Hey, you know, every once in a while, a book and/or a writer comes along that pretty much defies description

And no, that’s not a cop-out on my part—I’m just telling it the way it is. Try this, a small extract from Jeb Burt’s ‘The Dogs’ followed by ‘The Blight’ in its entirety. First ‘The Dogs,’ which should whet your whistle:

They left in the early afternoon. The streets were dry. They left me with their cards, in the sides of my mouth, as I fought from the bedframe they tied me to with her clothes. As they left they told me they’d get her abductor—who was me. A matter of compiling the evidence or, they said, faking it. “Don’t worry, Ace. We’ll solve your case.”

They left me with her pants—they took her blouses, sandals, to their wives. I wore her pants around my neck and stared through the glass, listening to the silence that follows rain.

I heard a howl. On the building across the street a dog, tall and black, watched me. It lashed its tail against the sky, crying accusations, each slowly falling to the broken street past my closed window.

“Burt is pushing for a new language along with a new world.”

—Paul LaFarge, author of The Night Ocean

“LOST AMERICANS is a series of wildly imaginative arias on the dark side of the American experiment. The rampant aggression and relentless future-looking of our nation’s westward expansion are embodied here in ghosts, monsters, technological horrors, wealth and power accrued at the expense of mortal souls. I savored every lyrical sentence, every strange and apt invention in these stories.”

—Matthew Sharpe, author of Jamestown

“In a time when most everything is sucked dry of soul and prepackaged to resemble everything else, Jeb Burt’s LOST AMERICANS is a shock of true wildness, exquisite weirdness, and ferocious purity—a necessary reminder of what fiction must aspire to. These darkly intense stories, alive with glorious, haunting images, make their singular journeys under an imminent threat of doom, if not already in its wake, walking the line between beauty and derangement, compelled to always take the greater risk.”

—Yelena Akhtiorskaya, author of Panic in a Suitcase

And now, unbelievers, cos we promised you . . .

Here is ‘The Blight’, 458 words of sheer poetic perfection, a complete story—start, middle and close— plucked from a mind beset with a raging fever that will not be gainsaid. Here is a new voice freshly set free from endless fields of rare literature heaven-sent for all those who loved Sebastien Doubinsky’s PS outings of some years past, Burroughs’s early works, Moorcock’s seminal Jerry Cornelius novels, plus Brautigan, Kerouac, De Filippo and Dick. Read and absorb:

The plague descended suddenly. It caused no surprise.

The towers downtown became polymer and styrene spires. Cars plasticized to opal propylene as their tires fused into the cement of coast routes.

The women dancing in the Jelly Julie on Sunset monstrously thermoset before the horny men, as the petrochemical bane reached the Central Valley. It hesitated at the edge of the migrant towns and great vale of farmland, as if to weigh how the urban populace met this change. When the people continued the old lifestyle, merely titillated by this novelty world of vinyl and epoxy, the polymerization surged on through cropland. The film moguls and actors and club musicians, porn titans and courtesans, drank piña coladas under acrylic palms along Malibu sands and Mulholland lawns of emerald isobutyl. The plague hardened the San Joaquin Valley to an inedible breadbasket of decorative fruit.

Famine set in. Others followed the fused strippers: Melrose sidewalks crammed with mannequins in aspect of shoppers,peering into jewelry store windows. The skin carameled in the California sun into dulce de leche, the eyes shining.

Those who could afford horses fled northeast into the Rockies, but seemed to bring the plague. At the ends of shotguns they were turned from mountain towns, the road an eel of crisp resin at their heels. At the east base of the American Cordillera, the Armed Forces erected a battery to halt the movie moguls and stars, haggard advertisement tycoons and champion surfers, whose wealth and love of good living kept them before the blight.

The Rocky Mountains vulcanized under their tired feet. Their horses hardened. Ice slopes glacéd. Tors—Bakelite—reflected the sun like knives of obsidian as their clothing fused into their necks. The cursed Californians stared from ledges amid rubber pine, a long show-window of alp trekkers between seasonal shipments; they stared, doleful, across the rolling living grass of the Great Plains, from which their forbearers brought crop to the Central Valley and to which they ushered death. Slowly, bodies catalyzed and howitzers fired upon screaming mannequins wobbling down interstates.

The plastic blight ended at the Great Divide. As the nation mourned the West, agleam every sunset like a derelict candy land, the Midwest and East Coast conceded the logic of such a plague coming from California.

A gold blight hit New York. The silver hypodermic of the Empire State pushed gold into the sun. The Chrysler Tower and architecturally vervy investment banks in lower Manhattan rippled and shone. The auric creep pursued investment bankers and commodity men through Ohio. Heavy artillery eliminated them in the rolling corn.

Southerners and plainsmen thanked Heaven for its benevolence. Two years later the black flesh was there. Remaining Americans waited. Shined eyes stared from softening skin and dimmed.

C’mon, kids, trust me on this.

They can’t be wrong, those folks out there beyond the Towers who, right now, are sitting crosslegged on the greensward, trading sentences and part-sentences like bubble gum cards, shaking their heads in a mixture of admiration and astonishment as they lean against the towering gates and commit to memory the likes of this (from ‘Night Bowls’):

Cashier girls brew coffee in aluminum tubs in the drive-thru. They never see him. He rises in dark with streetlamps cressets in the palace mist, and when he moves into the orange air itching for Lucky Strike, his roommate Jude is on the porch, saying “Tonight tarot” through smoke.

Phew! Okay, stay with it now because there’s more.

Oh, my—(and talking of De Filippo and Dick, which we were) what do we have here?

Why, it’s a superb brand new novella from my dear friend Paul Di Filippo, too long absent—far too log—from the forthcoming section of PS. So let’s remedy the situation.

On the trail of a missing con man, our private eye hero uncovers a vast conspiracy that stretches from the dawn of time to the Omega Point—and finds himself central to the whole enigmatic game.

The maritime scent on my tainted finger remained pungent throughout the drive to the Holtzclaw place, diminishing only gradually by the time I arrived.

Juniper Holtzclaw had held onto a very nice piece of property, despite all the ongoing litigation against her absent husband. About six-thousand square feet of mock-Tudor McMansion on a landscaped acre in a part of the city where trees outnumbered rats, good au pairs ranked barely higher than killer Pilates instructors, and trash pickup happened discreetly down hidden service alleys. I felt ashamed just parking my twenty-year-old Toyota beater at her curb. If I got lucky, nothing would fall off it while I was inside.

Walking up to her front door, I suddenly wondered exactly when the appurtenances of my life had transitioned from modern to antiquated. Getting divorced hadn’t left me with lots of disposable income, true, but I could have afforded a new phone, for Christ’s sake. But I seemed to have cultivated to the point of obsession some bias against the new, some inertia to change, a begrudging attitude toward the present that was only getting more pronounced. Pretty soon, I figured, I would be living backwards, like Merlin or Benjamin Button.

I thought of a Robert Mankoff cartoon I had seen in the New Yorker a couple of years ago. A patient lies on the psychiatrist’s couch, the skeptical shrink eying him suspiciously. The nutty guy says, “But I like living in the past. It’s where I grew up.”

Juniper answered the door herself, albeit somewhat suspiciously, a fair stance given the random irate strangers stopping by at all hours. She had kept the house, but no servants. That was a big comedown.

Clad in a cream-colored cowlneck sweater over flower-patterned pedal-pushers and a pair of those mock gladiator sandals that laced up her shapely calves, she looked like the missing quarter of a million bucks that Holger had fled with. She recognized me, of course, but did not seem overly enthusiastic at my arrival.

“Mr. Ruggles. No news, I take it. What more can I do for you?”

“Can I come inside, please? If I make one more convert for the Mother Church, they’ll give me a second wife.”

That bought me a chuckle, and soon I was sitting on a dark leather couch in a sunny, over-decorated parlor half the size of Union Station. Offered a drink, I angled for tequila, but got only white wine, which was the equivalent of hoping for sex and instead getting a lecture on social justice. As for any hypothetical sex itself, it was “Outlook not so good,” according to the Magic 8-Ball placed midway between my gut and dick.

"Surrealism with a beating heart and a merry soul. Paul Di Filippo’s latest romp takes us elsewhere, else-when, and back to now. Featuring a worldweary private detective who finds—as we all hope to do—life’s lost pearl within reality’s battered rind. Co-starring coats of sentient slime (one good, and one evil), a regained wife named Yulia, and—what is AEOTA? Yoks, tears, and illusions. No one rings the changes like our Paul."
—Rudy Rucker

"Here it is, people—the latest long-awaited cosmi-comic cocktail from the feverish noir brain of Paul Di Filippo, blending tinctures of Rudy Rucker, Phil Dick, Illiza Shlesinger, Thomas Aquinas, John Sladek, Arthur Schopenhauer and Suzanne Vega. Who or what is AEOTA? But surely everyone— Unpack your ancient Nokia 7650 and be prepared for a heady, whirly spin."
—Damien Broderick

Nicky and I stayed with Paul and Deborah on a couple of occasions which involved lots of books (HEY, EVERYthing involves lots of books, right? Or why do it!), lots of banter, several lobster sandwiches, a trip to Waldon’s Pond, and lots of summer sunshine visits to various beaches on the wonderful New England coastline. It was here in this latter spot that we were treated to a strange occurrence, namely that of Paul running into the surf and throwing himself sideways into the waves. Since then, whenever we bump into each other on either side of the Atlantic (though always on dry land), we’ve been threatening getting together again. Maybe next year. I sure hope so. Until then, the crazyness of AEOTA will have to suffice.

This week, as you can see, we have a carnival of riches.

What I’ve already mentioned would be enough for anyone but this next item may well be the cherry on the cake. It’s a mini collection from Mark Steensland, who I met at another Providence visit, this time the much-loved NECon event, where I rekindled my friendship with Rick Hautala and met Mark for the first time.

Here's Mark:

In 2006, during a conference at Ithaca College in upstate New York, I was standing in the auditorium lobby, waiting for the doors to open, when my eyes lingered on the badge of a guy who just happened to share a name with the author of NIGHT STONE. I introduced myself and discovered—to my surprise--that it really was Rick Hautala. Since we were both attending solo, we sat next to each other, starting a conversation that lasted until his death in March of 2013.


Over our too-brief time together, we collaborated on all sorts of scripts, films, novels, and stories, one of which (called ‘Lovecraft's Pillow’) is included in this collection. I can say without qualification that Rick was the best friend I ever had. I often told people that he was more of a brother to me than my blood. And if you had the great good fortune to know him, you understand exactly what I'm talking about.

It was Rick who introduced me to NECon, and then to everyone there. Thanks to Rick, Chris Golden helped get my middle-grade novel BEHIND THE BOOKCASE to an editor at Random House, and, thanks to Rick, F. Paul Wilson gave me a cover blurb when they published it. Thanks to Rick, Richard Chizmar produced our best short films: ‘The Ugly File,’ based on the story by Ed Gorman, ‘The Weeping Woman,’ based on the story by Paul Kane, and ‘Peekers,’ based on the story by Kealan Patrick Burke.

Thanks to Rick, Pete Crowther saw ‘Peekers’ and loved it.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=10diurwIa7Y

And now here I am, writing a blog entry for PS Publishing as they send my short story and poetry collection into the world. I hope some of what I've done in these pages honors all of those who helped me get here.
 Did I forget to mention the name of the conference where I met Rick? No, I didn't forget. It's the best part of this tale, which is why I saved it for the end, to make it one of those stories that proves truth is stranger than fiction. It was the first Rod Serling Conference.

And, whoa, Nellie—hey, unless I’m imagining it, I think I can hear that haunting TZ theme and even smell the smoke from Rod’s cigarette.

Okay, you warriors . . .

There’s other stuff here on my desktuff I’m absolutely dying to share with you (like a new Tomislav Tikulin project and another big Dave McKean project)—but we’re all of us going to have to wait, at least for some of it. Maybe a taster or two next week—if you’re good. Until then, enjoy your weekend and look after each other. Oh yeah—and happy reading!

Hugs from the seaside

Pete