The new book’s a beast, folks. That’s why I’ve been quiet in here. It’s chugging right along, as regular State of the Substack/Patreon folks know. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had an essay, and set it aside to turn back to Stevie and her saga.
Stevie Bellingham is the main character of Esoteria, the new book. She’s plucky. She’s dysfunctional. Her heart is true. She has the power to change the world and she’s afraid to.
The logline for audiences would likely read A street-smart young girl in a dysfunctional family is granted almost unlimited power, and must use it to stop the avatar of death.
That’s not great, but that’s because loglines aren’t great, they’re a corporation’s way of tricking you into crossing their palm with silver and reducing powerful concepts to commercial jingles. They make something as complicated and deep as Before Sunset into “Two kids take a long walk and talk about love.”
I’m ninety-one thousand words in, and I just finished part two of five. This is not normal. This is not what I’m used to. I hate it. I love it.
My books are getting longer. Twenty novels in, I’ve learned that to question and analyze what a book needs is to court disaster. I’ve stopped worrying about pleasing some nebulous corporate interest in the hopes of getting them to buy my book and take most of the profits in exchange for the delusion of fame or security.
Those bastards all want books that are 80,000-120,000 words, barring sci-fi/fantasy, and I used to tailor my work to that arbitrary number when I was younger and dumber, to my shame.
If it’s long, and deserves to be long, it should be long. I always want a story to follow the dress rule, which I learned from a benedictine long ago. A good story must be long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to keep things interesting. That can be four hundred thousand words, and it often is. The Grapes of Wrath certainly does not suffer for its length. Nor does Of Mice and Men. Both are just right.
The reason we have a cognitive block to that truth is because most things we see that are long are long rather arbitrarily. Hi, streaming. But when there is reason, a real reason to explore characters in depth, holy shit. True Detective.
This particular long story is about the decline we’ve* been living through these last forty years** and how it takes people who otherwise would be heroes*** and traps them in a magical cage of dysfunction so strong they can’t live up to their potential.
*Americans. Sorry rest of the world, I didn’t live there.
**Not the rich, never the rich.
***David Foster Wallace?
That’s the real logline.
Yes, Esoteria has dragons, lich things, giant spiders, an undead old man, a witch of sorts, a boyfriend, and something like magic that isn’t. It’s full of weirdness. But really it’s about how the American Dream fucks us all the way up, as told through fantasy and horror elements.
Stevie’s my age, and that’s intentional. She was born on September 11th. It’s on the nose, yes, but it must be, to counter those born on the Fourth of July. Her life is broken along a series of key events that perhaps she had a hand in creating, perhaps she didn’t. Like all of us, she was there, she might have changed things, she couldn’t change anything, and that helplessness washes over her and gives her guilt and stress and neurosis she can’t afford therapy for. She explodes, she implodes, her heart is in the right place.
I divided the major eras of her life into five key events to show how they shaped and changed her, and us. The novel is her going through each.
There’s Waco, David Koresh and his apocalypse cult, when she’s thirteen. That’s where she (and I, and we) learns (learned) that there are Americans out there who would be glad to kill even children to see their ideas take root. And certainly adults. And absolutely you.
It could be any one of the isolated violent incidents of that era where more people (with guns) started deciding actively that the rule of law doesn’t matter if you believe God says it doesn’t, with a healthy political dose of realizing “Lookie here, God can say whatever we want Him to say!”
I chose Waco because that’s where I learned of it for the first time.
During this period, Stevie is losing her mother to alcohol while being blamed for causing said alcoholism by existing. Many kids from the eighties and nineties will remember how much better their parents lives would be if they had never been born, because they were told repeatedly.
She’s struggling with having a job at 13 because she can’t be provided for. She’s grappling with isolation born of dysfunction (no one wants to be friends with the weird poor kid). None of the adults really have a solution when something terrible happens, she realizes. Maybe they are the cause of all terrible things.
Then comes Oklahomah City. The bombing. An echo, almost. It’s where we learned that the bad bad shit we all just saw in Waco wasn’t a one-off. A chapter to forget. Where it became abundantly clear that this will go on, and on, and on. And grow. And most importantly, perhaps, that the call was coming from inside the house.
Stevie’s falling in love for the first time at fifteen. She’s gained the ability to do anything she wants (there’s a plot device, important but unimportant), but she’s afraid to do anything with it because her power makes her feel good. REALLY good. Like a drug. She doesn’t want to be her mother. She doesn’t want to be an addict. She wants to be a hero. Her world, a world where she has to be emancipated at fifteen, pay rent, go to school, and parent her parent, essentially, presents her few opportunities. She is punished for trying. She never gets to be a kid.
That’s what the world did to a lot of us. What it’s still doing.
Try hard, do right, and you will succeed! Not really. We got student loans, no house, and extra responsibilities our parents never had. And less of a voice. The noose only tightens unless and until you remove the executioner. And if you don’t, the executioner finds some great excuses to yank the rope harder.
Like 9/11.
I wish I could go back in time and tell younger me that there’s going to come a time in your life where you’re going to see another isolated terrorist act, a tragedy functionally akin to the Waco fires in intent and execution, on the scale of Oklahomah city, and that it will end with the functional equivalent of America invading and blowing up most of Texas to solve the problem of David Koresh. And why? Because those Texans were brown, and because it was profitable.
Imagine what that might do to a gal of twenty-one. Remember what it did to us, if you were around.
Now yes, yes, there’s no denying the tragedy of 9/11. Unless, of course, it’s the proportional daily 9/11s that happened in 2022. Those 9/11s are fine, because they helped business get back on its feet. Not one invaded hospital.
An awful lot of freezer containers filled with Grandmas, though.
Never forget. I won’t.
The kids knew we were going to war back in September of 2001. Day of. The adults knew too, but they all pretended it was a reluctant duty instead of the joy of ‘MURICA KICKIN’ ASS that it clearly was for them, just like in 1990. The key giveaway was watching all of them with their dicks out gleefully masturbating at pictures of the American flag while people were dying. They came right on camera for us on Fox News, all you had to do was watch with open eyes instead of applying the Rally Around the Flag filter.
Unlike the Boomer turn on the protest wheel back when the government pretended to care about hearing the people, we got free-speech zones, those few of us who decided to say this shit wasn’t cool out loud. The turn came then, where Gen X collectively learned that “having our voices heard” wouldn’t do shit. And never really had.
And that we’d never have a voice, importantly.
The Boomers knew of the futility of protest, but like they always have, they didn’t teach us their lessons, then blamed us for not knowing what they knew.
They just wanted to get a house and forget the bad times rather than acknowledge that their hell was forever. So did we, but we didn’t get the house, or we might have become them, I fret. We got the boot on a human face forever. As Vonnegut once famously said, “So it goes.”
What will this do to Stevie? My guess is that she has much the same reaction I did. She’s never going to trust anyone with power again. She will have demonstrable proof that it’s all a game to ensure corporate hegemony, and that in America, a life’s only value is its weight as a business tactic. It’s a club you ain’t invited to, and never will be, to paraphrase Carlin.
She’ll still try and help a lot of people without power anyway, being young. And she’ll learn that the system they all struggle in will disallow such intervention, even with what is functionally magical powers. Other powers will come to crush her.
They will methodically root her altruism out and defund it and punish her for suggesting rudimentary things. Like that everyone deserves shelter and food. That a nation founded on people going a great distance to found a better life ought to allow people going a great distance to find a better life to achieve that. Yes, Virginia, even if they’re brown. They’ll put some razor wire around her ideals and maybe make her swim a little. And it will cut her down. It will wear her to nubs.
The next major definitive event, of course, the levy breaking, is the election of Don Jon in 2016. When we collectively embraced the abyss and did nothing. The fringe came out and took charge. The fascists ascended. And the liberals all wagged a very stern finger and said “Now you stop that, now. Just stop that this very instant, or we shall write some very stern letters and do some very stern hoping.”
And we did! We wrote a lot of tweets and letters! We hoped. We thought that was all we needed to do. We still think that. We’re still doing that. Right now. Today.
“Neal, you’re such a cynic. What about Obama’s election, and Biden’s victory, in the middle of all that?”
I thought we already knew about whataboutism.
Let me tell you what those were, in case you missed it. Those were corporate love bombs. You know what a love bomb is? That’s when your dysfunctional parent who beats you and treats you like shit buys you a Playstation and says everything is going to be all right and hugs you after a weekend binge and a little kicking you around.
They give you a few days of respite that seems like kindness so you don’t leave home or cut yourself, because that’s more trouble for the abuser than buying a Playstation.
A few days later, the beatings resume, and if you look around the house, there’s no real policy changes. There are even some regressions. What do you mean, Dad got a new thicker belt?
Shut up kid. You had a Playstation. I know we sold it to pay the bills, but look back. That was a real good time, wasn’t it? Wasn’t that good? Doesn’t that make up for the bad times?
It’s as hollow and dysfunctional as it seems four our nation as a family.
Barack Obama and Joe Biden are a great and milquetoast couple of guys (respectively) trying to do good in a system that wholly disallows (and disallowed) it on any real scale. Ideals are worthless if we allow boots to stamp faces. Even if there’s a few years where the boots don’t stamp as much.
And they stamped our faces during both of their temporary reigns, because when one party isn’t acting in good faith, a body politic cannot function. And that cancer is reflected in the fates of our people.
Shoot the messenger if you want. I don’t give a fuck. It’s true, and a good writer’s first duty is to speak the truth as they see it. The Supreme Court is 6-3 and Trump’s going to win or be installed in nine short months. Me saying that doesn’t mean I want it, and if you hate me for it, that’s your issue.
Hunter Thompson writes of the moment the water broke on the ideals of his generation. How a person with the right eyes could see it.
Trump’s election was the moment the water broke on democracy. Not because we don’t have the illusion of it now. We do, and certainly will for some time. Rome did for three hundred years. We might make it four hundred. We might make it five.
But 2016? That’s where the idea that we’re all acting in good faith working toward something very clearly died and washed up on the shores of the Rubicon like one of many drowned immigrant corpses in the Rio Grande. You know, back when the New York Times was publishing their regular “Let’s say something nice about Trump” column?
I think Stevie’s still got a little optimism here. Not much. A small flame. The house is on fire, but the hose is right there. We can put this fire out. Right?
Then comes the actual burning while everyone stands around watching. The ascent of death. Covid. Millions and millions of bodies and a world that refuses to stop that killing if it means they can’t do their hair.
That’s where Stevie learns (as we did) that liking the idea of doing good (and being seen liking it on Twitter) is far more important to most of us than going through the ongoing pain of actually doing that shit. Writ large. Killing Grandma so you can keep your precious job.
That’s where we went from business hiding the fact that it would gladly kill you if it was profitable to boasting about it, and getting us to fight for it.
At this point in the story, Stevie learns that when we die, we go to a terrible place. All of us. The good, the bad, the centrist fucks. Not hell. Just a place where, like in our earthly lives, we are forced to work endlessly to climb a Sisyphean wall to no end, simply to please those bastard entities watching us struggle while they engage in endless pleasures.
Like in our plane, the pretense is gone, and no one cares. No one can. There is neither the strength nor the avenue.
She sees a world teetering so close to this unreal afterlife that one can look from man to pig to man and not see any difference.
She’s going to have to face the decision to destroy both, thus destroying everything, or let both persist, with the logic being that life in misery is better than death and non-existence.
Is it?
I don’t know what she’ll choose. That’s been one of the key choices of my own life. I think we all face it, in some way. The more you live, the more you realize just how insignificant your ideals are in the face of someone who will gladly kill you for a dollar and their well-paid cronies.
They’re our mothers. Our fathers. Our societies.
They’re also us.
It’s easy to point at Donald Trump. But we have a government of the people, for the people, and by the people. The leaders don’t come from some oustide dimension. We have Marjorie because you did not run. We have Lauren because you did not rally enough votes against her. Because I did not.
Until we take responsibility for what we are responsible for, we’re just ostriches with good intentions in a hell of our own design.
Put that another way, if you thought Blue Monday was dark and pulled no punches about the way people can be, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
I’m sure it would be more appealing to an audience to write an 80,000 word work about a strong hero who knows where everything stands awesomely taking down a powerful figure in a local evil cabal.
And I’ll still do that. I still do that. I love that story. I love both kinds of story. Hal will have a third book. You have to balance the good with the bleak. But the bleak exists, we’re all confronting it, and we need books about it, dammit.
I am a bit baffled that people wish to pretend these issues doesn’t exist, and actively shy away from reading about it or talking about it, instead embracing the idealized frippery of social media. Direct confrontation has always helped deal with all the bad bad shit. Delusion never has.
People just want to have the good feels right now. Which I get, because I get people. I do. They love to fiddle while Rome burns. You don’t have to see the fire that way.
It amazes me how many of my aging contemporaries now subsume their ideals for the desire to survive in slight comfort that isn’t really comfort, and damn the rest of us. They damn themselves to worse doing it, even, which they should realize. They saw it unfold over time. They were here. But they look away.
It’s the mindset that can have an entire nation not leading a popular uprising against the clear impending election of a belligerent fascist with designs to be a dictator.
We drop the balloons, every day, pretending this will solve itself. “This is the poll that will stop him!” “Look, he got BLASTED by this senator.” “One endorsement from Taylor Swift and one third of the nation is SURE to give up on the idea of camps for migrants and civil war!”
Deluded fucks.
I imagine them dancing in the streets next January, fingers stuffed in their ears, eyes to their social media, screaming “THIS IS FINE, DOG.”
It looks a lot like the faux hell in Stevie’s afterlife. And that’s not an accident.
But there it is. The answer, both for me and Stevie. Let it persist. But look in. Don’t look away. Show it all, even if it takes too many words, like this essay. See the hell we’re destined for. Die fighting. Point at those who won’t. Because there’s no more loathsome shit than a nation of ostriches who think worms are sky.