The People's Republic of Everything Read online

  Praise for The People’s Republic of Everything

  “Mamatas at his best. Makes me laugh. Makes me drop things. Makes me read on. Makes me run for cover.”

  —Terry Bisson, author of Bears Discover Fire

  “Nick Mamatas is the gadfly that makes the horse buck—whip-smart and no bullshit and with one hell of a bite. These are canny, nimble stories that navigate between genre and literature, and are unlike what anyone else is writing.”

  —Brian Evenson, author of The Warren and Fugue State

  “How does speculative fiction retain its relevance in an era when daily events feel fictitious and the mere possibility of a future seems speculative? If anyone knows the answer, it’s Nick Mamatas. The People’s Republic of Everything is a great leap forward. Let’s hope there’s somewhere to land.”

  —Jarett Kobek, author of I Hate the Internet

  “Mamatas extracts the essence of several subgenres and cult followings that are in themselves so niche, obscure, and esoteric, and creates a genre that is uniquely him . . . Kerouac’s language, Lovecraft’s atmosphere, and Bukowski’s coarseness.”

  —Infinite Text

  “Mamatas is such a great novelist that it’s easy to forget he also writes superb short stories. This collection is a testament to his short-form chops, and a powerful one at that.”

  —LitReactor

  Praise for I Am Providence

  “Just what I’d expect from Nick Mamatas: sharp wit, biting but humane social commentary, and, for the romantics among us, a faceless narrator decomposing at the morgue.”

  —Matt Ruff, author of Bad Monkeys and Lovecraft Country

  “Mamatas knows his subject inside and out, and that makes I Am Providence all the more cutting. He’s a fan himself, as well as a skeptic, and he turns his considerable authority and satirical skill toward skewering the subculture that’s grown up around Lovecraft over the past century.”

  —Jason Heller, NPR

  “Dark and hilarious . . . I Am Providence is that murder-mystery-in-a-writers-convention you didn’t even know you wanted, but (like the human skin-bound book which propels the plot) you really must buy.”

  —Lavie Tidhar, author of Central Station and The Violent Century

  “[Starred Review] A great choice for readers who enjoyed Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country; those who liked the dark humor, mystery, and speculative elements in Ben H. Winters’ The Last Policeman trilogy; and anyone who has ever been part of a fandom.”

  —Booklist

  “Dark and funny, a fantastic mix of horror and mystery. It pokes fun at tropes—both meta or otherwise—and successfully skewers some of the more ridiculous aspects of the publishing industry.”

  —LitReactor

  Praise for Under My Roof

  “[Starred Review] A big-bang ending caps the fast-paced novel, and there’s much fun to be had watching Mamatas merrily skewer his targets.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “What about the Great American Suburban Novel? Somewhere in there, as of now, you almost have to include Nick Mamatas’ Under My Roof, an oddball, occasionally hilarious, surprisingly wise and out-and-out subversive little pocket-nuke of a book.”

  —San Diego Union Tribune

  Praise for Sensation

  “Nick Mamatas continues his reign as the sharpest, funniest, most insightful and political purveyor of post-pulp pleasures going. He is the People's Commissar of Awesome.”

  —China Miéville, bestselling author of The City & the City

  “Mamatas is a powerfully acerbic writer, both in fiction and online. His acid wit is infamous, and it is on splendid display in Sensation, which is alive with scornful insight about pop culture, the net, and politics. I recommend it highly.”

  —Cory Doctorow, bestselling author of Walkaway

  Praise for The Damned Highway

  “The book is incredibly entertaining and, aside from a strange turn towards the end, is a great trip through a fictional history of the 1972 presidential elections.”

  —HorrorTalk

  “[A] clever, disturbing, and absurd (in the best sense) mash-up of Lovecraft and Hunter S. Thompson that mad our recommended gift list for the year.”

  —Weird Fiction Review

  Also By Nick Mamatas

  Novels

  Move Under Ground (2005)

  Under My Roof (2007)

  Sensation (2011)

  The Damned Highway (with Brian Keene, 2011)

  Love Is the Law (2013)

  The Last Weekend (2014)

  I Am Providence (2016)

  Short story collections

  3000 MPH in Every Direction at Once (2003)

  You Might Sleep . . . (2009)

  The Nickronomicon (2014)

  Anthologies (as editor)

  The Urban Bizarre (2004)

  Realms (with Sean Wallace, 2008)

  Spicy Slipstream Stories (with Jay Lake, 2008)

  Realms 2 (with Swan Wallace, 2009)

  Haunted Legends (with Ellen Datlow, 2010)

  The Future is Japanese (with Masumi Washington, 2012)

  Phantasm Japan (with Masumi Washington, 2014)

  Hanzai Japan (with Masumi Washington, 2015)

  Mixed Up (with Molly Tanzer, 2017)

  Nonfiction

  Kwangju Diary (with Jae-Eui Lee & Kap Su Seol, 1999)

  Insults Every Man Should Know (2011)

  Starve Better (2011)

  Quotes Every Man Should Know (2013)

  The Battle Royale Slam Book (with Masumi Washington, 2014)

  Poetry

  Cthulhu Senryu (2006)

  The People’s Republic of Everything

  Copyright © 2018 by Nick Mamatas

  This is a collected work of fiction. All events portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form without the express permission of the publisher.

  The digital edition of this collection does not contain the story “North Shore Friday.” This story appears at the link below with the author’s permission, excerpted from The People’s Republic of Everything, copyright (c) 2018 by Nick Mamatas (San Francisco: Tachyon Publications). All rights reserved.

  Introduction copyright © 2018 by Jeffrey Ford

  Interior and cover design by Elizabeth Story

  Author photo by Tristan Crane Photography

  Tachyon Publications LLC

  1459 18th Street #139

  San Francisco, CA 94107

  415.285.5615

  www.tachyonpublications.com

  [email protected]

  Series Editor: Jacob Weisman

  Project Editor: Jill Roberts

  Print ISBN 13: 978-1-61696-300-2

  Digital ISBN: 978-1-61696-301-9

  First Edition: 2018

  All contents copyright © by Nick Mamatas.

  “Walking With A Ghost” © 2009, first appeared in Clarkesworld #33, June 2009. • “Arbeitskraft” © 2012, first appeared in The Mammoth Book of Steampunk. • “The People’s Republic of Everywhere and Everything” © 2011, first appeared in West Coast Crime Wave. • “Tom Silex, Spirit-Smasher” © 2016, first appeared in New Haven Review #18. • “The Great Armored Train” © 2016, first appeared in Dark Discoveries #35. • “The Phylactery” © 2015, first appeared in Apex Magazine #79, December 2015. • “Slice of Life” © 2014, first appeared in Gargoyle #61. • “The Glottal Stop” © 2018, original to this collection. • “The Spook School” © 2017, first appeared in Nightmare Magazine #59, August 2017. • “A Howling Dog” © 2017, first appeared as an
audio drama in Pseudopod #562. First appearance in print. • “Lab Rat” © 2015, first appeared in Lazy Fascist Review #3. • “Dreamer of the Day” © 2011, first appeared in Supernatural Noir. • “We Never Sleep” © 2015, first appeared in The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk. • Under My Roof © 2007 (Soft Skull Press: Berkeley, California).

  For my grandmother, Theodora “Doris” Vroutos

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Jeffrey Ford

  Walking with a Ghost

  Arbeitskraft

  The People’s Republic of Everywhere and Everything

  Tom Silex, Spirit-Smasher

  The Great Armored Train

  The Phylactery

  Slice of Life

  The Glottal Stop

  The Spook School

  A Howling Dog

  Lab Rat

  Dreamer of the Day

  We Never Sleep

  Under My Roof

  Please note that the digital edition of this collection does not contain the story “North Shore Friday.” This story appears with the author's permission at http://tachyonpublications.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/North-Shore-Friday-copyright-c-by-Nick-Mamatas.pdf, excerpted from The People’s Republic of Everything copyright (c) 2018 by Nick Mamatas (Tachyon Publications: San Francisco). All rights reserved.

  NICK MAMATAS, CITIZEN OF THE REPUBLIC OF EVERYWHERE

  BY JEFFREY FORD

  I FIRST CAME ACROSS NICK MAMATAS on the Night Shade Books online bulletin board and his old LiveJournal page, where he played the role of the Nihilistic Kid. This was back a ways. Maybe fifteen years or more. The Nihilistic Kid was, if anything, a consummate ball-buster. The reason I cottoned to this in Mamatas’s case, whereas I might not in others, was because he had grown up on Long Island in New York, and he dispensed a kind of dark, socially relevant, partly cynical, partly contentious for its own sake humor that is indigenous to Long Island. I know because I grew up on the Island as well. So even when I was the brunt of his barbs, I still felt like I was home and found him, more often than not, hysterical. The other thing I noticed from that time was that if someone engaged him in a serious argument about some social or political issue, they rarely got the better of him. His approach was rational, well reasoned, and he had a depth of knowledge about history and politics (not just American) that informed his discourse. These two sides of him combined got me started reading his fiction and nonfiction.

  When I was asked to write this intro for a collection of his stories, I took the opportunity because it’s my belief that he’s an underappreciated writer. He certainly has a solid fan base on social media, and a solid base of detractors as well. The latter doesn’t seem to appreciate the ball-busting as I do. Nick spends a certain amount of time in public service, deflating outlandish egos, battling Nazis, and fluffing the cheeks of self-described Lovecraftian geniuses for the betterment of the Internet. Overall, though, I just don’t think people appreciate the scope of his writing talent. We’ll get to the stories in a minute, but first. . . .

  My initial Mamatas read was the brilliant Move Under Ground. The book came out in 2004 and was an exciting mash-up of satirical Beat hagiography and the reanimation of the Lovecraft mythos. Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs plough across America to save it from the rising tide of Lovecraft’s cosmic monsterage. It was cool, it was funny, it was harrowing. There were few novels from that time period that seemed as alive. And, I don’t know if he ever gets credit for this but it was one of the earliest cases of a new crop of writers working off of Lovecraft’s world, reconfiguring it into more interesting ideas and way better prose (think Laird Barron, John Langan, Kaaron Warren, etc.). Other important writers followed and the whole thing grew into a kind of movement coming out of a certain dark alley of the horror genre. It’s a shame, but the novel doesn’t seem to be in print anymore. Perhaps some smart small press or large will bring it back. If you haven’t read it, do yourself a favor.

  In recent years, Mamatas’s long fiction has gotten shorter, if that makes sense. He’s jumped ship from his origins in the horror genre (although you can still sense it growling in the basement of these books) from works like Sensation and The Damned Highway (with Brian Keene) to create three top-notch mystery/thrillers—Love Is the Law, The Last Weekend, and I Am Providence. At the International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts in Orlando a couple of years ago, he told me that he was influenced in these works by pulp writers like David Goodis and Jim Thompson. Like the works of these noir masters, Mamatas’s books are short, vicious stabs at the reader’s sense of well-being. The length of them is important. Not in these words precisely, but he told me that for him, with this group of books, “less is more.” They have all the thrills and suspense of the best of noir, but they’ve been recast for a contemporary world and shot through with a dark humor (see especially I Am Providence ). In reading them, I drew comparisons in their brevity and impact to certain novels by Simenon.

  So Mamatas is a novelist and yet he’s also a writer of nonfiction, journalism, essays, and reviews. In earlier years, he wrote for The Village Voice and a number of other magazines and papers. I use a couple of his nonfiction pieces in my college writing classes. His essay “The Term Paper Artist,” originally published at The Smart Set, is by now a classic. In it, he recounts his time making ends meet by churning out term papers for graduate and undergraduate students. I always hand it out in Comp classes before we begin on the first research paper. It gives the students a great perspective on the process they’re about to become involved in. The essay is funny, recounting tales of desperate students. In a deeper sense, it’s also a condemnation of higher education. I’ll say no more. It’s online for free. The other piece I use is his review of James Cameron’s movie Avatar. This review is one of the best pieces of movie review writing I’ve ever encountered. It manages to be incredibly funny throughout and to also lay bare Cameron’s ham-fisted plot and his blindness to his hero’s colonialist buffoonery. I always wonder why some magazine doesn’t hire Mamatas to write about pop culture or review books and/or movies. A great opportunity lost.

  In addition to his novels and nonfiction, not to mention his eminently useful writer’s self-help book, Starve Better (having more to do with actual day-to-day survival than writing advice), Mamatas has become an accomplished editor, having chosen stories for the online magazine Clarkesworld (2006 to 2008), editing anthologies like Haunted Legends (with Ellen Datlow for Tor Books) and more recently Mixed Up: Cocktail Recipes (and Flash Fiction (with Molly Tanzer for Skyhorse). His current day job (2008 to present) is editing translated speculative fiction and comics for the English-reading market from Japanese publisher Haikasoru. Mamatas is a multiple threat, moving so fast from one project to another that you might miss the scope of his abilities. To check up on all of this and much more, an interested reader should go to http://www.nick-mamatas.com/.

  And finally we come to the short stories. I took a look at Nick’s web page, and there have to be over a hundred of them. They’ve appeared in a wide variety of venues—in magazines and anthologies, and on podcasts. Prior to this current collection you hold in your hands, there were three others—The Nickronomicon, You Might Sleep . . . , and 3000 MPH in Every Direction at Once. It’s clear to me as a short story writer, reader, and lover that The People’s Republic of Everything is some of this author’s best fiction. Beyond the wide-ranging themes and styles of the fourteen short stories presented here, there’s also the bonus track of the short novel, Under My Roof, an early longer fiction, which takes place on Long Island. Although it’s reminiscent of a Vonnegut story, with its telepathic teen protagonist and nuclear-weaponized lawn jockey, it is its own hilarious beast and worth the price of admission.

  I’m not going to mention each of the plots of all the stories in the current collection. For Christ’s sake, you have the book in your hand. Read it. But I will go on a little here about what I admire about Mamatas’s short fiction. Really sharp writing. There’s an evident fa
cility with language all throughout this volume, a clarity and flow that draws you in. With this ability, it’s not necessary that every opening line be a hook. The style is its own hook. This allows the author to establish a more complex story and delve deeper into the piece before the reader is hungry for a turn in the plot. In addition, there’s a wonderful sense that the parts of these pieces have been put together by a watchmaker—scenes that appear initially to be disparate eventually fall into place like parts of a delicate mechanism. In nearly every Mamatas story, there is a central idea: political, philosophical, cultural. The characters are not sacrificed to this idea but operate as whole, three-dimensional beings, and the plot is not tyrannized by it. It operates deep down in the story, a dialectic, positing some crucial conflict, and the fiction is an invitation for the reader to grapple with the competing aspects of it. It’s the same action that’s at the heart of metaphor. This seems to me to be at work in both a historical, satirical piece like the amazing “Arbeitskraft” as well as in more contemporary ones that deal to some degree with the world of fiction-making, such as “Tom Silex, Spirit-Smasher.” In The People’s Republic of Everything there are plenty of laughs, curious citizens, unusual instances from history, and ultimately engaging situations, but there are definitely no answers. That’s your job.

  WALKING WITH A GHOST

  CHAKRAVARTY SPENT AT LEAST three months making the same joke about how the AI was going to start spouting, “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh C’thulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn,” and then all hell would break loose—a Singularity with tentacles. Sometimes he’d even run to the bank of light switches and flick the lights on and off. It was funny the first time to Melanie, and she squeezed a bit more mirth out of Chakravarty’s inability to pronounce the prayer to Cthulhu the same way twice. Making the Lovecraft AI had been Melanie’s idea, but it was Chakravarty who tried to keep the mood whimsical. Both worried that Lovecraft would just wake up screaming.