On Going For It
Hello! John here. I’m writing this post for Malarkey’s newsletter because Boxcutters, my short story collection, is coming out today. It’s also my birthday. I’m 34.
Oftentimes, when it comes to short story collections and the popular imagination, what you’re really selling is the author, and I’m not the most established voice. Sure, I’ve been at it a while, but primarily on the fringes of a nebulous online ecosystem of writers with more passion than credentials or conventional success, making art in the little pocket dimensions carved into a life.
Collections often have clear themes or at least a bent between literary or genre fiction (science fiction stories, horror stories, literary fiction—stories about motherhood, stories about love, etc.) Boxcutters isn’t a safe bet there, either. There’s a wide spread of scary stories and funny stories and bleak, sad, strange and magical stuff. Past, present, future, myth and cyberpunk and plumbing issues all bound up together in a life and in a book. I just felt like it all fit together. Thankfully, Alan agreed.
Some of my favorite books are collections that encompass wide, imaginative worlds while reveling in the warts on the skin of the human fruit. I go back constantly to George Saunder’s Pastoralia, Kij Johnson’s At the Mouth of the River of Bees, Ted Chiang’s Exhalation, Bradbury’s October Country, Keith Rosson’s Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons, Kafka’s Complete Stories and so many more. They emanate energy on the shelf.
As a reader, what I love most is when a writer is putting their whole ass into something. When they’re cultivating a dense garden of personal, political and symbolic meaning using language and structural choices that we have to take at face value if we want to stay along for the ride.
So Boxcutters is me going whole ass in the tradition of Malarkey: Expression done to meet its own standards, shared for readers who like that. It’s why Malarkey can do horror and poetry and historical lit and satire and coming of age back to back like it all adds up and reels you in. It’s the literary anarchy coming alive.
I’ve learned the best way to survive is to feel all my sadness and anger and happiness at once. Not to try and bury one or the other, but to let them live in synchronicity. Ebb and flow. That’s how I learned to keep at it, even when the sky was red and filled with smoke and people were dying or coming apart at the seams. It’s how it all made sense.
Boxcutters is fun. It’s caustic. It’s gracious. It’s furious and in love and in pain and it’s telling itself a lullaby. Writing it and putting it together and putting it out into the world has been amazing. I hope it works for you. I hope you get something good from it.
Thanks!
Best,
John
Praise for Boxcutters:
"If George Saunders injected more horror into his stories…if Philip K Dick was writing about the socio-economic problems plaguing today, or if Ligotti was a little less bleak…that's John Chrostek's Boxcutters! It's a beautiful and wild mix of myth and hope and utter sadness, strung together poetically to burrow beneath your skin. If you love writers who blend genres with seamless ease. Chrostek is the guy for you!"
—Corey Farrenkopf, author of Haunted Ecologies and Living in Cemeteries
“Boxcutters is a raw, bizarre and riotous collection of stories about falling through the cracks. Chrostek's characters endure the soullessness of materialism and their awful workplaces by searching for scraps of love in stuff like brawls, Amazon packages, iguanas, and plastic wigs. Perfect for weird fiction fans and anyone struggling with the angst and loneliness of our present time.”
—Ivy Grimes, author of Glass Stories
Get Boxcutters from Asterism Books.
Get Boxbutters from Amazo—no wait, they don’t have it because they’re stupid but you can get a signed copy from Evening House.