdfunding campaign which is in its final 40 hours, so go check it out now! They’ve nearly quadrupled their funding goal so now is the perfect time to kick them over the edge of the next two stretch goals!

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Letters from the Arcanist

A Feast for Pan

Greetings traveler…

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5 months ago · 10 likes · 1 comment · James D. Mills

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But instead we’re going to talk about Kpop.

While driving somewhere with my son the other day, we were listening to the top 40 station and a song by BTS came on. This was interesting to me because I had just written a long piece about KPOP Demon Hunter.

Hearing KPop on the American top 40 surprised me, but it also surprised me that it was BTS, who were famous in Korea back in 2011 when I lived there. For all I know, BTS has become more of a brand than a band and all the current members are different from the ones my students listened to fifteen years ago, but it interested me. Perhaps most curious is that the entire song was in English.

Now, I could do my normal thing of analyzing lyrics but who cares. It’s a mostly bad pop song that sounds like a million other bad songs produced in the US and UK by singers and song and dance groups I’m too old to recognize. It’s actually somewhat remarkable how uniform so much of the top 40s sounds to me, which is largely an indication of my age and not necessarily an indictment of the music—though, come on—and this would hardly be worth commenting on except for this nagging little fact:

BTS is Korean.

This is a Kpop song.

It seems very clear to me that the Kpop industry is heavily targeting American audiences. This isn’t a new thing. Any smaller music industry will always target a bigger one, and the US is the market that will turn you into a global star. That means more money and fame and prestige.

But I do think this is just depressing. Korea is an old culture. Thousands of years older than the US or even England. I would be more interested to hear music from Korea that doesn’t sound like it was produced in California or Sweden, to be honest.

The Beatles or other UK artists making it big in America does feel much more normal, if only because we have a shared language and mostly quite similar cultures. When a UK band comes out with an Americana sound—like Mumford and Sons—it doesn’t really cause waves or feel any different than an American writing a successful King Arthur novel.

And someone will probably argue that Kpop is distinctly Korean, that it’s more inspired by Cantopop and Jpop than it is by N’SYNC or Ariana Grande, but I do, in fact, have ears in my head. So while you might be able to make the case that Kpop is more Jpop’s daughter than anything else, that still makes it American pop’s granddaughter.

And maybe this is all quite anti-globalist or anti-multicultural of me, but I would disagree. Like I said, I’d much rather hear Korean music that isn’t so heavily American. I may not like it, but I would find it more interesting.

It’s why I think Tōru Takemitsu is a more interesting composer than Joe Hisaishi, even if I’d much rather listen to Hisaishi. It’s why I fell in love with Yasunari Kawabata and still find him infinitely more fascinating than Haruki Murakami or even Yukio Mishima, though those two authors have much wider appeal.

And so while I have nothing against BTS—though someone ought to write about the brutality of the Kpop industry1—or the American and Korean children who love their music, I do think it is music calculated and designed specifically for Americans, even more than it is for Koreans.

Which is weird and while it may or may not be a sign of decaying American cultural hegemony, I also think it’s bad for Korea and Korean art for almost the exact same reasons.

But I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing for a while, which is why I wrote about Kpop Demon Hunters at all but also why I wrote about Undertale.

When I stumbled across Hideaki Anno saying that anime should focus on the Japanese audience at the expense of the rest of the world, I felt it in my bones.

I personally never made anything with the overseas audience in mind. I can only make domestic stuff. Production companies are quick to say Think about the overseas market, but personally, that’s not my goal.

…

My stance is simply – it first needs to be a work that will be well received and found interesting in Japan, but if by any chance people overseas also found it interesting, I’d be grateful for that.

…

Works that are made through a Japanese thought process can only be understood in Japanese. Film has both visual and sound elements, so compared to other forms of storytelling, the language barrier is not that. However, lines in the script are still in Japanese, and the drama is achieved through the thoughts and feelings the characters experience in Japanese.

While I think art actually tends to transcend culture and language, I do understand his point and largely agree with him. The universal is in the specific. When you make art for one single person, you often find that there are millions of others just like her. By making art for that one person, you discover that millions of others connect to it deeply. They feel as if you made it specifically for them.

And, in a way, I suppose you did.

And so a work that is deeply Japanese or deeply American or deeply Moroccan will often resonate through people around the globe. It’s why Shakespeare is adapted not only in the anglophone world but also in places like Japan, where some of the best Shakespeare adaptations of all time have been made.

Jane Austen, for example, was writing to a very particular audience at a very particular time and place, but in doing so the world found a voice that spoke to them. Many of her eventual readers were not the daughters of landlords in England, but that hardly mattered. While she captured a very specific moment in time, this has rippled through the last two centuries and remains impactful and resonant to people in 2026.

I think of this with regard to something Yoshiuuki Tomino, the creator of Gundam, said.

Even among Gundam fans, there are many who make statements that are a far cry from anti-war. They seem to be stuck in the mindset of mere military geeks, and in the end, perhaps nothing of substance is getting across

…

The words that come out of [Gundam fans’] mouths are, Mobile Suit battles are so cool. Nowadays, younger creators are making Gundam, but there’s no hint of war experience in what they make, they’re just picture stories. That is my responsibility for not having taught them.

And so we run into the tension between artists and audiences, intention and consumption. You make art to resonate, to tell a very specific story in a very specific context and you’ll find that people you never even imagined—I doubt Shakespeare ever thought about Japan, if he even was aware it existed, but three and a half centuries after his death, a Japanese filmmaker made the best adaptations of his plays—fall in love with it, make it a part of their lives and identities.

But this also means that people who completely misunderstand you and your work may come to love it. It’s how Gundam, an anti-war work if ever there was one, becomes beloved by military enthusiasts who just think it looks cool as all hell2.

And so I find myself asking, often, who is this for?

Not the BTS song or Anno or Gundam. Who is art for? Who does all this belong to?

And why do we make it at all.

For there is nothing more human than making art. Whether that’s knitting or drawing or cooking or making a home movie or song or book. We make art because it’s fun, because we must. When you invent a story to tell your child because they tell you they want you to tell them a story, you’re making art.

Art for one person. Art that your child may forget. That you may forget. But it is art all the same. Art that matters. Art that makes life worth living.

To me, art is for everyone. Even the idiots. Even those who will never understand it.

But I think back to Toby Fox not doing an official translation to any language besides Japanese and how that made people furious with him, calling him racist and so on. I think of BTS making music in English for an English speaking audience. I think of Evangelion and Gundam being made specifically for a Japanese audience, despite the pressure to globalize their appeal.

Because the obvious result of trying to appeal to a global audience is something like a Marvel movie or this BTS song at the top of this essay.

I find nothing human in it. Find nothing interesting in it. I don’t see artists working a craft or wrestling with expression, with form and structure. I see a vast apparatus of moneyed interest behind it that’s really only in it for the money to be generated.

Art by ROI analysis.

And to make that Kpop hit, you put a bunch of young aspiring singers and dancers through a grinder where they’re forced to get plastic surgeries, where every inch and pound of their body is analyzed and regulated, where after all of that they might end up with nothing, not even the temporary fame of a one hit wonder.

I think about how young successful SFF writers get recruited by Disney to write Spiderman or Black Panther comics. I think about how young filmmakers dream of making a Batman or Star Wars movie instead of something of their own creation.

Like a thousand dying stars exploding into the vast chasmic silence.

But there is a light. You see it when a child hums idly. Not a pop song, but some nonsense melody of their own making that they will forget the moment it’s out of their lungs, that never meant anything but the simple pleasure of momentarily making it.

It is a light.

It is a fire.

Inside us. Burning ever on.

Today, I’m talking to Jonathan Olfert about his upcoming novel Seers in a Broken Season! The novel will be published by Old Moon Publishing, where you can find previous stories following Walks-like-a-Rockslide.

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Today, I’m talking to , editor, writer, and filmmaker about his epic poem The Fallujiad, which is serializing on substack. He is also the editor of Futurist Letters.

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Check out eddy’s novels.

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Richard Wagner built Bayreuth Festspielhaus specifically to stage his own operas. This was highly unusual at the time and remains one of a kind but he was so dissatisfied with the existing opera houses in Europe because they were not equipped to contain his vision. With wealthy backing of a king who would eventually drown in a foot of water, he designed his opera house solely for his operas to be seen in all their glory.

It is still in operation and people can go see the operas performed there.

Or, well, in theory they can. The tickets are notoriously difficult to get. For a century, they were effectively handed down through generations of families.

Wagner was a maximalist in every conceivable meaning of the word. He was also one of the true artistic geniuses of the 19th century. His staggering vision lifted and carried opera, stage performance, and literature forward, influencing generations of musicians and writers and philosophers, leading all the way to the movies, which we all cherish so very much.

Nolan, the man who hates myths

After Christopher Nolan announced he was adapting The Odyssey, I wrote a bit about translations of The Odyssey.

I said, at the time, that I could not think of a worse person to direct an ancient poem but here we are eighteen months later, the movie about to be released, already having received rave reviews from critics and a mass cancelation campaign by rightwing internet trolls.

I found it very funny that all these rightwing people were canceling a movie they hadn’t seen but part of the humor, to me, was that I knew all of these people would go see the movie and talk about how it’s the best of the year, acting as if they had not spent months typing apoplectically about wokeness and all that.

I’ll say it now here in bold so people can come yell at me later if I’m wrong (I won’t be):

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey will make a billion dollars at the box office, be nominated for 10 Academy Awards, and win at least two.

It will be a massive success with fans and critics and this controversy will slip through our collective memories like it never happened, and those who drummed up anger over the casting, the alleged translation Nolan used, the aesthetics of the costuming, the decision to shoot in IMAX, will all either quietly love the movie or become champions of it.

And because everyone has a goldfish memory, it won’t matter. You can hate something on Thursday and love it on Saturday and no one will care, and because all of these people are ducklings following their mother by the tail feathers, they won’t even think of themselves as having changed their mind.

I am not particularly interested in seeing it. I’ll say that right here near the start of this. I’m not against seeing it and suspect I may end up seeing it if my friends ask me to because I like movies, even if I don’t necessarily love Nolan’s movies.

I do remain convinced that he is the wrong person for this movie but I do quite like that he is at a point in his career where he can do whatever he wants with whatever budget he wants.

It has turned him towards maximalism, which I find interesting, though his specific form of maximalism has to do with technical aspects of filmmaking, which only feel innovative because everyone now just relies on CGI to duct tape their movies together.

The Controversies

Where to even begin with such nonsense.

First, it was the casting. Helen of Troy can’t be black, for example. They made Achilles trans, for another. Never mind that, at the time, neither casting was confirmed and, as it turns out, not only is Achilles not trans or played by a trans actor, he’s not even in the movie.

Which shouldn’t be that surprising. While Achilles is in the poem, he has a very minor roll, depending on who you ask.

Then it was the translation, because now all these online culture warriors tweeting for 12 hours a day suddenly had very strong opinions about Ancient Greek translation, never mind that, once again, there was no evidence about which translation Nolan used to inform the script.

Then there was the historical accuracy. Of a mythological poem about mythological characters. That doesn’t mean you can’t strive for historical accuracy or authenticity. Certain King Arthur adaptations have aimed to capture 5th Century Britain, which is when the mythohistorical Arthur would have been alive. A very valid decision to be made, though most of us know Arthur and his knights as riding horses in a very 11th or 14th Century manner.

And so when visual information got dripfed to the public, the first response should have been, Nolan is making an artistic interpretation rather than a historical recreation, but it’s harder to get mad about that on the internet. Harder to write thinkpieces or make videos about how Nolan is bowing down to woke Hollywood.

The most recent controversy has to do with aspect ratio and IMAX.

All of these controversies are met by the response: This is his artistic vision for this adaptation. He is not recreating a poem from nearly 3,000 years ago but interpreting it for film, for a modern audience, to satisfy his own artistic vision.

How unsatisfying to hear for the culture warriors! No, it must be some political agenda!

It’s both so odd and utterly predictable, but I am curious why Christopher Nolan has come under fire from these types. To put it mildly, Nolan is not some outspoken leftist. The Dark Knight Rises is one of the more reactionary movies I’ve seen in theatres. Even The Dark Knight tacitly justifies the NSA’s illegal wiretapping seven years before Edward Snowden revealed the breadth and depth of our government’s information dragnet.

I’ve always had the sense that Nolan basically appealed to rightwingers as much as he does to liberals so it was a surprise that this movie, of all possible movies, would lead to this reaction from the rightwing influencer biosphere.

It all seems so manufactured, all the lines prewritten by some thinktank and distributed to accounts large and small across twitter and youtube and anywhere else people might congregate online.

But why?

To what purpose?

I’ve heard it said that Elon Musk made a big stink about it, and maybe that’s enough to explain why. But perhaps it’s even simpler than some coordinated campaign by the Heritage Foundation or the richest man on earth.

A few years ago, I wrote about the money to be made from anger and I think it applies well here, though there’s one recent innovation to all this.

You can literally make money on twitter through engagement if you pay for a verified account.

Any engagement. Positive or negative.

Tweeting something factually incorrect may put money into your bank account because people will rush to correct you in the comments or call you an idiot or quote tweet you to tell everyone how wrong you are.

All of this is putting money into your pocket.

On Tiktok, I’m told that one algorithmic hack for your videos is to say something that is obviously incorrect in the first three seconds of your video because the algorithm responds positively to comments. So if you post something obviously wrong, you may quickly get dozens of people in your comments correcting you, which drives your video to even more people who may correct you which drives your video to still more people and you can ride this wave of performed ignorance to ever increasing numbers of views.

But better than simply saying something provably or obviously wrong, you could get people arguing. And that, well, that’s the real secret sauce right there.

And so rather than just lie about Nolan’s The Odyssey, you could instead try to drum up anger about it. Why Nolan specifically? Well, he’s one of the biggest names in Hollywood and his movies are some of the most successful of the last generation. In an increasingly fragmented culture, he’s someone that everyone is familiar with. Everyone has an opinion about him and has probably seen at least one of his movies.

You could make a bunch of posts about how it’s cultural appropriation or cultural erasure to cast a black woman as Helen of Troy. This will lead to a certain amount of people to yell at you for bigotry but it will also lead to a certain amount of people to agree with you and, still better, it will get these two camps fighting one another in your comments.

You build a rocketship of anger, of controversy, and that blast you off to a mountain of money on Mars. You may get a thousand or tens of thousands or even millions of views on your verified tweet, which quite literally puts money into your bank account.

So you do it again. And again. And other people are playing the same game. Thousands of accounts are playing this game, making money on hate and anger and spite and they’re all paying their rent or their mortgage with every person who joins in the argument.

Every time you dunk on them or correct them or fight with them, you are paying for them to keep going.

It is probably a miserable way to live your life, spending your whole day starting arguments online, but the incentives are there.

In this way, you no longer need a culture war astroturfed by billionaires or political operatives (though let’s not rule it out). You just need to monetarily reward people for being the worst, most vile version of themselves.

Because remember: not a single one of these culture warriors has even seen the movie or the script for the movie.

The Vision

But let us return to Nolan, leaving the controversies behind.

As I said near the top, I’m not so much a Nolan fan. I do quite like some of his movies, but he’s really just not for me. Having said that, I think Nolan is very good at the things he does, just like I think Tarantino and Lynch are very good at what they do and did. I just don’t care much for it.

But I am very happy that someone like Christopher Nolan exists in Hollywood right now. In a time where everything is a remake or a superhero movie or belonging to some kind of IP, Nolan is given huge budgets to make original movies that earn out their budget and then some.

This is good. It’s cool. I wish more filmmakers were able to get the same chances and the same budgets.

Of course, Nolan paid his dues. He did the Batman movies and proved he could make a billion dollars out of a big budget. This allowed him to make Inception. That was such a massive success that he has essentially been able to do whatever he wanted since, so long as it makes a lot of money.

And, god bless him, so far he’s succeeded.

He’s the rare artist working now who is critically acclaimed and commercially successful. He delivers crowdpleasing blockbusters that have enough clarity of vision to be considered great by even the snootiest of English language critics, making him a winner of numerous awards, including Oscars and BFI Awards.

And so while I might gripe about the casting of his Odyssey, (I think nearly everyone in the cast, excepting Anne Hathaway, is too old for their role) and you might complain about the costuming, or the fact that the actors use American accents instead of British ones (if this bothers you, grow up, you stupid baby), I think there’s no reason to believe it has anything to do with culture war or wokeness or whatever other culture war angle you can dream up.

This is his vision for The Odyssey. I would have made many different decisions, but no one handed me a few million dollars to make this movie. And once we all see his vision in the context of the movie, we can judge the merits of his artistic decisions.

Finally, this leads me to the IMAX of it all.

The movie has been shot on IMAX and will really only truly be seen in Nolan’s true vision on an IMAX screen. On the website for The Odyssey you can play with the aspect ratio to see how the film looks on different screens. I think this was done specifically to drive you to see the movie in an IMAX theatre.

The cynic in me thinks this was done to juice the numbers, as the kids say, to get to a billion dollars faster by forcing you to buy a much more expensive ticket.

It reminds me of when Avatar came out and part of the draw was the technology of it all. Seeing it in IMAX 3D was a unique way to see the movie that could not be replicated anywhere else. And it worked! That terrible movie made buckets of money because of the technological curiosity of it.

More generously, Nolan has made it a not so insignificant mission of his career to revive the theatre experience. He wants you to see his movies in theatres and one way to sort of twist your arm is to show you what you’ll be missing by seeing it at home.

But because true 70mm IMAX theatres are rare, this has led to some calling it elitist or classist for him to film the movie in IMAX to which my response is a resounding so what?

I return to Richard Wagner. You can only see his Ring Cycle in one opera house on the planet and the likelihood of you ever getting a ticket is effectively zero and if you do happen to get a ticket remember that the whole thing is in German, which only about 100 million people on the planet speak.

Yes, it is a great disservice to Wagner to compare him to Nolan, but the point is the same.

Not all art needs to be for everyone. Sometimes great vision requires exclusivity.

And so most of us—myself included—will not even be able to see the movie the way Nolan intended.

Such is life.

You can only see the Mona Lisa in one city on the planet, usually crowded by dozens of people raising their phones in the air to take pictures. If you want to peacefully sit with the most famous painting in history, it is no longer possible. The only way for you to experience it is surrounded by a mob of people like you trying to get a shitty iPhone picture of it through the protective glass that you probably will never look at again and probably won’t even show anyone.

The only way to see the Sistine Chapel or any cathedral on earth is to physically go there and stare upon it, walk into it. Grand works of art that sometimes took generations of people to build and your access to it is largely driven by the geography of where you were born.

At the same time, assuming Nolan took no care in the framing of the movie for what we plebians will see is just stupid. This is a big budget Hollywood movie. His studio wants this to make a billion dollars, and Nolan is a commercial artist making big budget movies for general audiences. This isn’t an arthouse movie that will premier at Cannes and then get a two week theatrical run in New York before being dumped onto the Criterion Channel.

You may not be able to see the movie the way Nolan intended, but you will see a version of Nolan’s vision that he did design.

The thing that shocks me the most about filming this all in IMAX is that apparently an IMAX camera can only shoot three minutes of film at a time, that it is insanely loud and so must be contained in a big blimp which physically gets in the way of blocking and choreography to the degree that Anne Hathaway described an elaborate set of mirrors used so she and Tom Holland could see one another in their scenes.

This is a much bigger knock against filming in IMAX to me. I suspect this will have serious impacts on the acting, the direction, and I think that will harm the movie and even the vision more than any casting or costuming.

But this is his vision. He must live or die by it.

For we cannot all be Richard Wagner, eternally earning his opera house.

Today I’m talking to , the designer behind Cloud Empress. Cloud Empress is a beautiful and fascinating world and game inspired by both Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind but also the landscape of the Midwest. We talk about crowdfunding, game design, writing, and so much more. This is the longest episode yet!

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And Kyle’s novels.

After my twenty fourth birthday, I furiously wrote out a novel called To Live over the course of two weeks. These were days where I spent every waking moment that I wasn’t at work writing this novel. Some days, I wrote over ten thousand words, and at the end of this two week sprint, utterly exhausted and spent, I had an 80,000 word novel. Over the following week or two, I added another 20,000 words to it.

My fifth novel and, perhaps, the one deepest at the root of who I am. It was published as my second novel way back in 2014 and people could not have cared less about it.

It was a novel about staying alive. About not giving in, even when all you wanted was to die.

Several phrases chorused through the novel but an important one was kicking and screaming, this furious fight for life, to live.

To Live.

It’s a novel that has haunted me for these last twelve years. It was experimental and dense, linguistically confrontational. It was a novel written as a fistfight between me and the reader. And so perhaps it should have been no surprise that it failed utterly, but it remains one of my favorite things I’ve ever written.

I put it out of print in 2016, I believe. Maybe 2018. Who remembers.

The name of the novel had to change when it was published by a midsized publisher in the UK and so it became Twilight of the Wolves, an evocative title that has always sat somewhat uneasily in my head.

Over the years, I’ve toyed with rewriting it. With cleaning up the language to make it easier to read, easier to follow, but one shower in the middle of last year unlocked it for me. What this meant, though, is that instead of a simple rewrite to make the novel more approachable, I needed to explode and reinvent the novel.

And so that’s what I began doing. I’ve been writing about the process at my other site. Over the course of a few months last year, I turned the first 4,000 words of that original novel into about 120,000 words. I suspect there are about 500,000 more words to write in the novel.

Though it is transforming from the bones outward, it remains a novel about staying alive. Choosing to live.

I was sixteen when I first heard Cursive’s The Ugly Organ. It did not become my favorite album on first listen. It barely even registered as I was the kind of sixteen year old—like so many are—who was obsessed with music, with finding new music, with swallowing whole albums and gluttonously demanding still more. But I was drawn to the fact that this was a concept album telling a complete story about characters. It played with fairytales, with love and longing, with loss and dying.

If such an album can be said to have a breakout hit, it was the song The Recluse. It, at least, had a music video.

This video and song were my introduction to Cursive.

Tim Kasher’s hushed vocals, the way jangling guitars play against a goddamn cello swirled within me and opened up something I’d never considered.

How many postrock/punk bands have a cello!

I was a classical music kid. This wasn’t something forced on me by my parents or adults, but it was one of the only things that helped me finally fall asleep every night. I’d turn on the classical music station on the radio and listen for hours until, at last, I was able to sleep. What I found there was the sound of my own heart.

Violins and cellos, piano keys.

And so for this reason, Cursive always stuck out to me, even if I didn’t often find myself putting their album on when I drove my car to school or work, when I took long walks or smoked cigarettes or lay in my bed and staring at the wall, the ceiling.

Every few months, I’d remember them, though, and while I mostly listened to The Recluse because of the way it so perfectly captured the kind of longing and lamenting that I sought, I’d also put on the whole album and listen from start to finish.

And while I’d like to go through the album song by song, moment by moment, lyric by lyric, that might get a bit out of hand. There are, though, a few things to know about the album, I think.

Tim Kasher doesn’t have a good voice, but his voice is perfect for the kind of music he makes and writes. His shouting, the caustic way he plays guitar, fighting against Gretta Cohn’s cello, but also the way his voice mellows.

There’s a lot of Built to Spill and The Pixies in Cursive. The elliptical song structures, the way he uses volume, but then there are also more classical structures from, well, classical music but also pop music.

A song like A Gentleman Caller begins like a postrock assault of distortion and Kasher’s acrimonious shouting, the accusation but also the longing.

A story about telling a woman that her man is cheating on her leads to our narrator hopping into bed with her. The instruments distort and fight against one another leading to a haze of discordance, of static shivering up and down your spine.

Caustic, abrasive, full of accusations and anger, frustration. For we have all loved someone who didn’t love us back, who loved another who we thought was unworthy. It roils within us, souring every interaction, filling us with bile and words we hold back, keep inside to fester and flower into either sorrow or hatred.

Do you know the structure of emotion? Can you hear the aural shape of it?

When the violins and cellos arrive in a movie at the emotional apex, the sound design of the narrative is working on you. Sometimes you find yourself crying because of the song, the way the piano hits your eardrum, the way the violins saw through your heart. When synthesizers rise in a cyberpunk movie, causing every hair to stand on end as our protagonists rush into the sunlight or darkness, it is sound design holding your heart, creating the texture of emotions in your skin, vibrating down through your bones.

A Gentleman Caller is a perfect example of this. The song rips and roars and rushes through all the bad decisions that lead to a one night stand, to cheating on her boyfriend, but then, upon waking, her mind clear of the drugs and alcohol, she finds only the shape of what she’s done. The man beside her who is not her man. The narrator, too, finds what he has done, roiling in shame and embarrassment. His desire falling to pieces, no longer all he wanted or needed.

Distortion falls away and we’re left with the quiet of our actions.

After the sonic assault, the music falls away and we’re left only with the cello, Kasher’s voice dropping low and singing slow instead of yelling fast.

The cello leads us on joined by drums and bass and guitar and our narrator emptying out the song with doo-do doo-do doo-do doo-dos until even his voice gives out and we’re left with that caressing cello.

I’ve been thinking about this album again because I’ve been thinking about my old novel again, the one I’m rewriting. After dropping my kids off at daycare, I put on Staying Alive by Cursive again, hoping for a bit of nostalgia, to be reminded of who and what I once was, how a song became a sensation and I unfurled that sensation over four hundred pages fifteen years ago.

Art hits you differently when you’re young. It burns you. Shapes you. A song can consume you. A single line can take over your personality. A poem can break you. Seven words can make you fall in love. Hopeless and wholly. Ten words can turn you to dust, to nothing, to a memory.

It took three words to break me.

The song begins far away. Just touches of sliding guitar and the gentle thrum. Down the hall, barely heard, the guitars begin and seem to echo even as you’re hearing them for the first time. They don’t come closer until the cello arrives.

It wraps round you in a gentle, comforting embrace. Holds you close as the rest of the instruments step closer and closer, giving shape and texture to this auralscape while you bathe in cello.

And then Tim Kasher sings, gently, nearly two minutes into the song.

I’ve decided tonight I’m staying alive.

Six words hit me thunderously, but not when I first heard them at sixteen. I was, at the time, too in love with my sorrow, enamored with my own pain, torturing myself and believing in that torture, believing I needed to hurt, to writhe in anguish for my words to ever matter, to ever mean a thing.

I was too young to know.

They did not hit me at eighteen or twenty, but instead when I was twenty three, living on another continent after abandoning my previous life.

I’ve decided tonight I’m staying alive.

Six words to leave me breathless.

After a brief lifetime of longing for death, I was, at long last, old enough to hear these words. The soft, gentle caress of his voice, the thunderclap of life shaking me out of years of misery, of loneliness, of longing and hoping for death.

I had long known that death was a choice. One that I kept putting off. One that I hoped someone or something else would make for me.

When I was sixteen and I fell forty feet and only broke my collarbone, I didn’t feel hope or like I had been saved for some purpose but that death had not yet taken me in her gentle embrace. I was not dead, not because I chose to live, but because I had not yet taken that one step necessary to die.

But here, I was able to see and hear. Able to hear that life is a choice.

An affirmative choice rather than a listless stumbling ever forward of time. Rather than living, I often felt that I was simply not dying.

It can be odd, perhaps, to have known me at the time, to see all the many fun and wondrous things I was doing, to see the places I was going, the people I was meeting, the love I was spreading as far and as wide as I could. Wandering from country to country, smiling and laughing.

And inside, I was simply waiting to die.

My life was a slow process of not dying rather than living.

I’ve decided tonight I’m staying alive.

It hits me still. Hits me in the chest, seizing my lungs.

Because I remember. I remember him.

I look back at the me that was fifteen years ago, at the one terrified of life, longing deathly, and I see how that may have been the moment he decided to start living.

It was not a singular moment. Not really. But rather an accumulation of moments over many months.

Just kicking and screaming.

He sings this so gently yet I felt it in new ways. Felt that life did not have to be this accidental process but one that I could choose with everything in me, that I could fight for.

That life was worth having. Worth living.

Perhaps not my life as I was living it, but a life.

A life that could become mine.

If I wanted love, which I was so desperate for, I could have it. But only if I fought for it. If I fought for life. If I fought to stay alive.

If I uncurled my back and raised my chin to the skies and opened my mouth and emptied my lungs in a howl that would lead me ever onward.

There’s almost bemusement when he sings these words, like he’s as surprised as anyone to be alive, to choose life, and though he sings calmly, quietly, his blood boils within him, streams from him.

This album about pain and loss is also one about overcoming your own pain, about seeing past it, about moving past it rather than dwelling on it, becoming obsessed with your own misery. It is a denial that pain is required for art, that in order to make great art you must suffer great tragedy.

Those things can go hand in hand and often do, but we can also simply embrace our pain, consume it, accept it, and carry on with the act of living, of creating, of healing ourselves.

Here the cello takes a front seat and begins driving the melody. We hear it in Kasher’s voice, the languid way he sings these lines.

A head full of suicide, full of death and sorrow, but what of it.

Sleep on it.

One more night.

Give life one more night.

At the same time, the guitars and distortion begin rising once more to swallow the cello and even his voice. My hair stood on end. It does still. This sound rolls through me, roils within me, lightning against my skin.

One more night.

One more night.

The sonic disruption drowning out the sleep, the last night, the softness of the cello and even the softness of his voice.

And so he must shout. He must fight.

My sad old friend is shouted into the distortion, into the vast sonicscape created around this moment. The drums begin driving us forward, reaching higher and higher while also digging deeper and deeper into us.

My misery, that old familiar friend, the one who had become a comfort to me. Sorrow as a blanket to wrap round your life, to explain your own life to yourself.

Here, we are breaking out of it.

Driving home after dropping my kids off at daycare, putting the song on to remind myself of who I was when I first wrote this long ago novel, this screaming forth of life hit me so terribly hard that a shudder ran through me and tears sprang to my eyes.

I’m staying alive

I’m staying alive

I’m staying alive

For all that I am no longer the boy and the man I was, they still live within me and echoes of their lives yet ripple through my skin, through the tempo of my heart, and I was cast back through time while I slowed to stops and drove on, while I was so very much myself at thirty eight in the life I never dreamt was possible.

And the tears came forth, running down my cheeks as I subvocalized the lyrics that were so deeply in me that it didn’t matter that it had been fifteen years.

The guitars speeding up, fighting, thrashing, raging over my skin, digging their teeth into my sinew, into my joints, into my bones, into my own boiling blood streaming through me, screaming through me.

Tears not for myself or for who I once was but rather for both, for all of it at once, for all the mes trapped inside my head, for all the echoes of me still in my blood and bones, down to the root of who I am, to the bedrock of my life, of my heart, of all that I am.

Blood and bone, root and stone.

My life crashing like a wave down upon me, like the waves that nearly drowned me when I was thirteen, like the forty foot freefall from that cliffside to the stones below that should have killed me when I was sixteen, like all the times I sought meaning in drugs, in drinking, in casually falling in love, in throwing my heart away, like all the mes waking up in unfamiliar places without knowing how I got there but dreaming always of something more, of death and dying, of giving up and giving in, and all of these swirled within me and smashed into one another at those three simple words that sent me writing 100,000 words about staying alive.

I’m staying alive.

And the next three that showed me how.

Kicking and screaming.

And then the music carries on, faster and harder, reckless and violent, thrashing and crashing, distortion thrumming through me for two solid minutes and still onward as that distant choir begins singing.

The worst is over.

I feel it in my bones. Feel it like shrapnel stuck in my skull. Like slivers of light piercing through my eyes on mornings when I wake up and see the curve of you, hear our daughter cooing or calling for me, hear the boys already awake and playing or fighting or calling for me.

And gradually, that distant choir comes closer and closer. Inch by inch, chord by chord.

The worst is over.

I feel it so acutely.

The worst is over.

I have been depressed probably my whole life. From my earliest memories, I felt a weight of sorrow on me. Sometimes this weight became suffocating and I would have done anything to make it stop, except for the singular act that would have ended it. Ended everything.

A life of depression. It ebbs and flows but always returns. There have been times it was so bad that I didn’t sleep for days, where I hallucinated, where I stopped eating, where I simply could not eat food. where I wandered through months like a wraith, where I spent days staring at the walls, lying in bed, barely able to function.

I never went to therapy. Probably should have, but never did.

Instead art became therapy to me. Not making it, no. Some may say that creating art is a form of therapy, but I have never felt that way. Rather, consuming art was my lifelong therapy. It’s why this newsletter exists at all, in truth. The art that has shaped me, that has given me this life, is everything to me. The reason I’m alive.

My hope and the only rubric for success in this endeavor is in sharing this with all of you. Hopefully, you have felt this way too. And if you haven’t, perhaps I can show you how. Show you how a life is made of movies, of music, of books and games, how three words can shatter, can rebuild, how a single painting can invent a year, how a song can shape a decade, how a movie can teach you how to live, how to survive, how to heal.

I have always been depressed and likely always will be, but I no longer want to die.

No longer hunger for death.

For the first time, I fear death.

And it is good. It is so vibrantly and spectacularly good to cling to life, to want to see the next week, the next year, to long for the future, to expectantly wait for my children to grow up, to grow old beside my wife.

There is a light.

It is all around us.

There is a fire.

Burning inside us.

The last two years have been some of the worst in my life. The long process of my father dying, the deaths of my friends, combined with various other things I cannot and will not share have turned the last few years into some of the hardest I have ever experienced.

But I can say without a doubt that the worst is over.

At least for me.

Tomorrows will come to crush me, to try to squeeze the life and hope from me, but still the worst is over, at least for me.

And I feel it so powerfully, swelling within me, as that choir inches still closer until it crowds out the distortion, the guitars, and even the drums until only the voices and the cello and the reverb remain.

The worst is over

The worst is over

And then even the choir fades away, sliding out of consciousness, into reverie, leaving us with only the tingling sensation of fingertipped guitar strings, of gentle cello, and I feel my lungs exhale a lifetime of pain and sorrow and death.

Feel instead the warm light of the choir, of my wife, of my children, of this life we made, of the future unfurling before us, and I feel such immense gratitude.

I close my eyes and kneel down and raise my face to the sun so thankful that I am still alive.

That I chose to stay alive.

Alive.

I’m staying alive.

Today, I’m back with my cohost Kyle Muntz! Today we’re talking to Molly Tanzer about her new book Blue Fire being crowdfunded right now! She is the author of the And Side by Side They Wander, the Diabolist’s Library trilogy, the weird western Vermilion, an io9 and NPR “Best Book” of 2015, and the British Fantasy Award-nominated collection, A Pretty Mouth.

Go back Blue Fire now!

Check out her novella And Side by Side They Wander out right now from Tor.com!

Sign up for the upcoming Broken River Magazine!

Please check out Songs of my Mother being serialized on Royal Road!

If you’d like to recommend a story or game for us to discuss, get in touch.

Music by Bart Larsen. Everything else done by me, I guess.

Listen on Spotify or Apple or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Check out our SF series The Shattered Stars.

Check out eddy’s novels.

And Kyle’s novels.

A few months ago, I began serializing my novel Songs of My Mother over on Royal Road. For the first week, I posted five chapters per day and then slowed down to one chapter per day.

We’re now well past the halfway mark and still going strong! At this point, there are over 170 chapters posted over there that you can read for free!

So do please head over there and check it out. I would love to have more people reading this and presumably some of you are interested in reading my fiction since you’re receiving this email at all.

It’s done all right on Royal Road. It was an experiment to see how serializing over there could work, especially given that my novel is not a very clean fit for the literary ecosystem. A subversive epic fantasy doesn’t necessarily gel well with the LitRPG crowd. But I’ve gained some consistent readers, which was my only real hope with this experiment. I’m satisfied enough that I’ll be trying a project over there more geared towards that audience.

My goal was to immediately lead this into a crowdfunding campaign for the whole series, which I will either publish as three or four books. I would like to publish it as one single book, but it is too long, I’m afraid. And while it might be fun to hold a 1,500 page novel in your hand and even for me to publish one, I think it would lead to a lot of frustration because I imagine the spines won’t hold up.

I decided to put that on hold for now, though, because I’ve decided to launch a different project with the Broken River Crew.

We’re launching a magazine!

You can sign up at the Teaser Page here.

You can read more about this project by clicking over there, but a magazine is something the has been talking about for a few years. We even nearly launched it here on substack a few years ago but ultimately decided against that iteration of the magazine. Much of this has to do with our desire to be less beholden to algorithms and to offer people something physical.

For the various bookfairs we’ve done this year, we’ve been selling zines and the reception has been delightful. People dig it! They like being able to grab a physical bitesized piece of literature like this. This started with what we’ve been calling the Broken River Sampler, which you can consider Issue 0 of this magazine. Six short stories, one from each of the Broken River Authors.

What Is Broken River Books?

Broken River Books is the award winning writers' collective from Rios de la Luz, J David Osborne, David Simmons, Kelby Losack, Grant Wamack, and e rathke with artwork by Tony Tran.

What Is A Year of Broken River Zines?

We’re launching the magazine in September as part of Backerkit’s Printopia initiative with the intention of mailing out a physical magazine to all of our backers every month for 2027, starting in January. Our goal is to keep doing this possibly forever. Just keep monthly issues coming out to all of you with a sustainable base of subscribers.

Each month will have work from the Broken River crew and maybe some surprises from various guest authors and artists along the way.

What Is Backerkit?

It’s a crowdfunding site where people (like me) offer a product that you can back to make it real. There’s a funding threshold so if we receive enough backers, the project will come to life! If we fail to meet our goal, then, well, nothing happens. And so you back a project you believe in and want to see become real.

Funds are collected when the campaign ends if it is successful.

Why Should I Back?

You’ll get monthly magazines delivered straight to your door at a discount! You’ll also get other various goodies to be announced during the campaign. Along with the zines, we’re also offering book bundles exclusive to the campaign, so this will be the most cost effective way to grab a handful of books together.

So do check out the Teaser Page and enter your email to receive a digital copy of Issue 0. This will also keep you updated on the campaign and notify you when we launch in September!

What About the Broken Katana Campaign?

This has not been forgotten! I’ve had a lot of people ask me when this is coming and the answer has been: soon. And while I meant to launch in the spring and then this summer, I’ve had some things come up that you may or may not be aware of. But it has been delayed until after the Broken River Zine campaign and the fulfillment of Briar Bay. I also want Beetle Battle to be finalized and just waiting on fulfillment before I launch yet another crowdfund.

I plan on launching this in October, which will make for a busy time for me!

But it will also lead to its best result, I think. So the completion of the Howl series is still on its way! It’s just taking me longer than expected to get it out the door, but it will be here sooner than you think!

But the RF in TERF refer to radical feminist, which is by almost every conceivable stretch of the imagination the opposite of rightwing. So is a trans-exclusionary radical feminist the same as a MAGA hat wearing political operative? To many online, the answer is yes. But I think that’s simply because most rightwing people dislike or hate trans people.

While they share the belief that trans women are not women and trans men are not men, they got there for very different reasons and took very different paths. And I do think the Cormoran Strike novels are feminist. I think Rowling deliberately set out to write a feminist series showing how a normal woman can become a great detective and succeed even though she lacks the physical strength to be a physical threat to people she’s sleuthing.

What she did not do, I think, is set out to write an anti-trans series.

Catch up here:

• Introduction

• The Cuckoo’s Calling

• The Silkworm

• Career of Evil

• Lethal White

The Transphobia Panic

2020, everyone’s favorite year to remember! While the world was locked inside waiting for release, for safety, preparing for what turned out to be a historic election, others were having their time spoiled because JK Rowling had recently come out against trans people.

You can read exactly what she said in her own words way back in 2020.

Whether anyone liked it or not, this was the backdrop to Troubled Blood, the newest JK Rowling novel.

JK Rowling had announced that she was anti-trans and her newest book—the longest one she’d ever written—was coming. The assumption and full throated belief before publication was that this would be a tome riddled with transphobia. Upon release, various culture war people made videos about the book.

My first interaction with the Cormoran Strike series, incidentally, was this Contrapoints video.

Now, I don’t exactly expect anyone to watch a 90 minute video about JK Rowling and transphobia, but I do think the video is well done. On the otherside of things, you could listen to The Witch Trials of JK Rowling.

I really don’t expect anyone to listen to six hours about JK Rowling and this controversy, but you could. I would say that this podcast series is more defensive of Rowling (and also includes Contrapoints as one of the people interviewed and since we’re this deep you could watch her two hour video about The Witch Trials of JK Rowling) while Contrapoints is more antagonistic to Rowling.

So who is right?

Well, since you just watched 3.5 hours of Contrapoints and listened to 6 hours of The Witch Trials of JK Rowling, I imagine you can make up your own mind.

For whatever it’s worth, I do not consider this novel transphobic. I understand why people leapt to that conclusion, especially given the context outside the novel and given certain details in the novel, and Rowling’s history of satirizing her critics and detractors in her novels, but it’s actually quite clear that the trans serial killer in this novel is not trans.

The text is pretty explicit about this.

But we’ll get to that and circle back to this discussion.

The Case

Strike meets a woman whose mother disappeared forty years ago and she hires Strike to find out what happened and after a whole lot of rigmarole and red herrings and even a much hyped interview with a serial killer, the reason this woman’s mother disappeared is that the most unlikely person around killed her and stuffed her body in an ottoman that she filled with concrete.

The Structure of this Novel

This is the longest novel JK Rowling had written at its time of publication. It’s about 300 pages longer than the previous novel in the series, which makes this novel a whole novel longer than the previous novel in the series.

That’s quite a leap in length!

I’m interested in this sort of thing because this becomes an expectation in a long running series. If the first novel is 500 pages in a series, the next novel can’t be 200, though it could be 400 or maybe even 350. I don’t know that publishing was always this way, but now audiences have an expectation that cost and length are related to one another. So if a 500 page book costs $30, then a 200 page book can’t possibly also cost $30, yeah? Of course, if the sequel to a 500 page book is 600 or 700 or, dare say, 900 pages, now the reader feels as if they’re getting a pretty nice deal.

Listen, I know this shouldn’t matter. Ultimately it doesn’t matter, but have you ever seen a series where the novels vary widely in length1?

What this means for the Cormorant Strike series, where each book has gotten progressively longer, is that the rest of the series will be around the length of Troubled Blood.

What makes this interesting is that if I had to hazard a guess, I would say that more than half of the novel focuses almost exclusively on the interpersonal relationships and trials of Strike and Robin.

And there is much here to talk about, but what makes this novel work, what justifies its length, is the way these two narratives—the case and the interpersonal—mingle and interact and actively hold one another back.

Strike’s aunt Joan is dying. Robin is going through a brutal divorce with Matthew. Though they try to be professional and not allow anything to be missed on the job, the mounting stresses of both weigh on them.

Then you add a dozen other stressors, like Jonny Rokeby, Charlotte Campbell, Sarah Shadlock, Morris, and on and on and on. And that’s just the personal stuff! There’s also the disturbing nature of the serial killer who everyone believes murdered the woman they’re looking for.

And now before we dive into the rest of the novel, it’s time to talk about the allegations that this is an anti-trans screed.

And on we go

Perhaps we should blame Silence of the Lambs and specifically Jonathan Demme. Silence of the Lamb’s depiction of Buffalo Bill has become associated with anti-trans, anti-gay tropes. Demme disputes this, asserting both through the character of Hannibal Lector and through the character of himself that Buffalo Bill is neither trans nor gay. This statement would also get him in trouble with transfeminists.

I think something similar is happening here in Troubled Blood, but let us pause for a moment to explore some serial killer behaviors. From Hadden Clark to Ed Gein, numerous serial killers have dressed as women, often to lure victims into their clutches.

A woman asking for help on the side of the road is more approachable to a woman than some big dude. Once the victim, almost always a young woman, is close enough, they overpower them and do what serial killers do.

This is one of the strategies Dennis Creed, the serial killer in Troubled Blood, used on women. It’s not so dissimilar from the way Ted Bundy would use crutches or a fake leg plaster to make himself appear more vulnerable and less dangerous to would-be victims.

As far as I can tell, none of these serial killers identify themselves as transgender, and no one else seems to claim that they’re transgender. They dressed as women, not because they wanted to be women or considered themselves women, but because it was an effective strategy in luring women to their deaths.

This is exactly how Dennis Creed is described doing it in the novel as well. Never once is he described as transgender and never once does he identify himself as transgender. We are to understand his crossdressing as a pathway to murdering women, not as a sign of identity.

Now, it is worth asking if taking inspiration from real life is transphobic?

And you could say that she could have given the killer any other possible strategy for killing women that did not involve dressing as women. Sure, she could have, but, as I’ve said before, much of this series is about how women are constrained, contained, and harmed by men, physically, emotionally, and psychologically.

It does matter that Dennis Creed pretends to be a woman in order to murder a woman.

And, yes, I know, this dovetails and intersects nicely with transphobic tropes about transwomen, that they’re all just men who want to invade women’s space and rape and murder the vulnerable women there. When you combine this trope with Rowling’s own statements on trans people, I understand why people want to point to this as a clear indication about Rowling’s transphobia. Some have labeled it a thousand pages of transphobia, which is simply not accurate at all to anyone who has read the book. It’s an overstatement that makes the accusations of transphobia in the novel less believable. It allows a certain kind of culture warrior to lash back at these critics for what is pretty straightforward dishonesty. I mean, Creed is more of a backdrop to the novel, similar to the Olympics in Lethal White. They weigh on the narrative but the majority of the novel has nothing at all to do with them.

Creed dressing as a woman is mentioned a few times and really not explored further. I mean, the novel is very pointedly not about Creed, especially when you consider who the real killer was: another woman.

So I ask again: is it transphobic to write a serial killer inspired by people like Ed Gein?

In 1963, John Fowles published a novel called The Collector about a man who abducts a woman and locks her in his basement.

When I read Troubled Blood, I was often reminded of The Collector because Creed is not so different from Frederick Clegg. A pathetic figure who graduates from one crime to another, always in progression.

Troublingly, The Collector has become a bit of a handbook for serial killers since its publication. Leonard Lake, Charles Ng, Christopher Wilder, and Robert Berdella all became fascinated by The Collector and went on to kidnap and torture and murder people.

Art imitating life which then influences life which then influences art, because I do think Troubled Blood is influenced immensely by The Collector, even if Rowling never read it. Because we see the DNA of this specific kind of serial killing and terror in Dennis Creed.

Anyone who has ever read about serial killers or gone through some brief fascination with them has likely seen the same kind of trajectory that Rowling describes with Creed, that Fowles depicted with Clegg.

Small crimes to big crimes to bigger crimes. What begins as obsession becomes a kidnapping becomes serial rapes becomes mutilation and torture becomes a murdering spree against young women.

And so why this specific detail and why a serial killer who always murders women? Set aside reality and ask yourself why Rowling would choose these specific traits to pull from the many cases of serial killers?

And I think it goes hand in hand with my original thesis about the series but also the conflicts between Robin and Strike and especially the conflict between Morris and Robin.

Back to Basics

Strike’s aunt Joan dying in this novel is one of the more powerful elements at play here and it works as a catalyst for many of the conflicts between Robin, who is also going through her ugly divorce with Matthew. Because both detectives are so consistently distracted by these large moments, they are sometimes short with one another, take things the wrong way, miss important elements of the case, and on and on. Strike is dumping more of the workload on Robin and the subcontractors as well.

While Strike’s character arc has always swirled around family, this is the novel that hits that hardest. His mother, who exists as a long shadow in the series, is never on the page, whereas Joan is there enough that we know their relationship. And even in the brief flashes of it here and there, Rowling is able to give her enough life and vibrancy that we feel it when she dies. Feel the hollowing loss of it.

And then Charlotte keeps calling Strike, announcing her suicide until one final moment when he must save her from across the country while she overdoses.

These are two large conflicts in this novel weighing Strike down, keeping him distracted, keeping his hackles up.

At the same time, I think one of the big weaknesses of the series is the inconsistent way the secondary characters exist. They sort of flit in and out of the series, which is very much how relationships work in real life. There are years where I spend a lot of time with one of my friends but then there might be months or even years in between seeing them again. Such is life.

This is less satisfying in fiction, however. It makes sense, since the series is really just about Strike and Robin, but it also weakens the narrative, since so much of who Strike and Robin are relies on their families. Yet how much do we see of their families or even friends and associates in a novel or in the series at all?

I think there’s a version of this series where the death of Joan feels as big as the death of Fred Weasley. Fred is also a secondary or even tertiary character who disappears for long stretches of the series, and yet we felt his death acutely. It hurts when Fred dies.

Less so with Joan. I think Rowling does as much as she can in this novel to make us care—and she succeeds—but I think the flashes of Joan we’ve received through the series could be so much more. And so, in a sense, her death feels narratively convenient rather than emotionally resonant. Though maybe I’m being unfair here. It’s not badly done, but more a case of what could have been.

At the same time, I think this is effective. Strike, our man, can only really admit his love for Joan and his appreciation of her when she’s at death’s door, when it’s almost too late. And then he only really reckons with the death and the hurt once it’s already past him.

He does not love her properly. Does not appreciate her the way he should.

I think this, too, ties into the thesis that this series is about the ways men hurt women.

While the divorce with Matthew is weighing Robin down and keeping her distracted, she’s also dealing with her own family and, especially, the new hire Morris.

Morris demeans Robin in hundreds of small ways throughout the novel. We might call these microaggressions. It’s honestly probably the best depiction of how microaggressions accumulate to the point of feeling like a constant deluge of harassment. In both big and small ways, Morris chips away at Robin over the course of the year that this novel describes. From a drunken dick pick to always treating her like she’s actually his subordinate rather than his boss, to the casual flirtations he throws her way no matter how stonily she receives them, Morris is a perfect embodiment of the ways men constrain, contain, restrain, and abuse women.

Combine this with Matthew who did much the same thing in the previous novel—refusing to accept her decisions, forcing himself upon her, forcing his proximity—and Strike who she feels, rightly, is taking advantage of her time while he deals with his own shit, and Rowling is explaining in very simple, declarative ways how and why a serial killer would pretend to be a woman in order to lure women.

Men are not always a danger, but they are always a weight. They are always pressing down on women. Even when it’s accidental or unintentional, in the case of Strike, the way he values his own time and judgment so much more than he values Robin’s does oppress her, even if only in a very slight way.

But what we see is how one or ten slights are easy to shoulder and even shrug off. It’s when they never cease. When one becomes ten becomes a hundred becomes a thousand.

Death by a thousand cuts. The straw that broke the camel’s back.

These phrases exist for a reason. We all understand them. Many of our problems in life are not these big cataclysms but rather the accretion of minor problems over some time period.

You don’t fight with your parents because of one thing they did when you were growing up. You fight with them because of that one more thing they did. You put up with a thousand of these little infractions but that thousandth and one caused you to snap and storm out.

You’re not mad at your sister because she’s wearing your shirt. You’re mad at her because of a thousand little things and then she wore your shirt.

So it is with Morris and we see it so clearly. We understand why she puts up with it, continually hoping it will balance out, ease into place, but it never does. Never will.

And when it ends so abruptly, so bloodily, so grossly, in so demeaning a fashion, we almost want to punch our fist in the air! But then we’re stuck with the small victory of a small man losing and we feel dissatisfaction because we have actually changed nothing.

Do you see the radical feminism that informed Rowling? Perhaps not and perhaps you could make a reading list of feminist thinkers to understand this better, to contextualize it more cleanly into a political and philosophical statement when Robin breaks Morris’ nose, when she lashes out at Strike or her mother or when she chooses not to lash out at Matthew, but I think Rowling demonstrates it all so cleanly here.

In all its messiness, in all the annoyance and inconvenience, we see exactly what men do to women.

It’s not always a politician restricting rights or some kind of Handmaid’s Tale dystopia or a serial killer dismembering young women. Sometimes it’s just the constant waterfall of tiny constraints and petty humiliations.

It’s also, I think, why the actual killer in the novel so easily hides in plain sight. And this, too, leans back into why Rowling’s serial killer Dennis Creed dresses as a woman to lure women to their doom.

Who would suspect this tiny woman to be the one killing all these people?

She seems so harmless. So small.

We as the reader and Strike and Robin as the detectives must believe that some devious man did these things. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Even the outlandish mob theory Strike and Robin run through feels more believable than that this quiet woman would be the mastermind to so much death and devastation.

But that’s what makes it work, you see.

Can you see it?

Can you feel the thousand papercuts killing you?

Can you feel the piling straw crushing you?

The Tale of Cormoran and Robin

The novel takes place over the course of an entire year. A year of personal calamity for both partners. Strike hasn’t bothered to date anyone since truly embracing his love of Robin. Robin’s been dealing with the divorce, with Morris, with the agency.

Strike even incorrectly believes Morris and Robin are dating, seeing her desire to not call Morris a fucking asshole the same as assent to his advances.

It’s been a bad year and they’ve spent much of it sort of siloed from one another. Strike in his grief for both Joan and Charlotte and Robin in her divorce. A distance has grown between them and they’re not really certain how to pull closer again. Because of their distractions, the problems with their own lives, with their own families, they misinterpret one another, make assumptions about one another, and even grate on one another.

And then, drunkenly, hopeless over this case, they are alone together and both of them know, in their own ways, that they are standing on the precipice. If they make that next step, they will end up in bed. They will end up having sex.

They will change their lives utterly.

Or, perhaps, that next step by one will be the step back by the other.

Rejection.

Success or failure, the agency could collapse in on itself. What if Strike doesn’t want that? What if Robin doesn’t want him?

So trapped in their own thoughts, in their own fears, the moment is lost and dead and they both feel shame and slight humiliation.

It is fear. Fear chewing them to bits.

Strike looks at the failures of his life and especially his failure with women and cannot believe that he won’t ruin things. Can’t believe entirely that Robin would see him as someone worth being with.

And Robin knows Strike’s history with women, has seen how he dates women so casually, never taking the next step in a relationship. She cannot be just another girl.

She wants this. Not just him but the agency. She needs this life.

Fear and shame.

They circle one another, loving one another, but unable or unwilling to show it. To make it truly felt and understood. And when Strike does act bravely, it is so slight. A choice word here and there. He expects her to pick up the slack, to understand.

And here, too, we see the weight of men. He throws out breadcrumbs and demands she find the trail to his heart. When she doesn’t, he feels frustrated, misunderstood, and sometimes takes it out on her.

But, at long last, at the end of this long, tense, uncomfortable novel, after forgetting her birthday and Christmas again, he calls her in on her birthday. Her annoyance swells because, once again, she believes he’s forgotten.

But then he takes her out to a fancy meal for her 30th. Treats her to champagne.

And for a moment, he is light as air. He is riding on sunshine. Because Robin is with him and they’re celebrating.

And Robin is with him.

Smiling.

And Robin is with him.

Today I’m talking to Sam of about his new game Gloam, which is available right now as a PDF and physical zine! We talk about the accidents of game design, how and why he developed Gloam, and what to expect from the game.

Check out Gloam right now!

Check out Beetle Battle over on Backerkit!

Please check out Songs of my Mother being serialized on Royal Road!

If you’d like to recommend a story or game for us to discuss, get in touch.

Music by Bart Larsen. Everything else done by me, I guess.

Listen on Spotify or Apple or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Check out our SF series The Shattered Stars.

Check out eddy’s novels.

And Kyle’s novels.

Today, I’m back with my cohost Kyle Muntz! We’re talking to about his new book Tacoma. We talk about voice, style, our literary history, and so much more!

Check out Tacoma and then check out Short Story, Long where Aaron is the editor!

Please check out Songs of my Mother being serialized on Royal Road!

If you’d like to recommend a story for us to discuss, get in touch.

Music by Bart Larsen. Everything else done by me, I guess.

Listen on Spotify or Apple or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Check out our SF series The Shattered Stars.

Check out eddy’s novels.

And Kyle’s novels.

My father used to speak German to me.

He sang German. He shouted German. He laughed in German and tried to make all of us laugh and sing and shout with him.

Such joy. Such fervor. He’d play oompah bands and sing and dance so loud and so boisterously that we could not help but laugh, but smile, but dance with him.

I never learned German.

When my brother and I were in middle school, he even hired a German tutor for us to connect us to that root of our ancestry, to his. She had horrible teeth and smelled terrible but she was patient and kind while my brother and I quietly never learned a single thing over several months of her arriving at our house once a week until my father gave up on the whole affair.

All that we could have been. All these opportunities handed to us like flowers and left scattered in the stones like wilted petals.

My father grew up about as poor as it was possible to grow up. In 1962, his father died a week after he turned eight. My grandmother had seven kids, no job, and didn’t know how to drive. She never learned to drive but instead rode the bus here and there, fighting the city and banks to buy her house where she raised my father and his brothers and sisters. She never remarried.

Her kids ran wild and my father barely graduated high school. He nearly died by contracting spinal meningitis when he was seventeen. He spent weeks in a coma. The doctors told his mother he would never recover, that if he survived at all he’d be a vegetable, still and inert as stone.

When he woke, he couldn’t read or write. His older sister taught him how again and he went to college a semester late while he recovered. A few years later, he had a masters in civil engineering. For the first time in his life, he wasn’t poor and he realized he never wanted to be again. And so he worked tirelessly to succeed. A few years later, he got married and started a family. He found his dream company, but they were based in Germany so he learned German to get the job and then spent 10 or so weeks a year in Germany.

My father’s family came to the US in two primary waves. First in the 1750s and then in the 1880s from Prussia. He has always identified with his Prussian ancestry. Not German, but Prussian. I think there’s a beauty in lost civilizations that many people share. There’s a mystique to being Prussian now that Prussia no longer exists, hasn’t existed for over a century, ever since a certain Kaiser lost a certain world war.

And so when my father learned German, when he spent years running a German company in the US, when he frequently got to travel to Germany and speak German, I think he felt, perhaps for the first time, like he was coming home, his fingers tracing bark and branch, the gnarled roots of his name, the source of his blood and bones.

I remember landing in Limerick. I remember those Irish skies and the impossible greens of the countryside. I remember that grey ocean and the way language rolled and burred.

I remember the Black Cab tours and the Garden of Remembrance and the way my blood burned cold and my heart turned to stone and my eyes stung over all the horrors visited upon my ancestors while they fought for freedom. I felt home there. Like the echo in my blood ringing out, passed to me by my grandmother and grandfather whose grandparents survived the deathboats filled with the skeletal, the destitute, the hopeless.

I saw the places my nameless ancestors came from. Heard the way my mother’s maiden name sounds in Irish, rather than the way we learned to say it here in America.

In Ireland, people spoke German to me at times. I took three semesters of German but still it never took root in me and the only thing I knew how to say was Ich verstehe nicht or nicht spreche Deutsch to which the speaker would usually say, I thought you were German. This happened more in Germany, where everyone thought I was a local, belonged there, and I felt a stirring in my own blood, for this place I never had much interest in but that had imprinted itself on my face, in my bones, in the color of my skin and hair and eyes.

I have the face of my father. Everyone who knew my father when he was young says so and I have seen the pictures. My second son has his face too and, perhaps, his temperament.

Blood and bone, root and stone.

I stood at the roots of the German Alps and high atop them and felt the awe of countless generations as I stared out into the widest skies I’d ever seen, where those long gone people believed in Wotan and Jotnar and I could not blame them, began to feel them myself.

A stirring in my blood rising through the stones of the earth. Old and ancient abandoned gods.

But though I have my father’s face, I have my mother’s heart, and though I have my father’s eyes, I see with my mother’s vision. And so I kept coming back to Ireland, kept feeling most at home there, and even now, all these years since last I stood upon my ancestor’s land, I still find myself returning to those months, to those endless nights, to days I hoped would never end, to the sorrow and pain and awe and beauty I found there. The way it changed me. Shaped me. Made me into the man I now am.

Blood and bone, root and stone, all alone we always come home.

Days Before, Between

The first novel I ever read in translation was The Confessions of Felix Krug by Thomas Mann. Famously, this novel was unfinished when Mann died but it landed in our home because my older sister had been assigned it in her lit class in high school.

She never read it but I picked it up and unhinged my jaw and swallowed it whole.

It’s been probably 25 years since then. I was barely more than a child, coming off of Lord of the Rings and Speaker for the Dead, and though I was tinkering with Oliver Twist and Dracula too, The Confessions of Felix Krull was the first novel I’d encountered to describe ejaculate and use the word come that way. At this point, so many years later, I don’t remember much about the novel, but there was something illicit about it all. Not only was it quite literally not meant for me, since it belonged to my older sister, assigned for her class, but it was so clearly not meant for me because it was, perhaps, the first true adult novel I’d read in my life. As in, a novel written exclusively for adults to read.

I found it intoxicating in that way. Like every page was stolen. Like every hour I spent inside it was illegal, something to get me in trouble, to get books burned, if only my father knew. Because he was not above such things, as I described in this old essay:

Apocrypha

To Fill an Open Wound

Greetings, my fellow bibliophiles…

Read more

3 years ago · 60 likes · 27 comments · radicaledward

Reading had already opened the world wide for me, but in Mann’s unfinished novel, I found a vastness before me and beneath me. All around me. It showed me other worlds. Not fantastical or science fictional but here, beside me, near at hand, just a fingertip away.

I picked up Death in Venice many years later while I flew to Ireland for the first time. In truth, I remember almost nothing about that novella, but I began buying Thomas Mann novels, though I would not finally read one again until a few weeks ago when, for no good reason, I picked up The Magic Mountain.

And to be honest, I did not love the first half of the novel. Mostly, it reminded me of who I used to be when first I stepped foot in Ireland, in Germany, when I was young and wide eyed and open to everything, needing these kinds of vast and expansive novels that tackled philosophy and ideology and tried to wrap their arms squidlike round the entire world, around life itself in order to explicate what roils within us, in order to explain ourselves to ourselves, in order to find a life worth living in these long novels that threatened to change our lives.

And most of all, I wished I had read the novel when I was sixteen. I found it would have been, in a way, an antidote to Dostoevsky, or at least a companion. Wished I had read it when I was twenty as an antidote to Joyce and Woolf and Faulkner, or at least as a counterpoint. Wished I had read it when I was twenty three and hallucinating in my South Korean apartment on the scariest night of my life.

But instead I was sitting there at thirty eight able to appreciate the novel yet unable to give myself to it, unwilling, perhaps, to let its roots dig down into the stone of my bones or rise to the firmament of my heart to cradle my elusive soul.

Nostalgia for myself.

For the person I was. For the life I had lived and even the ones I hadn’t. The ways I could have been Hans. The ways I was Hans. The ways I fell in love with Clawdias at the bat of an eye.

For I was a Fool. The Fool. And I saw myself so clearly while reading of Hans as he wandered that sanatorium with his colorful cast of peculiarities, of infirmaries.

And while nostalgia has its pleasures, it’s rarely what I seek in art. When I want to return to the past, when I long for home, I simply pick up the things I loved before, the art I know moves me, the wind that stirs the coals to blaze once more as fire, the stone and bone that built that home inside me.

Though, of course, we all know that we can never truly go home, for home is a place we carry with us.

And so my disappointments with the novel mounted and I kept thinking of who I had been because I know that boy would have loved this Magic Mountain, would have loved the many philosophical monologues, would have loved the intense longings.

The novel was beautiful, in its own ways. I felt it acutely. The novel was a comedy, and I do so love a comedy, but it’s the kind of comedy that never made me laugh. Rather, I’d finish a passage or scene or chapter and think to myself, That’s a pretty good gag or that’s funny. This is one of the more interesting elements of the many philosophical monologues. There’s a real irony to them, a sort of silliness that might be hard for many to hear. But perhaps you’d be able to hear it if the characters were named Kramer and Frank Costanza.

The use of time and boredom fascinates as well. Any writing advice you’re likely to come across will tell you to avoid boring the reader. This is generally quite good advice, but it also limits you in a very specific way.

Because a novel like this is, in a way, no different than watching seven seasons of Parks and Rec or reading some gargantuan fantasy series like The Wheel of Time.

Is every episode of Parks and Rec good? Are all of them even funny? I mean, not really. And don’t get me wrong, I do so love that show, think it’s one of the better sitcoms of this new century, but when you make 100+ episodes of a TV show, you’re going to have some misses.

But the important question is will you skip those episodes?

When you settle in to laze around on your couch and shotgun a season of a sitcom, you’re doing it, in part, out of boredom, and even the boring parts of the show don’t bother you. There’s a kind of comfort there. It’s why we keep coming back. Same with epic fantasies. Same with many 1,000 page novels.

You’re settling in to take part in a world. To join a community of fictional people in a constructed reality. When they wander aimlessly or babble needlessly, when they just sit and joke around, when the comedic situations take precedent over plot or characterization, we are not pushed out of the show but instead, oddly, counterintuitively, invited deeper in. We buy into the expansiveness. When the hobbits wander idly and chat amiably in Farmer Maggot’s fields while Frodo is kinda sorta running for his life, this could break immersion, could be said to slow the whole narrative, but instead it allows the novel to sink its teeth into us, pull us under, deeper, to drown in this imagined reality.

It is the endless debate over Tom Bombadil. Does he belong in the narrative? Does he break the tension, the momentum, and on and on. What is his purpose here? Why did Tolkien include him?

If you can’t handle him at his Bombadil-o, you don’t deserve him at his Pelennor Fields. If you cannot settle in and enjoy the music of the 60 poems scattered throughout Lord of the Rings, you do not deserve the rest.

But if you read Lord of the Rings and were thrown by Tom Bombadil or the poems, then you are simply incapable of love, of immersion, and The Magic Mountain will slip through your fingers and you will never know the sledgehammer of beauty that Mann holds over your head.

Because when Mann bores you on his Magic Mountain, you find that you become one of those diseased men and women trapped there away from the rest of the world, living a life completely separated from what one might call reality.

Nothing they do up there matters, yet it is a matter of life and Death. Their lives are suspended, and yet on they live. Their lives keep happening. Keep storming forward. Yet none of it matters. Yet all of it matters.

We matter.

You matter.

They matter.

Clawdia and Hans and Joachim.

It is so little, so meaningless, and yet it is everything.

It is their life. Their one, single, and only life.

And this allows Mann to play with time. To dilate and contract it. Sometimes a day will last a hundred pages and sometimes years blink by in a handful of sentences.

This is what kept me moving forward. That, and its reputation.

It may be unfair, but if this had been published last year, I would likely have given up on it. Knowing that it’s considered one of the best novels of the 20th century gave me the will to continue on.

Even so, I took breaks here and there to swallow some other novel right quick. Get a taste of something else. Of some other life.

But then, things began to transform and they did so suddenly.

and you will know us by the trail of the dead

Root and stone. Blood and bone.

My father no longer speaks German. It has quietly and slowly slipped away from him over the years. For a long time, he still listened to German radio, but he doesn’t do that anymore either. I think he stopped being able to follow it, the language atrophying in his skull, in his flooded lungs, in his constricted gasping heart.

He converted to Catholicism when I was a child and enjoyed the fact that he was likely the first Catholic in his family in nearly 500 years. The Monseigneur at our church was from Germany and my father enjoyed receiving his confession in German until the good Monseigneur died.

So long ago. Age came for him too. He was a man, a priest, who took such joy in music. When he was not serving the mass, he conducted the orchestra and the choir that he assembled for his church. Eventually, age took that from him. Took the mass from him as well. Finally, his body gave out or gave in and we laid him to rest twenty years ago.

My father lives entombed in his own body. He has lost so much and he knows it. Is acutely aware of it. Feels it every agonizing day.

His haggard face. Barely able to eat, he wastes away. It is his face but not the one I recognize. Time, yes, but mostly the disease, the constant pain, the sickness stealing his body away, changing him from the man I’ve known my whole life. The shape of his skull visible now, his hair thinning to baldness, his hands and feet gnarled by gout.

He cannot go to mass. Cannot go to see the priests or the congregations, cannot receive weekly communion or confession. Instead, a priest comes to him once a month or so. His faith still bound to him, held close, thriving even in his dying body, but he cannot perform the rituals, go out and practice his faith the way he has for thirty years.

But he gets up in the morning and continues to work for work is all he has left to fill his days. He is a man who allowed his career to become his identity, to become his life, to become his single social outlet.

His friends die or live far away.

He has lost himself and all that mattered to him. All that he was has slipped through his trembling fingers, escaped as phlegmy gasps from his lips.

This is tragedy.

To live disabled from being yourself.

You spend a lifetime forging an identity. To then have it stripped from you by disease feels cruel.

I thought of my father when Joachim finally left the Magic Mountain.

He understood the consequences. Knew that leaving would likely lead directly to his death.

But he could not stay. Could not stay and remain himself. Could not be Joachim even one more day there up on the mountain.

I saw my father. The echo of him. This need. This burning desire.

To be yourself.

To be you.

Who are you when you cannot be yourself, when you cannot be the person you made over a lifetime?

What is life when you cannot be that person?

Perhaps it is not worth living.

I cannot know.

My father has had a miserable 18 months and a very bad decade, but for a few weeks he seemed vastly improved. After a week of him doing better, my mother commented on it, told him he seems more with it and capable.

He stood up taller and kind of smiled.

Blood and bone.

She asked him what’s changed.

“I stopped taking my medications.”

Root and stone.

What is life worth when you cannot be you, when your life is pain, when you cannot sleep without a machine pumping oxygen into your nostrils, when your skull feels full of cotton?

Congestive heart failure.

This morning, my mother told me he’s not doing well, that his leg has swollen up terribly, that he may have cellulitis or phlebitis or possibly just the water retention symptomatic of congestive heart failure.

When he called me this morning, he just talked about work. Told me, casually, off hand, that his foot had begun bleeding.

That’s not good.

He brushed past it and threw questions about this or that at me about the various jobs I’m managing.

And so we pretend, ignore, and my mother worries, fears leaving the house in case she comes back home to find him dead or dying, refusing, as always, medical intervention.

Joachim knew what it meant to leave, to return to the world below, to become the soldier that he needed to be. All his identity wrapped up in that, in being a soldier, one of the Kaiser’s own men. Pride, personal and national.

What is this life?

What is this love?

Who are we?

What can we be?

I remember the wind on my face and the spray of water and the coming storm sweeping over Lake Superior while our boat raced back towards shore. I remember your smile, those big goofy sunglasses, the joy and excitement you found in fishing. It was infectious, though I didn’t care about fishing, didn’t like the taste of fish.

I remember the baking sun and the close cropped grass of the fairway, the club in my hand, the way I hated every minute of golf, but I remember too the joy you found there. Long strides and heavy bags. You and my brothers, the wide stretches of grass, the big open skies, the trees lining the fairways, holding in the golf course from the surrounding neighborhoods.

Felt these moments raining down on me when Joachim left the Magic Mountain and felt them pincering my heart and throat when he returned, half alive, waiting to die.

The inevitability of death. The sorrowful mundanity of dying.

I’ve been working somewhat passively on a very long piece about the long process of my father’s dying. The strange listless boredom of it. The way life just keeps rolling along even as death surrounds us, hangs over us, our own little sword of Damocles.

This is something Mann achieves in the Magic Mountain and it’s why the boredom mattered, why the long stretches of philosophical monologues matter. All these words, all this talking, add up to so little when weighed against an actual event, like the death of a loved one. What are ten thousand words compared to our final act?

What do all these pages and words matter when faced with the monumental weight of Death?

And though it took so long for the Magic Mountain to find its power, it sort of relaxes back into that gear after we lay Joachim to rest. Life listlessly going on. All these words and all these weeks that are so meaningless, that are so separate from life below, on the flatlands, where the rest of life and civilization carries on.

We get the longing, the burgeoning love between Hans and Clawdia, the jostling for position between Carducci and Naphta for Hans’ soul and ideology, and yet what does any of it matter to the world beyond them, and especially when a certain character shoots himself in the head in the last fifty pages of the novel?

And I drop that there like that because it so takes you, the reader, by surprise when it happens in the novel, and is so thunderous that there is no way to reckon with it properly. You have spent so much time with these people, listening to them speak their ideology, argue this and that about philosophy and religion and politics, and then it all culminates in this singular moment of shock 900 pages into the novel.

And then several years drift by in a few sentences and we feel through this dilation of time how cataclysmically large this moment is. It is years large. These years happen over sentences whereas the first two or three years on the mountain take nearly a thousand pages.

This yawning silence.

This vast expanse of loss, like being twenty and staring out from the alps to the German lowlands, the countryside, the wide open eye of the sky, the domain of Wotan, the land Rome once held after nearly genociding the Celtic tribes of central Europe.

Blood and bone, root and stone, all along alone, you’re never on your own.

Words.

So many words and then silence.

A silence like an atom bomb.

A silence that rends your life apart.

One day, I will never hear my father’s voice again. One day, I may forget the sound of him singing in German.

The stink of cigarette smoke. Bottles of wine and vodka. The German singing. Laughter. Such laughter.

Such goneaway days.

I remember seven years gone when my son was only just born.

And then years traipse by, slipping through your fingers, while you do whatever you do that makes up a life, that fills the years.

Reality Pummels

And hanging over all of this is World War I. All the years Hans spent away from his life, from reality, the world around him sleepwalks towards disaster, towards the end of civilizations.

I stare back at this novel from a century later but the novel was published just a few short years after the war ended. And all along, I kept idly wondering if this would run into WWI.

You see, despite this being on my reading list for twenty years, I didn’t know anything about it. I suppose it’s a bit strange that I never purposefully learn anything about the art I engage with. I don’t watch movie trailers or read the back covers of books. I don’t read reviews of anything I haven’t already read or seen. It’s not out of some fear of spoilers because spoilers honestly don’t bother me, but maybe pure indifference to what something is until it’s in my hands.

And so when WWI finally arrived, I was surprised. Not so much by it appearing in the novel, but by the way it appears.

Up until the suicide scene, the novel has been a comedy. There’s even a kind of black comedy to the scene where this man shoots himself in the head. But largely, the novel has been comedic in structure and, I think, in intent. The tragedy of Joachim actually heightens the comedy rather than disassembles it.

The playfulness with time, the contraction and dilation, the romantic and philosophical longing, this bildungsroman that is both parody of the form and perfection of the form—it all creates a certain effect. Which, as I’ve said, largely made me nostalgic for the person I once was who would have loved this, but then you arrive at WWI and the novel transforms utterly.

Even linguistically. Becoming denser, more beautiful, more evocative.

While the novel has largely been plain and straightforward and ironic, it shifts in a way that reminds me only of Milan Kundera or DM Thomas, two writers who create this oneiric effect, twisting reality itself into a dream, until they twist and contort reality back into place, turning it into a sledgehammer the size of a bus to strike you in the chest, to pulverize your tiny little heart in your stupid little chest, you Fool, who never realized the type of story you were living in until it was too late, until the horrors of reality, of life, of time, of history came to pummel you to dust, to the Dust you are and have always been, and no amount of Pater Nosters or Ave Marias will save you or turn this back, no guardian angels or jealous gods will protect you from the hell of history, from the weight of all these years, of all these billions of dead dragging you down by the chains wrapped round your throat forcing you to stare down into the chasm of thousands of generations of ancestors who were starved and beaten, raped and murdered, holocausted and genocided by time, crippling cruel time, by these ancient gods thirsty for our pain and suffering, thriving on the loss, on the pain, on the torture of our bodies and souls and when at last we force our face back up to the skies, to the promised heavens, to the shining landscapes stretching all round us we find instead that we’re a mile underground staring back up a tunnel shining with golden light so far away and no matter how we scramble at the dirt and rock and stone and root and bone of the earth of the Tunnel’s walls, breaking off fingernails and toenails, bleeding knees and palms and busted shins and open lips, gasping lungs and vocal cords torn from screaming, from begging, from fear and trembling, yet still we claw back towards the surface even as reality and all the dead pulls us under towards the inferno, the molten maelstrom at the center of the earth, at the center of all things, at the center of our soul and all the souls of all who have lived and died, where that single god before all gods, before all things, waits for us, waits to claim us once more, to swallow us whole and melt our bodies and soul back into the maelstrom where we will churn with all the souls and bodies of everyone and everything that ever was or will be and down we’re dragged and down we go and down and down we burn.

There is a fire.

Keep the fire.

Keep it inside.

These words like fire.

These songs all swelling within us. All our songs silenced.

What of it?

We go on singing.

And when we come to that ecstatic final page at the center of a war we know tore the world to pieces, that left century deep scars in the German heart and mind, that ravaged the face of Europe only to be replicated and echoed a dozen times louder a generation later when the Third Reich rose and broke the earth and broke the back of Europe and broke the soul of humanity in a holocaust, a genocide the world may never move past—all of this swirls round us, swells within us as we stand with Hans on that battlefield at the end of The Magic Mountain.

And we are left with the most exquisite, most horrifying moment of ambiguity.

This horrendous unknowing.

Root and bone, blood and stone.

The Magic Mountain

I know I’ll see your face again.

After all this time, after all these words, after all my life, after all the loss, the pain, the sacrifice, the devastation, the echo of the years, of generations, the brutality of your soul entombed inside your failing body, your puttering heart, your foggy eyes and wasting flesh, I know I will see you again.

In the face in the mirror.

In the face of my son.

Perhaps, someday, in his son’s face.

The echoes of music, of love and life, of shining bright suns and wide eyed moons and the laughter ringing through dale and hill, through river and wood, through the years of my life and the life of my children and grandchildren, through all of us left to go on singing and dancing, remembering Germany, remembering Ireland, singing like we’re there, like we never left, like the violence never was, never touched upon us, like the merriment of life and smoke and wine and the firmament burning bright for all of us who hold your blood and bone, your root and stone, will never ever end.

But I know I’ll see your face again.

I know I’ll see your face again.

I know I’ll see your face again.

I’ll hear your voice.

I know your voice.

I hear it now. I hear you singing German.

See the plume of smoke pouring out your mouth, falling from your nose, the cigarette so casually in hand.

I know I’ll hear your voice again.

I know I’ll see your face again.

I know your face.

I know.

Your face.

Your voice.

Again.

Today I’m talking to Logan Timmins about I’M A TRANS AN AND I’M READY TO FUCK, which is live now on Backerkit. We talk about mechanics, different kinds of stories, making a game whose mechanics and gameplay interact and support theme.

Go back I’M A TRANS AN AND I’M READY TO FUCK!

Check out Beetle Battle over on Backerkit!

Please check out Songs of my Mother being serialized on Royal Road!

If you’d like to recommend a story or game for us to discuss, get in touch.

Music by Bart Larsen. Everything else done by me, I guess.

Listen on Spotify or Apple or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Check out our SF series The Shattered Stars.

Check out eddy’s novels.

And Kyle’s novels.

Today I’m talking to Justin Everett of Free for All Media about My Very Own Forest Spirit! We talk about experiments in game design, small games, the importance of playing in person and in the real world, and so much more!

Back My Very Own Forest Spirit right now!

Check out Beetle Battle over on Backerkit!

Please check out Songs of my Mother being serialized on Royal Road!

If you’d like to recommend a story or game for us to discuss, get in touch.

Music by Bart Larsen. Everything else done by me, I guess.

Listen on Spotify or Apple or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Check out our SF series The Shattered Stars.

Check out eddy’s novels.

And Kyle’s novels.

Today I’m talking to Jeremy Rozenhart about One Card Wonders, a library of games on 18 cards! Since recording this episode, he shifted from Backerkit to Kickstarter, but the crowdfunding campaign has launched and has already met its funding goal! We talked about getting weird and experimental with small games, game design, and so much more!

Back One Card Wonders right now on Kickstarter!

Check out Beetle Battle over on Backerkit!

Please check out Songs of my Mother being serialized on Royal Road!

If you’d like to recommend a story or game for us to discuss, get in touch.

Music by Bart Larsen. Everything else done by me, I guess.

Listen on Spotify or Apple or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Check out our SF series The Shattered Stars.

Check out eddy’s novels.

And Kyle’s novels.

Today I’m talking to Laurence O’Brien of Wotan Games about Pipes! We talk about small games, card games, and all kinds of things games! A wide ranging conversation and quite a lot of fun.

Back Pipes now on Backerkit!

Check out Beetle Battle over on Backerkit!

Please check out Songs of my Mother being serialized on Royal Road!

Check out Briar Bay, a Mork Borg/OSR setting zine live right now on Kickstarter!

If you’d like to recommend a story or game for us to discuss, get in touch.

Music by Bart Larsen. Everything else done by me, I guess.

Listen on Spotify or Apple or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Check out our SF series The Shattered Stars.

Check out eddy’s novels.

And Kyle’s novels.

Today I’m talking to Côme Martin about his game A Week with Frog & Rabbit! We talk about game design, the joy of simplicity, different types of TTRPGs, diceless mechanics, all ages games, and so much more.

Check out A Week with Frog & Rabbit live right now!

Check out Côme’s itch page too!

Check out Beetle Battle over on Backerkit!

Please check out Songs of my Mother being serialized on Royal Road!

Check out Briar Bay, a Mork Borg/OSR setting zine live right now on Kickstarter!

If you’d like to recommend a story or game for us to discuss, get in touch.

Music by Bart Larsen. Everything else done by me, I guess.

Listen on Spotify or Apple or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Check out our SF series The Shattered Stars.

Check out eddy’s novels.

And Kyle’s novels.

Today I’m talking to Anya and Irina Kagan of Gifts Galore Games about their Pocketopia project Gelt Galore! We talk about game design, playtesting, sharing and creating for family, and so much more.

GO back Gelt Galore now!

Check out Beetle Battle over on Backerkit!

Please check out Songs of my Mother being serialized on Royal Road!

Check out Briar Bay, a Mork Borg/OSR setting zine live right now on Kickstarter!

If you’d like to recommend a story or game for us to discuss, get in touch.

Music by Bart Larsen. Everything else done by me, I guess.

Listen on Spotify or Apple or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Check out our SF series The Shattered Stars.

Check out eddy’s novels.

And Kyle’s novels.

Today I’m talking to Andre Novoa of Games Omnivorous about his new game FLAIL live right now on Backerkit! We talk about his work with Mausritter, Mork Borg, and his Hexcrawl Toolbox, as well as the importance of making a game that’s easy and quick to get to the table, the importance of tactile experience, and so much more.

Check out FLAIL right now!

Check out Beetle Battle over on Backerkit!

Please check out Songs of my Mother being serialized on Royal Road!

Check out Briar Bay, a Mork Borg/OSR setting zine live right now on Kickstarter!

If you’d like to recommend a story or game for us to discuss, get in touch.

Music by Bart Larsen. Everything else done by me, I guess.

Listen on Spotify or Apple or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Check out our SF series The Shattered Stars.

Check out eddy’s novels.

And Kyle’s novels.