A woman in a car waves for cars to go around her. ICE agents issue conflicting commands, one telling her to go and another insisting she get out of the car. An ICE agent steps in front of her car, phone in one hand recording, the other hand going for his weapon. Terrified and confused, the woman backs up and turns her wheels so she won’t run over anyone. No one is in front of her car as she begins to go. The woman is shot by ICE. A physician begs to check on her. ICE officers refuse. “We have our own medics.” “Where are they?” a woman screams. She is told to relax. “How can I relax when you just killed my fucking neighbor?” Medics don’t arrive for fifteen minutes. Meanwhile, two minutes after shooting the woman, the killer walks away calmly, gets in his car, and drives away.
In a normal world:
Law enforcement would look like law enforcement, not masked goons cosplaying their power fantasies. They’d have better training. ICE would conform to codes of conduct and have stricter rules of engagement than soldiers do in a war zone. Peace officers ask themselves, “Must I shoot?”, not “Can I shoot?” Being filmed should temper ICE response. It doesn’t. The shooter shouldn’t have walked away. His superior should have taken his weapon as evidence for the investigation. Call it what it is. He fled a crime scene.
In a better world, those in power could admit mistakes. They would announce that there would be an investigation. They wouldn’t lie so badly that anyone could see the difference between what they say and what all the video shows. The President wouldn’t claim the shooter had been run over and was recovering in the hospital. The vice president wouldn’t libel the murdered woman. Yale-trained sophist JD Vance (AKA James Donald Bowman alias James David Hamel) would know the difference between “immunity” and impunity.”
And remember when Kristi Noem claimed they had arrested the girlfriend of the founder of Antifa?
Whatever happened to that case? How has the press forgotten it? The original Antifa emerged in Europe early in the last century. That girlfriend must really be a tough old lady not to have given up all her secrets by now.
At the conclusion of Citizen Second Class, I found a relatively peaceful way out from under a grasping authoritarian regime. That was fiction. Reality is not so neat.
Getting a good review from Publishers Weekly is a big deal. Getting a rave review feels amazing. When Amazon sabotaged my launch of Endemic, the pandemic was raging, and I was in a lot of pain that could only be fixed with eight pounds of titanium and ceramic implants in my hips. I was pretty down. Endemic has won several awards (the best and biggest was the North Street Book Prize). My hips are now fixed, I’m pain-free, and writing consistently again. A review from PW is icing on the literary cake. The PW review of Vengeance Is Hers appears in print mid-October, and PW’s review of Endemic is coming at the end of October.
THE PUBLISHERS WEEKLY REVIEW OF ENDEMIC
Chute is no stranger to dystopian fiction, and he uses Covid-19 as inspiration for this adroit thriller, reimagining New York City as an anarchic, post-pandemic fortress where the remnants of humanity are both brutally vicious and quietly resilient. Introverted and riddled with anxiety, Ovid Fairweather keeps her head down. She maintains a secret rooftop garden, trading produce for the necessities of survival—and small luxuries. Once a book editor, Ovid is the unlikely heroine of her own life, but this existence has cracked her protective shell, and she’s no longer willing to bow to oppressors.
Ovid’s first-person narration captures the bizarre banality of post-apocalyptic life, accompanied by the “voice in my head that spoke like a tough British man.” That wry running commentary plays out against marauders roaming the city streets and looting whomever they please. Everything is scarce (especially trustworthy people), but Ovid would rather fight in New York than flee to safety in Maine, where her cruel father beckons. She’s a protagonist who’s haunted by memories of being belittled and bullied but refuses to accept her past reactions in her present circumstances; when someone who knew Ovid before the pandemic threatens to destroy everything she’s built, she decides it’s no longer enough to outrun her past—she must kill the person she used to be.
While ratcheting up tension with the Memory Keepers, who impose a new level of tyranny and violence, Chute (Our Zombie Hours) keeps the plot focused on Ovid’s evolution. Along with the everyday terrors outside, she hears echoes from past therapy sessions and tries to piece together her fractured identity. But to move forward, Ovid must unleash a long-suppressed part of herself and commit acts she’s only read about in books. The virus in Endemic is a potent force eroding the underpinnings of society, but Chute celebrates the humans who, left to fend for themselves, decide that meek doesn’t mean powerless.
Takeaway: Pandemic ravages NYC but brings reticent woman roaring back to life.
Comparable Titles: Ling Ma’s Severance, Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark.
Production grades Cover: A Design and typography: A Editing: A Marketing copy: A
Writing Life Update
My wife and daughter are currently enjoying the sunny south of France and mocking me with photos of croissants. They sent me pictures of amazing views of Monaco and Nice, sure,BUT LOOK AT THOSE CROISSANTS!
Meanwhile, I am at home in rainy Other London, cocooning on a stay-at-home writing retreat. I start each day with a long writing session. I’m holding back on spending time on new Vocab Menace videos (just for ten days) to focus on the vaunted Work in Progress. I’m not sure where this thriller is going yet, but I’m enjoying the ride. I’m aiming for 65,000 words (or so). Lately, I’ve been writing BIG HONKIN’ TOMES, so I’m aiming for something that’s delicious but less intimidating to readers who are looking for a quick adventure between the sheets (sheets of paper, you pervs)!
Originally, I’d planned nothing but marathon writing sessions. Thing is, after a few hours at it from the early morning, I need to recharge. It’s turned into an unexpectedly eventful week in the off-writing hours. Yesterday, I had a coffee date and caught up with a fellow writer. I’m reading more, too.
I’ve been riding my bike and hitting the gym for one to two hours a day, cleaned the house, rented a carpet cleaner for the basement carpet, and got a chipped tooth fixed. In the past, I’ve chipped teeth sparring. That was exciting. How I did it this time, I have no idea, but it was expensive and less exciting. Tomorrow, I get to hang out with Russ (my favorite Mennonite, wise sage, and beta reader extraordinaire).
After today’s writing session, I’m spending the day with my son. Archery time is booked after catching up over lunch. I’ll take him for an exciting trip to a grocery store and maybe some temporary tattoos to freak out She Who Must Be Obeyed upon her return from France. I also slept on her side of the bed. She’ll hate that. Vengeance shall be mine!
And she better goddamn well bring me back a croissant. I mean, jeez! Look at those beauties!
There’s still time to work on another chapter. I’m on it. Have a week! (And read and review my books!)
Get ready to fight to the death. You might even have to fight beyond death.
AFTER was constructed to save us. When the medical biotech is weaponized, AFTER becomes an agent of warfare. Infected humans transform into rampaging killers. No one is safe.
Task Force Officer Daniel Harmon has one job: Stop the epidemic before it escapes a military research lab. As the body count rises, he’ll discover a dark conspiracy that will change our fate forever.
They will call this Apocalypse. We call it Revolution. On which side will you fall?
From the author of This Plague of Days comes a fresh zombie trilogy about technology gone horribly awry. It will feel too real.
One of the strangest turns in the news came this week when an alarming and easily predicted future became mundane history. Trump posted, “Long live the King.” That wasn’t surprising. However, some of his cult members backed him by celebrating. “Trump is king!” Many of these same folks post 1776 in their social media bios. Knuckleheaded knuckledraggers may know their country’s history. It seems they’ve abandoned the values they claimed they most cherished. Monarchy is back, baby! Get used to it!
Reminds one of the so-called evangelicals who, last year, decided to let go the gentler teachings of Christ. Jesus was “too woke” for our troubled times, apparently. They still call themselves Christian, just meaner and in a roid rage, I guess.
What feeds this nonsense? Bias.
There are many types of cognitive bias that affect us. There is hindsight bias, loss aversion bias, the gambler’s fallacy, and the beastly Dunning-Kruger effect. The D-K effect plus confirmation bias is a lethal combination, dangerous to civilization.Those are the better-known afflictions. I have a couple of favorites that may not be on your radar:
Survivor Bias
Survivor bias goes like this: “We live in a land of opportunity! I make a lot of money, so why can’t everybody else?”
This bias plays into the myth of the self-made individual. It ignores a plethora of historical, systemic, and personal variables. This bias turns the principle of fair financial compensation into a cruel game of keep-away. When interviewed, successful people often extol the virtue of hard work. Only a few self-aware ones say, “I worked hard, but I got incredibly lucky! I made it, but I’m not altogether sure how, but I know I’m an outlier.” It’s much more tempting to believe “I built X and now own a couple of yachts because I’m a genius.”
Lots of people work hard and are never adequately compensated. If success were so easily replicable, more people would attain it. For instance, if you’re a nepobaby who won the genetic lottery, the path to stardom is paved with pillows. Nobody who catches those breaks talks about that. When asked the secret to their success, I’ve heard actors say, “I know my lines and I show up on time.” Learning a script can be difficult, but showing up on time? You mean like every other employee on the planet? That’s blind privilege talking, you handsome dunce. That’s survivor bias.
Survivor bias doesn’t come up first as one of the more lethal societal ills, but it is dangerous. It feeds a delusion that’s used as a cudgel on the oppressed and unfortunate. If the poor deserve to be poor, you only care if you’re poor. Not much room for kindness and mercy there, huh? Survivor bias makes its believer a terrible person and everyone else worse off.
Normalcy Bias
An author friend messaged me to ask, since I write apocalyptic novels, does our current political situation feel like I’m living in one of my books? I’ve written about the many ways empires fall. My back catalog includes zombies, vampires, AI domination, killer robots, alien invasion, meteors, climate crises, disease, nuclear conflagration, mass poverty, and famine. Lots of fun to explore in fiction, right? What’s unfolding now, though? I couldn’t write it because so much of it sounds outlandish, too dumb, and replete with hissy fits. Nuclear stockpile inspectors and warhead assembly experts getting fired en masse sounds too silly, doesn’t it?That happened. Then somebody said, “Oopsy! Get them back! Where are their email addresses? What do you mean you deleted their email addresses?”
The doomsday clock is now 89 seconds to midnight. The world is teetering toward all your worst nightmares. Still, we carry on, believing that cooler heads will prevail. That, my friends, is normalcy bias.
The courts decided they couldn’t allow a presidential candidate to go to jail for even one day for his crimes. He should have been confined for contempt and endangering officers of the court, at the very least. Didn’t happen. Couldn’t happen. That was normalcy bias at its dark and dirty work. You’ve always been told no one is above the law. Obviously not so.
The objection always comes to changing circumstances: “X can’t happen because it’s never happened before. It would be unprecedented!”
This is a recurring theme in my fiction (and my answer to this complaint):
Everything is unprecedented until it’s not.
Normalcy bias keeps you dangerously comfortable. It assures you that the health insurance you have relied on will always be there for you. Why? Because it always has been. To lose it would be unprecedented! (See above.)
Normalcy bias kept endangered people from fleeing Germany before World War II broke out. Normalcy bias assures people that all their investments are safe until the stock market collapses. Normalcy bias made Canadians, Mexicans, and all NATO allies feel that the United States government would be their friend. The news reveals the truth: People have friends. Governments have interests.
Human behavior, mental illness, and neurobiology are interests I try to monetize by writing novels with flawed characters. Sometimes, they suffer mental health issues like mine (anxiety, for one instance). Other times, they use their knowledge to manipulate others. It’s fun in fiction. When cognitive biases dominate our media intake and the political sphere, ignorant people transform into monsters and innocent people suffer and die. Our biases make us more vulnerable to personal and systemic failure. Ignorance can be cured easily, but stupid is much more complicated.
Biases kill.
(On the other hand, when I meet with literary agents in April, I’ll pull from my bag of tricks in the pitch meetings to sell my next book, but that’s another post. Villainous laughter: Mwah-ha-ha-ha!) In the meantime, have you read All Empires Fall yet?
You know I write novels about apocalyptic events. I’ve always been fascinated by the ways in which empires fall. But what’s at the root of end-of-the-world stories?I saw the seed of it so clearly during the pandemic.Too many fools who failed high school biology and claimed to be big strong patriots were unwilling to suffer the mildest inconvenience of wearing a mask.
That’s how you get this:
And this:
A former CIA agent was asked what will cause the downfall of civilization. He answered, “Sophistry.” Add in a dearth of empathy, and I think he’s right.Too many people figure, “Hey, it’s not happening to me, so I don’t care.” They are too confident they aren’t next on the chopping block.For instance, universal health care doesn’t poll so well with Americans who have not dealt with private health insurance companies. Those must be the same folks who are mystified by the lack of interest in prosecuting the killer of a health insurance CEO.
People who do deal with private health insurance companies understand. There are too many horrific stories out there.The main cause of bankruptcy in the United States is medical debt. That’s a broken system.
The best metaphor I’ve heard comes from the Cognitive Dissonance podcast:
An emergency room doctor was treating a patient. You run in and pin the doctor’s arms to their sides. You’d be responsible for the patient’s death. Stopping doctors from doing their jobs is too often what private health insurers do.
Farther afield:
IDF snipers shoot children in the head. They target children, yet there are barely whispers of objections in the mainstream press. For those who do object to the murder of children are told, “That’s war. Grow up.” Children are conflated with terrorists. Meanwhile, it’s clear Israel’s leaders care nothing for the hostages. If they cared, they wouldn’t bomb Gaza to rubble.
That level of carelessness is how you get this:
Let’s try a little thought experiment:
If a terrorist is using your mum as a human shield, do you shoot, or do you try to find another way?
Sit with that a moment before you answer. It’s a monster test. Are you a monster?
Meanwhile, closer to home:
Donald Trump disrespects Canada and threatens our sovereignty. Too many write it off as a joke. The melon felon also wants to end birthright citizenship and weaken American forces by expelling democrats and transgender people (among a plethora of other offenses to morality and reason)..Many democrats who serve are officers, but damn the consequences so the Dear Leader’s fee-fees aren’t hurt.
The point is not whether DJT can or will do these things. The point is he wants to do these things and is threatening his best ally.He is careless with his words and actions. That is not something anyone sane wants to see from anyone holding the nuclear codes.
I predict a wave of regret much bigger than Brexit. FAFO.
Idolizing elites is how you get this:
My fiction explores the psychology of the underbelly of society. When I watch the news, I’m so often reminded of a Christopher Titus joke:
Civilization is a train. All the doctors, engineers, builders, and scientists are up front in the locomotive. The engine pulls a long train of cars carrying the goofs, the conspiracy theorists, the science-deniers, and flat earthers. One smart person at the back of the engine is looking down at the coupling responsible for hauling all those dumbasses. And he’s thinking, if I pull that pin, we could go so much faster and farther.
Yeah. The only thing saving the smooth brains is our empathy as we desperately try to drag their heavy asses into the future instead of retreating into the dark past.
If you’re looking for hope in the end, there’s this:
I’m happy to be working on a thriller about vigilante justice. The apocalyptic genre has much cooled. This Plague of Days provides many solid tips for doomsday preppers, but fewer readers are inclined to read end-of-the-world stories when they fear they’re about to actually experience them. Citizen Second Class seems closer to where we’re now headed.
President-elect Trump is threatening 25% tariffs on America’s principal trading partners, Canada, China, and Mexico. Every economist is certain that it will increase prices, slow the global economy, and hurt poor people most. Today, I’m hearing several commentators saying he doesn’t mean it. It’s supposedly an opening negotiation tactic, but how can they know? They’re giving him too much credit. Such tactics suggest there’s a strategy and foresight, but Trump’s history is chaotic. He tends to get his opinion from whoever last spoke to him. Destruction of the economy and punishment of the poor is definitely on the table.
While immunologists worry about H1N1 jumping species to humans, RFK wants to freeze immunization research and remove mandates for common vaccines (which is absolutely not how herd immunity works). He thinks the solution to depression is simply to send the afflicted to farms where they have no access to processed food. While Biden wants to get weight-loss drugs covered by insurance, Kennedy wants to ban them. Amid a long-standing epidemic of dangerous obesity and diabetes, RFK says the answer is simply to eat healthy foods. Gee, why didn’t we think of that? For a former heroin addict, he sure doesn’t understand addiction.
Recently, Bill Maher hosted a Stanford-educated doctor who claims med school taught her nothing valuable and that eliminating processed foods is the answer to all metabolic problems. So, “Doctor,” aside from the problematic classism in that stance, you’re telling me that RFK has all the answers, and Trump supporters everywhere will breathe a sigh of relief when you take away all their hamberders?
There was one powerful person who advocated healthy eating, and they condemned her as a communist and a fascist. Remember? Her name was Michelle Obama.
Everything is unprecedented until it’s not.
This post is not a prediction. This is a warning.
Another commentator suggests that all the stuff about tariffs will prove a distraction from Trump’s real goals. Namely, to persecute minorities, transgender people, and the undocumented. Rather than deport undocumented immigrants, the real money may be in the for-profit prison industry as these people, and the unhoused, are put in camps.Trump even plans to eliminate birthright citizenship. A lot of potential for collateral damage there, even among many of those who voted for the Trump presidency.If he goes through with his stated intentions, expect a rise in crime, stress, chaos, and a recession. A lot of people will definitely get hurt. I can’t say how many will be killed due to malice and recklessness.
I write novels. It’s fiction, but I extrapolate from the state of the world.Citizen Second Class, for instance, relied heavily on the premise that the ultra-rich elite would imprison, disenfranchise, and exploit lower classes. In a new society based on classism, racism, and sexism, the over-privileged Illuminati would enter fortified conclaves to keep the starving masses outside their walls. It was supposed to entertain and provoke thought. It wasn’t supposed to be a prediction or prescription.
So, what’s next?
I’ve never heard leftists speak the way some did after Kamala Harris failed to win the White House. I ran across a vocal minority on social media who had become more interested in self-defense, namely arming up. Others sound like the preppers and doomers I’ve written about in This Plague of Days. At the very least, those who could are stocking up on foodstuffs in anticipation of a rise in the cost of living.
I suspect many people will withdraw from political action if they have that privilege. Some people who were politically active will find solace in sports, music, and whatever else soothes them. Maybe more people will read again, much like they did during the height of the pandemic. Others will be spurred to reorganize to meet the moment when the mid-terms and the next presidential election arrive.
It is silly to say, “He didn’t do it last time, so he won’t this time.” Last time, he had a few people holding him back. Last time, the Supreme Court didn’t make him a king who could do no wrong. This time, he’s surrounded by hateful, sycophantic nuts.
Another favorite: “I like him because he says what he means. Now let me bend your ear on why he doesn’t really mean the bad stuff.” Trump’s stated intentions for changes in tax policy, immigration, deportation, foreign policy, and tariffs comprise a perfect storm of humanitarian and economic disaster.
Petulance is not a policy. It’s the basis for recrimination for his grievances, and it won’t help his constituency. He’s not even interested in serving all Americans.I don’t have to extrapolate into the future to say that. We need only look at his history.
If you are happy Donald Trump was elected, no worries for you. No one listens to my warnings, anyway. What’s making some of his supporters nervous are the voices of liberals saying, “Okay, you won. Now we’ll see if you’ll enjoy what you voted for. You assumed he’d only come for us. Wait. We’ll see how you feel when the melon felon affects you.”
I take no pleasure in this. I prefer disasters described in fiction. It seems that if you want real positive, progressive change, it’s up to the accelerationists now.
I was pleased to be informed today that the Hollywood Book Festival chose four of my books for awards and recognition! Endemic took first place in the science fiction category (just as it had at the New York Book Festival) while the This Plague of Days Omnibus won runner-up. The Night Man placed first in the genre category and Amid Mortal Words received honorable mention in sci-fi.
Writers work long hours in solitude and obscurity. Novelists toil away at keyboards making shit up, often not knowing where we’re going and doubting what we’re doing. Reviews and fan letters fuel our fervor. Recognition of our work by book contests gives a rare and wonderful boost.
We celebrated the wins with a feast of Chinese food. The shrimp har gow and sweet butter coconut buns were delicious.
