The study reeks of stale air, burnt coffee, and artistic self-loathing as you enter. Your eyes are slowly, inexorably drawn toward a nondescript binder on the desk. You know you shouldn't open it. Yet like the idiot protagonist of a cosmic horror story you are compelled to gaze upon that which is best left forgotten. Your eyes begin to roll back into your skull as you glance over the humbly bragging foreword. By the time you read the trite opening sentences, the maddening mediocrity has already consumed your soul.
You should have listened.
1 When's Okay to Say...?
Some people just shouldn't write children's books.
A nameless child wanders through this watercolor picture book, encountering various relatives, friends, and pets throughout the day. The child obviously suffers from anxiety and may also be neurodivergent, but the disembodied voice of the narrator only ever calls them "selfish" or "rude" for expressing their worries to other people and in turn bumming them out. The narrator goes on to teach the child how to refrain from sharing too much.
At first this works, and everyone's mood immediately improves. Every character, even the goldfish, expresses joy that the child isn't sad all the time now. Even the color palette becomes brighter and more pleasant to look at. But soon the child decides that they don't enjoy being "polite", and resume being honest with the people in their life.
This causes some sort of cancerous growth to appear in the air above the child's head, which grows and pulsates the more they share. By the final pages of the book it has split open to reveal a crimson, Sauronic eye that leers down at the child for trying to do or say anything. The kid eventually faints while hiding under a laundry hamper with their teddy bear- which the book makes sure to point out is only the child's friend because it's completely inanimate and doesn't have a choice.
"Lesson" finally learned, the child completely shuts down emotionally, and the eye shrivels up and disappears in time. The final spread depicts the whole cast joyfully embracing the child, who now has a pained smile fixed upon their face.
2 O, Mirthsome! O, Girthsome!
A questionably titled crypto-biography of the life, death, and ascension of Groesbeck the Carbunculous, a jovial god of consumption, infestation, and probiotics in an implied urban fantasy setting. Groesbeck begins the story as a lowly, put-upon fast food restaurant health inspector who is as unlucky as he is personally underwhelming. The first few chapters try to hammer this point home by showing all the ways he fails to find love, aspire in hobbies, or earn the respect of his coworkers.
This barely changes after he falls prey to the parasites in an undercooked beefalo patty. He continues to act upbeat and undemanding, perhaps to the point of delusion, even as his body becomes a ravaged hive for the infestation. His body balloons until he is confined to his apartment, and through his own placid observations it is implied that the entire building has been condemned around him as a quarantine zone.
It is at this point the parasites begin speaking to him, singing him praises and adulations for the first time in his life. They thank him for giving them life, but lament that they have so few siblings with which to play. Groesbeck takes to his new "children" quickly and tries to share their affection and positivity with the rest of the world, to less-than-stellar results.
The remainder of the book covers these failed attempts to spread the joy, horrifying and putting to flight countless townsfolk and causing an epidemic in the process. The text attempts to treat his corpulence with a degree of body-positivity, but instead comes across as fetishistic and occasionally outright shaming. Groesbeck's speech takes to a strange poetic metre by this point, and he drops the title during one of his many bombastic soliloquys.
The book ends when Groesbeck is rolled down a hill into a pit and lit on fire, but returns to life two weeks later to continue his great work at the head of an ever-growing wave of upbeat, infested converts. The final page-and-a-half is dedicated to the marching song they sing while washing like a tide over the tristate area.
Tucked into the back of the manuscript is a copy of a C&D order from a litigious game company also known for its jovial and corpulent rot-monsters.
3 X Gaiden Rinne!
An anthological deconstruction of the isekai genre. It subverts the traditional escapist fantasy and wish-fulfillment tropes of the genre by couching its sequence of worlds and stories firmly within a tightly interconnected dharmic cosmology. Every protagonist is reborn where they are because of the karmic debts their past selves accrued, and their every action is of immense consequence for the incarnation that succeeds them.
Oftentimes the protagonists (who are all sent there as a consequence of death, though none are traffic accidents) are reincarnated as denizens of the worlds their past selves cultivated. Some of these are karmic rewards, but just as many are awful revelations that the person has been reduced to NPC-levels of agency and must now endure the next visitor's whimsy; just as so many others had suffered their own time in the limelight.
Ever-present throughout the anthology is an enigmatic Pure Land buddha who oversees the protagonists' struggles, failures, and lessons. The buddha fully reveals themself in the penultimate chapter to confront the one protagonist who rises to supervillainy in their utter refusal to let go of the power fantasy they feel entitled to. The resulting clash of hubris and wrathful aspect proves cataclysmic, and the closing chapter makes the ambitious attempt at conveying a sense of blissful anatta to the reader.
4 Boli
A historical fiction "romance novel" describing the mostly physical relationship between a pair of 16th century Maldivian cowry shell divers. The story's prose, initially purple and flowery, grows increasingly stilted, jarring, and lurid as the author moves on to more and more bizarre, esoteric, or just plain immature euphemisms for sexual acts and body parts in an attempt to keep things fresh.
This is constantly contrasted, sometimes to the point of tonal whiplash, with a remarkably well-researched and in-depth analysis of the power structures and systems of oppression of the Portuguese-colonized Indian Ocean and the human toll that the cowry industry takes. As the divers' world falls apart around them, they throw themselves at one another with increasing desperation.
At about the midpoint of the story, a vague sense of magic realism rises up from background dormancy. The cowries and their shells gain voices of their own, which they use to snark at one another or make observations on the divers like some kind of molluscan Greek chorus. None of their wisdom or dating advice is heeded however, and the situation continues to deteriorate until the divers have to flee their homes and the authorities.
By the final chapter, the story's language reaches a fever pitch as the couple, their boat, and the entire exploitative cowry industry merge together into a many-limbed pataphorical orgy that then pleasantly sinks into obscurity beneath the waves of the Indian Ocean.
5 The Lay of the Cantankerous Hrütlander
Despite being called a lay, this story is not a lyrical poem told in octosyllabic couplets. It is in fact a turgid, 400-page long sword & sandals adventure novel about the eponymous Hrütlander, a towering embodiment of hypermasculinity and sullen demeanor in the lands of the Far Nørthe. He journeys down from the mountains of Hrütli-lejr, tasked by the gods to act as kingmaker for two warring clans; the Rittugids led by Chief Rittu and the Chegguderi led by Chief Klegga Cheg (or perhaps Chegga Kleg; the text flipflops on his name constantly).
Apparently "kingmaker" in this world means that the Hrütlander has moral license to betray anyone and switch sides in the conflict at a whim, which he does often and at the slightest perceived insult. The plot and the world as a whole eke out an existence in the margins between long, self-indulgent scenes of Iron Age warfare made all the more bloody by the Hrütlander wielding his highly impractical, ahistorical atgeir topped with nine blades.
The world itself is a fictionalized mythic Scandinavia, written with about as much nuance and understanding of the source material as you might expect from a high school metalhead who plays far too much Skyrim. The land is cold and inhospitable except by the tribes of barbarians who grow huge, muscular and/or buxom on nothing but beef and ale that they seem to have an inexhaustible supply of. The Rittugids and Chegguderi are introduced as being irreconcilably different from one another, but the only differences that come through in the text are their hair color (blonde and brunette in contrast with the Hrütlander's "glowering red"), and which side of the body they start on when sacrificing a living person to their god Wōdyn.
At the climax of the story, the much-anticipated three-way (battle) between Rittu, Chegga/Klegga, and the Hrütlander is unexpectedly cut short by the appearance of a sorceress who reveals herself to be an ale-wench whom the Hrütlander previously tried and failed to bed. She kills the chieftains and hurls the Hrütlander into a tear in the spacetime continuum, sending him back to the early Jurassic Period where he promptly falls into the middle of a savage territorial fight between dinosaurs that had no business being in the same time and place as one another.
The closing text boldly proclaims that the story will be continued in the sequel, Gondwanalandmansaga: The Saga of the Man from Gondwanaland.
6 Maul Punx
A so-called "dystopian suburb punk toxo-romance" set in the distant year of 199Y, in an alternate reality that split off of our own when the cult classic 1989 teen dark comedy Heathers was directed by Stanley Kubrick as originally intended by the writer. The film stayed as niche as the original, and the world at large remains almost identical to our own. The major difference is that this timeline divergence inspired a subculture of especially disaffected suburban youths.
Not content to passively criticize the world around them, a coalition of Midwestern punks, goths, and a few nerds begins an uprising in which they burn down several McMansions and a car dealership before invading and fortifying a mall to repulse the authorities. This course of action becomes almost immediately the correct choice when an overworked lab assistant at a nearby military base accidentally unleashes a bioweapon that turns the majority of the town into zombies.
What ensues is a mix between awkward romance as two youths (a trad goth with an interest in taxidermy and the bassist for an experimental emo-shoegaze band) take a liking to one another, action-horror as the undead besiege the mall, and a rather unsubtle critique of American consumerism- the zombies all moan "maaall" instead of "braaaiiins", among other hints.
The couple turns out to be an unhealthy fit for one another, with jealousy and codependency quickly taking root between them. Still, they decide to stick it out together through the siege, frequently speaking the cynical adage that they're "better off dead (together)". Ironically, they end up being the few left entirely unscathed when they fall back to the roof of the mall under the unrelenting zombie assault.
Eventually it is revealed that the zombies are weak to loud music, which the youths take advantage of until exploded undead heads have painted the majority of the parking lot. They also get a radio antenna working on the roof, which allows them to discover that uprisings similar to theirs occurred all across the Midwest at around the same time. The mall survivors pass on the secret to countering the outbreak, and the dawn rises on a very odd new world.
7 Reorigination
The novelization of a screenplay that was dubbed simultaneously too technically difficult, visually boring, and audience-alienating in premise to perform. It follows a pair of advanced, cephalopod aliens bound to their life support shuttles as they float in high orbit above a backwater planet and ruminate on the extinction of their entire species. One, a historian named the Preserver, laments the folly and hubris of their people. The other, a bioengineer named the Caretaker, tries to devise a way to save the species from death and genetic bottlenecking.
The Caretaker eventually hypothesizes that they could insert their DNA into the genome of one of the modified and accelerated subject species on the planet below, essentially hijacking them and creating a new hybrid designed to replace the originals. The Preserver balks at this idea, citing how their systems-spanning empire fell apart precisely because they wouldn't stop meddling in the development of other species. They say that they deserve to die out as a warning to others if they will not stop repeating history like this. The Caretaker counters that they can still learn from their mistakes as long as they're not all dead, and that the loss of all their accumulated wisdom would be a tragedy for the whole galaxy.
What follows is a long, increasingly bitter philosophical debate over free will, ethics, and the burden of knowledge. Eventually the disagreement comes to a head and the two aliens fire their shuttles' weapons at one another. One of the ships is fatally damaged and its life support shuts down after some remorseful parting words; the other stays intact enough to putter down to the planet's surface.
It is left deliberately unclear which of the aliens survived; either the Caretaker violated their oath to protect and cultivate life by killing their fellow and taking advantage of their own charges, or the Preserver was ironically the one who ultimately consigned their species to history before trying to create a lasting warning for other sapient species.
8 Omnilect
Presented as a found diary with occasional margin notes from the "finder" character, this alternatively uncomfortable and outright goofy book details an anonymous linguist's spiral into mental illness and a paranoid world of conspiracy theories.
The linguist was recently kicked out of their university for a series of violent outbursts, as well as their increasingly vehement belief in a Tower of Babel-esque theory of the origin of human language. To prove this theory correct and unearth the supposed global conspiracy threatening it, the linguist goes on a globetrotting academic tour despite barely having enough money to feed themself with.
According to their theory, the original human language was split into all existing language families by some cataclysmic event in prehistory. Mankind's destiny can only be reclaimed by reconstructing this ur-language. This must be done by purging all of the false words from the world and finding the "true words" hidden in every language; approximately 1 word per lect. As an example, the true word of the modern French language is "peste" in the sense of a bratty child, and absolutely every other part of the language can and should be thrown out, excluding cognates or loanwords now "owned" by other languages. There are as many exceptions as there are rules to this theoretical language, and the linguist often interrupts the flow of the story to explain them at length.
The linguist's pet theories and other eccentricities often put them at odds with the other people in their travels. They constantly alienate themselves from others while making little if any progress in their search, leading to a worsening mental crisis and more than one physical altercation for extremely specific reasons. One dispute escalates into a fistfight with a group of Neo-Nazis for their "crypto-Saxon revanchism" (rather than because they're, you know, Nazis). Another scuffle nearly gets the linguist hit by an irate New York taxi driver for insisting that dumplings be called farts, from French farce for stuffing. Toward the end of their journey, another incident involves the linguist ineffectually slapping people with a karakul cap at the Al-Salam Festival in Australia until they were arrested and escorted off the premises, ranting all the while about the "Idiqutic erasure" they saw in modern definitions of the word Uyghur.
Somehow, the linguist never catches a criminal charge.
The linguist eventually decides that the Seima-Turbino Phenomenon must in some way be the key to proving their theory. They illegally cross several national borders through Eurasia, before finally pausing to rest in a hidden camp in the Altai Mountains on the Sino-Russian border. The linguist believes they are being hunted by one or both governments for the knowledge they possess, and the diary ends as they resolve to seal it in a waterproof container and plunge it into a nearby lake to retrieve later.
The epilogue shifts point of view and describes how the diary and the abandoned remains of the linguist's camp were found by an equally anonymous hiker. The hiker guesses that the camp is decades old by the time they finally find them, and doubts that the linguist got what they were searching for. The hiker proves unusually adept at decoding the diary, which is revealed to have been written entirely in the linguist's own neo-Babelian conlang, which consists of a grab-bag of vocabulary from thousands of languages living and dead, all awkwardly stitched together on top of a grammar that vaguely resembles Esperanto.
The hiker debates destroying the diary, and remarks upon how strangely prescient the linguist was at times, before going home and sitting down for a plate of mutton farts.
9 Huginn, Where's Your Muninn?
Another children's book, less reprehensible in premise. Huginn & Muninn, the pair of ravens who fly across the world acting as spies for Old Norse mythology's Odin, have become separated. This is bad news for the little birds, because they rely upon one another to be a single functioning unit. Huginn (whose name means "thought") has all the smarts, but it's Muninn ("memory") who remembers everything.
The reader guides a clever but easily disoriented Huginn through several locations in the Scandinavian cosmology, helping them solve challenges that range from riddles and logic puzzles to fully articulated pop-out games. Surprisingly mythically-accurate portrayals of various saga stories can be seen playing out in the background of each page as the reader goes along, though Huginn is comically oblivious to them.
Ultimately, Huginn and Muninn are reunited after they find the latter trapped in a rather easily unlocked birdcage right outside Fensalir. Apparently they were pranked by one of Freyja's bored cats while the Vanr was visiting Frigg for brunch. The ravens embrace, thank the reader for their help, and then take wing together to tell Odin all that they've learned.
The book still hasn't found a publisher, despite its admitted charm. The most commonly cited reason in rejection letters is content deemed inappropriate for children. It probably has something to do with that one background illustration with Loki and the horse.
10 Substition
A "sub-supernatural thriller" detailing one government agent's very bad day.
The story opens with our protagonist, Agent Tomris, sitting at her dinner table on a drunken Thursday night with the muzzle of her pistol tickling at her soft palate. As Tomris mentally prepares to repaint the apartment walls and ceiling in Reptilian Brain 117, her life flashes before her eyes. These memory vignettes form the bulk of the story.
Tomris became obsessed with the supernatural early in life, and chased any avenue by which she could prove it real. This hunt became increasingly more desperate the older she got, as more and more magicians and occult traditions failed to deliver. Eventually she was on the cusp of giving up hope, when she found the Agency.
The Agency of Paranormal Research & Development is a secret department of the United States government, founded shortly after the end of the Second World War when it was discovered that the Germans and Soviets had similar programs. Emphasis 'had'; one was disbanded soon after the war for lack of progress, while the other was lost in a shipwreck on route to Argentina.
The Agency is also a colossal failure by all metrics, barely kept on life support by its shoestring budget and the efforts of overworked agents. It is forgotten and overlooked as much as it is secret. But Tomris joined the Agency's ranks anyway, to get closer to the supernatural.
There, she learned the greatest and most terrible truth of her entire life: the supernatural was extremely real- and also extremely boring. After nearly a century of research conducted across the globe, dozens of examples of paranormal activity were known to and even housed by the Agency. But most specimens are frustratingly unimpressive, and their underlying rules and explanations remained elusive.
For example, one of the first objects new agents are introduced to is the first to be discovered by the Agency: the Orb. The Orb is a seemingly plain sphere of tin 27.8cm in diameter, seated on a table in what has since become someone's office after the department went through another facility downsizing. The Orb is completely ordinary in all parameters, except that it weighs ~12% less than it should. Its composition and physics have been rigorously tested, but no light has been shed on why. It's... just a slightly light ball of metal.
Other impossibilities prove to be equally unimpressive: a stone coin that, when flipped, seems to accurately answer and even predict any Yes/No question related to someone's shoe insoles; a man from Milwaukee who can spontaneously generate over 15 liters of water from nowhere but only by sweating it out during moments of extreme stress, discovered because he was an acapella performer with stage fright; a corgi who cast no shadow so long as no one was looking at him (Mr. The Pippers was more of a beloved office pet than anything, and died of old age decades before Tomris's arrival), etc. Their natures are impenetrable, and their applications are useless, especially to a shadowy board of directors who would rather can the whole project already.
While the work is gratifying at first, the crushing reality of the situation (plus the long hours and lousy pay) start to take their toll on Tomris. She begins to question her entire life. So what if the paranormal is real, if all it is is this? What's the point? Why would the universe suck all the magic out of magic? This depression, combined with a B-plot about her caustic, estranged family, eventually brings Tomris to her dinner table with gun in hand.
The narrative snaps back to the present just as she begins to squeeze the trigger. But the positioning of the gun triggers her gag reflex, causing her to pull the gun out at the last moment. She survives, and the bullet only grazes her upper lip. A moment later, she receives a phone call from the Agency: a recently exposed cult might actually be onto something.
The point of view then abruptly shifts to that of a nameless six year-old girl who is being held captive by the so-called Order of the Grey-Litten Ingress, a millennialist cult dedicated to a being, energy, or concept (or all of the above at once) referred to as "Abiding in Silence". She and another two-dozen people of varying ages and backgrounds were kidnapped by the Order, and are slated to be sacrificed to pave their way into the next world.
The cult leader is interviewing each of the sacrifices before the ritual, and takes a keen interest in the girl's sharp tongue and wit. They engage in verbal sparring, debating the nature of knowledge, the question of salvation, and whether or not the cult's patron even exists. Slowly, the girl gains the upper hand on the cult leader. By the time the Agency is knocking down the doors to the cult's compound (after a lengthy delay spent squabbling with local law enforcement over jurisdiction), he is reduced to a catatonic wreck endlessly lamenting that 'magic is dead'.
In the final chapter the PoV switches back to Agent Tomris. The disorganized cult is subdued, nothing unnatural has a chance to happen, and all hostages are recovered- with the exception of the girl, who takes off into a nearby wetland upon the Agency's arrival. Tomris pursues her and gets lost for what feels like hours. She finally finds and tries to coax the girl back, saying they can reunite her with her family. The girl gives Tomris a smirk, then viscerally merges with a nearby mangrove tree, which proceeds to stand up and crabwalk its way deeper into the swamp.
Tomris finds herself back at the compound with another agent snapping their fingers in her face, saying that she had "zoned out" for a minute there. Disturbed but exhilarated, she contemplates what this encounter might mean as she changes the bandage on her lip.
