Little Dead Body Map

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while; I guess “Little Dead Body Map” is arguably old news. But it does mark Jason Howell Hamilton‘s return to public writing — and now I’ve linked his Substack, so you can read the new news.

I met Jason on Wattpad, which is now an incubator for the occasional YA or thriller bestseller and, I can only imagine, the world’s most slash-savvy large language model. He ran a group called 100/20, which it took me a while to realize meant “100 writers over 20 years old,” a small act of resistance against the prevailing current of One Direction fanfic (those teens are closing out their twenties now). It was a good group of humans, many of whom I followed to Twitter and the blogosphere when the juice from Wattpad felt less and less worth the squeeze of posting, reading, and commenting. He moved from there to his own website, which hosted a more public version of another themed thread he’d been doing on Wattpad called “THE ?UESTIONS,” which was just putting questions to the group of writers he’d accumulated. I’d always thought it was a huge shame when he retired it — and I’m not linking it now, since it appears to have been bought by some nice folks who are very passionate about their chosen career of installing malware on your browser. After six years, I’m glad he’s back.

“Little Dead Body Map” kicks off what I think I can call a strain of neo-Howlarian writing, which tastes a little like water from a gascan and feels like the black gunk that accumulates on untrafficked surfaces on subway platforms, if you ground it between your thumb and finger. It’s grounded in the parts of the Bay area where the engineers don’t live, the administrative state they don’t have to deal with, and the technological systems they might create but are not bound by. It might be like if Stephen Graham Jones grew up in Oakland. If that sounds good, subscribe.

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Currently listening: THE LAST HOUSE ON NEEDLESS STREET, by Catriona Ward.

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If you’re a fantasy reader in the market for a different twist on dragons, have a look at BRIMSTONE SLIPSTREAM, the opening novella in the Streets of Flame series — free to download on all the major retailers.