Aberrants – Short Stories (2025)

Taken from the Trouble in Paradise blog

Well, it’s been a good four years since I posted here, but since I’ve just about wrapped up Aberrants, I thought I’d update this blog with some news, details about my short story collection, and some general Pilgrim updates.

Aberrants is a bit of a departure from the genre I spent over a year studying and writing in (the Middle Ages). It probably falls within the vaguely indefinable category of “weird fiction” and certainly features a ton of philosophical and experimental—at times surrealist—ideas. What I’ve ended up with are the eleven short stories that make up Aberrants. They are derived from the reading I engaged in during the break I took after Pilgrim and well into 2024. In them, I think you will see the clear influence of Borges—in tales like “The Abrahamics” and “Southern Monsters”. There’s Miéville, most obviously, I think, in “Escape From Kharkiv” and possibly in “Southern Monsters” too—there’s a trick with language that plays a part that I don’t think would have come to be without rereading Embassytown sometime last year. The tentacles of Scott R. Jones extend into “Heretics“, where an egotistical techno/archeofuturist spills his ideology and ruminates about the future, AI, the soul, and… art. His contingency thesis draws from Raz, whom I read often and understood seldom.

“Terra Ex Nihilo” is the bastard lovechild of all of the above, plus Aquinas and Edward Ashton. It features a contradiction-hunting space crew traversing space via the luminiferous ether, guided by an “O-Machine”—the hypothetical Super-Turing device said to exist beyond rational constraints and solve impossible paradoxes. It really shouldn’t make sense, and probably doesn’t, but it was a blast to write.

“Squeak!” is something I’ve always wanted to write but never found the excuse for. For those of us who grew up reading Redwall and The Welkin Weasels, there’s always going to be that impulse toward an anthropomorphic tale. A rat city. Nay, a rat civilization. “Squeak!” is about one such civilization and their urge to rid themselves of their prehistoric animal instincts. It features a Machiavellian rat who has read too much Mosca, a Rat King and its Council, and a breeding instinct that sees the entire civilization collapse into chaos every three months as they are reduced to pure, base, instinctual beast. With this, I really wanted to do more than just “reskin” a human tale in animal form and actually center the plot around something particular and unique to this rat civilization.

There’s more, of course. You can pre-order your copy here or wait for the release next month!

Pilgrim has done well. Really well. Much better than I expected, anyway. It’s taken about a year to pick up, but now it’s been a consistent best-seller in its category on Amazon and Audible. It’s an Audible pick for the month of January, which means the audiobook is flying. Hurrah! We ran a Kickstarter late last year for the illustrated limited edition to great success, meaning there will soon be an edition featuring the artwork of Filipe Pagliuso and Tyrone Le Roux-Atterbury!

What’s next? Nothing is set in stone, but I’m slowly working on something that blends the historical, folkloric, and theological aspects I leaned on in Pilgrim with the weird elements that inspired Aberrants. We shall see!