Some Words About Awful People
A little note from Axel Kolcow
Scott Mitchel May’s Awful People: A Ghost Story is not a novel I would’ve picked up on my own but hooboy am I glad I walked into it. May throws a lot at the reader in the opening pages: a shadowy government organization, adultery, drugs, and weird parapsychological shit. The narrative skips around time and character and the story unfolds like an inferno.
On my first read-through, I recognized people I’ve known in these characters. Jed is a lot like my ex-fiancé but a hell of a lot smarter. Molly is every woman who has ever offered me a bump at a party. Michael is my least favorite kind of man. Baker is my second least-favorite man. Frank is, well, you’ll see about Frank Novinsky yourself if you preorder the book. And I recognized myself in some of these characters. In Jesse’s struggle with stand-up comedy and in his struggle to belong. In the way Helen responds when her all-male coworkers casually sexually harass her. Even in The Bear’s private little mind games. The novel is painfully, artfully real even as impossible things occur.
It’s also incredibly funny. The jokes and ironies hit as much on the second read-through. Doing that second read, I found myself pausing to re-read entire passages even though I didn’t have to. I took a lot of pleasure in tracking the plot threads May laid early-on only to tie everything together at the end. And every bite of thematic expression tasted even better on the second go. This is a novel that rewards multiple readings.
The ghosts are us, my friends. We’re the awful people and we are the pasts haunting our presents. But also there are literal or semi-literal ghosts in this book. And telekinesis, divorce, bologna that dents metal, Lyndon B. Johnson, impossible mental powers, way too much LSD, fried chicken so good you’d slap your mama for it, going viral, a head that explodes, and an exploration of deep human questions that keep us all up at night. It’s great. It’s great and you should read it, too.
Axel B. Kolcow is an artist, writer, and performer living in the Rust Belt. They are the Deputy Editor of Taco Bell Quarterly and an editor/publicist for Death of Print. Find more of their work at bkolcow.com.
Awful People, a novel by Scott Mitchel May, published by Death of Print, a division of Malarkey Books Corp. & Co. Inc. & Sons, is available now pretty much anwhere that sells good books.
Final note: also sorry, TinyLetter, our now-former newsletter host, got swallowed up and shut down by MailChimp, and MailChimp is kind of expensive. We set up an account with Ghost, only to discover it was going to cost $50 a month. That’s $600 a year! So at the last minute we migrated to substack (we probably will turn on paid subscriptions, but we won’t hide our writing behind a paywall; instead it will be an alternative way to subscribe to our book club, or King Ludd’s Rag, although we will probably just have like a tip subscription option too, or slush fund option we can draw on to pay for short stories). We run our website through Squarespace, which does have an email campaigns service, but it’s also pricey and frankly kind of cumbersome. Everything is expensive, except, perhaps, for our books. Anyway on the plus side we publish short stories on our website sometimes and I think we’ll start blasting them out in our newsletter moving forward too. Never going to do a deluge of newsletter posts, but sometimes there will be one that’s a short story, and sometimes there’ll be one that’s some random note from a Malarkey editor. Who knows. Life is a mystery. I do want to say we never planned on publishing Scott’s book, but it sure has been a pleasure. Sorry to all the writers who had work coming out on