Making of Mercy

guest post by Kelby Losack

Guest Post by Kelby Losack. Order his new hillbilly cyberpunk novel Mercy. This book is so good. Follows the structure of one of my favorite kinds of stories, which almost always makes me cry. Follow him on twitter.

If you’d like to submit your own writing for a future Guest Post, please see the post here.

Autumn foliage in north Texas is all crispy blond and brown. Just dry. I scoped the hills through a thirty-aught-six. Caught view of some kind of bird—a blue one, I don’t really know birds—and I pulled my phone out and snapped a pic through the scope. My brother laughed at me, but only with his shoulders and face. Trying not to make too much noise.

There’s a lot of lulls in the rhythm of a hunt. We got restless and did some walking. Taking turns who had their head on a swivel, who was watching our steps.

We came up on a clearing same time as this eight-point buck, almost close enough to reach out and touch. My brother’s hand flew to my chest and we stood frozen, breathless. Less than a dozen steps between the two of us and this king of the forest, who stood still as we were. All of us staring.

My brother slowly raised his rifle. Focused down the sights. The earth quit spinning and everything fell silent. Then my brother’s shoulders went slack and he lowered the rifle. The buck’s ears twitched before he dipped back into the safety of the brush.

I didn’t ask what happened, why didn’t he take the shot, because I already knew.

But then he said it anyway. “I have never been that close before.”

We’d cross paths with the same buck later on that day, and this time there’d be no pause as he stretched his neck towards something he’d barely get a taste of hanging from a tree. Can’t remember what he could have been going for; the trees were all skeletal and naked. But before bagging and tagging the king, there was another long lull, of my brother and I talking shit between long drags of silence.

The idea for Mercy first hit me during one of these quiet moments. I told my brother about this story idea for a human sacrifice disguised as a hunting trip, an Abraham and Isaac story where a suicidal widower is tasked by a hillbilly cult leader with delivering himself and his son to a sacrificial altar in the woods to keep some ancient, bloodthirsty god satiated.

My brother said, “Damn, you should write that,” so I decided yeah, I would.

Other shit came between—Letting Out the Devils and some fucking around on collaborative projects—but Mercy was steady percolating. Discussing it with the Broken River crew gave it more layers.

J. David Osborne said the next wave is cyberpunk. So Mercy became cyberpunk.

E Rathke built a world in which the moon split in half and fell to earth and a black tree forest full of mutated creatures grew out of the wreckage. He put this lore in the Broken River shared folder of manuscripts and ideas and so there was another sandbox Mercy would play in.

David Simmons been steady genre-hopping with banger after banger that retains his unique voice despite the setting or premise, so I thought bet, I can do that. It’s time to write a post-apocalyptic / cyberpunk / hillbilly cult horror novel.

Grant Wamack and I been digging out of similar trenches lately, getting it out the mud by any means, grinding tirelessly sunup to sundown. Mercy had to reflect this, had to work as a ritual of turning the tables of fortune. (Grant’s writing has also influenced the sexual content of my work recently, which I don’t know how to say without it sounding weird, but it’s like a competitive thing to include at least one pornographically steamy scene… I regret admitting this. Moving on).

December 1 became the deadline to drop JDO’s Dying World and Mercy at the same time. This was in October maybe. I put the book up for pre-order and got serious on it. In the meantime, there was Cyberpunk 2077 and a four-years-running Fallout 4 play-through that sort of represented and influenced the look of this world in my head. Meantime, in comes E Rathke being like, “I’ll write a cyberpunk thing by then, too,” which is the true origin story of Howl, a banger that exists as evidence to homie’s ability to spit out a book off the top of the dome in a very short amount of time. I mean, yeah, I had just begun writing Mercy for real, but the ideas and notes had existed for a year.

But anyway. The book gets written, mostly. I’ve got the premise. I’ve got what I think is the right ending to pull off the table-turning ritual. I’ve got December 1 rushing up quick because, lowkey, my wife Erika and I found out this year we’d be having our second son—a happy accident—and all of a sudden, the book that’s about to drop stops hitting for me. I don’t really fuck with it so much. I type to get the word count up, flesh out my ideas, but it’s not right. And mostly I’m backspacing, staring at that cursor going blink blink blink at the end of a paragraph I don’t care to show the world.

So I trash it.

Delete the whole thing. No new file, no copy and paste this over to another draft to try and work in another direction, none of that. Five days before the book is supposed to drop, I hit delete and start all over.

Because this is a story of going toe to toe with god and upping a giant gun in his face. So that’s what I had to do in order to write such a thing: I had to let the odds stack up against me and fight like hell. I didn’t sleep for three days, then I slept for two hours and got back at it. I was getting that tweaker high of being up on amphetamines for way too long, a state I hadn’t existed in for going on a decade. I craved sleep and for this book to just be done with, flushed out of my system. And why’d I do this to myself again?

I thought I knew what the story was. A father and son story. A look at what the hillbillies of a cyberpunk world get up to. Maybe it’d go in the direction of survival horror, maybe it’d go full Berserk crazy. But it wanted to be something more somber, more poetic, much as I was running from that. I wanted to write something fun and stupid, I really did, but this kid happened.

In a month or less, my wife and I will be welcoming Phoenix Asher into the world. His existence in this incarnation has already given me grey hairs and motivated my ass to be more ambitious, while whole time humbling my ass to be more grateful.

We weren’t planning on another kid, but the lines on the stick were blue all the same.

Excited, nervous, our first thought was “Damn, we need a bigger house. And some more money.” So I got to hustling harder, got to remodeling our thousand square foot starter home to be ready for a whole-ass family of four.

Then soon as the surprise of this child was sinking in, we lost it.

I cleaned the blood off the bed and the carpet while floating somewhere above myself. I made deals with beings on the other side, cut my palms open, drew sigils in the dirt. I held Erika while she wept and wondered aloud the things I was trying to hold in.

A few weeks went by of hating whatever god shook us up just to knock us down. Then came the tremors in her belly. Strong enough even I could touch and feel the movement inside her tightening stomach.

The doctors have wiped record of a pregnancy off the chart. It doesn’t make sense to anyone, but you can’t deny a baby who fought against god to be here. The first checkup back after losing him, that same baby boy was big and strong and wriggling around like a motherfucker on that monitor.

I don’t know what to tell you, because I don’t know what to tell myself. The kid was here then he wasn’t. And then he was again.

“This… this is the same baby.” The doctor had no explanation. Could only state what we were all looking at.

Mercy wanted to be more than a fun detour into a new genre. This kid’s tale had to be told. A father and son story when I am a father of two sons can’t be half-assed.

So I scratched it five days before release. And what flowed out was what it wanted to be the whole time.

A ritual. An exorcism. A fable for my sons, warriors who could go toe to toe with god and not flinch.

Mercy is available now.