MILKSHAKE: A Novella from Long Day Press
With a voice reminiscent of Jesse Ball’s How to Set a Fire and Why, speaking from within a landscape like those found in Diane Cook’s Man V. Nature, MILKSHAKE is a sludge ballad of reincarnation, suburban squalor, kids’ meal toy burial grounds, mutant gators, fortune-telling mollusks, and the Low Country of Vermont. It is a sound like Doom, doom, doom, a fever dream of a novella in which fantasies of the mundane become an escape from a world in the throes of freak environmental crises.
MOUNT SUMMER: A Fiction Collection Available from Out to Lunch Records
A rented steam cleaner won’t stop spilling blood. Employees of a New England pizzeria try to wait out a worsening snowstorm. A boy discovers that a specific hardwood at the edge of a boat graveyard will ultimately be responsible for his death. Professional movers with hexed pasts race toward the ocean after being exposed to asbestos. A woman trades her apartment for a lake inhabited by a giant snapping turtle.
The stories of Mount Summer delve in people and towns left too long in the sun. They linger in the impermanence of beach communities and then follow their sunburned tourists back to the places they tried to leave.
Stories by Travis Dahlke
Illustrated by John Shields
Soundtrack by FiFac (Jeff Dragan)
Presented by Out to Lunch Records
ISBN: 9780578304885
King Ludd’s Rag No. 3
Issue 3 of King Ludd’s Rag, our zine of long-form fiction, features stories by Travis Dahlke and Tara Stillions Whitehead.
KLR is printed on regular computer paper and folded and stapled by hand. 56 pages. Purchase.
HOLLOW AS LEGS: A Novella from Otherwhere
‘Antique hexes and dead childhood dreams are revived in the mouth of a raging Connecticut snowstorm. Hollow as Legs dwells in the pre-math of an apocalypse, where an algal bloom is turning the infected into hair-covered ghosts.’
It’s ten days after Christmas morning. The dog days of winter-break bring homebound college kids on old paths with townies who never left. An anthropological account frames a plow driver trying to undo digressions with embezzlement while navigating neighborhoods in a night long with library books, 711 wine & Demi Lovato. An orphan leaves home to brave the storm and start anew after his foster parents fall ill. Waterslides in an abandoned amusement park reminisce on their younger, albeit darker days. A woman struggles to move on early to cope with the Alzheimer’s that is claiming her father.
Story by Travis Dahlke
101 1/2 pages softcover
Printed on a RISO RZ1070E, hand bound and numbered in Amsterdam
2017
Published by Otherwhere—