We had a good Christmas over here.
My wife got me a copy of We Had It Coming and other fictions by Luke O’Neil and it already feels like the exact flavor of dread I reach for on purpose.
I read A Creature Wanting Form last year and loved how his stories sit in that uncomfortable overlap between tenderness and catastrophe, and somehow still manage to make me laugh out loud, a lot!
His character (I like to imagine that it's just him. He calls it fiction, but, I dunno) is just trying to live while everything around them is wired to grind them down and he somehow makes that feel both sickening and strangely humane at the same time. The syntax gets weird in ways that work for me too, like the sentences are pacing the room and wearing a groove in the floor.
His newsletter and site, Welcome To Hell World, run in the same emotional register. It’s part reporting, part diary, part scrap pile, all centered on what it means to live inside the American hyper capitalist disaster without pretending things are fine. The writing is angry, but the anger is pointed at power instead of at the people getting crushed which is rarer than it should be.
New book on my nightstand.
Mood set.
🖤
