Over the winter, I was able to dig in and finish writing my first novel, The Maw, which I started working on in the winter of the previous year. Writing books is a weird, very non-linear undertaking that I am still trying to figure out, but I wanted to use this blog to share a bit about my writing process (more on this in the coming weeks) and also to share a bit about the book itself. As a summary:
The Maw is a work of speculative fiction that blends aspects of eco sci fi and magical realism in the vein of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy with elements of climate dystopia in the vein of Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness. It is at once a coming of age story at the same time as it is the story of the generations that will inherit a fraught and broken earth. It casts climate change as a manifestation of familial trauma, just one of many that ripple across scales, from the corporeal to the cosmological.
For those that are interested, I have also included the first chapter of the book below. I would love any comments and/or feedback from folks, as well as any recommendations on how to get a literary agent on board to represent me! Feel free to reach out!
Part 1:
The House
CHAPTER: 1
Mike Tanner did not remember lying down. He did not remember falling asleep. He knew only that he was tired and then suddenly, he was running. Running from something vast and unseen. Something far larger than himself. He was waiting. Waiting for that thing to open up and consume him. Waiting to be swallowed by a swiftly descending darkness.
His heart thrashed. His lungs heaved. His muscles burned with acid.
Then, over it all, he heard the sound of impatient, rushing waters. A noise, not from a dream, but from reality. He felt his senses resolve as he slowly became aware of the fact that he was aware. Awake to the fact that he was awake and not running, not being devoured at all. It was just a figment of a weary subconscious, but for a brief moment, there seemed only the slightest difference between dreams and not-dreams. They were folded together like dough, rising like bread in the predawn oven of his mind.
Mike Tanner opened his eyes. A hard, fall rain drummed on the skylight window, steady as it had since midnight. Staring up from his bed, Mike traced droplets across the glass as they scurried like rabbits towards invisible burrows, hidden from his raptorial gaze.
He took a deep breath and let the sound wash over him, finally and fully awake.
Mike loved the rain, dangerously acidic though it was these days. Calamitous. The sound of it seemed capable of producing both calm and insanity in its own time. It was the fanatical metronome of Outside. Nature’s conductor. He would hate to be caught out in such conditions, he thought as he lay comfortable in bed, as much for the physical elements as for fear of what prolonged exposure might do to the human body. There were a myriad of cancer risks that came with the rain, especially this late in the season with the haze of wildfires billowing in from the west. Sometimes, the smoke would turn the sky red like blood in the afternoons. Tiny particles of ash to nucleate supercells that pounded through the summer nights.
The house, at least, kept him safe.
Here, protected from the rain’s existential bite, he could take solace in the tempestuous noise on the windows. It was soothing and familiar, tangled in seasonal memories from his childhood, even though both the storms and the seasons had changed so much since then.
“Dad. Daddy…?”
Mike heard the soft calls from the other room. Words padded like footsteps through the plush carpeted halls.
“Shit.” Mike mumbled to himself, remembering the kids. He had agreed to take them for the week. It was rare for him to do so, especially since the paperwork on the divorce had been finalized. But when they spoke on the phone last week, his wife—now ex-wife—Marcie, had been persistent, even more so than usual.
“It’s the least you can do, Mike. It’s Sadie’s birthday.”
Her tone was exasperated, as if laboring to keep things simple in hopes he would understand. Mike hated when she did that. He found it patronizing even though admittedly, it was necessary more times than it was not. He was forgetful. Or maybe he just didn’t pay attention, so wrapped up in work sometimes that there was room for little else.
“Right, yeah. Of course.”
“You forgot, didn’t you?” Marcie’s words were knowing. Mike felt himself bristle a bit, as if preparing for another fight. The divorce had put an end to some things, but not that.
“You know, you forgot last year too and we were all still living together.”
An ‘incredible feat’ was what Marcie had called it during one of their last big blow ups, referring to Mike’s ability to be an absent father, even while spending entire days confined to the same house as her and the kids. Mike still blamed the end of their marriage on the rolling stints of stay-at-home orders, which despite trapping so many work-from-home families together for months at a time, had proved rather more adept at tearing them apart.
But in the end, it was par for the course.
Marcie and Mike were only the latest among their separated or recently separated friends, families now scattered to various apartment complexes across the city or to suburban enclaves just outside. Those with kids shared custody, or seemed to avoid it, severance never bringing about the best in people. Still, rounds of quarantine were only half to blame. In reality, Mike knew the simple fact that theirs was a marriage sinking for years. It ran aground as soon as the ballast of resentment had sunk it too low.
There was an element of sadness in it, regret even, but also a sense of relief. Relationships only ever took on water. It was true for Mike, more so than most, but it was also a sign of the times. It had become easy to build one’s own silo these days. Isolation—space—was not contagious. It was not complicated. It was desperately simple. Once acclimated, it felt more like a warm blanket than some kind of punishment and in that way, it was the most privileged of modern luxuries. What would have spelled death for proto-human ancestors was now, at least according to armies of experts, the only thing holding society together.
Life was full of irony, but it was just as well. In a withering world, it was easier to suffer alone than with an audience of spectators.
“I didn’t forget, it’s just this week is crazy at work. Why don’t I just have something delivered?” Mike proposed by way of compromise. With the new pitch to the German investors on Thursday and the board meeting on Friday, he could not afford the distraction that his children presented, especially Sadie. “What’s that show she likes? The one with all the plants and animals…”
“Real Natural Adventures.”
“That’s it—I’ll have something dropped off next weekend. She’ll love them.”
Marcie was silent on the line. The telephone crackled and spit, which meant the fires must be burning hard out west. For a moment, Mike thought it had mercifully dropped the call for him, allowing silence to say the thing that he could not bring himself to. Marcie’s voice cut back it, clear and forceful over the static.
“She doesn’t want new things, Mike, she wants time with her father. I can’t believe I still have to explain this to you.”
Marcie’s voice was tired. She was tired. She had been here so many times with Mike. But they were all tired these days. Them. The kids. The neighbors. The seasons. The sun. They all shared the same collective exhaustion. Thick and heavy like pouring molasses. Nothing was easy, but the feeling was prescient. Dying things always grow resigned at the last. The coming of the end presaged by a strong desire to sleep.
“You think this is fun for me? You think I like to work this much?”
Mike was feeling cornered. Marcie could tell.
Both of them knew the truth: he hated his work, but he needed to hate it. It had become a compulsion, something he threw himself at constantly, the only totalizing distraction in a world that was slowly crushing him alive. People found meaning in all kinds of work, Mike knew. They found ways to be happy, or at least, how to hold their happiness aside for those fleeting after hours or warrior weekends. Work was just a thing they did. But Mike felt himself defective in this regard. No matter the title nor the salary that attended it, he could not help but feel this gaping black hole below him just waiting to pull him down into absolute nothingness. He barely understood how it had gotten to this point. A series of small decisions, it seemed. Slight compromises of the self, each made to appease the monstrous gods of modernity and the market. It was their world anyway. Everything else was just living in it.
“What do you want me to say to that, huh?” Mike was on his heels.
“I don’t want you to say anything, Mike. That’s what you never seem to understand. It’s not about winning a goddamn argument. It’s about being present for your children.”
“I do all of this for them. All of it. They’ll understand one day.”
Mike did not recall whether he said this last part or merely thought it. So many of their fights fit a pattern and there was something familiar, comforting even, about the roles they had each learned to play. It was well-trod soil. Firm underfoot. And he often felt as if he was not so much arguing his side as he was delivering lines that he had seen hundreds of times before in movies or on TV. This phrase in particular was tried and true, one of several that often moved their fights towards some sort of uneasy conclusion. In reality, he did not know if he believed it anymore or if he ever did, but he had been thinking it for long enough that it felt true.
Marcie took aim and delivered her response precisely.
“Well, maybe you can explain that to your daughter just like your dad explained it to you.”
Comparisons to Mike’s father had a way of penetrating his armor even when appeals to his children did not. It was a tool Marcie used sparingly, but effectively.
“Oh, really. Really, Marcie….”
Mike hated the implication, which was usually a sign that Marcie was honing in. It was his father’s generation, after all, that had turned the earth against them in the first place. Filled the air with their carbon. The sea with their plastic. The earth with their excess. They had created this world, ran up these gluttonous debts, but would be gone long before any of the bills came due. And it was Mike’s father who seemed to embody this. The arrogance of civilization. The confidence of a lucky gambler. The drum of great machines, yammering in madness as if they, or anything else, might go on forever. But he had died in the end, just like so many others, taken by another novel virus, origin unknown, that spread across the globe like fire through the brush.
Mike was different from his father because he sought only a sliver of security in the uncertain world his father’s generation had wrought. He was different because he thought that the world still owed him something, just not everything.
Marcie did not wait for his reply.
“You know how this works, right Mike? It’s not complicated. If you don’t put in the time, you’ll never get them back. You might not care now, but someday you will.”
“You knew the deal.”
The words came out like stones. Mike was unaware how much his father spilled from him as he spoke. But it was his typical response, a last-ditch effort, one that he had used to end many of their arguments. It put their relationship in rational terms that he understood, contractual terms, terms that his colleagues—lawyers, publicists, finance specialists—would accept, if not his ex-wife. He could not be held responsible if her party felt cheated for not reading the fine print.
To Mike, the coldness of such sentiments had been forgotten. He only knew that taking this approach was part of a well-defined strategy, one that deflected away from himself. Over the years, he had learned to perfect the technique as much as a defense against Marcie’s advances as for the sake of his own survival. Such thinking had the added benefit of helping to muddy the waters when their fights grew bitter, usually when he sensed Marcie was circling some deeper truth. Certain things, after all, could never be said. There was an unspoken agreement that needed to remain that way, one forged long before either of them had any clue what it would mean to commit to rigid roles in a world that was fluid and ever-changing.
But what was the alternative? The earth outside was unraveling. The seasons were breaking. Society was perched on trembling fault lines of natural history. And despite all of that, they were comfortable. Their material needs met. They were safe, even if complete strangers to themselves and each other. On some level, it didn’t even matter that they were actually headed towards an iceberg—a metaphor, of course, there were so few of those left anymore. It didn’t even matter that everything was built on a lie. It didn’t matter that the world inside was just as toxic as the world outside, but in a million different and more sinister ways. They were committed to this life, this lifestyle. And they had each other to prop up the facade, to play guard over their shared prison, which was either the size of the house or the size of the whole world. The divorce had changed that only on paper. Old habits required harsher methods in order to be broken.
Marcie did not reply right away. The phone crackled some more. It was good to leave space. It created drama. Productive tension. Like an expectorant.
“You’re right, Mike, maybe I did…” Marcie said finally. She could have told him he was wrong, that it was a false choice. She could have told him they should run away with the kids. Start a new life. Try to rebuild. Fix their family. Do something—anything—radical and new. But she did not. She kept to the terms. “…Maybe I was too stupid or too blind or too in love to see the writing on the wall. Maybe that’s on me. But it's not fair to the kids. Lucas could care less, but Sadie...”
Marcie had leaned into those last words, hoping that they might land with more purchase. Mike was still resistant. But he was too tired to continue. After some groveling and a few more half-baked excuses, Marcie’s tactic finally paid off.
Mike had agreed to take them.
“Daddy...?” The pleading voice came once more from down the hall.
“Coming,” He mumbled as he turned into his pillow, too soft to be heard. Grabbing his phone, he glanced at the time. Five in the morning.
“Fuck,” he muttered as he rolled over again. He would have to be up in an hour anyway if he wanted to have time to exercise before logging into work around seven. He might as well get a move on.
Begrudgingly, he sat up on the edge of his bed and swung his feet to the floor. He cringed suddenly and reached down to press his hand into his abdomen. The pain in his gut had made itself known, dull and ever-present. Listening to the rain overhead, he rubbed it gently, feeling it release ever so slightly, providing the smallest amount of relief.
At dawn, before sun-up, the sensation was usually mild and his mornings generally started out pain-free. But as the day wore on, the inflammation of his work always seemed to render itself in that same soft spot at the center of his torso. By dark, when he finally logged off, the pain was often unbearable to the touch. He would pour a drink, or two, and pop a few of the pain killers that had been prescribed without much of a fuss through the company’s tele-health system. According to his doctor, the condition was chronic and fairly common. A symptom of the stresses of the modern world. And like all of the ails it produced, it was the modern world that also provided the cure. An incredible tautology. Magnificent in its simplicity. Also, incredibly lucrative. Probably unrelated.
Mike took the pills for his pain, but he would be lying if he didn’t admit that he liked the way they made him feel. Numb. Weightless. Empty. But lately, the pain had been growing worse, snaking its way into his morning hours. He would have to schedule a virtual appointment to renew his script, but that would have to be later in the week after the investors and the board meeting. And Sadie’s birthday, of course.
Mike took a deep breath before he rose, feeling the first waves of anxiety ripple across his nervous system. Work would be hell this week, he thought as he made his way down the darkened hall. And with the added task of caring for both kids, he was already anticipating the need to up his prescription sooner than later.
Mike’s feet shuffled over the generous furrows in the carpet as he approached the door to Sadie’s room, which was just one of several guest bedrooms in the house. This visit was the first overnight for the kids in his new house since the divorce and initially, he was unsure where to put both of them. Lucas was in a room downstairs on the first floor, content with distance as teens often are. But Sadie had insisted on being on the second floor, closer to her father.
“You sure?” Mike had asked on Sunday after their mother had dropped them off. Marcie did not linger and soon it was just Mike and the kids. “You don’t want to be near your brother?”
“Lucas doesn’t care. And besides, all he ever does is play his video games anymore.” Sadie pointed to her brother, who had entered the house quietly and deposited himself on the ample couch in the living room. He sat, fingers fidgeting over an invisible controller, a virtual reality headset strapped in front of his eyes.
Mike had left the TV on as he usually did during the day and the news was running a story on the flotillas of refugees that continued to wash up on US shores. On the screen flashed images of destitute and half-drowned families dressed in sopping rags being plucked from the sea. Nothing the kids needed to see. He picked up the remote just as the coverage cut to video of the same families behind chain link, a lost herd of cattle caught in the warm embrace of the government’s refugee resettlement program.
“You’re not still scared of the dark, are you?” Mike asked.
For years, Sadie’s fear of the dark had been one of her few persistent issues which, after a certain age, neither he nor Marcie knew how to address.
“I’m not scared, I just don’t like it.” Sadie replied as she watched her father fumble with the remote. Then, eager to reclaim his fickle attention, “don’t worry dad, he can’t see the TV. His headset blocks everything, see: LUCAS! LUCAS!!” Sadie began screaming and waving her arms to prove her point. Her brother continued with his game, unaffected.
“Ok, ok!” Mike tried to put the brakes on Sadie’s raucous display as the television finally went dark. “Let’s keep it down in the house. How about you sleep in the bedroom upstairs.”
“The one next to yours?” Sadie asked, pleased at the proposal.
“The one down the hall from mine.” Mike corrected her. “The one next to mine is the office...”
“Right. No kids allowed.” Sadie replied, knowing her father’s strict house rules by heart. It had been the same when the family was together, her father almost always concealed behind any number of doors, each one rendered impenetrable by the same petty decree.
“That’s right.” Mike was glad he did not have to explain further. “But the room down the hall is great, it has its own bathroom and everything.”
Sadie was disappointed and could have cared less about her own bathroom, but she did not press the matter. She knew her father was pliable but barely. If she wanted to stay on his softer side, she had to follow all the rules. The punishment otherwise was something far worse than being yelled at, worse than getting grounded. It was being ignored. Sadie feared her father’s superhuman powers of indifference more than any monster that still lingered in her ten-year old imagination, more than any shadowy darkness anywhere in the world.
As Mike approached the bedroom door, the rain grew harder, drumming faster on the roof overhead. He finally noticed the rest of the house. It was dark, unusually dark and filled with an uneasy solemnity. Houses at night always have a way of feeling haunted just by the things that are not there. New though it was and still smelling of the contractor’s spackle, Mike’s house was no exception.
He noticed the small hallway lamp, which he usually left on at all hours, had been extinguished. The storm must have tripped a breaker. Mike filed the detail away, another thing he would have to deal with before the day began. Turning the handle, he entered the room.
“Daddy!” Sadie was relieved.
“What’s going on, sweetie?” He spoke into the cavernous guest room, his voice still ragged from sleep. Outside, thunder and lightning joined the storm.
“All the lights are out. I have to go to the bathroom.” Sadie’s voice was timid, but in it, Mike could hear that she had already been awake for some time. He noticed the nightlight in her room was also out.
“Aren’t you old enough to do this on your own?” He kept his tone in check. It was too early in the day and the week to start with any of that.
“I am... it’s just a lot darker than at mom’s house and....” Sadie sounded embarrassed. Mike was annoyed. Hadn’t she grown out of this? For young kids, fear of the dark was common enough, even if it had seemed somehow heightened in her. But at some point, kids are supposed to figure it out. Their old house, the one in which they had lived during the first few stretches of quarantine, had been particularly adept at triggering this response. She had shared a room with Lucas for as long as it was feasible. That seemed to help. But the combination of the new environment and the storm were enough to bring these old fears once more to the surface.
Mike let out an exasperated breath.
“Ok, let’s make it happen then, huh.”
In a moment, Sadie sprung from her bed and Mike watched as her silhouette crossed the room and ducked into the bathroom. He leaned against the door frame and rubbed his eyes, yawning.
“Dad?” Sadie said, puzzled.
Mike heard her fiddling with the light switch.
“Yes, sweetie.”
“The lights are broken.”
“The storm just knocked out the power.” He thought of the lamp in the hall.
“But it’s dark…”
“I’m right here, Sadie. Nothing bad will happen to you.”
Mike stared out the window at the storm outside while Sadie took her time in the bathroom. Rain continued to batter the glass, its streaks turning electric blue from the flashes of far-away lightning. A deep thunder rolled through the house, its vibrations bubbling up through his legs as if coming from underneath him. In the distance, Mike thought he could make out something—something vague and more than slightly ominous—through the rain and the wind. To his groggy mind, it looked as if a wall of trees stood, black and swaying, at the edge of his property where the fence used to be.
Wouldn’t that be nice, thought Mike, remembering all the fuss that the partition had caused between him and the Anderson family next door.
Mike had purchased this new home before the divorce was finalized, even though his lawyer cautioned him not to seem too eager while financial issues were still pending. But after another several month stint of confinement with his family, he desired solitude and quiet even more so than slightly lower alimony payments. After moving in, he had the fence built to reinforce the point. Rather than contributing to his peace of mind, however, it instead became the focus for an on-again off-again conflict with the Andersons who were aggressively certain that it encroached several inches into the drainage swale that ran between their modest suburban properties.
The issue had escalated, resulting in several appeals to the homeowner’s association and a revolving door of strongly-worded emails and passive aggressive overtures. Monarchs playing politics over their earthly domains. Wild animals pissing to mark their territory. It was all the same impulse, in the end, just with slightly different tools at one’s disposal. Eventually, the tinpot dictators at the HA issued Mike a stiff fine, which he had to pay or else have the fence altered at his own expense in order to meet neighborhood specifications. Rather than pay up, he had ripped the thing down himself one weekend and piled its wooden bones in a heap next to the house. It proved a point, but he was not sure what.
Having been robbed of the crowning humiliation to mark their victory, the Anderson’s became incapable of letting the issue rest. They were creatures of Mike’s father’s generation. They felt entitled to their square footage. Every inch. For the entire summer, Mike caught petulant glances across the yard from Bob and his wife Melinda as they sat drinking coffee on the back porch in the mornings and wine coolers in the evenings. At their feet, their elderly poodle mix, Miss Nancy, seemed always to cast the same shade from the blackened sockets of her conjunctive, diabetic eyes.
Mike could handle the homeowner’s association and to a lesser extent, he could tolerate Bob and Melinda’s intrusive looks, but something in Miss Nancy’s hollow stare filled him with the most inconsolable rage. Eventually, with the additional salary that his last promotion afforded him, Mike hired a gardener to take care of the outdoor maintenance. To hell with the Andersons. Fence or no fence, he would not have to set eyes on that miserable, mongrel dog ever again.
“Done.” Sadie appeared out of the bathroom. She was wide awake and ready to go. “What now?”
“What do you mean? Back to bed.”
“But I’m not tired. Can I watch TV?”
“The power is out.” Mike repeated, realizing at the same time that this would most certainly prevent him from logging into work as he had hoped. Maybe it would be as simple as setting a breaker in the basement, which was at the extent of his handy-man capabilities. But it was always possible that the problem was more systemic.
“That’s OK, mom keeps shows saved on the tablet.” Sadie seemed reluctant to be left alone once more in the darkness of the guest room.
Mike thought about the time. At this point, if he managed to get back to sleep with the storm pounding, he was realistically only looking at twenty more minutes of actual rest. He might as well get an early start on the day in hopes that power was restored in time for work.
“Fine,” he said to Sadie, “but you have to promise to keep it down. Your brother is still sleeping.”
“Yes!” Sadie was excited. She had grabbed her father’s hand as he turned to walk out of the room.
It was unexpected. Feeling her grip, Mike’s frustration momentarily abetted. He felt a flicker of something—was it joy?—as he re-remembered how easy it was to make his daughter happy. But this early in the morning, he was too taken by the immediacy of her energy, which needed to be corralled and redirected, to let those feelings percolate below the surface. She let him lead her down the darkened stairs.
Outside, lightning flashed. One two three four five, Mike counted. Thunder sounded. Less than a mile away, he thought.
The storm crept closer like a rising wave come to drag them all out to sea.