The oaks and firs stood up as they reached the interstate and pushed on through the South West Pacific Highway to the Salmon River Highway, past places with names like Falling Creek, Tualatin, Joe Dancer Park and Erratic Rock.  Places you could walk out into and die and never be found.  He could imagine them seared by sun in summer and shrouded in snow in winter.  Hammered by hail the size of coins in spring and autumn, pounding flesh and smashing bone, processed to be carried off chunk by speck in the guts of birds. 

He had had a friend, a thin man with soft eyes and a tight jaw who ground his teeth whenever he was thinking, who’d walked out one day in a spare place like these.  He’d left a note by the front left wheel of the pick-up truck parked outside his cabin, pinned to the dirt by an old can of dogfood.  He was one of the generations who typed all day, and his handwriting had lost the fluency of daily practice.  The note read, “You won’t find me.  I am returning to the cycle of nature while I still can.  I don’t want to see the end of the future.  Tell my father I’m glad he has cancer.  Goodbye.”  He had scrawled a drawing of an empty hourglass at the bottom of the note.  Adam remembered flipping the note, and finding that it was scrawled on the back of a pharmacy receipt for a great many painkillers and four bottles of expensive mineral water, the stuff with extra vitamins in.  They never found him.  Adam presumed that the empty plastic bottles of pills and water were still bobbing around in a creek somewhere, as a final fuck-you to the littering world he despised, while he circled overhead, riding legion in the bellies of birds.

This is from the opening chapter of NORMAL, my next novella, soon to be published by FSG Originals.  It is being published in two ways.  In advance of the print edition coming out at the end of the year, NORMAL is being serialised on digital in four weekly parts.

Some people call it “abyss gaze.” Gaze into the abyss all day and the abyss will gaze into you.

I first wrote that "abyss gaze" line years ago.  This little book has been a long time coming.

There is a place, in the wilds of Oregon, within the secure perimeter of an experimental forest, where the people who think about the future are sent to recover.

If you’re good at it, and you spend your days and nights doing it, then it’s something you can’t do for long stretches.  Depression sets in.  Mental illness festers.  Some people call it a bad case of abyss gaze.  Gazing into the abyss all day leads to the abyss gazing into you.  If abyss gaze takes hold, and you’re lucky, you’ll be sent to Normal Head, OR.

Think of it as a summer miniseries, maybe.  A four-week show.

Here, the people who watch the future are unplugged and immersed in sylvan silence.

There's a philosopher, espousing a return to Dark Ages systems and values, claiming on any given day to be dead and/or possessed and/or an alien,  kept in permanent residence for both his safety and the world’s.  There’s a biologist who claims to be in constant conversation with her own gut flora, which she insists is actually the planet’s dominant lifeform, and refuses to leave because her vegetal owners like it here in the forest.

And there’s Adam Dearden, arriving here for the first time after catching a bad case of abyss gaze in Namibia.  He doesn’t want to tell anyone that one night in foggy Windhoek he met a man who wasn’t there.

And there’s the inmate who went missing from a locked bedroom the next day, leaving nothing but a pile of insects in his wake.

A locked-room mystery set in a remote rest home for broken futurists.  NORMAL.