I’ve been a fan of J David Osborne for a long time. I even published an excerpt of his nonfiction book about Death Stranding and fatherhood. I listed one of his novels as my all time favorites! I even like his podcast, which is maybe the rarest kind of praise I can give.
So it’s with glee and honor that I get to share the publication day of Howl with his new cyberpunk novel Dying World.
Buy them both now!
I got to read Dying World yesterday and I blasted through it in one sitting. It’s cyberpunk in all the ways you’d want. Influenced by Akira, Cyberpunk 2077, and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, it is a wild caper with weird technologies, lewd and crude characters, brutal fights, and an all-out race to an ending that, even if you predict, will still leave you smiling and nodding along, pumping your dang fist like an idiot (like me!).
Along with all that, it is hilarious. It made me laugh out loud several times, which isn’t something that often happens to me when reading. But there are moments in this book that are so beautifully hilarious that you’ll likely end up cackling too.
It’s as cyberpunky as cyberpunk gets and it’s just awesome.
Then there’s my book, Howl, which I wrote in a sprint without a plan, just trying to have as much fun as I could. If you can hear me laughing while you read this, there’s a good reason!
While Dying World is deeply cyberpunk in the ways you’d expect, I went a different direction. Possibly to an absurd degree. Howl is more in the vein of Vampire Hunter D in its wild and zany vision of a future so distant and weird that it may feel at times like it was defined more by whims than by any concrete plan.
You may not believe me when I say this, but I built the world for this months ago. I just didn’t intend to write anything here. Did the worldbuilding for other people, making a playground for writers to stomp around in. But then, as often happens, I played in my own playground.
Howl was built to be a wild, fun, and exciting ride. I want you to laugh, absolutely, but I also want to give you some thrills here. Which is a style of writing that’s new to me, since I’m more prone to have characters sit and talk for 100 pages than throw them into a sword fight in the woods with a vampire, but what could be more fun than sword fighting a vampire in a forest of giant mushrooms?
Paying subscribers should have received the ebook yesterday in the email address they use to subscribe here. If you didn’t get it for some reason, let me know and I’ll send it again.
The paperback editions of Dying World and Howl are not yet ready but will be soon. I’ll update everyone here when they’re available.
I’ll keep it brief today and just hope that you go get my book and love it. I wrote it to be as much fun as possible. I hope you get Dying World, too. It’s the most fun novel I’ve read in a long time.
The sequels for both are coming early next year.
Wolf.
Howl.
as cyberpunky as cyberpunk gets