ATM Publishing is thrilled to announce the release of Trevor James Zaple’s latest novelette, Interstitial Burn-Boy Blues…
Tommy and Stuart are travelling to California for two very different reasons. Tommy has been chasing love across the dried-up, burnt-out ruins of the once-populous American Midwest. Stuart is hunting for his wife and daughter’s killer, a man he once called his neighbor, who fled the snow-choked corpse of New York City after a winter storm finally did the metropolis in. When a chance encounter on a passenger bus heading west strands the two in the forsaken underbelly of Las Vegas, Tommy and Stuart find that getting passage into the Golden State’s “promised land” is much harder than they ever imagined.
This is Interstitial Burn-Boy Blues, the gripping new release from ATM Publishing by Trevor James Zaple, available now!
As Trevor tells it…
Interstitial Burn-Boy Blues is one part of a larger work about restless days, and the restless people who inhabit them. The story unfolds in a world that seems foreign at first, almost alien. It’s a world where tremendous blizzards have buried major American cities, where the Great Midwestern Plains have once again succumbed to desertification, and where the savage effects of war have touched American soil, leaving destruction, and opportunity, in its wake.
Canadian-born poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist, Margaret Atwood, put out a call some years ago for “cli-fi fiction, speculative or otherwise,” that tackles the difficult and uncomfortable questions concerning what the world will look like in the course of, or aftermath of, the impending climate apocalypse. The problem with said apocalypse is, of course, that one never knows if they are in the aftermath, and as such one can only hope, for the sake of your characters, that the worst is behind them. With that in mind, it is my hope that the eventual entirety of this work approaches the spirit of what Atwood’s call demanded.
In a lecture on the politics of fiction, French postmodern philosopher Jacques Ranciere said that the essence of writing lies in taking the anonymous textures of everyday life and forging them into an artificial overarching narrative—the tyranny of the plot. The textures in Interstitial Burn-Boy Blues are derived from the components of American restlessness, and as such I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge a debt to two masters of American Restlessness: John Steinbeck and Bruce Springsteen. Both spoke to notions of home, to the lure of the road, and to the endless movement from decay to opportunity. Both did their best work in time of uncertainty and change in American culture, and with such an era again upon us, it is only natural that their restlessness should inform this and many other such works.
Dive Deep into Interstitial Burn-Boy Blues, and keep in mind as you do—this is only the beginning!
