Bad Times with Julian Mercer

The debut publication from Julian MercerWith contributions from Jack Chase (author of Made in America, The Bastard of Taylor's End)*Presented by Abbycat LiminalA fractured debut of interlinked stories set across desert test towns, roadside motels, and postwar Hollywood, this collection explores isolation, obsession, and the quiet violence of American interior lives.In a desert town built for nuclear testing, a sleepless engineer watches his silverware vanish piece by piece.A man on the run checks into a motel room that already belongs to someone else.A woman calls her boyfriend ninety-seven times from a roadside motel after a fight. When he finally arrives, she's calmer and kinder than he's ever seen her-and knows things she shouldn't.On the night of January 9, 1947, a sleepless cartoonist shares coffee with a young woman in a Hollywood diner-hours before she becomes the most infamous murder victim in Los Angeles history.A group of teenagers celebrate graduation at a mountain cabin, where a stranger appears on the trail and behaves like a lifelong friend.Spare, unsettling, and quietly devastating, this debut marks the emergence of a singular voice operating between noir, psychological realism, and American myth.