Ninja weapon shortage. College football shoe scandal. Record humidity — supersaturation — dew point of complete absurdity. A group is claiming they have the legal constitutional right to storm the cockpit of any commercial flight and take over the controls of the jet because Jesus said you can in the new American edition edible picture Bible. On some Sunday morning talk show, an old man in a Punisher muscle shirt pointed at the fine print on the back of a yellowed Hooters Air ticket, interspersed with the same commercial for a meat gun filled with liquid bacon the station played every 90 seconds. A few days from now, seventeen flights would get emergency diverted, two shot down by F-22 interceptors. A thousand deaths, eight million dollars of AIM-120 AMRAAM missiles in action, who knows how many insurance settlements for families of the deceased. People don’t know when to say when anymore.

Atmospheres 2 is out now in print and on Kindle. There’s not much more than the back cover description out there, so I thought I’d talk a bit more about the book.

Atmospheres 2 is an experimental novel that’s about living in an apocalyptic world where reality is no longer real, or it’s impossible to separate reality from several chaotic monetized alternate realities that people think are real. Sound familiar? It’s not a conventional high-concept sci-fi thriller with a solid plot device to carry you through a precise three-act arc where the anti-hero saves the day. It’s a full-on barrage of absurdity, a collage that covers several distinct themes throughout the book.

When I say experimental, what I mean is there isn’t a conventional narrative, but instead a series of loosely interconnected stories with recurring characters and motifs that follow a through line through the book. It’s 100 segments, arranged in three acts, each segment a thousand-word world of its own. Half of them are third-person and half of them are first-person, following an unnamed Trusty Narrator through the chaos. At one level, it’s like flipping through a hundred random channels of cable TV, tuning in to a specific story or scene, then changing the channel. But sometimes an idea appears, vanishes, and comes up later in an altered form, consistently poking at the question, “What is reality?”

The book takes place in a near-future reality, a shifting landscape of corrupt corporate America, dead malls, abandoned cities, desolate highways, anonymous hotels, and the debris of a failed society that’s been pumped full of stimulants and electrons of every format. Aside from the interleaving pieces jumping between the Narrator and reality, the book shifts from conversation to road journal to cable news to corporate press release to cultural criticism to disaster reporting.

There are three distinct acts in the book, and they help define the different themes that run through the entire novel:

• Act 1 - Atmospheres focuses on the alteration of perception by technology. Social media, fake news, corporate prestidigitation, and manufactured celebrity are all explored. I know this can be trite and overplayed these days, and everyone’s writing about enshittification and why kids need to get off their damn phones. I think like the other themes in the book, I don’t lean in too hard on one side of the issue, but just show the absurdity and madness. This questions whether reality is real or just an unstable simulation built from brands, sound bites, manufactured media, and algorithms.

  I write a lot about the hellscape of unchecked corporate consolidation. It’s a world 99% owned and operated by the Fortune 5, where the same hedge fund that owns Arby’s, NASA, and Comcast also has control of the Air Force Global Strike Command and 2/3s of the American nuclear triad. Amtrak is now owned by Chuck E. Cheese, which is owned by Fairchild Aircraft, which is a division of Amazon. Pfizer bought Jack in the Box so they could sell their own customers heart medication. Boeing (which is a divsion of McDonald’s) had their sister company Northrop Grumman buy Proximo Spirits to distill fuel for their space program’s rockets. It’s all unregulated. It’s all for sale. It’s all completely absurd, but at least three times in the last two years of writing this book, I had to completely change a major plot line because something actually happened in real life. (Pizza Hut really got bought by a private equity firm that sells coffins? Yep.)

• Act 2 - Nightmares is about how this altered reality surfaces as violence and chaos. The main theme in this part of the book is “the cruelty is the point.” Corporations monetize suffering; authority turns to brutality to feel powerful; politics becomes completely corporate, only existing to turn resentment and loathing into common identity. The spectators of this reality watch on the sidelines until the sidelines collapse into disasters, plagues, and a catalog of horrors.

  The Narrator experiences what I feel every day: how do you navigate this when you don’t feel like either side? When nothing is real anymore, what is your reality? When the corporate ladder collapses leaving nothing to climb, what do you do in life? Does this hyper-reality of artificial identity mean you’re locked into the identity you formed with your social media, online purchases, and corporate history? Or does everyone’s obsession with this chaos and your lack of importance in the world mean you have total freedom?

• Act 3 - Visions is where the book turns much more surreal and dreamlike, where time loosens and reality completely collapses on itself. No spoilers here, but as the outside world turns to a complete apocalypse, the Narrator’s inner world drifts into a place where memory, fantasy, and experience completely melt into each other.

Oh, and it’s a comedy. Many LOLs ensue, trust me.

This book is probably more political than any of my other ones, but I don’t lean heavily into hack political satire. It’s also, despite everything that happens on the surface, probably one of my most deeply personal books. It’s about aging, regret, resentment, depression, and mortality. It’s about attempting to escape, be it with work, travel, addiction, food, or nostalgia, and how none of those provides a real exit.

Like I said previously, it took me almost 12 years to write this book. It constantly mutated as I changed and the world changed. I don’t feel I could ever really finish it, so I’m happy I was eventually able to reach a stopping point and present this to you. I hope you get a chance to read it.

I’m happy to announce that my twentieth book, Atmospheres 2, is now available on on Rumored Books.

TL;DR:

• Kindle
• Print
• Book page

Atmospheres 2 is an experimental novel about living in the chaos of a world where reality has become impossible to separate from the machinery that creates it. It’s a panorama of anxiety and existential dread set in a chaotic place where corporations and politics have become intertwined to the point of absurdity. The three acts of the book follow an unnamed character simply called Your Trusty Narrator, as he stumbles through an alienated life of corporate underemployment and altered reality. He struggles on a Sisyphean journey to find meaning in an existence that is quickly collapsing on itself, wondering if he’s the only person who notices.

This book is a sequel to my 2014 book Atmospheres, although it’s not a direct sequel with the same cast of characters, continuing the last book like a Spider-Man movie. It’s the same world, some of the same settings, the same general tone and philosophy. It’s also made of 100 segments arranged in three acts, alternating between first-person and third-person. But it’s more than twice as long (544 pages versus the original’s 242 pages), and I think the writing is a bit more dense, so there’s a lot going on. I think many readers will think the book is entirely plotless, but in some ways, it has a stronger underlying plot than most everything else I’ve written.

I’d like to think I write fiction, but I don’t even know at this point. It’s hard to be an absurdist when the actual news is far more ludicrous than anything I could write. This book is more political than anything I’ve done before, but it’s not a politics book. It captures a lot of the Kafkaesque inanity and dread about having politics devolve into a fully corporate swindle. But I think the main theme here is dancing around the larger question of identity a world where attention, self-identity, and reality has been completely strip-mined for monetization.

I started this book in 2014, and struggled for years to land it. It’s very much a “kitchen sink” book like Atmospheres and Rumored to Exist are, but I think it’s a distinctly different thing. It’s always a challenge to throw tons of everything into a manuscript and then try to arrange it with a through line, make everything jam with everything else. Coming up with the strategy of the whole thing and sticking to it was the hardest part to turn around, but like its predecessor, a lot of this is focused on the tactical level of having each segment be its own thing. I think a lot of people didn’t read Atmospheres straight through, but would open it to a random page and read one or two segments and enjoy them. I’m doing the same thing here, but it’s also something that someone invested in the book could read from 0 to 100 as a novel.

No, I did not use AI to write the book. I think I got a full manuscript done maybe five years before GPT-2 was even announced. I have a lot more to say about this, but I’ll save it for another post.

This is the longest I’ve ever worked on a single manuscript. It was interrupted by a lot of things: a pandemic, two graduate degrees, nine other books, two broken arms, and everything else in life. I keep a journal of notes in each book I write, and the one in this book is absolute madness. 24 hours of writing in Singapore, thousands of words of notes taken at the Ho Chi Minh airport, a bunch of editorial changes done while in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. There’s a lot more to say about the general history of this book and how it radically changed over the years. Something else to write about later.

Anyway, the book’s out. Hope you get a chance to check it out.