A Halloween Surprise
Been keeping this a secret for reasons that only I will ever understand or appreciate, but I wanted to let everyone know that my novel Sing, Behemoth, Sing is out right now!
You can buy it right here or add it to your goodreads pile right here1.
Cover by Chris Olson. Cover Wrap by Kelby Losack. Text by KE Wolfe.
Who is KE Wolfe? Well, that’s a somewhat hilarious story, but the short version is that my good friend Kyle Muntz and I wrote this together.
The novel is quite simple in many ways: it’s a western with giant monsters, indebted as much to Deadwood and Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars as it is to Neon Genesis Evangelion.
I love so many things about this book. It includes one of my favorite characters I’ve ever accidentally stumbled into. But it is a wild book.
Where Glossolalia was elegiac and dreamlike, this is more like shotgun blasts while riding your bike on a dirt road as fast as you can.
Here’s the back cover:
Attack on Titan meets Deadwood.
In a desolate future where the monstrous giants known as Angels stalk the earth, Mudd and Arnold walk in the shadow of Marmaroth. Far from civilization, they’ve fought their entire life to survive in the hazardous wilds. But unlike the Loveless—mindless thralls who feed on the excretions of the Angels—at least they’ve retained their humanity, even as they sing Marmaroth’s song from afar.
Until a murderous Angel comes with his spears of light, intent on murdering his own kind: and the earth trembles as giants clash. A friend Mudd thought he knew consumes the heart of an Angel—and ceases to be human.
As the giants begin to fall, what will happen to those who worshipped them?
If you’re not sure what to make of such a thing, you can read the first two chapters below right now. They’re pretty good.
Loveless in the Moonlight
After we finished singing, we watched Marmaroth looming in the distance as a silhouette against the full moon. Big enough, nearly, to eclipse it entirely. Arnold stood and stretched his back, grunting like a pagan. The fire danced against the night. Flickering light revealing my companions.
I took a strange comfort in this shared experience. Whether pagan or believer, we all sang as one with the angels. Even the brotherhood opened their lungs to sing.
Therese said, “Think she’ll show her wings?”
“Got fifty on the next hour,” I said.
Luci the Fool laughed, spat. “She’s not in heat.”
“So?”
The flames revealed her metallic smile. “Means you lose.”
Arnold grunted again, stepped away from us. Into the night. The darkness swallowing him like he dipped himself slowly in ink.
“We’ll see.” I threw the stick I’d been debarking at the fire but missed. Ignored Therese and Luci the Fool’s laughter. “Hey, Arnold, what about you?”
“Leave him alone,” Therese said. “Poor guy’s heartbroken.”
A stab of something like jealousy. I coughed to hide the hurt that he hadn’t told me. We’d been wilding since we were kids, stalking the angels and ducking the loveless sprouting in their wake. I squinted into the darkness. Tried to make him out. I coughed again because no one had said anything for a minute. Couldn’t just ask what happened after the awkward pause. “Eloise?” I knew her name. Had known her since before even Arnold. But Therese and Luci the Fool didn’t know that.
“She told me before we left.”
Arnold’s cavernous voice came from the darkness. “She told me to keep my cop hands off her. Last thing she said to me.”
Struck me as odd. Leaning back, I folded my arms. “You’re not a cop.”
Arnold’s furious face emerged from the stirring shadows. “Tell her that!” Then the rest of his body fell into the light. Wide as a buffalo with big meaty hands. Were I a woman, I’d not want his hands on me either. “She said,” Arnold sat heavily, tucking one knee under the other, “that I was worse than a cop. I was a murderer hired by cops.” He sighed, his shoulders slumping. Then he put his face in his hands and didn’t say another word for an hour.
Something about what Eloise told him caught in my skull. Like a fragment lodged there long ago. A faded, yellow page bloomed in my memory like a sunrise, but I didn’t know why. It sounded almost like the start of a comedy routine, but for the bit about murderer.
She was right, though. He was a murderer and the cops had hired him to cave in a skull. We’d been wilding for a week, which meant he’d gone a week without telling me that Eloise left him. Tried not to take it personally, but he could have mentioned it anytime. We’d been following Marmaroth, standing in her shade.
It was difficult to speak to people, to be honest, but Marmaroth in the distance had always opened us up to one another. We could go months without saying anything that mattered and then spend entire days spilling our hearts and hopes and fears and loves to one another in the darkness of her shadow.
Luci the Fool said, “How much time til you lose?” Her metal gleaming in the firelight.
I shrugged. “Not gonna lose.”
Therese said, “Ten minutes.”
“Who’s got after?”
I said, “Therese is next, then Arnold. Then you.”
She smiled that shining smile. “Then sleep.”
“Unless you lose,” Therese said.
Marmaroth opened her lungs and bellowed. The sky shuddered, then the blackness sloughed off the night as the wind ripped over the landscape, blowing dust through our camp and ripping the fire away along with the wood. All four of us threw ourselves down into the dirt and clasped each other’s hands to keep from being thrown through the air and into darkness. The rushing wind of her call deafened us, leaving my ears ringing. Then the night refilled with blackness and when I raised my head from the dirt, I watched Marmaroth stretch her wings wide, shrouding the moon, turning the night an even deeper shade of black.
I backhanded Luci the Fool’s shoulder. When she turned to me, I pointed towards where the moon was and saw her mouth a curse.
In the cold and the dark, Luci the Fool and I went to gather what firewood we could find. She asked me about Arnold and I evaded saying anything because I didn’t really trust her enough to share something real. Trusted her to save my life, sure, but not to keep a secret.
Trick’s always to ask someone about themselves. Everyone’s always desperate to talk about themselves. Especially hunters. “When you get the metal?”
“Ah.” She turned to me with a wide shining smile. “You’ll have to tell Therese that she lost her bet.”
This deflection held such little interest for me that I didn’t even acknowledge it, just kept walking. These heathens thought transforming their bodies without being corrupted by the angels was next to godliness but I always found it revolting. So little of humanity remained and they were so willing to scorch and shatter the remnants.
“Told her you’d ask within the first week. She thinks too highly of you. Thought you’d wait at least a week.”
“Didn’t think we’d be out here a week.”
She brayed like a lobotomite. It startled me. A loud, dumb boom of a laugh right in my ear. “So impatient. Therese told me you’d wilded before but now I don’t know.”
Ignored her baiting me. From the first, I knew I was gonna hate her. Knew it the moment I saw the metal poking through her skin. Pagans I could handle, but zealots spooked me. Anyone who’d do that to their body was capable of anything.
Marmaroth had stopped walking. Rarely a good thing. All the years I’d lived in her shadow, her slumber filled me with dread. Dread for what I knew came next. A swarm. A feast. Then death. “She’s going to sleep.”
Luci the Fool sucked in a breath. “For real?” She didn’t know Marmaroth. She’d haunted some other angel—she told me but I forgot—out east since before I was born, though she didn’t look it. Felt good knowing something she didn’t. She may have haunted a whole choir of angels before but she didn’t know my girl Marmaroth, most exquisite of angels.
I nodded, pointed. “She’s bending her knee. She’s going down.” As I spoke, her wings snapped high into the air, then formed a dome over her as she lowered herself to the earth. The immensity of her body reminded me of the story from my childhood. The story my mother’s mother told me about the birth of the monsters and the death of the dream. “The mountain’s slumber. The monster wakes.”
“They swarm her?”
“You smell that?”
She leaned back, opened her mouth slightly, and inhaled loudly through her nose like a coyote. Recoiling, she coughed, then sneezed.
“Yeah,” I said.
“She’s in heat,” she spat. “This is a fucking disaster.”
I kept walking until I came to the edge of the bluffs. Marmaroth had carved the canyon with her endless journey to nowhere, or at least that’s the story. For as long as anyone could remember, she walked in circles around the highlands. Some say it’s because the highlands are holy and the angels are attracted to sacred sites. Others say Marmaroth’s reverence towards the highlands made them holy. Some say the highlands only exist because her walking carved the canyon.
Don’t matter to the priests.
Luci the Fool came up beside me as I stared down into the canyon. As Marmaroth curled her massive body, the loveless swarmed by the thousands. The way the moonlight glistened against her excretions revealed the loveless already feasting. More and more rushed in their shambling way towards the sleeping angel. Caught in her wake, the loveless abandoned their humanity and transformed into some new creature. No longer human but never to be an angel.
Luci the Fool spat again. “That’s a lot.”
“Yeah.” I did a sign of the cross, said a prayer for Our Lady of Coyotes. “Time to head back.”
She sighed. “Means I’m not getting paid, huh?”
Meant I wasn’t getting paid neither. “Between you and Jesse.” I watched them, the loveless. Revolting. I told myself that would never be me. Never would I lose myself. Told myself that my haunting was not the same as their thralldom. Told myself I’d never be like Penelope or Maggie or Ash or any of the others who I’d loved and lost to the tide of the monsters. Watching them rush towards the great sleeping monster, I felt my thoughts slurring. Questions filling my skull, wondering if my people still lived, if that was even living at all, if—”
“Come on,” Luci the Fool said.
Like being dunked in cold water, I gasped when I surfaced.
“Hey,” she pulled me away from the edge, made me look at her. “Hey,” she slapped my face hard with her metal hand.
I pushed her back but she was on me, shoving my shoulders all the way back to the earth. Staring up at the empty sky, my breath gone, she climbed on top of me. Pinning my arms down with her knees. “Hey, you dumb motherfucker. You still in there?” She slapped me again and again before my eyes focused and saw her. “You there?”
I nodded, sputtered something. My mouth full of blood.
She shook her head. “Unbelievable.” The scorn and spite in her voice splashed against me. Shame. It soaked me. I had been walking the edge so long, always feeling the pull but never losing myself. And I hadn’t lost myself. Still, I was embarrassed. She helped me up and we wandered back to camp without firewood. She kept muttering about what a fucking idiot I was and on and on.
I didn’t say shit.
Cathedral
The hours back towards Cathedral slipped by in an anxious haze full of pointless bickering over what couldn’t be helped.
Marmaroth in heat. The loveless swarming.
From the way Arnold and Therese fought I’d swear that this had never happened before. Only just morning, moon still hanging high by the time Father Baijiu saw us. Hauling water from the river, she set down her bucket real careful before pulling out her shotgun that I knew hadn’t had shells since maybe her daddy was the wild’s priest. She told us to stop and Luci the Fool told her to fuck off so of course Father Baijiu cocks the worthless thing, lets that echo out into the night, make us think about it.
I said, “It’s Mudd and Arnold.”
“Jesus Christ,” the relief in her voice like a trill, “I almost shit myself. Back already? Grab my water.” She eyed the four of us. “Maybe fill another bucket.”
Luci the Fool asked if she had something harder, like an asshole, but Father Baijiu smiled wide and motioned us to follow her up the hill.
Cathedral loomed massive up the hill almost like it was another sleeping angel instead of the oldest damn thing made by human hands, back even—some say—before the angels. A large dome cracked open like an egg with a scoop taken out sitting atop a wide rectangular foundation with windows of colored glass and the biggest doors I’d ever seen.
Stepping into Cathedral from the wilds had a sensation to it. The tactile embrace of the sacred, the sloughing off of the profane. Somehow always cold inside that stone and marble ruins. My hair rising all over my skin. I closed my eyes, said a prayer to Our Lady of Coyotes as I was bathed in the cooling waters of the final home of the long dead god. Taking a deep breath, I felt renewed.
Luci the Fool’s metal shined against the slight daylight as she spoke over Arnold and Father Baijiu, “I ain’t never seen so many loveless in one place. I’m telling you, this place is fucked. In a month, anyone who’s not miles away’ll be sucking down Marmaroth’s leakage or eaten by them that did.”
Father Baijiu poured out six small glass of baijiu and lifted only one but motioned for us to take the rest. Selena grabbed the sixth.
“How goes it?” I nodded at her. “Didn’t see you when we came in.”
“Thought I was good.” She downed her shot, winced. “What’s this about loveless?”
“Just a swarm,” Father Baijiu said.
“No,” Luci the Fool barked. “No, not just a swarm.” She mimicked Father Baijiu, mocking her to her face. “It’s the biggest fucking—”
Felt her throat collapse against the edge of my hand. She fell heavily to the ground gasping.
“Jesus, Mudd.” Therese shook her head.
Standing over her, I looked down. “This is Father Baijiu’s house. Don’t be an asshole.”
Arnold yawned loudly. “Got any food?”
Luci the Fool stared up at me with the kind of hate I well knew and so I met her stare and watched her squirm trying to catch her breath while Arnold and Therese explained to Father Baijiu and her wife what we saw.
Gasping, Luci the Fool stretched her metal hand up towards me. I took it and pulled her up. In one single movement she got to her feet and had a knife to my throat, her metal hand clasped behind my neck. Her voice a wet rasp. “You touch me again and I’ll cut out your eyes and tongue.”
Our eyes locked, I breathed as calmly as I could. Didn’t want to show fear or too much aggression as I made her aware of my bare hatchet pressed just below her sternum.
Her eyes opened wide for a moment, then squinted as if trying to see something on the other side of my pupils.
Selena said, “Just kiss already.”
Arnold’s baijiu came out through his nose and the rest laughed. Even Luci the Fool smiled, clapped her metal hand against my shoulder. “Think you’re ready for me, boy? Or are you one of those believers in the dead god that don’t fuck?”
She let me go, not really wanting a response and so I didn’t give her one.
Father Baijiu leaned against the stone pillar reaching up into the sky, touching nothing. The dome cracked open above us let in the ocean of sky that someone told me was once full of stars that lit up the night sky but that the stars all ran from earth after the angels came. It was an idea that lodged in my skull, that the stars knew us the way pagans say the gods know us, that they reacted and responded to what happened here below. Found it both comforting and terrifying.
Father Baijiu said, “At the cliff’s edge?” She nodded at our silent agreement, then looked up into that same ocean of nothing above. “Thousands feeding. Might be they won’t head upland. Sometimes they keep wandering Marmaroth’s path for years before a smattering of them start climbing.”
Luci the Fool snorted. “Maybe you didn’t hear or maybe they didn’t say, but your angel’s in heat, Father. Even a week away, people are gonna become singing and dancing pilgrims and those pilgrims will come back in two weeks as moaning loveless and they’ll bring dozens or thousands with them. Your big stone church here’s not going to save you or nobody.” She turned to me. “How long does your angel stay in heat?”
“Maybe a week.”
Luci the Fool scowled, turned to Therese. “That true?”
“Him and Arnold would know.” She looked to Arnold.
He yawned again, unstrapped his sword and set it down. “One time she slumbered for two years.” His eyes flicked to mine. “We, uh, we don’t—”
“Two years,” now Luci the Fool stared up into the stars. “Yall survived two years of hell.” She shook her head. “So she’s an inconstant bitch. A week or two years.” She laughed. “And yall just stay right here.”
“It’s our home.” Father Baijiu poured another glass for everyone.
Luci the Fool sipped at hers. “You know I’m from out east.” She eyed Father Baijiu who nodded. “Camael’s Dominion, as they called it. Camael was regular as menstruation. Two weeks in heat. Two years off.” She smiled as she looked down into her glass of baijiu, remembering. “We felt safe. Hadn’t seen too much trouble until Sorush on his infinite journey round the earth came into Camael’s Dominion. Yall ever see two angels fight?”
I swallowed, a spike of terror down my spine, radiating out. I clenched my fist, let them relax.
Luci the Fool took another sip, nodding. “To answer your previous question, Mudd. Joined the brotherhood and took metal after Sorush and Camael lay waste to the countryside. It was Camael’s corpse that begot the new civilization out there.” She hooted. “We was rich, boy. I tell you that much right now. You don’t know the wealth to be harvested from a dead angel. My whole life up until then was just scavenging off his droppings and excretions. But Camael’s heart powered our new little civilization for years. Would still be, likely, had things remained.
“But a dead angel—” she shook her head, “it’s like cracking open a dam. You expect the coyotes, maybe even the ghouls and warlocks. What you don’t expect are all those lesser angels. Their children.” She paused and the silence pounded in my head like a gong. Didn’t even pull my eyes away. In that sacred place, she revealed the depths of the plagued world. “I was but twenty or so when Sorush murdered his brother Camael. We descended to raid his corpse. For some reason, we didn’t expect others to do the same. The siblings Varhmiel and Vequaniel came to consume Camael’s bones. Zadkiel and Theliel arrived with their thousand wings and made peace with the siblings. Then they procreated and birthed a hundred more lesser angels that crawled through the muck and the mire. Some of them were so weak and ill-formed that even the loveless consumed them rather than fall thrall to them. For seventy years, I fought the monstrous offshoots feasting and spawning off the dead angel’s corpse.” She drained the rest of her baijiu, snorted. “All good things, as they say. Ah, well, we ran in the end. We ran as far and as fast as we could.
“You say Marmaroth—a week or two years.” She shook her head, laughing. “One of the great angels! The loveless are one thing. I have never seen that many though. Don’t care how proud yall are here in the west. That many loveless means either Marmaroth is an angel unlike any other—aren’t they all?—or there’s more here than just her.”
Father Baijiu cleared her throat. “I have something to show you.”
Fuck, I breathed and Arnold shivered.
Hope you enjoyed that little excerpt. Now go buy it!
As long as you’re still here, go get Glossolalia, too.
Because of unknowable amazon magic, the paperback is not yet available but will be shortly and possibly even by the time you read this. The audiobook will also be coming sometime in the next month. Probably.
The more Evangelion the better, of course
I loved this! I'm getting the paperback as soon as it's out!