Officer Leon James slipped out the back door of the Quayside Oil Company, where he worked part-time as a security guard on the overnight shift. In his hand was a paper bag containing the cold meatball sub that he brought from home but had forgotten to eat. Instead, he’d spent his break dozing in an office chair, his chin nodding toward his chest . . .
Several years ago I lived in Las Cruces, New Mexico, forty miles from Ciudad Juárez, which at the time was the most dangerous city on the planet. I was in the middle of writing my novel, Sunland, and took long drives whenever I needed to think . . .
I watched them come home year after year from Iraq and Afghanistan, young men and women no older than my own children, some missing an arm or a leg, some terribly disfigured by bomb fragments, all damaged emotionally by what they had seen, and I knew I had to write about it . . .
She came up to me in the parking lot behind the Slung Rig after the show. The lot reeked of piss, puke, and exiled pizza scraps. Even the rats were too finicky to troll around this Hamden hole, where headbangers and punkers partied or balled inside their cars whenever there was a gig. Those who could get it on around this stench had a better constitution than me—that, or some sort of mutant fetish, but hell, that’s mutants for you . . .
[Video] View the book trailer for Robert Antoni’s As Flies to Whatless Boys!
Every Friday, the Akashic team highlights industry news, reviews, and features from around the web. This week’s roundup comes to you from Akashic intern Alia Maria Almeida!
Which reminds you of the first time you ever dropped acid.
Hardly anyone then had ever heard of LSD. But rumors dawned of a great new drug which let you see God, or someone similar. Apocryphal stories drifted like alien blimps through misty skies. How LSD had been discovered by an atheist Swiss chemist who got some on his hands and became a holy man. How Aldous Huxley had taken tons of it and left his dying body behind, rising like a comet into heaven . . .
Etzler’s Machines by John Adolphus Etzler (by Robert Antoni, from As Flies to Whatless Boys)