(Also I am not actually pivoting to video. I thought that was fairly clear from the way the silly video I posted yesterday ended, but from some of the (very nice and supportive) messages I’ve gotten, I may have been wrong about that. It is conceivably possible I will make more sketches as the Spirit Moves, but I don’t think I have it in me to be a YouTube Content Creator.)

My dad, Tom Coberly, died in 2016. He read a lot of books. Over the last few years, most of those books have made their way from Colorado, where I grew up, to wherever I was living (Minnesota and now Maryland). They represent a broad spectrum of books, ranging from The Count of Monte Cristo to A Farewell to Arms to Democracy in America to The Souls of Black Folk to Babel-17 to Churchill’s complete history of World War 2 to assorted Masonic histories to maybe everything Thomas Sowell ever wrote and various things by William F. Buckley, Jr. All these things, some more my speed than others, are now in my basement library. (I didn’t keep literally everything, but I kept most of it.)

Over the last year or so, Mom decided to tackle the Sci-Fi Shelf, the monolith that loomed in the corner of their bedroom, overflowing with double- and sometimes triple-shelved sci-fi and fantasy. I rarely approached this shelf, which had for me a sort of totemic quality; a spire of Sacred Texts. Not all of it was Dad’s, but much of it was; about 250 volumes ranging from stone-cold classics (The Dispossessed, The Chronicles of Amber, I, Robot) to collected volumes (some of Damon Knight’s Orbit, Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions) to things I’ve never heard of. She wanted to get these out of her place, so these things are now also mine.

Most of these appear to have been collected in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, though there are appearances from books both earlier and later than that. Most of the hardbacks do not have dust covers, which lends my library the air of a used book store, so if nothing else, they are a useful aesthetic addition to that project.

Of these sci-fi and fantasy books, I count 215 books that I either haven’t read or haven’t read in such a long time that I might as well never have read them.

Starting in September, I am going to read all of them, and post thoughts thereabout here. This is a ridiculous thing to do: if I read/post about them at the rate of one per week, it would take me a little over four years to complete the whole list. Much more realistically, we are looking at about an eight-year project. We’ll see how it goes, but there shall be no shortage of potential Content!

Sometimes I have, like, books 1, 3, and 5 of a series. I will take whether or not to read the other books (and thus add yet more to the pile) on a case-by-case basis; certainly I will not feel obligated to procure and read books 3-10 of a series that I did not enjoy. (I’m probably looking at you, The Stainless Steel Rat). But if I have inherited books 1-6 of a series I don’t like, I will read each and every one of them, I promise. I intend to bounce between different authors, so as to not have the project just be Heinlein for an entire year. (Dad really loved Heinlein). A (very) few of these are nonfiction material either by or about some famous sci-fi author; I will include them in the project anyway.

I intend to turn paid subscriptions on in September when this project begins, so keep an eye out for that! For those of you who are real sickos like me and think this project could be fun, below is the entire list. (Alphabetized by author and then title, so some of the serieses got all shuffled up, but I am too lazy to fix that right now). Comment below or chat at me if you want to request a specific book in the near future!

(Here is a link to a tag for the whole project).

1. Aldiss, Brian; Galactic Empires - Volume 1

2. Aldiss, Brian; Galactic Empires - Volume 2

3. Amis, Kingsley & Conquest, Robert; Spectrum 4

4. Anderson, Poul; A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

5. Anderson, Poul; Fire Time

6. Anderson, Poul; Mirkheim

7. Anderson, Poul; The Avatar

8. Anderson, Poul; The Dancer From Atlantis

9. Anderson, Poul; The Day of Their Return

10. Anderson, Poul, Dickson, Gordon R. & Silverberg, Robert; The Day the Sun Stood Still

11. Anderson, Poul; The Winter of the World

12. Anderson, Poul; There Will Be Time

13. Anthony, Piers; Ox

14. Asimov, Isaac; Buy Jupiter: and Other Stories

15. Asimov, Isaac; Foundation’s Edge

16. Asimov, Isaac; Nightfall and Other Stories

17. Asimov, Isaac; The Currents of Space

18. Asimov, Isaac; The Early Asimov

19. Asimov, Isaac; The Gods Themselves

20. Asimov, Isaac; The Hugo Winners

21. Asimov, Isaac; The Martian Way

22. Asimov, Isaac; The Robot Novels: The Caves of Steel & The Naked Sun

23. Asimov, Isaac; The Robots of Dawn

24. Asimov, Isaac; The Sensuous Dirty Old Man

25. Asimov, Isaac; Where Do We Go From Here?

26. Benford, Gregory, Simak, Clifford D. & Spinrad, Norman; Threads of Time: Three Original Novellas of Science Fiction

27. Bester, Alfred; The Computer Connection

28. Biggle Jr., Lloyd; Monument

29. Biggle Jr., Lloyd; Nebula Award Stories Seven

30. Biggle Jr., Lloyd; Silence is Deadly

31. Biggle Jr., Lloyd; The Metallic Muse

32. Blish, James; Cities in Flight

33. Boucher, Anthony; A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, Vol. 1

34. Boucher, Anthony; A Treasury Of Great Science Fiction, Vol. 2

35. Bova, Ben; Kinsman

36. Bova, Ben; Science Fiction Hall of Fame

37. Brunner, John; The Sheep Look Up

38. Brunner, John; The Wrong End of Time

39. Brunner, John; Total Eclipse

40. Burroughs, Edgar Rice; A Princess of Mars

41. Burroughs, Edgar Rice; John Carter of Mars

42. Burroughs, Edgar Rice; The Chessmen of Mars

43. Burroughs, Edgar Rice; The Gods of Mars & The Warlord of Mars

44. Burroughs, Edgar Rice; The Master Mind of Mars

45. Burroughs, Edgar Rice; Thuvia, Maid of Mars

46. Campbell, John W.; The Best of John W. Campbell

47. Carr, Jayge; Leviathan’s Deep

48. Carr, Terry; Creatures From Beyond

49. Carr, Terry; The Infinite Arena

50. Carr, Terry; Universe 3

51. Carr, Terry; Universe 4

52. Carter, Lin; Flashing Swords #1

53. Carter, Lin; Flashing Swords #2

54. Carter, Lin; Flashing Swords #5: Demons and Daggers

55. Carver, Jeffrey A.; Star Rigger’s Way

56. Chalker, Jack L.; The Four Lords of the Diamond

57. Cherryh, CJ; Port Eternity

58. Cherryh, CJ; The Book of Morgaine

59. Clarke, Arthur C.; 2001: A Space Odyssey

60. Clarke, Arthur C.; Childhood’s End

61. Clarke, Arthur C.; Imperial Earth

62. Clarke, Arthur C.; Prelude to Mars

63. Clarke, Arthur C.; Tales from the “White Hart”

64. Clarke, Arthur C.; The Lion of Comarre & Against the Fall of Night

65. Clarke, Arthur C.; The Wind from the Sun

66. Clement, Hal; Mission Of Gravity

67. Cooper, Edmund; The Overman Culture

68. Cooper, Edmund; The Slaves of Heaven

69. Cowper, Richard; Clone

70. Cowper, Richard; The Road To Corlay

71. Dann, Jack; Wandering Stars

72. de Camp, L. Sprague; The Best of L. Sprague de Camp

73. de Camp, L. Sprague; The Hostage of Zir

74. del Rey, Lester; Early del Rey

75. Dick, Philip K.; The Man In The High Castle

76. Dickson, Gordon R.; Ancient, My Enemy

77. Dickson, Gordon R.; The Far Call

78. Dickson, Gordon R.; The R-Master

79. Dickson, Gordon R.; The Star Road

80. Dickson, Gordon R.; Three To Dorsai

81. Dickson, Gordon R.; Timestorm

82. Donaldson, Stephen R.; Lord Foul’s Bane

83. Donaldson, Stephen R.; The Illearth War

84. Donaldson, Stephen R.; The One Tree

85. Donaldson, Stephen R.; The Power That Preserves

86. Ellison, Harlan; Dangerous Visions

87. Ellison, Harlan; Again, Dangerous Visions

88. Elwood, Roger; And Walk Now Gently Through The Fire

89. Farmer, Philip Jose; The Magic Labyrinth

90. Franklin, H. Bruce; Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction

91. Gerrold, David; The Man Who Folded Himself

92. Gerrold, David; When Harlie Was One

93. Harrison, Harry; Astounding

94. Harrison, Harry; SF: Authors’ Choice 4

95. Harrison, Harry; The Deathworld Trilogy

96. Harrison, Harry; The Stainless Steel Rat For President

97. Harrison, Harry; The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You

98. Heinlein, Robert; A Heinlein Trio

99. Heinlein, Robert; Assignment In Eternity

100. Heinlein, Robert; Between Planets

101. Heinlein, Robert; Beyond This Horizon

102. Heinlein, Robert; Citizen Of The Galaxy

103. Heinlein, Robert; Expanded Universe

104. Heinlein, Robert; Farmer In The Sky

105. Heinlein, Robert; Farnham’s Freehold

106. Heinlein, Robert; For Us, The Living

107. Heinlein, Robert; Friday

108. Heinlein, Robert; Glory Road

109. Heinlein, Robert; Have Space Suit: Will Travel

110. Heinlein, Robert; I Will Fear No Evil

111. Heinlein, Robert; Job, a Comedy of Justice

112. Heinlein, Robert; Orphans of the Sky

113. Heinlein, Robert; Podkayne Of Mars

114. Heinlein, Robert; Red Planet

115. Heinlein, Robert; Requiem

116. Heinlein, Robert; Rocket Ship Galileo

117. Heinlein, Robert; Space Cadet

118. Heinlein, Robert; Starman Jones

119. Heinlein, Robert; Starship Troopers

120. Heinlein, Robert; Stranger In A Strange Land

121. Heinlein, Robert; Take Back Your Government

122. Heinlein, Robert; The Cat Who Walks Through Walls

123. Heinlein, Robert; The Day After Tomorrow

124. Heinlein, Robert; The Green Hills of Earth

125. Heinlein, Robert; The Man Who Sold The Moon

126. Heinlein, Robert; The Menace From Earth

127. Heinlein, Robert; The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

128. Heinlein, Robert; The Past Through Tomorrow

129. Heinlein, Robert; The Rolling Stones

130. Heinlein, Robert; The Star Beast

131. Heinlein, Robert; The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag

132. Heinlein, Robert; The Worlds Of Robert A. Heinlein

133. Heinlein, Robert; Time Enough for Love

134. Heinlein, Robert; Time For The Stars

135. Heinlein, Robert; To Sail Beyond the Sunset

136. Heinlein, Robert; Tomorrow, The Stars

137. Heinlein, Robert; Tramp Royale

138. Heinlein, Robert; Tunnel in the Sky

139. Herbert, Frank; Hellstrom’s Hive

140. Herbert, Frank; Under Pressure

141. Hitchcock, Alfred; Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories to be Read With the Door Locked

142. Hoskins, Robert; The Stars Around Us

143. Hoyle, Fred & Hoyle, Geoffrey; Into Deepest Space

144. Hoyle, Fred & Hoyle, Geoffrey; The Inferno

145. Jones, Raymond F.; Renaissance

146. Knight, Damon; Orbit 10

147. Knight, Damon; Orbit 11

148. Knight, Damon; Orbit 12

149. Kurtz, Katherine; Camber of Culdi

150. Kurtz, Katherine; Camber the Heretic

151. Kurtz, Katherine; Deryni Checkmate

152. Kurtz, Katherine; Deryni Rising

153. Kurtz, Katherine; High Deryni

154. Kurtz, Katherine; Saint Camber

155. Kurtz, Katherine; The Bishop’s Heir

156. Kurtz, Katherine; The King’s Justice

157. Kurtz, Katherine; The Quest for Saint Camber

158. Kuttner, Henry; The Best Of Henry Kuttner

159. Leiber, Fritz; The Best of Fritz Leiber

160. Leiber, Fritz; The Wanderer

161. Macauley, Robie; A Secret History of Time to Come

162. MacDonald, John D.; Time And Tomorrow

163. Maclean, Katherine; Missing Man

164. Maine, Charles Eric; Alph

165. May, Julian; The Many-Colored Land & The Golden Torc

166. Morressy, John; Frostworld and Dreamfire

167. Multiple Authors; Five Fates

168. Niven, Larry; A World out of Time

169. Niven, Larry & Pournelle, Jerry; The Mote in God’s Eye

170. Niven, Larry; The Ringworld Engineers

171. Norton, Andre; Forerunner Foray

172. Norton, Andre; Iron Cage

173. Nourse, Alan E.; Star Surgeon

174. Piper, H. Beam; The Fuzzy Papers

175. Pohl, Frederik; The Best of Frederik Pohl

176. Pohl, Frederik; The Cool War

177. Priest, Christopher; The Inverted World

178. Robinson, Spider & Robinson, Jeanne; Stardance

179. Sheckley, Robert; Can You Feel Anything When I Do This?

180. Silverberg, Robert, Dozois, Gardner R., Effinger, Geo. Alec & Eklund, Gordon; Chains of the Sea

181. Silverberg, Robert; Deep Space

182. Silverberg, Robert & Elwood, Roger; Epoch

183. Silverberg, Robert; Lord Valentine’s Castle

184. Silverberg, Robert; Shadrach in the Furnace

185. Simak, Clifford D.; A Choice of Gods

186. Simak, Clifford D.; Cemetery World

187. Simak, Clifford D.; Enchanted Pilgrimage

188. Simak, Clifford D.; Shakespeare’s Planet

189. Simak, Clifford D.; The Visitors

190. Spielberg, Steven; Close Encounters of the Third Kind

191. Sturgeon, Theodore; Case and the Dreamer

192. Sturgeon, Theodore; E Pluribus Unicorn

193. Sturgeon, Theodore; The Golden Helix

194. Sturgeon, Theodore; Theodore Sturgeon Is Alive And Well

195. Tiptree Jr., James; Up the Walls of the World

196. Tucker, Wilson; The Time Masters

197. Vance, Jack; To Live Forever

198. Varley, John; Titan

199. Wilhelm, Kate; Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

200. Williamson, Jack; Brother to Demons, Brother to Gods

201. Williamson, Jack; Three From The Legion

202. Wollheim, Donald A.; The 1972 Annual World’s Best SF

203. Wollheim, Donald A.; The 1973 Annual World’s Best SF

204. Wollheim, Donald A.; The 1974 Annual World’s Best SF

205. Wollheim, Donald A.; The 1978 Annual World’s Best SF

206. Wollheim, Donald A. & Carr, Terry; World’s Best Science Fiction: 1969

207. Wright, S. Fowler; Deluge

208. Wyndham, John; The Day of the Triffids

209. Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn; False Dawn

210. Zelazny, Roger; Changeling

211. Zelazny, Roger; Doorways in the Sand

212. Zelazny, Roger; Lord of Light

213. Zelazny, Roger; Madwand

214. Zelazny, Roger; My Name is Legion

215. Zelazny, Roger; To Die in Italbar

in dwarf fortress terms this is called a Strange Mood

A few days after I do this, I get an “explanation of benefits” from my health insurance company. The most recent one I got included this image:

To be clear: I am exceedingly grateful that I live a privileged enough life that I can receive MS-halting medication for $14.40 an infusion.1 But let’s take a quick look at these numbers, because they bother me every time I see them.

The infusion clinic submitted a claim to my insurance for $88,775.00. The breakdown of where that number came from is a little confusing, but the largest single item was $87,600.00, which I assume represents the actual drug itself, with the remaining $1,175.00 representing the costs of paying the medical professionals to stick me in the arm, keep an eye on me during the infusion, and provide me with small bags of Cheez-Its™ upon request. Of that $87,600.00, my insurance paid $35,754.00. On that specific line item, my personal liability is $0.00. (The $14.40 I owe comes from a different line item; I’m not sure what specific aspect of the infusion experience is delineated thereby). The balance, then, of $51,846.00, was simply written off as a discount, as far as I can tell.

It is not news to me (or, probably anyone reading this) that this is how insurance works in the United States. Insurance, whether private or public, negotiates discounts on all the things they’ll pay for, which means no one in the world ever pays the purported sticker price for any sort of medical treatment. Nor is this a recent development: once upon a time, pre-ACA, I was a legal assistant for a personal injury law firm. A client had received a radiology bill for about $10,000; I sent the hospital a single faxed letter that said nothing more than “our client is uninsured, would you consider giving him a discount” and they immediately cut the bill from $10,0002 to $500.

But there is something deeply weird about a system that works like this. Prices, per the logic of the economists, are supposed to be essential stores of useful information. The price of a pencil contains information about the supply and demand not only for completed pencils, but for rubber, graphite, wood, whatever metal they make the little bit at the end out of, etc., as well as the state of the global supply chain that can get these raw materials from their points of origin to wherever it is they’re making pencils and then get those completed pencils into the hands of consumers. So when I buy thirty pencils from Amazon.com for $4.36 ($0.15/each), I am supposed to feel confident that this number in some way represents the True and Accurate Cost of a Pencil.

Now, this example contains several problems already. Amazon can afford to sell staples at a trivial profit margin or even a significant loss if it thinks doing so will cause people to buy other more profitable things while they’re also buying pencils, or if it is trying to destroy another company that has to actually make a profit on the pencils it sells, in hopes that once it has destroyed the other company it can jack up the prices on pencils while now in possession of that smaller company’s market share. These sorts of things thus already disrupt the usefulness of the $0.15/pencil figure, but put all that aside, for now. At least in theory, the price of this pencil contains useful information.

What is the useful information contained in the $88,775 figure I received in my Explanation of Benefits? Let us assume it costs the pharmaceutical company some more-or-less concrete amount of money to manufacture the drug. Some of the price of the drug is also presumably allocated towards paying back the investments the pharmaceutical company made in developing the drug. It then also costs the infusion clinic some more-or-less concrete amount of money to administer the drug to me (needles, plastic tubing, rent on the infusion clinic, salaries for the staff, Cheez-Its™). Both of these entities (the drug manufacturer and the infusion clinic) have also decided on some specific profit margin that allows them do all these things while also making enough money to make it worth their while. So far, so basic economics. But do you have any confidence in how those numbers relate to the $88,775.00 number I was quoted?

The insurance company agreed to pay approximately 40% of the quoted figure, and the drug manufacturer and infusion clinic appear to be perfectly fine with this. This means they are taking a 60% haircut on their stated price. What this tells me, then, is that the stated price ($88,775.00) is, to use a technical word: bullshit. It is not a real number. I am not some sort of unique special case that would break the normal rules of the market: I am a bog-standard MS patient who is likely to take this drug twice a year for the rest of his life. If $88,775 was the real price they needed to be paid for this drug then, assuming I live to be 75, I would end up costing this drug company approximately $4,000,000.003 by the end of my life. In other words, in no world does this drug cost $88,775.00 to manufacture and administer, and everyone knows it, and yet they quoted that figure to the insurance company with a straight face anyway.

Does this bullshit directly harm anybody? Possibly not. The insurance company gets to tell its shareholders that they negotiate these incredible discounts on their medical purchases, the pharmaceutical companies I guess get to pretend that they are giving discounts on life-saving medication so they don’t look like sharks, and everybody involved probably knows more or less what the actual amount is going to be and can make business decisions accordingly. It’s all a sort of polite fiction.

But remember: prices are supposed to be reliable sources of information, right? So which price are we supposed to use when we determine how much this specific drug actually costs to manufacture and administer? Probably the ~$36k figure, since that’s what everyone is actually paying for it, but how confident are we that that figure is any accurate representation of the value of this drug? What other weird shenanigans are going on to arrive at that figure? There must be some reason people keep pretending this drug costs $88k, so what role does this polite fiction actually perform? What system is the drug company gaming by pretending this drug costs $88k to manufacture and administer?

I recently changed jobs, and with it, my insurance. (I actually ended up with the same insurance provider, but went from the state-employee plan to a private plan.) While shopping for insurance, I had one primary question: will my new insurance plan cover the medication that stops my MS from eating my brain? Trying to get anyone to actually answer this question was more or less impossible. Customer service at three separate insurance companies danced around the issue, frequently confused about why I was even asking the question. When I finally did buy an insurance plan, I then called to try to confirm in advance how much the infusion was going to cost me, since I knew from experience its purported sticker price was about $88k. This was also an impossible question for anyone to answer.

Finally I called the pharmaceutical company that makes the magic immunosuppressant I am so invested in receiving. They couldn’t tell me how much the insurance would cover either, but they did inform me about a neat program they have, a co-pay program wherein they will actually pay for the first $20k of out-of-pocket expenses I am charged (each year!) for receiving the infusion in case the insurance doesn’t want to play ball.

This flabbergasted me. This is not a charitable organization; why on earth a drug company would agree to pay $20k out of its pocket just out of the goodness of its heart didn’t compute. Then I remembered that they weren’t “paying” anything, they would just be agreeing to further discount their product. But it is a useful fiction for them to pretend they are “paying” this amount, so that I will be grateful for it, and perceive it as a kind service they are doing, rather than realizing that the other prices I might theoretically be on the hook for paying are heavily inflated and are not remotely accurate representations of how much the drug is “worth.”

Above, I called that $88k price figure “bullshit.” I stand by that. But I also acknowledge that it probably serves some purpose — some sort of signalling function that allows the manufacturer or the insurance company to behave in the way they want to behave. Maybe it clears some statutory or regulatory threshold I’m not aware of, or maybe it serves some hidden function in the broader portfolio of products and services these companies purchase. The Great Old Ones that are our massive corporate overlords work in mysterious ways, but these ways may still be rational when viewed from the Lovecraft Space in which they live. And at the end of the day it doesn’t matter that much to me, specifically: I don’t have to pay any of those numbers. But there is something profoundly unsettling about living in a world in which major decisions are made based on data points that appear to be so obviously fabricated. I see that EOB and I can’t escape the feeling that somewhere, somehow, I am being taken for a ride, and that I am going to end up paying for it later.

We are currently losing a War with Iran. I claim no expertise in military strategy or geopolitics, but I have seen no trustworthy person suggest that the War was well-conceived or well-executed. Thus—given that every step of this appears to be a colossal, embarrassing mistake—it is tempting to try to grab for common ground with the sorts of people who have supported the idea of a war with Iran. So it is tempting to say things like “the-war-with-Iran-has-materially-weakened-our-geopolitical-standing.” This strikes me as true and, thus, the sort of thing you can say while maintaining a gloss of respectability and intellectual seriousness. You can say this while wearing a nice jacket and a microphone during a CNN interview. Or, similar to many elected Democrats, you can complain about the fact that the War was “illegal-because-Congress-wasn’t-consulted.” This is also true, and also a bad thing. But, as a primary objection to War, it seems to suggest that the problem with War is procedural; a matter of form, not content. Or we can fret about gas prices, or analyze the effect the War has had on the popularity of the current administration.

I get why it is appealing to say these things, particularly when one is trying to appear even-keeled and like a Very Serious Person. “This War failed to meet its stated objectives” and “This War was conducted without the consent of the American legislature” are the sorts of claims that can be evaluated without reference to what Rorty would call our “Final Vocabulary”—that is, the unprovable axioms and values that lie at the base of each of our world-views.1

The fundamental problem with this War is not that it didn’t work or that it was conducted without going through the proper channels. Even a very successful version of this—where we got Congress’s approval and then blew up the Ayatollah and, in response, Iran withdrew from geopolitics for a generation—even this version would still have been a wicked and evil thing for us to do.

I am not willing to cede my Final Vocabulary when evaluating these things. It was bad for us to go to War with Iran because it is bad for us to go to War with anybody, because going to War involves killing people, and it is bad to kill people. I will not go so far as to say that there are literally no circumstances in which it is okay to kill someone, but those circumstances are much fewer and farther between than most people would like them to be. Even in a world where we could precisely target the people we kill with unerring accuracy and thus cause no collateral damage; a world in which the only Iranians killed were the Ayatollah and active-duty soldiers in the Iranian armed forces; even in such a world, granted for the sake of argument, it would be bad to go to War with Iran and kill those people unless we had no other reasonable choice.

Can anyone look me in the eye and say that we had “no other choice” than to go to War with Iran?

Regardless, we do not live in a world in which it is possible to kill our targets with such precision. Nor will we ever. War cannot be fought in such a bloodless, clean way, no matter how smart our bombs or how well-trained our soldiers.2 So in this world, the one in which we do live, a decision to go to War will always kill people who are “innocent” in any sense of the word, no matter what you are willing to grant for the sake of argument. In this War, for instance, and as only one example among many, we almost immediately blew up an Iranian elementary school, and killed somewhere around 120 children.3 One hundred and twenty children blown to pieces or crushed and smothered to death by the roof of their school.

My instinctive response to this is not to adjust my bow tie and quietly suggest reforms to our use of AI-assisted targeting software. My instinctive response to this is not to debate the acceptable amount of collateral damage in military operations. My first instinctive response to this is unprintable, because uttering it aloud would possibly be a crime. My second instinctive response to this is just to lie down and scream and cry until unconsciousness takes me, and then to keep doing that, day after day, until my exhausted body gives out and I no longer live in a world where my taxpayer dollars go towards massacring children.

I do not and have not done either of the things proposed by my instinctive responses. I am, alas, too invested in being an intellectual, a Serious Person, a Reasonable and Respectable Thinker. I’ve almost got the beard for it, but I am too much of a coward to be John Brown. In discussing the Iran War with friends, I have repeatedly granted things for the sake of argument. I will probably continue to do so. Argument is, theoretically, a way to change someone’s mind, and we are going to have to change minds.

But we must not lose sight of the actual truths underlying these arguments:

We live in a demonic nation, one that gambles away the lives of foreigners and the poor with reckless glee; A nation that is ruled by Mammon and Moloch in the name of Profit and Power; A nation built on child sacrifice and butchery of the weak. Rivers of blood run down the steps of the Capitol Building as surely as they did in Tenochtitlan, but at least the Aztecs had the good sense to be honest about what they were doing.

By: A Very Serious Person At A Very Serious Magazine

I am very brave and fair-minded. This is the most important thing you must remember as you read this review: above all, I am fair-minded, and I am brave.

I am reviewing a book by a Trans Person. I like the book. However, occasionally in the book, the author, who is a Trans Person, writes about Trans Things, and uses words like “transphobia.” I do not like the word “transphobia,” because I am “gender critical,” which means that I am, remember, very brave. But I am also fair-minded, and so even though this Trans Person uses words like “transphobia,” I can tell you that I enjoyed the book.

The book is about other books. I like other books, and so I liked that this book said we should read other books. The author, who is a Trans Person, once read a lot of books, and she liked reading those books, and so she wrote a book about reading books, and about why reading books is good.

Did you see what I did there? I said “she,” even though the author is a Trans Person. No one made me do this. I need you to understand that I’m ordinarily perfectly content to use the pronouns a Trans Person doesn’t want me to use; I am, as I’ve said, very brave. But this Trans Person who wrote this book was nice to me once, so I will respect the fundamentals of human conversation and courtesy in this one instance, because I am fair-minded. But please, remember: I am very brave, so I may choose not to do so in future conversations with or about other Trans People.

I like this book because the author of this book (the Trans Person) acknowledges that good books are complicated, and that complicated books sometimes say complicated things, and that it is not good to refuse to read complicated books just because they are complicated. I also like this. I like it when books are complicated.

What I do not like, though, is that this Trans Person says mean things about people who are “gender critical.” She says a mean thing about Hillsdale College at one point, and that is not very nice. She says she likes complicated things, but she does not seem to think that Hillsdale College is complicated; she seems to think that Hillsdale College is a bad and ridiculous place, which makes me sad, because what if Hillsdale College is actually a complicated place? What if the “gender critical” people are complicated?

Finally, she says the word “transphobia.” I know I already said that, but it is the most important thing to say about this book about complicated books and it is how I am going to end this review of this book about complicated books: by talking about the word “transphobia.” I am a “gender critical” person, which means I view the word “transphobia” as a personal attack, and so whenever someone uses the word “transphobia,” I feel sad. This book, then, was written by a Trans Person, and it uses the word “transphobia,” and I don’t like the word “transphobia,” because I am very brave. But I am also fair-minded, so I liked the book even though it uses the word “transphobia.” What a wonder I am.

The review was called “A Eulogy for Kuranes” because it was, well, look: I was, I think, 22. It was a bit dramatic and silly, because it was about the videogame it was reviewing (Porpentine’s Howling Dogs) and it was also about being lonely and adrift and frightened in the world and playing too many videogames, and Kuranes is the name of a character from Lovecraft’s Dream-Cycle, and you know what? Don’t worry about it. The review is not actually what this is about.

I was feeling a little sentimental the other day, and I vaguely remembered that this review had gotten some small amount of attention, and I was curious whether any of the other blogs that commented on it at the time still existed. So I googled the title, in quotes: “A Eulogy for Kuranes.” Google showed me only one link, alas: a link to my wordpress site. The blogs of the other people who said nice things about my review appear to be lost to the mists of time, so you’ll just have to trust me that there were, at least, seventy thousand of them. But while looking at this dearth of results, I looked at the rest of the screen. Behold, above the link, this:

That’s right: without me asking it to do so, Google took my search input and decided it was a creative writing prompt for its built-in AI functionality, and so it wrote its best attempt at a eulogy for Kuranes, the character.

Let us acknowledge that Googling one’s own writing is sort of like Googling one’s name or namesearching on Twitter. We all probably do it, but it’s a disreputable and embarrassing habit and I would not ordinarily talk about it in public. Put that aside for now.

Do you remember those “If Google Was a Guy” sketches from CollegeHumor about a decade ago? Where eternally underutilized comedic character actor Brian Huskey reacted to people’s deranged and confused Google searches as though they were being said to an actual person? Imagine going up to a reference librarian, asking them about a book, and having them respond with a full tight five based on the title of the book you asked for. Not, like, one joke over the shoulder while the librarian looks up the title in a database or walks over to a card catalog; not an attempt to make a human connection via a shared interest; no, a full comedy routine, eyes locked with yours, pauses for laughter, a little bit of pacing to “explore the space,” a “thank you, you’ve been great” at the end. If someone did this to you you’d either call an ambulance or challenge them to a duel.

Note further that this perplexing and wasteful1 attempt at Lovecraft fanfic appears above the search results. I know that years of skipping the ads to get to the search means that most of us have trained our eyes to ignore everything above the line break, but still: purely from a layout perspective, it appears that Google thought this dreck was the most important thing on the page. If this was an actual human being, it would be pitiful and embarrassing, like a barista throwing his screenplay at a director from behind the coffee counter, but it’s not. Google is not trying to publish this piece, or get a job as a writer, or trying to make me laugh. Some wire in its circuitry got crossed and it interpreted a search query as a prompt for creative writing, and so it spat this garbage out without any intentionality or thought.

I used to wonder what Lovecraft meant when he referred to Azathoth as a “Blind Idiot God,” but I’m realizing that he was describing a modern tech company. Nobody, including Google, wants their search engine to randomly freestyle unsolicited Weird Fiction pastiches. Yet it does so anyway, and there’s no way to stop it from doing this. I can’t, so far as I can tell, turn off Google’s LLM box that haunts the top of the search engine, balefully threatening to assault me with Vogon poetry every time I ask for “Thai restaurants near me.” This is Google, mind, not ChatGPT or Claude — were I using one of those services, I might well be asking it to gin up a little award-winning litfic story, if I was a bad person. But Google? Who wants to generate slop with Google? Why does Google know how to write bad fanfic? Why, when everyone claims this technology will either save or destroy the world, is it so goddamn annoying to use all the time?

Iä! Iä! The daemon-sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud! Iä! The monotonous whining of the flutes; the maddening beating of vile drums; the whirling, staccato dancing of the tenebrous Other Gods! The ultimate nuclear chaos that forms the genesis and revelation of our reality! Iä, the Soul and Messenger of the Other Gods, the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep, cackling and watching his stock price rise despite the capering and writhing of all of us, caught in the vortex that is Azathoth! Iä!

Nevertheless: lately on Substack and in various other corners of the Internet, everyone is bemoaning the state of book reviews. If you don’t believe me, read Lefray’s piece, ’s piece, any of various pieces by , Dwight Garner’s piece for the New York Times, or ’s piece complaining about Dwight Garner’s piece. Or just go hang around on Notes for five minutes if you follow anyone in that loose confederation of “literary” Substack people; somebody will say something interesting that will include bemoaning the state of book reviews. Unfortunately it does seem like we are right to all be so-moaning. The usual recitations here follow: there are around five full-time book critics in the entire United States; most professional book reviews are overwhelmingly, disingenuously positive; the freelancers doing book reviews get paid the equivalent of a smile and a firm handshake; there is good work being done on Substack but it is small potatoes, cliquey, and also the people who run Substack are possibly the devil?; and, worst of all, The Washington Post closed Book World.

What all these writers don’t know is that the reason The Washington Post closed Book World was to spite me, specifically. See, I was supposed to make my debut in that late publication right around the time the publication ceased to exist — the review copy of the book I was to review had only just arrived in my hands a few days prior to the publication’s shuttering. The only logical explanation, then, is that Jeff Bezos became so terrified of the overwhelming literary force he was about to let loose on this world that he axed his newspaper’s entire book section to prevent my ascendency. Perhaps he read my 2026 New Year’s Resolutions.

—

For the last few years I have been writing book reviews for The Bulwark, a publication that is not, I think, primarily read for its book reviews. Perhaps because of the fact that book reviews are a relatively small part of The Bulwark’s output and are not the most brand-defining material they publish, I have gotten to do more or less whatever the hell I want. (Though always with excellent editing assistance from and collaboration with the editors there.) I am reasonably proud2 of my output, and I have certainly enjoyed having a little extra spending money (my book-review habit mostly funded my book-purchasing habit last year). But most importantly, although I have been writing off-and-on in small corners of the Internet for about 15 years, I’m not sure writing has ever been as much fun for me as it is when writing these reviews.

In one of these pieces, I have about 2000 words to summarize the book’s whole deal, explain whether or not I think it is any good, and also try to make some sort of argument about it, all while hopefully being funny or otherwise entertaining. The review should be well-sourced with quotes from the book, references to the author’s prior work, and at least some mention of other books that are doing similar things, but all without feeling stodgy or dense or like an article one would find on JSTOR. I try to walk at least two tightropes: 1) being legible to an audience that won’t necessarily understand all my references without being condescending or so rudimentary that nothing interesting gets said; and 2) being confident in my own “authority” (I am a reasonably well-read person who thinks about books a lot) while also being very clear about the fact that I am essentially a dilettante (I am a lawyer by trade, I did not go to grad school for English, and there are enormous holes in my reading). Finally, I usually try to give the reader some hint at the experience of reading the book by evoking its vibe in the text of the review itself; thus I opened my review of Katabasis by walking the reader through a (criminally truncated) description of St. Anselm’s Ontological Argument. This inevitably also has the advantage of injecting some personality into the review, and making it clear this is Bill’s Opinion about the book, and is not pretending to be some mountaintop proclamation from a Learned Sage.3 I enjoy these little puzzles!

But okay, fine, Bill, so these are fun to write. So what? That’s not exactly what everyone is talking about at the moment while they are bemoaning the state of book reviews. Let’s further put aside, for now, the question of whether or not the reviews I write are any “good” in a craft or literary sense, and let’s engage with the horrible Fear underlying all of this bemoaning and bewailing: Does anybody in the world read this sort of review or even want to read it? Who out there is really itching to read my opinion on some book they’ve never heard of? Is there, in other words, any market for this shit, or am I just engaged in a sort of literary onanism that I have somehow fooled a reputable publication into paying me for?

For lo: Know that even I, as a book-review writer, don’t read book reviews every day! When was the last time I opened the New York Times and just flipped through or clicked around its arts-and-culture section to see what was out there? Have I ever done this? I say this now honestly and with tears in my eyes, rending my garments, lamenting my many sins: I didn’t read Book World very often! I really am (a very small part of) the reason why the damn thing shuttered, since if me and people like me were better about clicking on all its articles, it might still be around! Furthermore, why are we talking about any of this right now, given that our government keeps doing things like blowing up elementary schools and fishing boats while running concentration camps and and and and and and and and!?

Vanity! All is vanity!

—

I do not often go out seeking to read “reviews” as-such, but I do read “reviewers.” What I mean by this is that I am usually most interested in reading reviews written by people I have already come to trust; reviews where I am inherently interested in not just (or even primarily) the object under consideration so much as the perspective of the person doing the considering. Thus I enjoy reading Gretchen Felker-Martin’s short reviews of movies and TV on her Patreon because I’m always interested in what will happen when her aesthetic preferences and fixations slam into some specific piece of art. Phil Christman’s every-so-often book review columns for Plough are a joy to read because for all that they are essentially just a bundle of capsule reviews, he threads his thoughts so well through them that by the end you feel as though you’ve gone on a short but meaningful journey with Phil as your guide. Hiking is more fun, at least for my portly self, when I have a companion. I’ll read BDM review anything because she always seems to focus on some aspect of the work that it would never have occurred to me to focus on, which is clear even when I haven’t read or watched the thing she’s talking about.

For these sorts of pieces, what is most interesting about the “review” is that it allows me to watch a critic I appreciate give a specific object their sustained attention, often when the object in question is new enough not to have been surrounded by critical consensus or common jokes or narratives. (e.g. “Fargo? You mean the movie with the woodchipper?”) This focus may allow me to learn more about the object, about the critic, or about the world at large. Put another way, a review gives a writer something specific to write about. If that sounds annoyingly vague, that’s intentional: I’ll read a good writer write about anything in the world, but in order for that writer to write about anything in the world, they’re going to have to write about something in the world, and a review is a good way of designating that some-thing out of all of the other myriad somethings on offer.

I remember being excited whenever a new Tom Bissell videogame review came out for Grantland, regardless of what the specific game was, just because I was excited to read more from Tom Bissell. I had read enough Tom Bissell at this point (the early 2010s) that I could almost catch myself feeling as though he was a friend. He was not and is not, of course; I have never met nor corresponded with the guy. But I do know, because he told the whole world, and thus told me, that he once spent three years addicted to cocaine and doing little more than playing Grand Theft Auto IV. This is a very personal thing to know about someone! I do not know equivalently personal things about most of the people I spend time with. So repeated exposure to Bissell’s criticism (and other essays) made me feel like I had seen through the screen or page and had come to know this person a little bit, and thus made me invested in what he had to say, in the same way that I am more likely to read an essay written by a friend of mine than one written by a stranger, because I already am invested in the thoughts and opinions and, well, soul of that friend.

Is it possible that what I have just said above is, basically: “the purpose of a review section at a newspaper or magazine is to introduce a reader to a spread of interesting writers to whom they can develop parasocial attachments”? This feels like it is probably not, actually, the intended or expected purpose of a review section at a newspaper or magazine. Surely Grantland did not publish Tom Bissell reviews in the primary hope that doing so would cause people to doodle little pictures of Tom Bissell in the margins of their school notebooks.

So, why did Grantland pay Tom Bissell to write reviews of videogames? Presumably because they thought doing so would make them money. Although, of course, Grantland apparently never made enough money, and only lasted four years, and was explicitly founded to be a home for long-form journalism, which is not the sort of thing, in 2011, you do if you are just trying to make a lot of money, so they must have been doing something else, too. Prestige or at least attention? The sincere belief that the articles were good? Who knows. Who knows why anyone does anything? The nature of human existence is that once you start pulling on threads like “what is the purpose of a book review” you very quickly end up dealing with questions like “how can we justify art in the face of human suffering” and “what is the purpose of human existence” and “why is there something rather than nothing,” and these are questions over which I must pass over in silence, not knowing how to talk about them.

—

My favorite review of anything is not a book review. It is a review of a videogame I have not played: Chris Breault’s review of Fallout 4 for Kill Screen. Contrary to everything I just said above, I do not know anything about Chris Breault. I do not know him in either the literal or the figurative sense; I claim no secret knowledge of his soul. But the first paragraph of his review about this big-budget videogame is:

Here comes the trashman! He’s strutting down the highway in his scrap metal suit, tin cans rattling up and down its legs, soda bottles and glue dispensers falling out the cracks between its plates, cereal boxes bobbling on the tips of his metal fingers. He’s blasting “The Wanderer” with no headphones on and waking the mole rats up. He’s bounding downtown like he owns the world. He intends to put all of it into his pockets.

This review is a riot, a delight, a gleeful hatchet job that nevertheless joys and sorrows in all the cool things this game does right; it is a rifle round fired from two miles away that perfectly hits the heart of the lumbering beast that is Fallout 4, or any overbloated AAA release from the 21st century. “The trashman” serves as a drumbeat running beneath the whole review, never letting you forget what’s fundamentally wrong with the stupid game, thrumming and drumming and shaking the table even when Breault is describing an excellent sidequest or the many real joys to be found in post-apocalyptic Boston. The entire review is only about 2500 words long.

At the moment, almost 11 years later, it is also a pain in the ass to read, because Kill Screen (which has always, throughout its entire 17-year run, been mired in some sort of inexplicable drama that I have never understood) has rebooted its website so many times that the version of the review I linked above is completely borked, with deformatted pull-quotes thrown randomly into the middle of the text, sometimes really spoiling the next paragraph and fucking up the rhythm of the thing. You also can’t read it unless you sign up to let Kill Screen e-mail you. For some number of years, the whole website was down and I couldn’t find this review; then, later, it came back up. I copy-pasted the piece into a Google Doc so I won’t lose it if and when the website goes down again.

“It is a good thing to review books, even when nobody reads the reviews, even when the government is blowing up little girls in Iran, because sometimes when you are reviewing books, you write a review of a videogame, and then some weird guy occasionally thinks about that review a decade later.” This is, essentially, my argument, I think.

• What an odd little book! (Spoilers follow).

• Paul Muad’Dib Atreides is the Emperor, and his Fremen fanatics have been waging an unending, bloody jihad on most of the galaxy for the last 12 years. He is sad about this, and wants to escape the myth of Muad’Dib and prevent the approaching death of his beloved, elfin Chani. Meanwhile, all the other major factions in the galaxy (the Bene Gesserit, dissatisfied Fremen factions, the old Emperor’s family, the Spacing Guild, and these new guys called the Bene Tleilaxu) are conspiring to kill or at least pauper him, concocting a perplexing scheme involving a shapeshifter, an atomic weapon, and the resurrection and ensleeperagentification of Duncan Idaho. I am not convinced that the plot really makes any gotdang sense whatsoever, but a sense of pervasive “what on earth is going on” is what the book seems to be aiming for, so perhaps it works!

• In her post on Dune, which I linked to last time, noted that Herbert loves an anticlimax, and this tendency is very much still present in Messiah. Duncan Idaho has been resurrected as a ghola, and has been implanted with the command to kill Paul under certain circumstances. When the time arrives, he just doesn’t do that. But maybe it turns out that this was actually the plan all along, because now the people who make gholas have figured out how to fully restore the memories of a ghola, such that now they can make more and better gholas? The interstellar jihad takes place entirely off-camera. Paul has prescient visions of Chani dying elfinly in childbirth, and when the time arrives, that’s exactly what happens. Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam haunts the book, but is executed off-screen. The main thing Resurrected Duncan does other than angst is close out the book by banging Paul’s 15-year-old sister.1 The book thus keeps you off-kilter throughout, which is probably a good thing for a book like this.

• Perhaps it is just because Messiah is less than half the length of Dune, but Herbert’s prose tics (discussed last time) annoyed me less. (Or perhaps there were fewer such tics; I only remember Chani being described as “elfin” once this time.)

• Alas, nothing in Messiah hits as hard as the best parts of Dune. The memetic power that accompanies Herbert’s best lines in the first book (“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”) did not seem to make it into the second.

• The stone burner scene is pretty darn good, though: the trap is sprung, this atomic-adjacent weapon goes off, and all of Paul’s bodyguards realize what it is, and that they are all about to be blinded, but there’s nothing to do but wait for it; they are far enough away it won’t kill them, but the stone burner’s unique radiation has a voracious fondness for eye tissue. Now, does this make any sense, radiation that only affects the eyes? I have no idea.

• It will be challenging to adapt this into a movie, I think! I suspect Villeneuve will show us a lot more of the jihad so there will still be plenty of explosions. Also, the movie of Dune: Part 2 ends with Chani leaving Paul, whereas she is very much devoted to him in Dune Messiah, and her death in childbirth is a major part of the story; we will see what they do instead!

• Onwards, now, to Children of Dune.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, dir. Nia DaCosta

• Hell yeah, dude.

• 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is the fourth movie in the 28 [Timeframes] Later franchise. The first, 2002’s 28 Days Later (written by Alex “Annihilation” Garland and directed by Danny “Trainspotting and also somehow Slumdog Millionaire” Boyle) is a very influential movie: from it we get fast zombies, shaky cam, using words like “the infected” instead of “zombies,” etc. The sequel, 2007’s 28 Weeks Later, was made by a different team of people, and is much bleaker than the original. Whereas Days, though very dark, ends with the heroes living in an idyllic farmhouse while the infected starve to death in the distance, Weeks ends with the infected charging en masse out of the Paris Metro. In Weeks, every attempt at human kindness makes things catastrophically worse; it may be the only movie I’ve ever seen where the faceless government goons mowing down civilians are proven to have the right idea. 2025’s 28 Years Later was again made by Boyle and Garland, and it is a very odd beast, and is also the start of a sub-trilogy; The Bone Temple is the second part of that trilogy. Years is about specifically British identity, and it does things like splice sections of the Laurence Olivier Henry V into a scene of a father and son heading into infected territory on a scavenging mission. It is a bonkers film.

• 28 Days Later is the sort of film that, if you see it at the right age, will take over your life. I have friends for whom this film is foundational to their identities. I did not see it at that age; I saw it for the first time four years ago. I like it! It’s a good movie! But it is not a foundational text in my life. Perhaps this is why when the first 28 Years Later movie came out last year, I was delighted and not annoyed by how different it is from the first two movies in the franchise. I did not care that it seems to contradict the worldbuilding of 28 Weeks Later, partly because Weeks is a much lesser film than the first, and partly because I just don’t care that much about the worldbuilding of these movies. This franchise isn’t Star Trek or Game of Thrones, it’s a series of morality plays interspersed with terrible violence.

• Anyway: The Bone Temple rocks. It continues its predecessor’s delight in doing just whatever the hell it wants, making huge, outrageous swings and daring you to call its bluff: this is perhaps best showcased in a lengthy sequence in which a bunch of maniacs freak out to Iron Maiden’s “The Number of the Beast.” One of the infected becomes addicted to morphine and spends his hazy, drug-filled days staring at the moon rather than eating people! The evil cult of uninfected humans that shanghai one of our characters all dress up like British TV personality and known rapist Jimmy Savile while reaving through the post-apocalyptic landscape like Alex DeLarge’s droogs!

• But most importantly: Ralph Fiennes turns in an astonishing performance (returning from the first movie) as Kelson, the mad doctor who has built the titular Bone Temple: a vast ossuary composed of the bones of infected and uninfected alike, all carefully cleaned and assembled into the world’s most metal war memorial.

  

• Despite what this might imply, Kelson is impossibly, self-sacrificingly kind to everyone he meets, including the infected alpha he calls Samson (played excellently by stuntman and former MMA fighter Chi Lewis-Parry). Kelson is the only person who sees the infected as people who are sick, rather than as evil hordes or literal demons; he is fully aware of the danger they pose, but he refuses to treat them like animals. This is the sort of behavior that causes my friends who hated the first Years to roll their eyes — why would you tranquilize the rampaging monster and escape, rather than just kill the horrible thing? Worst of all, why the fuck would you take the time to treat the infected thing’s wounds while it is tranquilized, rather than just running as far away as you can?

• While pulling arrows out of the tranquilized Samson, Kelson makes a joke about charging him, but then stops and clarifies that he’s kidding: “I’m NHS.” That’s why he doesn’t kill anything; he’s a doctor, and here, at the end of the world, he is going to remain a doctor. He has a patient to treat. Nothing else matters.

• I first encountered The Honey Month eleven1 years ago as part of a bundle2 of Weird Fiction ebooks I bought from StoryBundle. I thought I had read at least part of The Honey Month back then, but now, having just read it all the way through, I see I was mistaken. Yet I remember being excited when El-Mohtar’s book This Is How You Lose the Time War came out, specifically because I had good memories of The Honey Month. Goodness knows what was actually going through my brain at the time.

• Having actually for-sure read it now, I can say that The Honey Month is delightful, if unlikely to stick with me for too long. El-Mohtar received a gift box of 28 different honeys, and she sampled them one a day some February past, and wrote tasting notes on each honey as well as a story or poem to go with each. These are small, fae things. A woman gives a cardigan to a girl, only to discover that the girl is some thing out of Faerie; by giving her the cardigan, she has suddenly become responsible for the care and feeding of this creature. A little girl is offered a taste of honey by several talking crows. A woman is stung by a bee, and begins to dream about a “star-girl.” None of the stories or poems is longer than three pages, and most are less than that.

• The stories and their pleasures are fleeting but sweet, and I thoroughly enjoyed them. El-Mohtar repeatedly captures the delights and dangers of a good Faerie story throughout. I could see myself picking the book up again some future February, reading one a day first thing in the morning.

• This Is How You Lose the Time War I had read3 before. In it, two incalculably vast factions are fighting a war through time, tweaking small things in the past so that their interests will be served in their own impossibly distant future. Two agents, called Red and Blue, have been circling each other for eons; but when one of them writes the other a taunting letter, a correspondence begins which results in them falling in love.

• El-Mohtar wrote Blue’s sections, and her friend Max Gladstone wrote Red’s sections. Like The Honey Month, Time War thus feels a bit like a writing exercise; the sort of thing you might do with a friend as a warmup and prelude for other, more serious work.

• It’s cute but a little bit slight; the mechanics of the Time War and the various superpowers the two characters have are only thinly sketched. This is fine, honestly: Time War is a short love story, and it doesn’t pretend to be an exploration of temporal mechanics, but it does end up feeling a bit like El-Mohtar and Gladstone are just playing around with other people’s tropes and tools. It’s The Big Time meets River Song, and that’s a perfectly pleasant way to spend an afternoon.

• The River Has Roots came out just last year. It returns to the fae stylings of The Honey Month but is novella-length, and I enjoyed it. Two sisters live on the edge of Faerie; the older is falling in love with a Fae being but is also being courted by a tedious and grasping man from the village: tragedy and romance and sisterly love ensues.

• River consistently uses the word “grammar” instead of “magic,” and when magic things happen, they are described using words like “conjugation.” At one point a character is transformed into a swan because when she fell into the magic river, she was wearing a signet ring; the river translated “signet” to “cygnet” and transmuted4 her accordingly. This is alluring and, most importantly, does not overstay its welcome; the book provides just enough explanation for things to give you a sense of the logic underlying the magic, but without going into so much detail that you feel you’re reading an RPG sourcebook.

• El-Mohtar’s first collection of short stories comes out soon, and there is some reason to believe I will get to review it for a publication you may have heard of; more on that if and when said review is published. She’s been a prolific short story author for about twenty years, and has won a basketful of awards, but somehow I don’t think I’ve read any of them. I’m looking forward to digging into her work further.

Dune, Frank Herbert

• I’ve read Dune before, of course, but this time I read it out loud with5 Julia. We have since started Dune Messiah, which I have never read, although she has read the whole series. (Well, the six Frank Herbert books. Neither of us has any intention of touching the other books, which all bear the baleful mark of Kevin J. Anderson.)

• Dune is the classic example of a sci-fi book where “the ideas are good but the writing is bad,” as and others have pointed out before. As always, it’s more complicated than that. Herbert’s prose is frequently very clunky, and once he figures out how to describe a character’s physicality, he will just repeat that adjective or phase over and over again to the point of parody: Chani is “elfin,” you say? Gurney Halleck has an “inkvine scar?” Characters in Dune are forever carrying on internal monologues that spell out their thoughts in the clearest fashion possible. Conversations often look like:

  • “I think it is time we did something about the badguys,” Chani said, a note of resolve on her elfin face.

  • Could it be that her Fremen training has also given her some amount of prescience? Jessica wondered.

  • “Perhaps,” Jessica said. “Unless the badguys are ready for us.”

  • Is the Reverend Mother trying to tell me something? Chani thought, elfinly.

• This is tedious, and it becomes tedious immediately; the famous scene with the gom jabbar loses a ton of narrative momentum because characters are always stopping to ask themselves obvious questions. Herbert is generally allergic to subtlety: the Harkonnens are evil because of the great betrayal they perform against the Atreides but, in case you had any doubts, Baron Harkonnen is also an enormously fat pederast who kills slave-prostitutes in his spare time.

• Yes, there is also all the Other Stuff: the battle-of-the-sexes is tired; the Fremen are heavily exoticized Space Bedouins out of the darkest nightmares of Edward Said.

• And yet: the Litany Against Fear. And yet: the Butlerian Jihad. And yet: Paul, unable to escape his terrible destiny, screaming to himself in the dark of his tent, all while his Mentat mind catalogues his reactions as interesting data. Stilgar’s incredible practicality; Leto’s doomed nobility; Jessica taking in the Water of Life and transforming it from poison into psychedelics, inadvertently forever altering her unborn daughter in the process. Kynes, dying in the desert, realizing with horror that the Fremen have a hero. The Bene Gesserit, the Voice, the Orange Catholic Bible, the shields that “turn the fast blow, admit the slow kindjal!” Above it all, Shai-Hulud, the Old Man of the Desert! These things are lightning. Dune does many things poorly, but the things it does well, it does better than anyone.

• As I’ve said before, I try to start every year by sitting on the couch all day on January 1st, reading an entire book from cover to cover. This time I read two books from cover to cover: the above short story collections by George Saunders. I should not have read both of these in the same day; when I asked what Saunders I should read for a project I’m working on, he recommended these two books, but told me not to overdo it because it is easy to overdose on George Saunders. I did it anyway, because there is nothing I like better than soliciting good advice and then doing the opposite!

• Still: turns out famous short story author George Saunders is good at writing short stories! Who knew! Well, everybody knew: my copy of his debut collection (CivilWarLand) is blurbed by Thomas Pynchon, DFW, and Michiko Kakutani. But prior to January 1st I had read only Lincoln in the Bardo, his novel about ghosts and Abraham Lincoln.

• By reputation I knew that Saunders writes a lot of genre-adjacent stories, and specifically loves weird theme parks, but I was surprised by how many of these stories were not “genre-adjacent” but rather just straightforwardly science fiction stories. Of the 17 stories (or, well, 16 stories and a novella) featured in these two collections, at least three would not look at out of place at all in the pages of Interzone or Clarkesworld. These are “Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz,” “Escape from Spiderhead,” and “My Chivalric Fiasco.” “The Semplica Girl Diaries” and the novella that closes out the first collection (“Bounty”) are at least sci-fi adjacent, as well.

• Or maybe it’s just that I read a lot of Interzone and Clarkesworld (and, not in sci-fi but horror, Black Static, may it rest in peace) published since George Saunders got famous, and maybe all of those authors are just doing their own George Saunders impressions. Still: I would ordinarily expect to find a premise like “what if in prison you were subjected to a series of pharmaceutical tests about invoking and then removing very specific emotional states, and what if you didn’t like it very much” shelved next to Ted Chiang.

• For all that I read much more than most people (though much less than most Serious Readers, I suspect), and for all that I occasionally write book reviews for publications people have occasionally heard of, I am probably not hooked-in enough to the eternal struggle between genre and literary fiction to really opine on the state of the war.1 Still, it’s interesting to me that one of the most famous and well-regarded literary short story author of the current moment doesn’t stick just to what I would ordinarily think of as “literary fiction.”

• Regardless: I liked most of these stories, which are mostly stories about broken people dealing with unwinnable situations. The image I have in my mind of Saunders’s reputation is that words like “satirical” and “tragicomic” and maybe “mean” pop up the most in the word cloud about him, but there is a strong sense of sentimentality that runs through these books. (I suppose I should have known this already: the ending of Lincoln in the Bardo borders on mawkish.)

The Incandescent; Emily Tesh

• A friend gave me this book for Christmas, and I trust this friend, but could not help being nervous about it, because it’s one of those books that is marketed in an annoying way. “It’s a dark academic sapphic2 romance fantasy!” “It’s this book you’ve never heard of meets this other book you’ve never heard of!” I try very hard not to let a book’s marketing color my opinion about the actual book, and I’m glad for it, because I enjoyed this one quite a bit!

• It’s a wizard school book, but it’s about a professor at the wizard school, not the students at the wizard school, which I appreciated. I’m sure other such books exist, but all the wizard school books I can think of are from the perspective of a student. Usually this student is uniquely talented but also in some way marginalized or looked down upon by the other students, usually because they are from poverty. They meet a school bully, they make friends, they discover a Dark Secret, the faculty are often cheerfully irresponsible about the lives of their charges, etc. Some of these books are good (A Wizard of Earthsea does most of these things, after all) but one does get a little tired of it.

• But our main character here is Saffy Walden, the workaholic director of magic at a posh British boarding school that teaches many mundane subjects3, but also offers courses in various kinds of magic. Saffy is funny and seriously devoted to her students’ safety, but she is also rude, snobbish, and stubborn, and has no life whatsoever outside of her work.

• A surprising amount of the book is about pedagogy. It is about how one teaches magic, yes, but it is also about how you teach teenagers at all. I’ve never been a teacher in a school, so I have no idea how accurate it is or if Saffy gives good advice, but it felt pretty credible to me.

• It struck me how much better this book is than Katabasis, by R.F. Kuang, which I reviewed for The Bulwark here. Katabasis’s premise and magic system4 are more interesting in the abstract: magic in Katabasis is essentially coterminous with analytic philosophy, such that a good knowledge of Bertrand Russell allows you to cast spells; the main characters of that book are descending to hell to rescue the soul of their thesis advisor. In The Incandescent, the magic we spend the most time with is about binding demons to do your will, and the premise is basically just “what if a magic school existed in 21st century England.” But the problem with Katabasis is that Kuang never trusts her readers. The abusive professor is painted in the broadest of strokes, she never gets sufficiently weird with the analytic philosophy, the sociopolitical points are all made with the subtlety of one of those cartoon Harley Quinn mallets, etc.

• But The Incandescent feels like it was written for grownups! The main character is well aware of the privileged position she and her students have; she agonizes about how best (as a privileged white lady ) to communicate with her star pupil, a Black British girl who is in foster care after a magical tragedy killed her family, but there are no easy answers to these questions and the book doesn’t pretend that there are. The demon-binding exists in a state of ethical fraughtness that the book discusses but doesn’t entirely resolve! When the climax hits, Tesh plays with the magic system in ways that logically follow from the rest of the book but still manage to be surprising!

• I doubt The Incandescent will appear on my Top 10 Fantasy of All Time or anything, but it’s a good, competently-executed story with some clever ideas, fun characters, and a little more going on beneath the surface than a lot of the stuff out there. What a breath of fresh air that is.

Once upon a time, there came a day when Facebook opened its doors to everyone, not just horny college students. On that day, everybody’s mom joined Facebook. A few days after that, everybody’s grandma joined Facebook. Somewhere around this timeframe, Edith joined Facebook, and one of us added the other as a “friend.” I have historically had a philosophy of adding everyone I’ve ever met as friends on Facebook, a policy that I have repeatedly had reason to regret.

There was a time when I yelled a lot on Facebook about politics. This is because I was in my late twenties, in law school, and angry. Worst of all, I had convinced myself that people cared what I thought about these things. The mid-teens were a good time to yell on the Internet if you were even vaguely eloquent; it could get you a lot of attention and glowing praise. At least once, I, sir, won the Internet.

But Edith did not like the things I said on Facebook, because the things I said were mean about Donald Trump. Edith did not, originally, like Donald Trump, but in the years since 2015 she became fully inducted into the cult. Every few years she would out of nowhere send me a link to a video hosted on some website I’ve never heard of, which video consists of two hours of sweaty bald men and hawklike blonde women bloviating about the deep state and the very real and very concerning problems with the 2020 election.

The pattern was this: Trump would do something awful, like encourage the Charlottesville rioters, or threaten to revoke citizenship for flag-burners, or whatever, pick one of your favorites, and I’d complain about it on Facebook, adopting a posture of aspirationally erudite righteous anger. Some people would “like” this, and then Edith would come along and yell at me. Usually she would not defend whatever thing I was mad about, but would instead talk about all the various ways Democrats are worse. I tried to reason with Edith, but never seemed to get through to her. It was like arguing with an empty carousel; there was a lot of noise and motion and flashing lights, but we didn’t seem to get anywhere. Whether this is because I was being patronizing or because she was being irrational is impossible to say. (Probably it was both.)

Some time around 2021 I told her I didn’t want to talk to her about politics any more, and in my attempt to put my foot down, I erred on the side of being rude rather than unclear. It seemed to mostly work.

I still occasionally yell about politics on Facebook, but it’s only a few times a year, now, instead of a few times a week. I could say that this decrease is because I have grown out of this phase; I could say it is because I’m tired. It feels like angry political yelling gets fewer eyeballs than it used to on Facebook, anyway. Perhaps this reflects algorithmic changes, perhaps this reflects less traffic on Facebook. Or perhaps people became tired of my yelling; there are only so many ways one can say “Orange Man Bad” before it just becomes noise, after all. Another way of saying this is that I don’t yell about politics on Facebook as often as I used to because I don’t get as much attention anymore; make of that what you will.

But Edith, stalwart and unflinching, still prowls Facebook, and of late she has forgotten that I don’t want to talk about politics with her. So the other day I said that I do not like the President of the United States kidnapping a foreign head of state without even talking to Congress about it first, and Edith logged on to remind me of the evils of drug trafficking and to ask if I still believe the “Russia Hoax.” I was very annoyed, but a part of me was also delighted. At this point this is a longstanding relationship. I have been fighting with Edith on Facebook longer than I’ve known my wife. “Edith,” in my mind, has become a synecdoche for all the most frustrating members of the Orange Cult. “Yes,” I ask myself, “This is a good idea; but how will Edith feel about it?” The specter of Edith haunts my every post on that cursed Book of Faces.

About a year ago, my grandmother got hurt. Grandpa can’t help with these things as much as he used to, because he’s increasingly scatterbrained due to a series of relatively small strokes. (As such things go, he’s doing fine, but you can’t leave him alone with anything. This is very sad, but he’s 98. If I don’t get my act together soon, then when I’m 98 I will have been dead for about 40 years.) Edith came to see my grandparents; I can’t remember if she was already there and this was all a lucky coincidence, or if she flew down specifically to help. Regardless, it was a long journey separated by well more than a thousand miles, and Edith, I am told, was essential in keeping the wheels on the bus. The word my mother used was “superhero.”

“My political enemies are real people who are sometimes nice, at least in some aspects of their lives” is a trite observation, though like a lot of trite observations, it’s important not to forget it. We must remember that our enemies are people, too, full of complexity and frailty, unexpected virtues and unexpected vices. But it’s also important not to forget that, even so, they are still our political enemies. The command, after all, is “love your enemies,” not “don’t have enemies.” My great-aunt Edith did a kind thing for my grandmother; it is but one achievement in what I understand to be a lifetime habit of being kind and reliable to the folks around her. Also, if my great-aunt Edith has her way, our nation will be cast into a hellish pit of cruelty from which it may never recover.

In 2026 I will continue to write book reviews for whoever will pay me. This year I published seven reviews at The Bulwark, under the excellent editorship of Martyn Wendell Jones, Adam Keiper, and Ben Parker. One of these reviews so inspired a reader on Bluesky that they praised the “surprisingly cutting review” that Bill Kristol wrote about R.F. Kuang’s Babel. I am not Bill Kristol, and the book I wrote a cutting review of was Katabasis, not Babel, but we take what we can get. In 2026, my newfound sense of purpose and responsibility will undoubtedly allow me to write book reviews for The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and, of course, The Bulwark. This incredible burst of forthright, incisive criticism will create a new renaissance in the field of book reviews, and all those Substack posts worrying about the state of book criticism will become relics of a bygone era. Literary historians in the future will write about pre- and post-Coberlian criticism. I will get to go to many cool parties, where people will gasp in delight at my bon mots.

In 2026 I will finish the novel I’ve been working on for a while, and will immediately receive an offer for at least a “significant deal” from a major publisher. Spurred on by a sense of moral urgency, I will instead go with some scrappy indie publisher, and my book will rescue them from the abyss of financial insolvency. I will then immediately finish a second book, and sell that to them as well. In later years, a dismissive literary critic who dislikes my oeuvre will say that “Coberly’s primary contribution to literature was his ability to keep indie presses afloat so that they could publish more deserving authors.” He will be extensively criticized by the majority of the literary world, and his career will never quite recover, but viewing his essay from the hereafter, I will be heartily delighted by this epitaph.

In 2026 I will write a host of excellent essays for this Substack. This year, I wrote relatively little for this publication, which simply will not do. How will I ever become the darling of a new literary movement if I do not have a robust and extensive presence here on Substack? So in 2026 I will publish two pieces a week here. One will be pithy and bloggy, calling to mind the best of Grantland or The Toast; the other will be rigorous and beautiful, calling to mind the best of Elizabeth Hardwick or Brian Phillips. I will reopen paid subscriptions, but only for a week, as the royalties for my novel (rushed to publication, as mentioned above, to rescue the indie publisher) will make me feel that it would be greedy to extort money from my adoring fans just to read my “silly little thoughts.” (This is what I will call them, even though many people will wonder whether or not they can nominate a blog for the Pulitzer.)

In 2026 I will either immediately get over the sense of futility that has made my already challenging job more challenging than it needs to be, or I will make a career change. If the former, I will become the best public defender east of the Mississippi and singlehandedly inspire systemic change not only in my own courthouse but in many other courthouses around the nation. If the latter, I will wrap up my cases and then switch jobs, but only after writing a heartfelt, intimate, and raw account of what it is like to be a burning-out public defender that causes many people to tell me they are very proud of my knowledge of myself and of my ability to take care of my mental health. Either course will naturally become irrelevant once the book sales start coming in and I quit to become a full-time writer, but it will be good to tie up that chapter of my life.

In 2026 I will have an epiphany about how best to communicate to the American public that we should all stop being such jackasses to each other and should instead tear down our broken system and build something shining and beautiful in its place. My attempts to write it down will be immediately quashed by a shadowy conspiracy of Silicon Valley gazillionaires, all of whom have, of course, already been working to keep me in obscurity. I will take to printing this revelation out and anonymously distributing it on street corners and smuggling it across state lines in crates of pickles (do they ship pickles in crates?). The resulting Pickle Tract, as it is called, will inspire mass protests and uprisings; at first there will be violent clashes as the police overreact, but this will stop once a few curious police officers read the Pickle Tract and become inspired to join the movement themselves. By 2032, the United States of America will operate as a perfectly oiled anarcho-syndicalist commune. People will speculate wildly about who wrote the Pickle Tract, but I will never admit to it.

In 2026 I will be a perfectly attentive and supportive husband in every way, and will also keep the kitchen perfectly clean for my mother-in-law.

Finally, in 2026 the Colorado Rockies will be good at baseball. I know this one is unlikely, but it’s good to have dreams.

Never leave babies alone. Nothing tastes sweeter to the Ghrivit than the fear of a child too young to understand its fate. A mother’s grief is the Ghrivit’s delight.

Never travel in pairs outside the village wards at night. The Ghrivit loves to steal one away and leave the other wondering and alone.

If your children have an animal they love, it must be kept indoors. The Ghrivit loves the sound of children weeping over a bundle of broken bone and matted fur.

Do not hunt the Ghrivit. You will not find it. Someone you love will, instead.

There were many rules like this. The Ghrivit had stalked the hills and jungles surrounding the village since at least the time of Zeder’s grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother, but the shamans had learned to keep the people safe. The rules came from trial and error, and the shamans still did not understand all there was to know, but the deaths grew fewer every season. A few fools were taken, and a few too weak to run if they heard it lumbering towards them through the undergrowth, but most of the people lived their lives unharmed.

The Ghrivit killed Zeder’s grandfather when he was already an old man. Perhaps he broke some unknown rule, or perhaps the Ghrivit was simply hungry. Zeder had been taught that it drank blood when there was not enough fear or sorrow to maintain itself. Whatever the reason, Zeder found his grandfather lying on the path before his house, his neck broken, his brown skin turned ashen and pale, with deep wounds on his inner thigh where the Ghrivit had fastened its fangs. The shamans took his grandfather, burned him, and hung his ashes in a woven basket at the edge of the village. Zeder’s tears turned to fury.

Many young men and women swear an oath to kill the Ghrivit, and the shamans were used to fielding questions from eager, grieving children. But Zeder, in thrall to the fiery solipsism of youth, firmly believed that it was his destiny, as though the ancestors had placed their mark upon him, and he was still scheming and plotting when the strangers arrived.

They came to Zeder’s village, an assemblage of fifteen men and women, most wearing clothing far too warm for the heat. Six of them were warriors, escorting the remaining nine, who were shamans of some kind. Most did not speak the language of the village, and conversed among themselves in a strange, slow tongue that seemed devoid of life and passion. Zeder could sense no relation between the meaning of their words and the pitches at which they were spoken. The words were broken apart, lonely, and quiet. Zeder wondered how you could be angry in a language like that. How could you be afraid at the same tone in which you spoke of love, or trade? When Zeder asked one of the shamans, Chinna, about these things, the old man shook his head and held his hands to the sky.

One of the strangers spoke the language. She spoke slowly, haltingly, and with an accent none of the people of the village could place. Many of the strangers carried what at first Zeder took to be spears, but what Chinna told him are called muskets: devices from distant places that throw balls of fire at their targets, like slings or blowguns, but faster and louder.

The chief had been warned of the arrival of these strangers by a scout from another village, who told him the people only asked strange questions and scribbled markings on bundles of bound leaves. They camped outside the village, and sought permission from the chief to bring him gifts and to speak with his people. After much consultation with the elders, the chief allowed the people of the village to speak with the strangers, and sought to learn what he could of their ways.

The strangers came from a village far away, and they claimed that their village contained more people than could be found in 10 villages the size of Zeder’s. He did not believe this. How could the hunters keep them all fed? How could the chief have time to settle all the disputes that must arise? But Zeder did not speak – he only listened. The strangers spoke of vast boats, and of places of learning where many of their shamans gathered to teach and learn magicks and hidden knowledge. They came from one of those places, and were spending four whole seasons traveling from village to village, asking questions, seeking to learn about Zeder’s people and their jungles.

They asked about the sacred milky liquor brewed by the shamans for ceremonial purposes or grand celebrations. They asked about the many baskets filled with ashes that hung around the village. They asked how the chief adjudicated disagreements between villagers, and seemed particularly interested in the relationship between the chief, the shamans, and the village elders. Who had the authority to command the warriors, and had the village ever made war upon another?

At last, they asked about the Ghrivit, and they were fascinated by the rules the shamans had deduced for evading its attention. They asked often about the consequences for breaking these rules, and seemed dissatisfied with the chief’s insistence that the rules existed only to safeguard his people from the Ghrivit. He did not impose other penalties – these were not laws, but rules for survival. Disobeying one of these rules would bring its own punishment.

On the fifth day after the strangers came to the village, there came a piercing scream from their camp. Zeder and many others ran towards the scream, grabbing obsidian knives or hardened wooden clubs. When Zeder arrived, he found several people, both from the village and the camp, standing around the broken and bloodied form of one of the warriors.

His clothes were shredded, and his arms and neck were broken. There were deep gouges all over his body, and his eyes were missing. Two deep punctures on his inner thigh removed all doubt: the Ghrivit had claimed one of the strangers. The warrior had ventured into the jungle with one of the women who had traveled with him. They were separated, and she became lost, but when she found her way back to the camp, she found his body, waiting for her, just outside her tent. No one else in the camp had seen or heard anything unusual at all.

When this information was relayed through the interpreter to the people of the village, they nodded grimly and made signs of mourning. “Never travel in pairs outside the village wards at night,” they said to each other.

This time, when the strangers asked about the Ghrivit, they asked different questions. The leader of the warriors, a large man with dark hair and thin eyes, interrogated Chinna for a long time. Where was the Ghrivit’s lair? How often did it come out to prey? What was the size of its territory?

These were hunters’ questions, and Chinna tried to dissuade them. “Do not hunt the Ghrivit,” he said, and implored them not to go. He did not wish to see these strangers harmed for nothing. It leaves no tracks, Chinna said, but the big man held up a metal box that ticked and whirred as though it was full of insects, and told him that the Ghrivit did not have to leave tracks. They could find anything that breathed.

Zeder watched the four warriors leave the next day. They were silent and grim, and Zeder’s people had already begun to mourn. He shook his head, unable to believe that these foolish people would ignore Chinna’s warnings. A few days later, the village heard sounds like thunder or the falling of a large tree off in the distance, and Zeder knew the men were dead.

But the warriors returned to the village, and they brought with them the corpse of the Ghrivit. They flung it into the center of the village for all to see, and crowed and laughed about their triumph. The woman who spoke the language could be seen smiling, her face radiant. She wept as she clasped the chief’s hands.

Thrown into clear light, the Ghrivit seemed small. It looked more like the corpse of a deer, killed by some jungle predator and left to rot. Pale, bloodless skin, gray like ashes, could be glimpsed through mattes and tangles of thin, black hair. Its face looked stretched, as though the nose and jaw had pushed themselves out of the rest of the skull. It had long, narrow fangs, one of them broken by the ball of foreign metal that had killed it. Its limbs were too long for the rest of its body, its arms and legs stretched out far away from its torso. Its legs had too many joints, as though it was given a second set of kneecaps. Its body showed many scars.

But as Zeder knelt beside it, he knew that it had once been a man. He saw it in the outline of the creature – saw where bones and sinew had contorted, guided by some invisible and unmerciful hand. Among the scars caused by seasons of doomed warriors, seasons of knives and spears and clubs, Zeder could see the faded remnants of tattoos, tattoos not unlike those on his own arms – given to him when he became a man. They, too, were stretched, and no pattern was discernible, but they were there.

The village celebration lasted long into the night. The warriors from far away were given flutes and necklaces, precious stones, and sacred clothing. One mother offered her daughter in marriage to the warrior who had fired the killing shot, and he graciously declined after many meaningful looks from the interpreter. Much of the liquor was consumed that night, so much so that afterwards, the shamans spent many more weeks than normal preparing enough to replenish the stock.

But Zeder did not join the festivities. He slipped out as soon as he could and lay in a clearing not far from the village, gazing at the stars, and wondering about the stone of anger that had hardened in his stomach.

The people from far away stayed another week, and when they left, the village changed. Couples snuck into the woods together, no longer afraid that the Ghrivit would take them, giggling and gasping in the jungle. The hunters ranged further afield, bringing back game in greater quantities. Parents realized they no longer had to teach their children the long-held rules to protect them. The shamans held many secret meetings where they debated whether or not to leave the ashes of the departed hanging in the trees. The young men struggled to find anything to talk about, now that the Ghrivit was gone, buried beneath the chief’s threshold.

The shamans now had to answer many new questions. Must pets be kept indoors, now that the Ghrivit was gone? Must babies be watched at all times? Did the spirits of the forest and of their ancestors still guard them? Or were they now left all alone, now that the threat had passed?

After the first few weeks of celebration had ended, a nameless uneasiness began to enter the minds of the people. Women began to make signs at the doors of their houses once again, signs to protect them from a monster that no longer lived.

All the while, Zeder grew angrier.

He performed his duties quickly and rashly, often leaving them to be done again by another when he was finished. He ate little. He snuck out at night to stare at the sky, his mind screaming with a thousand contradictory thoughts. He was angry with the warriors, who seemed to fearlessly wander the jungle as if the Ghrivit had never lurked there, smiling to itself in the shadows. He raged against the strangers who had shamed the whole village by strolling into the dark and murdering his ancient enemy. But most of all he raged against the Ghrivit, for killing his grandfather, yes, but also for dying by someone else’s hand.

He spent weeks like this, his days filled with drudgery, his nights filled first with these eternal, repetitive thoughts, and then with dreams which chased him over the same territory. He hunted the Ghrivit; it hunted him. He hunted the warriors from far away, and they laughed and laughed at his weakness. Once, he hunted the people of the village, and awoke shaking and weeping.

One night he was clumsy as he stole more of the sacred liquor, and Chinna caught him. But rather than whipping him, or scolding him, Chinna beckoned Zeder to his room, and together they drank in silence. After several cups, the old man sighed and slapped his thighs.

“You have spent these weeks in a deranged state. You are rude to your fellows, and you leave your work unfinished. You steal more liquor than anyone in the village – yes, we know these things. We, too, were once young. For weeks I have told my brothers that Zeder needs only time, that all of us have to face this new world in our own way. But it has gone on long enough! I doubt my wisdom in leaving you alone so long. So! Tell me: how can I help you to live in this new time?”

Zeder poured out all the fire within him, asking many unanswerable questions and saying many unkind things about the strangers, about the warriors, about the chief, and about the shamans. Chinna listened to these things, unmoved. Zeder’s voice grew until it was almost a shout before he suddenly stopped, embarrassed by the placidity of the old man at whom he had been screaming. He cast his eyes downward and picked at the brushed dirt floor.

Chinna poured each of them another cup, and strove for the words that would quiet the young man’s anger. But he could find nothing to say that was not trite or weak. So he silently prayed for guidance, and said nothing for a long time.

In the silence, spent and tired, Zeder took another deep draught. As he felt the liquid burning within him, he suddenly had a new thought, for the first time in weeks. He felt a flush of embarrassment that he had not thought of it more quickly. He hesitated, but Chinna still seemed unwilling to speak. Zeder straightened his posture and looked the old man in the eye. “How did the man before become the Ghrivit?” he asked.

Chinna sighed. “I have told you so many times, beyond counting, that the shamans do not know who the man was, or why-”

Zeder held up his hand, and Chinna fell silent, astonished at the young man’s arrogance.

“Yes, my teacher – I know all you have said. But I ask not who, or why, or when, but how. How did a man, flesh and blood like you or I, become the stretched and murderous thing we saw? The shamans cannot have lived and studied our enemy for all these seasons and never have asked this question. So I ask you again: how did the man become the Ghrivit?”

Chinna wondered at the fire in Zeder’s eyes, and the passion with which he spoke. Later, he would wonder at his own words that night, and would often lie awake and interrogate his motives. He blamed the drink (for he was older than he once was); he tried to tell himself that he had not guessed what the young man was planning. But whether it was the drink, or his desire to share his knowledge, or some quieter notion that the boy was right, Chinna cleared his throat and told Zeder what he knew.

I met him because we wanted to get a dog for our dog; Azzie seemed a little bored sometimes and we thought it would be good for her to have a friend. So we went to the rescue, and we met the little black dog, and we eventually brought him home to stay. We named him Nyarlathotep, but called him Theo. We did this because the other dog was named Azathoth, though we called her Azzie. This is because it is funny to have a tiny terrier named after one of the Great Old Ones, and we thought the pattern should continue.

Theo was clearly not an on-purpose dog. He had a squat, round body that perched precariously atop his disproportionately long legs. His black fur could never decide whether it was curly or straight, and changed its texture wildly depending on its length and which part of his body it was growing on. For the next eleven years, people would ask me what kind of dog he was, and I would say “I don’t know,” and then people would confidently tell me what kind of dog he was, as though they had resolved the Great Mystery forever. Each of these people would give me a different answer. He may have been a Yorkie-Poo, he may have been partly Pomeranian, he may have been part Scottie. I marked him as “terrier mix” on the formal paperwork whenever I was asked to put something down. Sometimes people asked me why I didn’t do one of those doggy-DNA tests. I didn’t do that because they cost money and because I didn’t care about the specifics of Theo’s genetic makeup. He was Theo, and that was sufficient.

He was always kind of an asshole. Once he got comfortable enough with me to be certain I wasn’t going to eat him, he began asserting his prerogatives as a Dog of the House. He bogarted the dry food even when he wasn’t hungry, leaving poor Azzie to starve until I intervened. He barked when someone was at the door, yes, but mostly he barked when you were already doing something he wanted you to do, but were just not doing it as quickly as he wanted. Grab a can of dog food and open it, in Theo’s presence, and you were treated to a torrent of vocal abuse until you put the food in front of him. His bark was indescribable, as befits a terrifying monster from beyond time and space; it was a sort of high-pitched, tuneless hammer of sound. He made a number of weird noises, ranging from high-pitched shrieks to bizarrely melodious growls.

One of my dear friends eulogized him as a “pleasantly bitter creature.” Another described his endealment as “I want to be in the action but not perceived or interacted with.”

He was exceptionally “food-motivated,” and he was a scavenger; you could not leave food anywhere near him if you wanted to eat it yourself, though he was never so gauche as to take it away from your hands or your plate if you were present. But if you were sitting with him on the couch, and you had a slice of pizza on a tray near the couch, and you stood up to go to the bathroom? Well then, of course, that pizza became Theo’s, even though he had not expressed any interest in it prior to that moment. He was a sly creature. He also occasionally had magic powers; walk him through a stand of tallish grass and he might walk out clutching an entire cheeseburger between his teeth.

His grouchiness compounded with age. For the last five or so years, whenever I had friends over to my place of residence, I gave them the following speech: “I have two little dogs. You may pet the little white dog. Do not pet the little black dog. He will run up to you and look as though he wants you to pet him. He does not want you to pet him. If you pet him, he will make a horrible noise and snap in your direction. He cannot hurt you; he is very small, does not actually want to bite you, and does not have many teeth left. But it will be surprising, and you will not like it very much.” I was proud of the clarity of this speech. I thought it laid out all the relevant information. Folks rarely listened to me, because of the eagerness with which Theo greeted these guests. Shrieking and consternation inevitably followed.

For all that, he clearly loved us. Julia, who came into our lives seven years into my time with Theo, is very proud of the day she realized Theo had begun to trust her and adopted her back; by the end of his life I’m pretty sure he liked her a lot more than he liked me. (This was a sign of intelligence and insight on his part.) He spent his days sleeping on the floor in Julia’s office while she worked from home, though there were more comfortable places to sleep. He loved to sit next to me while I read a book, and would never get up from that position of his own volition.

How strange it is to take an animal into one’s home just for the purposes of companionship! Theo did not herd sheep or kill rats or protect me from intruders or produce eggs or wool or do any of the other things that domesticated animals might be expected to do in a more practical partnership. He cost me a lot of time and money, and he yelled at me a lot. Sometimes he was very gross. Yet he made my life much better, because he was my friend. He helped me through the worst periods of my life so far. He did not understand the world at all, and he was frequently very annoyed by it, and he traveled through it with me anyway.

Some theologians are very committed to the idea that animals do not have souls. I do not really understand why, and do not care to get into the weeds of it, because it is clearly silly. Theo was too ornery to have been purely a natural phenomenon; I am more certain of the eternal persistence of Theo than I am of my own eternal persistence. There is no way to write about “all dogs going to heaven” without devolving into the interminably saccharine and cloying, so I’ll move on, but I expect to see Theo again.

Once, many years ago, I was walking the dogs around Minneapolis. Walking both dogs at once required one to engage in a sort of ridiculous, twirling dance, as they inevitably tangled themselves up in each other’s leashes and investigated different smells on opposite sides of the sidewalk. So I was not entirely paying attention when another dog arrived on the scene. This dog was comparatively enormous, leashless, and very angry at the presence of me and my little dogs. He rushed at us and stood only a few feet away, snarling and barking and feinting in our direction. Azzie and Theo began to bark up a storm, and I tried to put myself between them and this larger dog as I also tried to retreat away towards my house.

It was one of the more surreal experiences of my life. Azzie kept running around to look at the invader and then run behind me, the attacking dog kept circling around me as though he was stalking her in particular, and I was trying to decide what I was supposed to do. I realized that I might have to fight this other dog to keep my dogs safe, and I was trying to figure out how to do that without causing my dogs to run into the street, there to be hit by passing cars. Eventually I retreated far enough way from this dog’s territory that he decided to let us go, and we made it home without anyone having to fight anyone else.

But during the thick of it, when real violence seemed a possibility, I noticed that Theo kept putting himself between Azzie and me and the attacking dog. Every time I changed angles to try to keep the dogs behind me, Theo moved and stood his ground and yelled at the other dog. The other dog must have outweighed him by at least 50 pounds. But Theo put himself in harm’s way for us anyway. (That this was not particularly helpful, and in fact made it harder for me to extricate us from the situation, is not the point.) He was a brave and silly little dog, and I miss him.

He is now at rest, and he should be proud of himself. He was a good dog.

The train was small, and sparsely populated. The woman who checked my ticket frowned at me in displeasure when she saw my destination. It was a seven-hour journey to Tirinin, and I resolved to sleep most of the way in my berth in the sleeping roomette I had booked. I gazed out the window for a time, but the poor quality of the glass and the vagueness of the landscape soon lulled me to sleep.

I was awakened by the porter, who curtly informed me I would have to leave my berth for the approach to Tirinin. Perplexed and half-awake, I followed him down the line of cars until we came to a long, deserted passenger car with no windows whatsoever. I was struck by a wave of claustrophobia, and all the ordinary noises of the train seemed magnified by the bare, cold walls. I told the porter I preferred to stay in my berth. His refusal to acknowledge my statement made it clear that I would either move to the windowless car for the remainder of the journey or leave at the next stop, well before I could see any sign of Tirinin.

So I came to Tirinin in a dark car, and stepped into the station with no idea of where the station might be in the context of the city. The train seemed to hardly stop, and the porter nearly threw my luggage at me, though it seemed not out of fear so much as annoyance at the inconvenience.

The station was derelict. There was no sign of any other living thing, and it appeared to be constructed inside a miles-long tunnel, such that the only sunlight came from far away in either direction down the train tracks. There was no person staffing the station, only a rusting sign noting fare rates from Tirinin to anywhere else. There was no place to purchase a ticket. The station was desolate, and lacked even the usual empty crisp packets or napkins blowing in the wind.

As far as points of egress, I saw only a dusty concrete stairwell cut into the wall, unless I was to walk all the way down the track to the end of the tunnel. The stairwell was lit by a few flickering lightbulbs. I climbed what must have been five or six stories, growing increasingly thankful I had brought only one small suitcase, before I entered into a large antechamber, filled with whispering people, lounging around as at a fête. They acknowledged my presence with polite nods, but did not make any move to a formal greeting. I saw no signage or maps to assist a new arrival with orientation, so I chose a direction at random and began to wander the halls.

I was immediately overwhelmed by the garish richness of the furnishings and the decor on every wall. I had envisioned a series of garrets, rickety things constructed in haste, but instead often found myself thinking that I had stumbled into Versailles. The entire City seemed to be a series of expensive residences all jammed together. Vast ballrooms connected to small, winding stairs that led from one structure to another, so it was often difficult to tell where one stopped and another began, and it was soon clear that the distinction was irrelevant. The walls of even the smallest rooms were covered with ornate paintings of men on horses and women in gowns, figures from some ancient mythology or aristocrats from perhaps living memory. I did not recognize any of the scenes or the subjects, and when I asked what some particularly grand painting depicted, those around me would merely shrug or disinterestedly speculate.

Statues of bronze or marble were found everywhere in niches or corners, or sometimes incongruously standing in the middle of a hallway, as though someone was turned to stone while navigating this labyrinth. The city was lit by electric chandeliers and lamps in sconces which were always flickering and never quite sufficient to properly illuminate the rooms, such that the city was in a perpetual twilight, and my eyes quickly grew tired from squinting whenever I tried to examine the filigree on a balustrade or the details in a fine carpet. There was no sunlight in Tirinin, for there were almost no windows to the outside, and what few existed were shunned, and seemed to be slowly being boarded up.

Smoke from fireplaces and tobacco and opium choked the air, and the grime of so many people living in such close proximity dampened the opulence of the decor. Whenever I touched the walls I left smudges or smears in the black, sticky dirt. The people, too, were garbed in tattered finery, largely in old aristocratic attire that was long out of fashion, long coats and breeches or impractical gowns, and even a few powdered wigs. I wondered at the presence of so many ostensibly wealthy people -- where were the beggars? Or did the decayed state of their clothing mean that these people were the poor, and the rich had all vanished or hidden? The smell of the city was often unpleasant -- odors of filth and tobacco smoke and many bodies -- but there was nothing I could see to distinguish any markers of social class or station.

There was little respect paid to privacy in Tirinin, often alarmingly so. Many of the apartments and rooms of the buildings were claimed as residences, yet the doors were nearly always open, and I rarely found a room with fewer than five or six people in it, chatting amiably or playing at cards or dice. More than once I stumbled into a bedroom and found people asleep in enormous four-poster beds while others read or argued philosophy not ten feet away from the sleepers. I never felt unwelcome in any of the rooms, though little was done to make me feel comfortable, either.

The hallways and stairwells were crowded with people, and I was often forced to quietly push myself past these clusters to make any progress. These human obstacles did not acknowledge me at all, even when I was obliged to shove with some degree of force, unless I spoke to them, in which case they turned to me politely and attempted to include me in their conversation.

These dialogues were difficult to follow, partly because I did not know the subjects of the gossip or the art in discussion, and partly because the people of Tirinin speak with such a strange accent, and in such a low tone, that I had to strain my ears and concentrate very hard to make any sense of what they were saying. Nearly everyone I spoke to in Tirinin spoke barely above a whisper, a low-pitched, quiet sibilance, such that the whole city is filled with a constant susurrus that is only occasionally comprehensible. I walked through a murmuring city, picking out only a few words. My mind would try desperately to seize on the thread of some passing conversation, but would be unable to decipher anything more than a stray syllable. Eventually I began to think of it less as a mass of human voices, and more as the crash of the sea near the beach, or the brush of the wind atop a hill. The susurrus was a natural phenomenon, the ambient breathing of the city itself, and to try to glean meaning from it was as foolish as trying to speak with a babbling brook or a whispering forest.

For several days I wandered through the hallways and ballrooms of Tirinin, lost and aimless. I could find nothing identified as a hotel, but there were many beds that seemed to belong to no one in particular, so after one sleepless, perambulatory night, I decided to claim the nearest empty bed. No one bothered me, and no one seemed to think I was behaving inappropriately, though even after I repeated this process many times during my visit, I never became entirely accustomed to it. Food was brought up periodically from somewhere near the first floor, and the people standing would politely file into ballrooms or drawing rooms and gather at tables that were quickly erected for this purpose. I could draw no distinction between the people who acted as servants and the people who were eating. Was this a form of communal living, where each took their turn doing what needed to be done? I spoke to my dinner compatriots, and though they made pleasant, if quiet and incoherent, conversation, they always turned aside my questions about how the city functioned, and never asked me so much as my name.

I came to believe that everyone in Tirinin was here as the guest of some great and generous lord, one who had thrown open the doors of his palace to all who wanted to celebrate with him, and then fallen asleep and forgotten to give his servants any instructions as to the end of the festivities. But I never heard any reference to such a person. Indeed, I heard no reference to any government of any sort, nor of any police force nor militia. The city persists without any obvious central authority at all, hanging in a sort of crystallized state. I felt as though one touch from any king or emperor would crumble brittle Tirinin to the ground.

I wondered how I would find my way back to the train station, and after a few days, I began to feel very lonely.

It was difficult to panic in Tirinin, though I had become very lost, because there seemed little danger I would be robbed or face any of the other inconveniences a traveler ordinarily faces. There was no danger I would starve to death or freeze, since food and lodging were everywhere in abundance. Out of a sense of duty I tried once to pay for a meal and my bed, both located in a long dining room with rich, red carpets, but everyone I spoke to was confused by the request. So this was how I spent my days, until I saw her.

I was struggling to admire the umpteenth Baroque painting of someone I could not identify when I saw someone across a stairwell whom I immediately recognized as not from Tirinin. She was not pale, as most of the citizens of that sunless city are, and her voice, though not loud, was stronger and clearer than any of the locals. She was asking questions of a group that was clustered on a landing, and they were very clearly not giving her any sort of meaningful answer. She sighed and looked around, and made eye contact with me. I flushed, feeling as though I had been eavesdropping, and she started. After a brief moment, she motioned me to come down to her, and we moved down the stairs and into what had once been a sitting room.

“You are not from Tirinin,” I said. I tried not to sound as glad as I felt.

“Neither are you,” she said.

I could not place her accent, though it was very different from the one that surrounded me. I felt an immediate kinship with her, as one sometimes does with strangers on long travels, and resolved that we should be friends, if she would be willing. I said as much and she laughed, but it was a laugh of agreement.

“Although I had intended to leave soon,” she said.

“Tirinin has shown you all it has to offer?” I teased.

“No,” she said, and she briefly looked through me. “But I think -- I know I have seen nearly all I choose to.”

“I do not wish to keep you,” I said. “But I could use a guide. I fear I have been walking in circles, and can hardly tell one hallway from the next.”

“A guide?” she laughed. “I am no man’s Virgil. But it would be good to discuss this place with a more willing conversation partner.”

We spent the first day comparing our experiences in the Huddling City, discussing the various ballrooms and auditoriums we had seen. She had seen much more of the city than I, yet even so I described a few rooms that she claimed not to have noticed. But soon we moved from description to guesswork.

We theorized about the city. We spoke about the many absences: there seemed to be no children, nor elderly people, and we had seen no animals of any kind, nor factories or other sites of industry. There must be kitchens and wine cellars somewhere, to supply the meals, but even in her six weeks of travel she had not found them. (Six weeks seemed to me an impossibly long time to spend alone in this susurrating city.)

She showed me many rooms I had not seen. Auditoriums where the citizens of Tirinin debated arcane points of legal or philosophical tones, whispering from center stage. Mirrored hallways that people ran through, as though they could not bear to see their own faces.

I never grew bored, but I began to feel as though I understood the City. Then, three days after I met her, my guide found a small door beneath an opulent stairway and beckoned me towards it.

The doorway led to a stairway down, and I found myself beneath the city, in a series of caves made of brick walls. Water flowed through many of them, such that we could only walk on a narrow pathway. I could not tell if this was a flooded space, or some form of cistern. I heard moaning on the air.

She led me through the winding passageways until we entered into a large room lit by torches, like some medieval dungeon. The floor of the room was covered with pallets, each occupied by a single person clad only in a long, soiled nightgown. They writhed in pain and discomfort, and the noise of their groaning was immense. I felt I was watching a hospital filled with the wounded from some ancient battlefield.

I looked at my guide in horror and she shook her head and shrugged.

At this time another person approached us - a woman dressed in the tattered finery of the citizens of Tirinin Above. She nodded in our direction but did not speak. She seemed to be waiting for us, with a faintly proprietary air over the writhing figures, but she did not seem troubled or concerned.

“What is wrong with them?” I asked, for I could see no obvious signs of injury or sickness.

“Nothing is wrong with them,” she whispered. “They are fulfilling their duty. It is their time to be ill.”

This seemed so perfectly inexplicable that I did not know how to respond. She must have taken my silence for understanding, for she inclined her head and went back among her patients, and I was too awkward to pursue. My guide smiled. We left shortly thereafter. I did not want to watch the ill people any longer, and some of their moaning and writhing had begun to seem almost prurient, rather than pathetic.

It was late, so after we had climbed out of the caverns and moved again into the lamplit halls of Tirinin, we retired (me to an unclaimed hammock in an empty ballroom, her to a small room three floors above) and resolved to meet again in the morning.

“I have found one other thing you might care to see,” she said the next morning, and moved with purpose towards a stairwell I had not seen before.

We went up. Having never seen the city from the outside, I had no idea how tall it was, and with every new flight of stairs I felt increasingly vertiginous. In retrospect it cannot have been more than a few minutes in total, but I distinctly recall feeling as though I would be traversing this staircase for a thousand years. The staircase was disused and free from ornamentation, and gave off the air of the backstage in some grand opera house. I felt as though I was intruding, and my guide and I were alone the entire time we climbed it, the closest thing to privacy I had experienced since I entered the City. The absence of the city’s susurrus now felt oppressive. The sunlight filtering in cracks through the boards on the windows revealed tornadoes of dust, which choked my lungs. Up, then a landing, then turn, then up, then a landing, then turn, all without doors or any way to stop other than to keep climbing or to turn back. I did not wish to turn back.

Ultimately the staircase terminated in a bare wooden room, with a long ladder in the middle, reaching up, up, up to a trapdoor. The trapdoor was open, and clouds and light peeked through. I climbed. My guide did not, and a look of trepidation was on her face.

I was exhausted when I got to the top. I climbed onto the roof, and stared for a long moment at the clouds above me. They roiled. I had no idea what time it was, or where the sun might be, as the clouds extended to each horizon. I advanced towards a railing and saw Tirinin in its entirety from the above. A city without streets. A city where every building touches another; a metropolis of rowhouses, each a thousand feet tall. I could not see the ground between them; they seemed suspended in a light mist. I could see the edges of the city, surrounded by festering marshes. And I could breathe freely for the first time in weeks; breathe without the stench and choke of people and dust and smoke.

A strange confidence came over me, and I felt certain that there was a secret meaning in this architectural calligraphy, that the patterns and insights pricking at the sides of my mind were not illusions, but were glimpses of a grander truth. Yet I became also certain that it would take the rest of my life to decipher this meaning, that it would remain forever out of reach until the moment before I took my last breath, choking somewhere in the catacombs below Tirinin, or drowning in its fetid wells, or wheezing, an old and wrinkled thing but otherwise comfortable in a four-poster bed in one of its many rooms. The secret of Tirinin was mine if I wanted it, but it would kill me to claim it.

This was not presented to me as a threat, or a warning, but as a price, clear as if it was written in a shop window. I knew, too, that it was a good price, not generous, but not extortionate. An accurate assessment of the value of the thing sold. I stayed on the parapet for a long time. I thought of how glorious it would be to move through the city with a purpose; to have an unambiguous goal with an unambiguous end. No more of my aimless wanderings. Never again would I fail another person, or be paralyzed with fear or weakness, unable to leave my bed in the morning. I did not know if this search would take a week or a hundred years, but I knew I could perform it, and knew it would claim all the rest of my waking hours if I chose it. This itself would be worth the price, for I would be buying a teleology.

For the secret was not only in the layout of what could be seen from my perch atop the city, but was encoded in the pattern of every tapestry, hidden in the brushstrokes of every painting, whispered in the conversations of those standing in the hallways, beaten out by the dance steps in the ballrooms, demarcated by the tapping of the walking sticks of those that endlessly traveled around the city, screamed in the groans of the writhing wretches in the cellars. I, myself, would be part of it -- creating the structure I was seeking by my very act of seeking. I would climb the other towers I saw, peeking out from the mist; I would swim into the sea in the city’s cellars and commune with the phosphorescent things swimming within it. I would transcribe every piece of music performed on the pianofortes, and trace every line in the woodwork of the stairs, until I at last understood Tirinin.

After a time, my mind grew still, and I came to, as if out of a dream, to find myself still leaning on the parapet. It had grown cold, and night was falling, and I had made my decision. I crept down the long ladder and saw her there, at the bottom, sitting against the wall and dozing, her shawl wrapped around her shoulders. I stared at her for a moment, until I remembered who she was, and then something in my descent must have woken her, for she blinked sleepily in my direction.

She nodded, and took my hand, and with a handkerchief she wiped the tears I had not noticed I was shedding, and I realized that she had seen it, too, and had made the same decision. She gave my hand a final squeeze, and we walked down the many stairs, through the winding halls, and came at last to the train station. There we waited for many hours, until a train arrived, barely stopping in the derelict station. We clambered aboard, paid fares to a disgruntled porter, found our seats in the windowless car, and did not speak until we had long ago left behind us the huddling city of Tirinin.

WCSBL’s tone is a delightful combination of “short and punchy” and “well-footnoted,” which can be a difficult tightrope to walk. Sometimes the footnotes are asides or jokes, some of them are just citations to pages in books. This, I think, is key1 to the book’s success. The subject matter at hand is enormous, dealing with fundamental problems in theology, economics, history, and politics; unless it is going to be 2000 pages long, it has to quickly summarize, sketch, and synthesize a lot of material in order to make its argument. Thus, the footnotes that are jokes or asides keep the book light and conversational while still acknowledging the vast issues that are being briefly touched upon on the way to a larger argument; the footnotes that are citations to everyone from Amartya Sen to Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò serve to show the intellectual rigor of the project and provide a curious reader with sources that would allow them to consider the argument further.

And WCSBL is an argument; it has the word “should” in the title. It is, of course, difficult for me to evaluate how successful it will be as a work of persuasion, because I was already persuaded before I opened the book. I am a Christian, and I am a leftist, and I am a long-time fan of Phil Christman’s work2. Further, Phil’s work was important in my own journey from libertarian to socialist, and I believe I have read everything he’s written for the last ten years or so, even the stuff about punk albums and media ecologists I’ve never heard of. If Phil is preaching, I am very much in the choir. In one sense, then, it is impossible for me to be “objective” about the book; not in the sense that I would lie to you about its quality in order to juice its sales numbers or whatever, but in the sense that I am already sold on the author’s premises and style. I do not approach this book neutrally, and the author did not have to earn my trust on page one the way he would have to if I had never read his work before.

Yet I think it has the right approach. In the chapter on who the book is for, Phil identifies the primary audience as Christians who are leaving the traditional American alliance between Christians and Republicans and who are not sure what they should do next; not sure if they should even have “a politics” at all. Phil presents his arguments not in terms of the shiny “culture war” issues that so many Republicans have used to attract Christians to their voting ranks over the last 70 years, but in terms of basic conceptions of economics and how we structure a society. (These are, of course, the actual fundamental differences between leftists and the two major American political parties.) He is righteously acerbic towards the evils of American politics while also honest and humble about common flaws or quirks in leftist reasoning or practices. He is frequently funny. He is clear that although he thinks Christians should be leftists, there will still be differences in how Christians approach problems versus how non-Christian leftists will approach problems. This is not a book that tries to generate support for a specific political party or political candidate; and it’s not about which specific brand of leftism is best. It’s Why Christians Should Be Leftists, not Why Christians Should Vote for AOC or Why Christians Should Be Anarcho-Syndicalists or whatever.

Ten or so years ago I was precisely in the category of “Christians who are leaving the traditional American alliance between Christians and Republicans,” and I think this book would have been helpful to me at that time. A short book like this cannot address every possible argument, but what it can do, and what WCSBL in fact does, is articulate a clear and honest moral vision of the world. That strikes me as valuable, and valiant, and probably far more persuasive to most people than a 2000-page doctoral dissertation.

Some years ago, my friend Joel and I recorded a podcast about Phil’s first book, Midwest Futures. In it, I said that the book reminded me of a sermon. I feel that way about WCSBL, as well. A good sermon aims to teach, but it knows it can’t exhaust the whole subject matter in twenty minutes. A good sermon aims to be entertaining enough to keep its congregations’ attention, and it aims to speak to people where they actually live. A good sermon is well-researched, and establishes the intellectual authority of the speaker, but ultimately, it is not an academic lecture; a good sermon seeks to inspire action. I think WCSBL is like that. In other words, Phil Christman is my favorite preacher.

“The idea of Jesus’s divinity and the incarnation—the central theological claims of Christianity, along with the resurrection—are linked with the idea that human beings should try to live together in a radically unselfish way, that we can and must try to do so.”

—

Sometimes in life I come across a book that is so precisely calibrated to exasperate me that I suspect it is the universe’s way of playing on me a cosmic prank. Such a book is Matthew Gasda’s The Sleepers: a slight, sucking void of a novel; a vapid, nihilistic nullity that devotes 300 or so pages to carefully and precisely depicting the psyches of the world’s most annoying people, all to no particular point or purpose.

The premise, such as it is: in the days before the 2016 Presidential election, several New Yorkers bump into each other, and some of them have sex with each other. Specifically, Mariko, an actress, contemplates why her relationship with Dan, a professor, is going poorly; mostly it is because he is no longer able or willing to have sex with her. Meanwhile, Dan is contacted by Eliza, a former student of his, who attempts, for some reason, to seduce him in the middle of the night via Facebook Messenger. Additionally, we spend some time with Mariko’s sister, Akari, as she dithers regarding her situationship with a younger woman. The bulk of the book takes place over perhaps 36 hours; the last few chapters skip wildly through time as we see the consequences of the decisions made during those 36 hours.

Generally, it is not that I found the characters in The Sleepers to be un-credible. The problem, in fact, is how terribly credible I found them to be; at no point does anyone do anything even remotely surprising, either in their actions, their words to the other characters, or in the privacy of their own minds. Dan, for example, is a sad-sack late-‘30s Marxist professor who can’t get it up for his hot actress girlfriend because he’s been watching too much porn and hasn’t gotten over the sudden death of his mother; with this information you can plot out everything you need to know about him and exactly how he will behave at any moment.

Almost all any of them can think about is sex, and usually they are thinking about or trying to have sex with someone they are not supposed to; at least two affairs are completed within the book’s text. Yet all of this is done in the most perfunctory, anhedonic and unerotic way possible. Genuine desire is alien to these people; sex is just the only language any of the characters knows how to speak, and so they act out their mid-life crises, their rebellions, and their desires for self-creation and self-definition through the grammar of sexual misbehavior, all because it seems to be the thing to do at the time.

This is Gasda’s first novel, but he is already an established name in New York’s underground theater scene. The most famous of his plays, Dimes Square, was staged in two New York City apartments, and starred people like the well-known critic Christian Lorentzen, and Fernanda Amis, the daughter of famous English novelist Martin Amis (himself the son of famous English novelist Kingsley Amis). Gasda’s plays were the subject of a New York Times piece in 2022.

It is therefore no surprise that this playwright’s novel is full of long stretches of dialogue. What is surprising is how tepid and lifeless this dialogue is. It aims, I assume, for a feeling of artless realism, a certain “this is how people actually talk” verisimilitude. If it achieves this, it does so at the cost of being dreadfully dull:

“‘Understanding another person takes work,’ Mariko said in a flat voice, ‘and we don’t put in the work anymore.’

‘Are you bored of me?

‘I wanna ask the same question.’

‘I’m not bored of you…’ Dan started to say.

‘But-’

‘I’m bored of certain things. Tired of certain things.’

‘Well duh.’

‘I know it’s not blindingly original insight-that things get stale or typical or whatever.’

‘It doesn’t have to be blindingly original, Dan. It just needs to be accurate.’

‘I know. And we’re talking about it. So.’

‘Are we talking about it?’

‘What do you call this?’

‘A negotiation to decide whether or not we’re gonna talk about it.’

‘That’s comical.’

They were both aware that his hard-on was going to waste.

‘Have you been drinking?’

‘I had a shot.’

‘Wow.’

‘What?’

‘Vodka shots are a little trashy, don’t you think?’ He glanced at the bottle on the counter.

‘Then I’m trashy. Next question.’

‘Why don’t you just come back to bed…?’

‘I’m curious to see where this conversation is going…’ Mariko looked down at Dan’s rapidly deflating cock.

‘We can talk, but also be lying down…’

‘You’ll fall asleep.’

‘No I won’t.’

‘You’re so gonna fall asleep.’

‘It’s two in the morning-’

‘It’s twelve thirty-three.’”

It’s even worse when the seductress and the seducee are texting:

“As if on cue, a text arrived from Dan: so…

so nothing, she typed

I feel like we left a lot of things unsaid.

like what?

like feeling-things

no Dan we didn’t

Are you sure about that?

No but let’s pretend I am. Yes. Yes I’m sure.

I sound crazy.

wtf… where are you right now?

i’m on my way home….

can I come over?

no

why not?

why not? because I said so.

I’m really anxious about last night. Want to talk.

cool....

what are you anxious about?

just the fact that it happened?

so you regret crossing a line with a student?

probably but also no because it’s you….

ok…”

Is this how people actually talk or text? Or, more to the point, is this how grownups talk or text? Dan is about 40 years old at this point! Why does he text like a 15-year-old? But let us put that aside for now; I have never tried to seduce (or be-seduced-by) a much younger woman over text message, so perhaps I do not really know what such a text conversation looks like.

All of these people are so dreadfully, unfathomably dull, concerned only with the pettiest of trivialities, too deadened by therapy-speak and mid-2010s Twitter to even have a real fight about anything; too self-aware to ever stop metacognizing about anything they do; too self-involved to ever actually do anything. They are sad and detached when they aren’t fucking, they are sad and detached when they are fucking, they are sad and detached when they are thinking about fucking. They are, in short, the most annoying people in the world.

“But!” I can imagine Gasda saying. “The book is called The Sleepers! All the characters hate themselves, too! I agree with everything you are saying; they are annoying on purpose! I wrote them to show that they are annoying! To show that the real people they are based on are annoying! To capture them in amber, resplendent in all of their annoyingness!”

So, sure: I am willing to believe that this is an accurate portrait of a certain kind of person. (To be clear, I do not actually know anyone who is represented accurately by this portrait, but then I do not go to the right kinds of parties in New York City.) But verisimilitude alone does not a good novel make; certainly not when the novel’s subject matter is people who are not only awful but also boring. You must do something with your verisimilitude in such a context; you should have a political or cultural Point to make, or depict these people not only accurately but beautifully, or satirically.

Is there a sociopolitical point here?

Maybe! The book is set in the runup to the 2016 election, and I can imagine a reading that says something like, “All of these goobers couldn’t believe bad things could happen because they were so wrapped up in their ridiculous lives, and then we elected Donald Trump, and bad things happened,” but that would be a largely extratextual reading. None of the characters has such an epiphany, for one thing; the brief portion of the novel that is set after the election rarely mentions the election at all.

If there is little-to-no sociopolitical point, is there any beauty in the novel?

Beauty, I suppose, is subjective; there are certainly seven people who were willing to say nice things about it for the back cover. But beauty doesn’t reside in the dialogue, as shown above.

Does it reside in the narration?

There are a few moments when the narration makes something resembling an aesthetic choice: “Across what was left of the waterfront, Manhattan leapt and licked at the sky, like a Van Gogh cypress, or a city in the Bible: hallucinatory and raw.” I don’t think that’s a good choice, since I cannot think of why a city in the Bible is “hallucinatory” (and I know both the Bible and hallucinogens with some degree of familiarity), but what the hell, it’s something. Yet most of the narration is just obvious close-third-person descriptions of why people are feeling the way they are, e.g.: “Though he had just attacked Mariko for depending on him emotionally, he now badly wanted Eliza to depend on him.”

Is there anything interesting going on formally?

Occasionally The Sleepers seems to be deliberately casting people as types; occasionally the characters will be referred to not by their given names, but by their jobs: the actress, the cinematographer, the professor, etc. But this is done too sporadically to be anything other than weirdly jarring when it comes up.1 We never learn anything about Dan when he is called “the professor” or about Mariko when she is called “the actress.” We already knew those were their jobs, and the title is used too sporadically to gain any sort of totemic rhythm. It is a stylistic gesture, but it is an empty one.

Okay, so is there satire?

Satire, to be successful, would have to be funny, and I, at least, found very little humor in this novel.

What about insight?

There was one moment when Eliza and Dan were trying to one-up each other by quoting philosophers they weren’t very familiar with, each pretending that they are better-read than they are. I felt that was a good depiction of how such conversations often go. I enjoyed that moment. It lasted for half a page. Beyond that, I did not feel as though I learned anything about the Types of People the book purports to be about. I did not need to read a 300-page novel to learn that childless, petless, hobbyless self-obsessed Brooklyn thirtysomethings with dogmatically but unseriously held progressive politics are awful people. I knew that already. But more importantly: everyone knew that already! Even (especially?) said Brooklynites themselves.

Is it an interesting character study?

It is not. The character who receives the most attention is Dan, but he is not interesting, he just, well, sucks. He sucks regardless of your political or religious or cultural philosophy. He sucks if you are a progressive; he sucks if you are a conservative; he sucks if you are a Nietzschean or a Christian or a feminist or a Marxist. He sucks because he cheats on his girlfriend; he sucks because he sleeps with a former student who is still enrolled at his university; he sucks because he cheats on his girlfriend with a former student and doesn’t even enjoy it very much. But at no point is his suckiness interesting or unique or poignant or even pitiable. It is not just that he sucks, it is that he just sucks—he only sucks. Dan sucks; he does nothing else. I would say he is the punchline of every joke, but there aren’t any jokes.

Compare The Sleepers to Lincoln Michel’s Metallic Realms, which also came out this year (and which I reviewed for The Bulwark, here!). The main character of Metallic Realms, Michael Lincoln, is a weird little guy who is something of a loser. But unlike Dan, who is completely unlikeable while also being entirely unmemorable, Mike is a deeply bizarre man who renders the anodyne activities of his housemates into episodes of Epic Tragedy and Romance. He, too, is surrounded by thirty-something Brooklynites who are, if not nearly as tedious as the characters in The Sleepers, nevertheless far from paragons of moral worth or artistic achievement. They are ordinary people and are largely concerned with ordinary, petty problems. Yet through Mike’s eyes, they become characters in a vast drama, which elevates their petulant squabbles and silly disputes to mythic proportions. This renders these episodes into moments both beautiful and satirical as Michel makes fun of all of the people involved while also clearly communicating his love for them and what they are doing.

Metallic Realms is about annoying Brooklynites, and it is a hoot, and occasionally insightful, and a real artistic achievement. The Sleepers is about annoying Brooklynites, and it is a waste of time and effort. It is neither astute, nor funny, nor vicious, nor titillating, nor beautiful, nor diverting, nor frightening, nor bizarre. I feel, Philistine that I am, that a novel should be at least one of those things.

Additionally, Joel and I put out our newest episode of The Big Read Cast, this one about Iain Pears’s An Instance of the Fingerpost, which is a delightfully weird murder mystery set in late 17th-century Oxford. You can listen to it here!

—

Walking through a museum is like going on a long drive on the interstate in that you will find yourself moving through the space with a cohort of strangers, people you will likely never speak to or “meet” in any meaningful sense, but who are nevertheless minor characters in your drama. That guy in the blue truck sure can’t make up his mind about how fast he wants to go! That family of four wearing University of Minnesota shirts are really enjoying the taxidermized walruses; that’s good, the daughter seemed bored at the rock exhibit!

When I was going through the Holocaust Museum a few weeks ago, two or three of these minor characters were wearing MAGA hats. Slowly walking through the train car that took people to Auschwitz; solemnly wrinkling their eyebrows at the footage of Hitler’s speeches in 1933; staring, wide-eyed, at the tower of photographs from Eisiskes, all while wearing those awful red hats.

I wanted to shake them, hard. “Do you not see,” I imagined myself asking, “that your stupid hat stands for all the same things the swastika does? Do you not see your own Dear Leader in Adolf’s apoplectic shouting?” I did not do these things, of course. It is unlikely that being accosted by a shouting lunatic would have helped them rethink their lives, and it would have been disrespectful to the dead of the great tragedy the museum remembers to cause an enormous scene that would have served only to stroke my own ego.

I do not, of course, know what was going through these folks’ minds. I doubt they deliberately donned their hats specifically because they were going to the Holocaust Museum. Other than their choice of headgear, they moved through the museum perfectly respectfully, as far as I saw. But to the fundamental question: “Don’t you get that your hat is a swastika-in-the-making,” there are only two answers. Either yes, they do get it, and they like the comparison, or they don’t get it, due to weapons-grade willful ignorance. Obviously they don’t view the situation like I do, or they wouldn’t be wearing the fucking hats.

Maybe the horror of the Holocaust Museum made these folks realize the error of their ways, and maybe they quietly stowed their hats at the bottom of their closets when they got home, never to be worn again. Maybe the twenty-or-so-year-old young man I saw wearing one of the hats had just bought it from one of the street-peddlers on his way around town and didn’t really think about it, just thought it was funny; maybe, confronted with the natural end result of the vile ideologies the hat represents, he felt ashamed.

I doubt it. Humans are too good at compartmentalization and rationalization, and Americans may be better than most. If the young man makes any comparisons between the Nazis and today’s politics, he will probably convince himself that the real Hitlerians are the underpaid professors and the blue-haired baristas and the career Democrats and the trans women on the Internet who make jokes he doesn’t understand. He will not be able to see that the trains that took the Jews and Romani and homosexuals to Dachau are running now in America, taking our immigrant friends and neighbors into our own concentration camps in El Salvador and Florida. He will not see how ICE, masked and cowardly, abducting people off of the streets, is but micrometers away from the Geheime Staatspolizei. He will look at the footage of the wildly applauding crowds at the Reichstag, and he will not see his own face amongst the throng, but it is there.

Also, I had the honor of reviewing Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new book, Dream Count, for The Bulwark; you can read that review here!

—

None of these are real cases, none of the people are based on any one particular person. Details are synthesized from real cases I’ve worked on, but everything is anonymized, for obvious reasons.

—

It starts at about 7:00 in the morning, when I get an e-mailed list of names and case numbers. I check this on my laptop at home, to get a sense of what sort of day I’m about to have. I check a few other things, if I haven’t already: what judge is assigned to bonds this afternoon? How many other public defenders are on the docket with me? Am I picking up the packet? Have I received any e-mails in the last few days about clients who were carried over from an earlier day?

Today, I am picking up the packet, so I leave earlier, aiming to get to the courthouse about 8:15. It is a pleasant drive, against traffic, southeast, away from the city, while the rest of the world travels northwest, jammed in tight, averaging maybe 15 miles an hour. I remember to slow when I pass the community college; the combination of the sudden drop in the speed limit and the automated camera, perched like Johnny Five in the median strip, has already relieved me of a few hundred dollars over the last few years, and I don’t feel like donating any more money to the county today. A truck tries to merge through me into the right-hand lane, but I slam on the brakes with enough alacrity that he misses me. At this point, I no longer feel a flush of adrenaline when something like this happens; I have lived all over this fair country, but have never seen a driving culture more gleefully reckless than where I live now. Turn signals, I fear, are old-fashioned and gauche. There are often bits of bumper and glass strewn around the highway on my morning commute, leftover remnants of another sacrifice to the automobile gods. I’d love to take the bus, but it takes an hour and a half to get me the ten miles from home to the courthouse, and is frequently late.

I scan my ID as I approach the courthouse garage, then park. I scan my ID again as I walk into the courthouse and the little plastic doors open magically before me, while all of the ordinary people have to wait in the security line, taking off their belts and putting their bags through the metal detector. I walk up the stairs to the clerk’s office, and knock on the unmarked door that serves as its service entrance. A moment later, the door opens, and a man hands me a manila envelope; I say thank you, and leave. It feels a bit like a drug deal, but this manila envelope contains information about every person who was processed through the jail for today-- information I am about to need.

I go to the jail next. I trade my courthouse ID for a little blue badge that allows me to move through the jail, then walk through the first metal detector. I walk down a hallway, and then go through the second metal detector. Then I am let into the airlocked hallway that lets me into the bowels of the jail itself, and walk towards the small courtroom inside the facility. There I meet the other public defenders who will be handling bonds today. We divvy up the names, striving to give everyone an approximately equal number of cases. We check for co-defendants, to make sure we don’t have the same attorney representing more than one defendant accused from the same incident; we try to check and see which of our clients have hired private attorneys since filling out the public defender application. We chit-chat about our weekends or what happened in court yesterday.

On very slow days we might only have five or six cases total, on very busy days (say, after a three-day weekend), we might have fifty. On Tuesday-Friday I’d say it’s usually around twelve. Twelve people who have seen a commissioner and either been held without bond or been given bonds they have not yet been able to pay. Twelve people who are going to see the judge this afternoon.

The alleged crimes vary. Most people charged with small misdemeanors have already been released by the time we arrive. What is left are mostly people charged with felonies -- armed robbery, first degree assault, possession with intent to distribute, rape, murder. There are also some serious misdemeanors like second degree assault (maximum penalty, 10 years in prison -- Maryland does not understand what a misdemeanor is). But some people are still in jail despite only being charged with very minor misdemeanors (like disorderly conduct or trespass); these folks usually have a long history of failing to come to court or are marked as “recalcitrant” because they were rude to the commissioner. Some of those folks are having a mental health crisis; some have just lost their temper; some are both.

Today I will be spending all of my time in the L Block, which is the general housing block. Many of my colleagues prefer to go other places, since L Block is so chaotic and uncomfortable and there is plenty of work to go around in the rest of the jail, so I volunteer to take the bulk of those cases. Every man who spends any time in the jail goes first to L, and then, if they are still in jail after a few weeks, will be transferred to a different block. Blocks O-R are for longer-term guests of the state; E Block is for people who have proven difficult to control, whether due to mental health crisis or bad behavior or both. C Block is for women, K Block is for juvenile young men, all theoretically waiting to be transferred to a secure juvenile facility, if there is any space available. I do not know what all the other blocks are specifically designated for.

I have six clients in L Block today. I get into the block around 9:15, and need to be in the courtroom down the street at 1:15. This gives me four hours to talk to everyone, answer their questions, advise them on how the process works, and try to call their family members to get any extra information I need before court, while also traveling back to the courthouse and hopefully eating lunch at some point.

I go into L Block, which involves standing outside the heavy door, pressing a little button, waiting for someone in the jail’s control room to notice me, and then waiting for them to press the button that unlocks the door. I go in, and then wait in the airlock for someone to buzz me through the last door. This always takes a surprisingly long time; one would think that a person, sitting in the control room, would be able to assume that if I have asked to be let into the airlock, I am also about to ask to be let into the cell block itself, but this appears to consistently come as a surprise to the unseen figure that controls my ability to move around the jail. I wonder what they imagine I am planning to do in the airlock; sightseeing, perhaps? (I am being unfair. In reality, the jail is understaffed, and the person in the control room is probably responding to a half-dozen buzz-in requests at any given point in time.)

L Block itself consists of a row of cells on the first floor, with many more on the second. There are showers, little individual stalls, visible on each floor. These have waist-high doors that obscure an individual from approximately ankle to neck, but the people are otherwise quite visible. No privacy in the shower in jail; one can imagine good reasons for this, but it is always uncomfortable to be talking to a CO only a few feet away from a man who is bathing himself. There is also a little concrete outdoor space for exercise; it is “outdoor” in the sense that there is no ceiling, but of course the four walls make it almost more forbidding than the cell block itself.

There are often more men in L Block than there is cell space, so there are usually also about fifteen bunk beds scattered between me and the CO’s desk. Men are asleep, men are chatting with each other, men are doing pushups in the corner, men are staring off into space as the reality of their situation starts to sink in. Men are milling aimlessly around between me and where I need to go; I am awash in a sea of orange jumpsuits from the minute I walk into L Block.

I go to the CO’s desk, and there see Officer Andrews, who hands me a piece of paper with a list of everyone in the housing block written on it. I grab a pink highlighter and highlight the names of the men I need to speak to. Officer Andrews gives each PD who comes in a different colored highlighter so he can keep track of who needs to talk to whom; this is a good and efficient system, which he is constantly having to teach to whichever new trainee is with him today; they often seem confused by this system.

Then, on days when there are fewer of us in the housing block at the same time, I sit in the little room off by the door, and await my clients. On days when there are a lot of us, someone will already be in that room, so I will sit at one of a number of tables in the middle of the cellblock floor and wait there. These are round picnic tables with little round stools attached; printed on the center of each table is a checkerboard, vivid red and black, in sharp contrast with the antiseptic grays and light blues that make up the rest of the decor. Today, the little room is unavailable for some reason I do not fully understand, but whatever: checkerboard table it is.

While I wait, people try to come up and talk to me. I know some of them; some of them I represented last week and they have follow-up questions. Some of them I do not know, but they see me, besuited and holding a laptop, and correctly deduce I am an attorney. These are not the people I need to talk to today. Sometimes I have time to chat with them; they ask me to look up who their assigned PD is; they ask me to pass messages to their assigned PDs, who they haven’t been able to get ahold of (probably because that PD has been in court every day for the last week); sometimes they want to ask for second opinions. Sometimes they did not apply for a PD, for whatever reason, and are now regretting the decision and want to know how they can apply for a PD. Officer Andrews sends one of my actual clients over, but before he gets there, another man, middle-aged, lost-looking, bedraggled, walks up to me and says “Can I talk to you? I don’t know why I’m here,” and I have to tell him I can’t talk to him right now; I have to talk to one of my clients first.

When you first start as a PD you imagine you are never going to say no to anyone who asks for help.

The six clients I need to speak with today are Mr. Smith, Mr. Jones, Mr. Johnson, Mr. Hernandez, Mr. Okwafor, and Mr. Bloggs.

Mr. Smith is charged with armed robbery. He is what we call a “frequent flier;” he has been in jail and prison many times before. We have a short, civil conversation. We exchange jokes. I get his contact information in the unlikely event he gets out of jail, we go over his charges. I start to explain what a preliminary hearing is, but he waves me off: he already knows how this works. In many important ways he knows the system better than I do, but he also understands the importance of an attorney. He asks me if I think we have a Fourth Amendment motion to suppress; I tell him that I don’t know, because all I have is the Statement of Charges, but that I agree we need to look into it. He will not be my client; once his case is indicted he will be assigned one of our Circuit Court attorneys, but I tell him that I agree I have some questions about the way the Statement of Charges is written. He asks me who the judge is, and when I say it is Judge Brown, he rolls his eyes. He knows he’s not getting out of jail today. I tell him he’s probably right, but I’ll do my best. He asks me to call his mother and let her know what happens. I tell him I’ll try to remember to do that. I remind him not to talk on the phone about the case, and he appears vaguely offended for a moment, as though I thought so little of him that I felt he needed this reminder. I shrug and tell him that I know he’s not dumb enough to do that, but it’s my job to be professionally anxious, and I’ve seen people do very silly things. He concedes that this is true. I shake his hand when he leaves. The whole conversation takes fifteen minutes.

Mr. Jones is charged with trespass, and is held on a $500 bond. He is homeless, and cannot post this or any amount of money. He does not have a mailing address for me, or a phone number. He tells me he has never missed a court date, but won’t meet my eyes when he tells me that. I tell him that if he is released, he will need to stay away from the Blackacre Pharmacy on 39th Street; he tells me he absolutely will. (Later I will discover he has been charged with trespass at this store on fifteen separate occasions). He is incensed that he is held on a bond, and spends much of our conversation trying to get me to agree that the situation is ridiculous. I am happy to do so, but explain I can’t do anything about the commissioner’s decision, all I can do is try to get him a better situation when we go before Judge Brown this afternoon. I try to tell him that Judge Brown is known for being harsh, however, so I cannot make any promises; he takes this as an admission of incompetence on my part and it takes me five minutes to get him to get back on track so I can ask him other questions. No, he is not interested in any sort of specialty court program like our mental health court; there’s nothing wrong with him, the doctors are all liars. This conversation takes about half an hour.

Mr. Johnson is charged with attempted murder. He is a young man, and at age 19 is technically an adult but, although he is bigger than I am, with a carefully sculpted beard, the look in his eyes is very much that of a scared child. He’s been in trouble before, but nothing like this. According to the Statement of Charges, he and some friends got into an argument with another young man, and one of Mr. Johnson’s friends shot that other young man, and then Mr. Johnson drove the car that got them away from the scene. The other young man is, as of the two-day old report in front of me, in critical condition. Mr. Johnson is very polite, and very quiet. He answers all my questions, but does not volunteer any additional information. He calls me “sir” after every clause. I try to joke with him a little with one of my better lines: “Sir, you don’t have to call me ‘sir.’ I work for you, not the other way around.” This often breaks the ice a bit; helps my clients realize that although I am part of “the system,” I am the part that is trying to help them, but Mr. Johnson just nods and gulps as though I have chastised him. I shouldn’t have done that, he thinks I’m making fun of him. I sigh at myself and keep things as formal and gentle as I can. He finally asks me a question: can he get a bond? I tell him I will try, but that I highly doubt it. He says nothing in response, but I realize he now trusts me even less than he did before. Towards the end of our conversation, I try very hard to make sure he remembers not to talk about the case on the phone; from a brief flash of fear in his eyes, I can tell he already has. This conversation, despite my best efforts to talk to this young man for as long as I can, also lasts about fifteen minutes.

Mr. Hernandez does not speak any English, a fact which somehow eluded the commissioner, such that the commissioner did not mark him down as requiring an interpreter. My Spanish is technically present but terrible; I cannot conduct a meaningful interview with a client in that language. I could not get an in-person interpreter to sit with me today anyway, but had it been correctly marked, we might have given Mr. Hernandez’s case to my colleague Steve, who does speak Spanish. We often end up just handing everyone with a Hispanic last name to Steve (or Sandra, or Alice, when they are there) for precisely this reason, but here I made the mistake of trusting the paperwork. I try to get an interpreter on the line but the Internet in the jail is not working very well, and give up; I then try to use Google Translate, so I can at least hack through the interview with some degree of success, but the Internet has completely failed, so I can’t even do that. Thankfully, Steve walks in the door at about this time, so I stand up and trade Mr. Hernandez’s case for an English-speaking client of Steve’s, Mr. Brinson. This takes me twenty minutes, and I have accomplished nothing of use.

Mr. Brinson, now my client, is charged with second-degree assault; he is accused of beating up his girlfriend, who is pregnant with his child, during an argument. The charge was not written out by the police; instead, the CW (complaining witness) went down to the commissioner’s office and filled out the charges herself, which resulted in this arrest warrant with no involvement from a law enforcement investigation of any kind. The Statement of Charges is thus hand-written and about a page long, riddled with spelling errors and references to other bad things Mr. Brinson allegedly did in months past, none of which have any particular relevance to the allegations in this case. Before I have said more than about “hello” to Mr. Brinson, he launches into a lengthy and elaborate history of his entire relationship with this woman, culminating in him telling me that she made this all up and caused her injuries herself to get back at him because he was talking to other women. I explain to him that I will not say any of this to the judge today, because today is a bond review hearing, not a trial, and I don’t want to say anything that will lock us into a defense before the trial. He rolls his eyes at me, convinced that if I just tell the judge what a shrewish harpy the CW is, this case will magically go away. I nevertheless manage to get the information from him that I need to present my argument. This conversation takes half an hour.

In the few minutes before my next client arrives, the bedraggled man I met earlier comes back and asks if I have time to talk to him now, I tell him not yet, that I have more people I have to talk to today, but I will try to talk to him before I leave.

Mr. Okwafor is also charged with second-degree assault; the CW here is his wife. Mr. Okwafor is from Nigeria, and tells me he has a green card. He is very concerned about his green card, as am I, but I am not an immigration attorney and do not give immigration advice without consulting with our immigration specialists in the office. He also tells me a long story about his relationship with his wife, stating that he took her phone away because she kept disrespecting him, but that he never laid his hands on her. The police report in the Statement of Charges is very confusing, with multiple different accounts of the events from both Mr. Okwafor and the CW in this case. It is not entirely clear to me what Mr. Okwafor is accused of, other than just “assault.” He has a good job he is worried about losing; he needs to get home to provide for his family. He asks me if I can ask for the case to be dismissed today; I tell him I cannot, or, more accurately, I can ask, but that there’s no basis for a motion to dismiss at a bond hearing in this case (or, really, in any case). He tells me they have no evidence, just her word against his; I have to explain to him that testimony is evidence, and that we may well have a lot of options at trial, but that there is no way to get rid of the case at this time. He seems to understand; he asks me if he can specifically request me to be his attorney; I tell him that’s not how it works, but that all of our attorneys are excellent and he will be in good hands. He tells me thank you, and tears up slightly before he leaves. This conversation takes twenty minutes.

Finally, I meet Mr. Bloggs. I have been talking to desperate men for more than two hours straight, and am a little tired; the backless stools in the jail are not doing my back any favors. Before I have said anything, Mr. Bloggs asks me if I am Jewish. I tell him I am not, and make a joke about my beard, which can make me look somewhat rabbinical. I can’t tell if my gentility makes Mr. Bloggs like me more or less. A little off-kilter because of this unusual way to begin a conversation, a few minutes later I briefly lose track of where I am in my usual spiel, but he laughs at the joke I make about it, and it’s fine, I don’t forget to tell him anything. Mr. Bloggs is charged with wearing/carrying a handgun in a motor vehicle, and is uninterested in talking about the case. He says he’s not worried about it, and that he knows they don’t hold people for that sort of thing, particularly since he doesn’t have any prior charges in Maryland. Instead, he wants to talk to me about an assault charge he is facing in another Maryland county. I try to tell him I can’t do anything about this case in another county. He still talks to me about the other case. I eventually manage to steer the conversation back to the case for which we have a hearing this afternoon, and explain to him that the County has been really cracking down on handguns lately, such that judges hold people for handguns all the time; he needs to give me an address so that if the judge authorizes his release on GPS monitoring I can start that process as quickly as possible. He gives me his mother’s address. I also tell him that if he has convictions anywhere in the nation, they will be a potential issue; Maryland does not only look at Maryland cases. He continues to talk about the assault charge in the other county. I manage to eke out the information I need from him anyway, though it is a slog and he is getting frustrated with my single-minded focus on the only case I can do anything about today. I ask him if he has ever been convicted of a crime, and he says no. I ask him if he is on probation, and he says yes. This probable inconsistency goes unremarked-upon; I will gain nothing from pointing this out. This conversation takes thirty minutes.

By the time I get out of the jail, it is about 12:15. I realize, after I am already sitting in the car and opening a blister of nicotine gum to help me deal with my headache, that I forgot to find and talk to the bedraggled man who approached me when I first entered the L Block. I definitely don’t have time to go all the way back through the jail security now.

I forgot to pack a lunch again, so I swing by McDonald’s. In the courthouse parking garage, I house the fries and the two little cheeseburgers. Julia hates it when I order McDonald’s, but it’s faster than the courthouse cafeteria, and there’s something sort of comforting about deliberately eating terrible food after a busy morning; I am sure a therapist could make much of this.

Back in my office, I try to contact the family members whose information my clients gave me, particularly Mr. Bloggs’s mother. I can’t get ahold of anyone.

About 12:45 I get an e-mail with the pretrial fact sheets, two-page documents that lay out what the jail was able to learn about everyone’s prior records and backgrounds. Mr. Smith’s record is exactly as he described it to me. Mr. Jones does indeed have 12 failures to appear on his record. Mr. Johnson has a handgun possession charge that was forwarded to juvenile court; because those are sealed, I can’t see what the result of that was before the hearing. Mr. Brinson has never been convicted of anything, but he has three prior assault charges against this same CW, each of which was dismissed, presumably because she did not come to court. Mr. Okwafor’s record is pristine. Mr. Bloggs, I see, has been convicted of a number of exciting things, both in Maryland and without. I wonder again why folks think it’s a good idea to lie to their lawyers.

About 1:00 I walk across the hall to the courtroom where bond review hearings are held. I walk to the front of the courtroom and, in a loud voice, ask if there is anyone here in support of Messrs. Smith, Jones, Johnson, Brinson, Okwafor, or Bloggs. Mr. Okwafor’s wife, the CW in his case, asks if she can talk to me. I say yes, but remind her that I am the public defender representing Mr. Okwafor and that she does not have to talk to me if she doesn’t want to. She does not appear to understand what I am saying, and asks me what will happen to Mr. Okwafor today. I direct her to the State’s Attorney’s victim coordinator, because I am not comfortable talking to her when I’m not sure she understands who I am.

Mr. Johnson’s father, a tall, grim man with neck tattoos that are barely visible peeking over the collar of his excellent suit, tells me I am not representing Mr. Johnson today, because they have hired a private attorney, but he does have a few questions he’d like to ask me about his son’s case. I encourage him to just speak with the attorney they have hired, since I don’t want to get in the middle of that relationship. He says he understands and shakes my hand. It is a firm grip; he gives me a lingering look I do not understand.

The hearings start. The judge, the prosecutor, and myself are all physically in the courtroom, but my clients appear on a video screen hanging up and to the right of the judge; they are appearing from inside the little jail courtroom. They are muted; I always tell my clients that if they can’t hear what’s going on, they need to wave their arms around so I can see that there’s an issue.

I make my arguments, the prosecutor says very little. Mr. Brinson’s girlfriend appears and tells the judge she is terrified of him and that she wants him held without bond. Mr. Johnson’s private attorney shows up with his immaculate hair and requests a continuance; he has not had time yet to speak with his client, he was just hired today. This is a good idea; I don’t think the kid is getting out of jail regardless, but he’s definitely not getting out of jail with Judge Brown. Judge Brown grants the continuance and tells the private attorney that it’s always a pleasure to have him in his courtroom. Judge Brown scowls furiously at me when I suggest there are reasons to let Mr. Jones out of jail, and sarcastically recites all of my client’s many failures to appear as though they are news to me, as though I didn’t acknowledge that issue in my argument. Mr. Okwafor’s wife tearfully tells the judge she just wants him to come home, and that she is not scared of him, and that she cannot pay the bills without his job.

Judge Brown holds all of my clients without bond. Mr. Smith is unmoved, Mr. Jones does not appear to have understood what has happened, Mr. Brinson is furious, and appears to be shouting obscenities from under the mute of the video call, Mr. Okwafor hangs his head, Mr. Bloggs looks stunned.

I explain to Mr. Smith’s family (who arrived after the hearings started) what has happened. His mother will call me every day for two weeks, asking me to file a new bond review motion; Mr. Smith, for his part, when I see him at the jail later, tells me he doesn’t want me to do that because he knows it won’t be granted and he wants to save his second request for a bond review for when he gets to Circuit Court; this is a sensible thing to do. I do what my client tells me to do, and after explaining that I am following her son’s instructions, stop answering his mother’s calls, though she keeps leaving me voicemails. She wants her son to come home.

Much later, the case against Mr. Smith falls apart and is dismissed after one of my colleagues wins a motion to suppress that disposes of all of the evidence in the case. It is a masterclass; I have many things to learn. Mr. Jones is held until trial, when his case is dismissed, because no one from the pharmacy bothers to come to court. He is arrested again a week later for the same charge. Mr. Johnson pleads guilty to second degree assault, an excellent deal, under the circumstances. Mr. Brinson is found guilty of second degree assault and sentenced to ten years, with five years suspended. Mr. Okwafor’s case is dismissed because his wife does not come to court on the trial date. Mr. Bloggs is found guilty of possessing a handgun, and spends six months in jail on that case but gets another year for violating his probation; the out-of-county case he was so worried about during our interview is dismissed.

But after today’s docket, before all of that happens, I go back to my office. I put all the notes I gathered into our filing system. Sitting back in my chair, I again tell myself I will put all the scattered folders that are on my desk and in a pile in the corner of my office back where they belong tomorrow, and go home.

I do this once or twice a week.

—

The campaign was called “Tears of the Planet” because I was not hiding the fact that it was heavily inspired by the first five hours of Final Fantasy VII. It did not play a lot like Final Fantasy VII, but that was very much the vibe. For the three of you reading who did not play Final Fantasy VII, this means that it was a game about a group of ecoterrorists (the party) struggling against an evil megacorporation that was pulling power out of the planet’s lifeblood, granting everyone short-term luxury at the cost of eventually killing the planet itself and everybody on it, while also cracking down on dissent and trying to worm its way into as much political power as possible.

Instead of Shinra, the evil corporation was called Kasimir Energy, Inc., after its founder, a guy named Valderoth Kasimir. Following the example of AVALANCHE, the terrorist group called itself the Sanguine Typhoon.

Over the course of the campaign, the party:

• Blew up a refinery in the center of town;

• Radicalized a bunch of college students while also terrifying a group of College Republicans;

• Got tangled up in a dispute between a playwright and her Warlock Patrons, ultimately resulting in a very dramatic showdown at an opera gala;

• Investigated a lot of terrible Mad Science, in the process discovering that one of their number was actually created by the Mad Scientists at issue;

• Explored their multiversal selves;

• Started a war between the evil corporation and what was essentially “Japan, but elves;”

and

• Watched as one of the Mad Scientists woke up an ancient Godzillalike monster, which monster they eventually convinced to go to back to sleep (via the sacrifice of two of their number) but only after the all-powerful mech that the corporation built to combat Godzilla leveled half their home city.

It was a hoot. It was frequently also oddly moving, and, despite its frequent moments of silliness, was one of the more “serious” games of D&D I have ever run.

—

“Serious” is sort of a weird thing to say about a D&D game, which is, after all, about getting a group of your friends together, either in a room or over a virtual tabletop, and playacting that you are a bunch of elves and gnomes out on some sort of Quest. Yet there are games I have run that are just silly goofiness, and games that have brought players to tears. This one was the latter. (Literally! It is a great honor to reduce a player to tears. I remember every time I’ve done it.)

There is a special sort of alchemy that happens when the players and DM are willing to work together to take the plot and character-choices seriously. “Seriously” does not mean “without humor,” or “po-faced,” but it does mean “without irony or self-consciousness.” As I have said before, roleplaying exists at that weird intersection of wargaming, throwing a party, and improvisational theater. When it works well, it’s hard to talk about it without sounding like the most annoying kind of theater professor: it’s magic, it’s sacred, it’s about the ancient, communal art of storytelling, etc.

In this game, we debated the ethics of eco-terrorism, we mourned friends who sacrificed everything to stop the evil corporation, we gave inspirational speeches, we had to reckon with the human cost of our actions, we made mistakes and people died accordingly. For the finale I shanghaied five other friends (who were not playing in the campaign) to record a radio play that recapped most of the events of the campaign up to that point. In other words, alas, this game was magic, it was sacred, it was about the ancient, communal art of storytelling.

—

In the very first session, after the players blew up the installation that was refining the Plasma that powers all of the city’s high technology, one of my players told me she had a big thing she wanted to do once the party got a sufficient distance away from the wreckage. For some reason, I was very nervous. This was ridiculous: I have played D&D with this person for almost twenty years by now, and at no point has she ever let me down or done anything to derail a session, save in the most interesting and valuable kinds of ways. Yet I had somehow gotten into my own head, and thought my friend was going to do something disruptive.

This is because we have all played games of D&D with someone whose desire is not to have a good time with friends by moving the game forward (or at least into interesting lateral directions) but by throwing a wrench into the game’s gears. Someone who, upon walking into a town, starts looking around for the nearest unattended orphanage to burn to the ground, for no reason other than a sort of psychopathic desire to play Grand Theft Auto with the DM’s carefully constructed setting, trying everyone’s patience in the process. Someone who, upon meeting the secret prince your party is trying to escort to safety, stabs him at the earliest opportunity, or who eats the magic gem just to “see what happens.”

Like all things, it can be done well, and it can be done badly. Many successful D&D groups have a character who is sort of a designated “chaos goblin,” someone who exists to make the DM’s life more complicated; done well, this is fun, if frequently frustrating; done poorly, it makes the DM wonder why they are spending so much time working on a campaign when they could find something more rewarding to do, like hammer nails into various sensitive parts of their body. Someone who is actually funny is the good kind of chaos goblin; someone who incorrectly thinks they are funny is the bad kind. There are no hard and fast rules, accordingly.

Regardless, my friend in this campaign was no kind of chaos goblin. But because this was the first session, and I was already feeling oddly attached to this game’s lore and tone, I allowed myself to become concerned that she was going to do something chaos goblin-y. Instead, she cast Skywrite.

The spells a D&D character can cast come from a limited list of spells, many of which have been around in various forms since the ‘70s. “Skywrite” has existed since at least 2nd Edition (1989-2000), and has never1 been successfully used to do much of anything. In 5th edition, (2014-present, sort of2) Skywrite allows a player to spend a whole spell slot (usually used to do damage to an enemy or heal a friend) to form 10 words out of the clouds in the sky. It’s a silly spell.

What she wrote, in the wreckage of the great Dragoroff Plasma Refinery, was “Kasimir, a Sanguine Typhoon comes to raze all your works,” which became the arc words of the campaign. It immediately changed my plans, which had been for the next several sessions to involve the players figuring out how they were going to communicate who they were and what they were about to the good people of the city. That was gone in an instant: it was quite a mission statement.

This is the sort of wonderful thing one can only do in a roleplaying game. In some sort of improvisational storytelling experience without any rules, saying “I form the clouds into words” could be a neat moment. Here, it meant that my friend had to realize she was playing the sort of character in the sort of game where taking Skywrite instead of a more obviously useful spell like Cloud of Daggers would be appropriate, and then wait for the perfect opportunity to deploy it. It required a player to take the rules and storytelling architecture of the game seriously, and then deploy them to great rhetorical effect. The sentence is exactly ten words long, which is the spell’s limit. It also felt like a riff on Ulysses S. Grant saying that he “proposed to move immediately upon [S.B. Buckner’s] works,” which is another of my favorite sentences, so it was well-tailored to its audience. It’s one of my favorite moments in any roleplaying game I’ve ever played.

—

Let’s be clear, the game was also frequently very silly. (Again, the goal is “serious,” not “without humor.”) The best example of this is that another friend played a character who was an old professor of magical engineering who became radicalized against the corporation, and started writing and spreading teachings about how we all had to band together to commit violent resistance against its oppressive rule. This character’s name was, of course, Bismo Funyuns. He was also probably the heart and soul of the campaign. This is in keeping with one of the ancient rules of D&D, which is that the silliest joke character will always end up playing an outsize role in the emotional stakes of the campaign. This is best summed up by this3 comic:

So it was with Bismo Funyuns, whose heroic sacrifice to control the Godzillamonster will forever be remembered in the annals of history. We established in the epilogue that after his death, various political groups would debate the specifics of Funyunism for many years; one of the characters started a cult dedicated to worshipping the gestalt creature that was formed by the combination of Godzilla’s body and Bismo’s mind.

But for all that the Slappy Effect may largely persist because the sort of person who is creative enough to come up with an (actually funny) joke character will also take the game more seriously (or at least, try to be more creative) than everyone else, I would propose a slightly different analysis:

An actually funny joke character probably comes from a player who is, above all else, willing to commit to the bit, which is the most important skill a person can have when playing D&D. When one player commits to the bit hard enough to play Slappy, all the other players feel the need to also commit to the bit. The rulesbound paladin can characterize herself in opposition to Slappy, and deepen her characterization accordingly. The edgelord rogue can be even more of an edgelord, in contrast with Slappy. Everyone has permission, because Slappy is around, to make more interesting choices, and this creates the sort of interparty bonds that allow for actual stories, rather than just a generic epic fantasy where the players are an itinerant band of venal mercenaries (or, in the parlance of the Roleplaying Internet, “murderhobos”).

Bismo was not a “joke character,” but his name was silly, which meant people enjoyed taking a serious sentence about a very real political leader and ending it with the words “Bismo Funyuns.” Were Professor Funyuns named something more generic, one player saying he likes that character’s plan might read: “I listen to what Jack says, I trust him,” which is boring. Change the name, and suddenly the incentive is to say something like “I would trust Bismo Funyuns with my life,” which is much funnier, yes, but is also a stronger statement of purpose and, frankly, a better line of dialogue.

Let me give you another example, this from a different game. Some years back a good friend of mine played a cleric named Frugg Stumbleduck. A cleric, for those of you who don’t play D&D, is usually the healer of the party, the character whose job, in large part, is to make sure none of the other players die in combat. Frugg was a cleric of the god of agriculture, and made a point of noting in his introduction that his character was missing both of his middle fingers. The first time another character got seriously injured in the game, Frugg walked up and cast Cure Wounds on him. In many games, this just involves the player saying “I cast Cure Wounds, you regain 1d8+3 hit points.” In my games, I always ask my players what it looks like when they cast spells, because having the player describe their spellcasting is a good way to get them into the habit of treating the rules as the basis for the actual game (the narrative/character moments) rather than the game itself. So I asked Frugg what it looked like when he cast Cure Wounds, and he said, approximately, “I cut off the tip of my ring finger and place it inside the wound, which then magically cures. You have to do this, because you have to plant a seed.”

What this meant was that for the rest of the campaign, characters would play much more cautiously, because whatever else might be going on, they did not want to be healed by Frugg Stumbleduck. It made for a much more interesting campaign, all because one of my players was being a goofball4.

Bismo’s name being Bismo also had ripple effects throughout the rest of the campaign: since Bismo was a gnome, that meant I also had to name most of the rest of the game’s gnomes after Key & Peele football names. This meant that at one point one character spent several sessions mourning the tragic death of her very good friend, the charming scoundrel Quiznatodd Bidness.

—

Because all of the players were committed to making interesting choices and leaning into the combination of silliness and seriousness that characterized this game, there are far too many stories for me to tell here. But I’d be remiss not to mention a few more highlights, such as:

• Our eladrin druid, shapeshifted into the form of a rat, having an intense battle with an ordinary orange tabby, which was possibly the most intense moment of combat in the entire campaign;

• Our tabaxi monk (who had an established cover identity as a middle manager at the corporation’s power plant) stealing a computer from her supervisor’s office, kissing her very-confused office rival, and then leaping out a window to parkour her way down the skyscraper and run off into the night;

• Our gnome rogue killing the mad scientist certain members of the party had really hoped to interrogate, in a moment that was both perfectly consistent with her temperament and delightfully surprising for the rest of the party;

• Our very grimdark Oath of Vengeance paladin taking a young merchant woman under her wing and teaching her the arts of soldiery and what most of us as people would say were all the wrong lessons about how to cope with the horrors of war; and

• Our scarred orc-monk taking time, in the final session, to have a long heart-to-heart with his granddaughter, even as this player also, earlier, taken the time to code a special “smoke a doobie” button on his character sheet.

—

I have no idea if any of these stories are having any sort of impact on you, the reader, because you weren’t there. But that’s kind of the point of an improvised experience like D&D. In Ursula K. Le Guin’s very weird and very wonderful novel5 Always Coming Home, she describes the culture’s practice of improvising poems6 that are not intended to ever be recorded in any fashion. When the anthropologist asks a child to repeat one of these poems, so she can write it down, the child says “no,” because that’s contrary to the entire point of these poems.

D&D is like that. With all due respect to the vast library of filmed D&D games (I really do enjoy the Dimension 20 stuff I’ve watched), the point is to build a story together that works on its own internal logic at the time, and not to worry about whether or not it makes sense or is meaningful to anyone other than the people at the table. It’s entirely possible that the game I ran doesn’t make any sense if read back out, and all of its most dramatic moments, the ones I will think about off and on for the rest of my life, could actually have been very trite. But at the time, with all of us working together to make something beautiful and temporary, like a mandala made of words and little pictures of dragons and polyhedral dice, it was beautiful. It was, honestly, art.

—

Roleplaying is an immensely silly hobby. I still intend to do it until I die.