David Dubrow

Author

Update, September 2023

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Hi! It’s been some time since I last updated the blog.

I’m still writing. Every day I put words on the page. It’s slow going. I wish I could write faster.

My most recent story, Gods, Men, and Nephilim, was published in the anthology Swords and Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy Volume 6.

Prior to that, my story The Mistress of the Marsh was published in the anthology Swords and Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy Volume 5.

Clever readers will notice a trend. I’m turning these and other unpublished stories into the chapters of a novel taking place in a fantasy version of ancient Rome. A straightforward swords and sorcery tale, something fun to read.

Still, it’s been a few years since I produced a work of any length. My last novel, The Holy Warrior and the Last Angel, was published in 2018. Five years is a long time between books, and my current work won’t be ready for publication until at least 2024.

So what happened?

The easy answer is that Covid happened. I didn’t get terribly sick, but the lockdowns and associated insanity ate up a good bit of my time and attention.

When my son’s school went digital at the beginning of the lockdowns it fell to me to be his schoolteacher. I made sure he did his elementary school assignments, added extra reading, and took him places throughout the day to get him out of the house. We didn’t lock down. We went to parks and nature preserves and playgrounds every single day, because it would be destructive and stupid to keep a growing, healthy child indoors all day over a disease that had an effectively zero percent chance to kill him or even make him seriously ill.

The Covid lockdowns were my chance to shine as a man who ranks high on the Disagreeability Scale. When everyone was complaining about weight gain (the Covid 19), I adopted a system of fasting and weightlifting that I still use today. When our leaders suggested we stay inside to keep from getting sick, I went outside to get fresh air and sunlight. When Doordash and Uber Eats became the way to eat, we had more and more home-cooked meals. In the end, the pandemic did wonders for my family’s health, and my son’s reading/language skills raised significantly.

Even so, the time spent being my son’s teacher, while a great experience, pretty much killed my writing for months. By March of 2020, when the state instituted lockdowns, I’d written the first draft of one novel and was about a quarter of the way through the sequel when I had to stop writing until June. This was a good thing: the books weren’t good. Jealous of writers who could crank out a novel once every two months, I had been trying to emulate that success in both speed and marketability, rather than writing good books. Much of it was crap, as I learned upon a good long review of the first draft. It’s salvageable, and I want to get back to it some day, but by the time I was able to sit back down at the writing desk, I had lost faith in the project. (Superheroes. A novel series about superheroes. I know. It’s still a cool concept, what I worked out.)

I got about halfway through my next project, which was a space opera about First Contact with intelligent alien life, before I needed a break. I had a decent outline and knew where I wanted it to go, but I was concerned that the format might be too close to my first novel series, which was complex, bordering on complicated. Too many characters, too much going on. Some day I want to pick that back up, too.

The break I took was to write a swords and sorcery story; I’d found an advertisement from Parallel Universe Publications looking for stories in that genre, and it’s something I’d always wanted to dip into. The success of that story, The Green Wood, spurred me to write more in that setting, leading me to today.

There it is. A peek under the hood. It takes me longer to write not because I’m so great, but because it just takes me longer to write. My friend Joe Hirsch has a much higher output, and he’s one of the best writers I know.

So, I’m still here. Still at it.

Thank you for reading, as always.

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Swords and Sorceries Volume 4

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My short story The Green Wood is featured in the new anthology Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy Volume 4.

Set in a fantasy version of ancient Rome, The Green Wood is an old-school swords-and-sorcery tale filled with action, intrigue, and black magic. It’s a real honor to have my name alongside tremendous talents like Adrian Cole, whose short story collection Tough Guys was one of my all-time favorite reads.

Here’s an excerpt of The Green Wood:

Grimacing at the ache in his shoulder, a pain so fierce that he feared a plague quill had pierced his lorica armor, Lior swung his spatha in a downward cut. The long, broad-bladed sword splintered the shaft of the pike that thrust at his side, and the dirt-grimed pikeman took the edge across his jaw, severing it. Shrieking, adding to the battle din, the man staggered back, clutching the crimson ruin of his face. Lior spurred his horse to trample him into the mire of blood and dirt.

Sweat streamed into Lior’s eyes, narrowed to slits against the glare of the sun. Byzantium’s 9th Cohort had struggled and strained and fought for every yard of earth since dawn, and now, at long last, he spied the crest of the hill past ranks of armored Gauls. If Byzantium reached the high ground, the battle would be all but won.

Renewed by the possibility of victory, Lior flicked the reins to charge forward. His exhausted horse reared, and its iron-shod hooves shattered the skulls of the enemy on its way down.

“Sticking our necks out a bit, aren’t we, sir?” shouted a voice behind him.

Lior grinned. “Perhaps a hair.”

Optio Albian rode up to his left. Not as tall as Lior, but twice as broad, with skin the color of brick and a jaw that jutted aggressively past his helm’s cheek-guards. “We’re too far ahead!”

“They’ll catch up!” Panting, Lior leaned cross-body to drive his sword’s point into the upper chest of a pikeman fumbling after a missed thrust.

“D’you see anyone else?” Albian hacked arms and heads with the workmanlike chops of a butcher. His entire right side was bathed in dust-caked blood from shoulder to sandal, and the horse beneath him rolled its battle-mad eyes, barely controlled by the pressure of his knees.

“When we reach the hilltop they’ll flock to us.”

“Not if we—“ Albian paused. “DOWN!”

Without hesitation, Lior threw himself forward, along the neck of his horse.

For the rest of the story, click here to get a copy of Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy Volume 4.

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Top Ten Books of 2021

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When you decide that you’re going to write books, no matter what kind, the decision irrevocably changes how you read. Writers read for pleasure like everyone else, but they also analyze what they read, determining what works from what doesn’t and why.

I do that, at least.

The best fiction makes you forget that you’re in the act of reading; the best non-fiction turns you into an engaged student (or activist).

What follows is a list of which books made the greatest impression on me over the last twelve months. Lists like this tend to be quite personal. I’ll leave it up to the reader to suss out what makes me tick. I already know.

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10. The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu. The first in a sci-fi trilogy, it’s a taut, imaginative trip into near-future technology, extraterrestrial intelligence, and recent Chinese history, viewed through a purely materialistic lens. There’s nothing spiritual or aspirational about it, making it the Hugo-winning apotheosis of 21st century science fiction, which tends to explore nihilism over grace. Books two and three (The Dark Forest and Death’s End, respectively) got progressively less interesting, and the physics, as it advanced, became more like magic than science (A.C. Clarke, call your agent). If you read Three-Body, you’ll have to read the other two. You should read Three-Body anyway.

9. Grendel by John Gardner. The story of Beowulf as told by the monster, it’s a novel to be both enjoyed and admired. Clever, funny, gory, literary, and thoughtful, you only need to read the first page to understand why it’s a classic piece of literature. Gardner was a brilliant writer who died way too soon.

8. Wilderness of Mirrors by David C Martin. The non-fiction story of two men, William King Harvey and James Jesus Angleton, who worked for the CIA; Harvey was instrumental in exposing Soviet spy Kim Philby (who was in England’s MI-6), and Angleton had known Philby for years without suspecting a thing. Both Harvey and Angleton were complete loons in their own way, and if you ever thought that America’s clandestine intelligence service was anything other than accidentally competent, this book will disabuse you of that notion.

7. Couples by John Updike. I first read this novel in the mid-1990s, after finishing Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy, so I thought I would give it another spin. The themes of love, infidelity, and yearning remain relevant decades after the book was written. His graphic depictions of sex (especially in the 1960s) and frank discussions of intimacy are likewise shocking; Updike does not leave anything unsaid (one critic once said of him, “Did this guy ever have a thought he didn’t put on paper?”). I take it that the novel is at least a little bit autobiographical; I’m just glad I wasn’t Updike’s neighbor back then. This is still my favorite book of his.

6. Neighbors by Thomas Berger. Another novel of suburbia (after Updike’s Couples). Earl Kreese, a staid, boring, regular guy finds himself dealing with a pair of crazies who have just moved in next door. The absurdity in this novel borders on the surreal, but it’s hysterically funny for both the new neighbors’ antics and Earl’s reaction to them. Among many other excellent novels, Berger wrote Little Big Man.

5. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. This was my first Murakami novel, and remains my favorite. Bizarre, filled with magical realism, ghost sex, and questions of identity and grief, it keeps you interested, even throughout the frequent descriptions of the protagonist’s mundane doings when not encountering weird phenomena. Since Kafka I’ve read several other Murakami books, which range from the tedious (1Q84) to the fascinating (A Wild Sheep Chase). Murakami is a writer who most people either love or don’t. I liked a good bit of what I’ve read, and didn’t like other bits.

4. Ordinary Men by Christopher R. Browning. If you’ve ever wondered how average Germans could murder so many Jewish men, women, and children in Poland during WWII, this is your book. A nonfiction work of horror, once you read it you’ll never forget it. I disagree with the writer’s conclusions, which take at least some of the individual responsibility away from the murderers, but this is still a vital text. Graphic and brutal.

3. H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life by Michel Houellebecq. I’ve been an avid reader of Lovecraft and his associates since my teenage years, and Houellebecq’s analysis of the man and his mythos puts them in a new light, making them shine again. What an amazing book. I also enjoyed Houellebecq’s novels Serotonin and Submission in 2021, and highly recommend them.

2. The Obesity Code by Dr. Jason Fung. A guide to intermittent fasting: why it works and how you can make it work for you. Fasting has helped me immensely since I started it (I read Fung’s book in one night and began fasting that next morning). I look and feel better every day. Life-changing.

1. The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor. I couldn’t stand O’Connor’s novels Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, but as a short story writer there was no one better in American literature. She shocks, she elevates, she hits you in the gut, sometimes in the same story. It’s an anthology I can’t wait to read again. The best book I read in 2021, and several of the previous years, also. Absolutely brilliant.

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I’m interested to see what 2022’s top ten are going to be. 2021 will be hard to beat!

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Squid Game and Other South Korean Diversions

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Few things in life are more enjoyable than sharing one’s interests. So it’s awesome that the South Korean show Squid Game has become such a big thing. Since eschewing Hollywood as a source of entertainment I’ve had to go further afield for screen entertainment, and South Korean dramas more than fill the gap.

Some time ago I wrote a roundup of some of my favorite K-dramas for the site Hollywood in Toto, and I’ve discussed other shows here. In light of Squid Game becoming Netflix’s top streamed show at the time of this writing, I wanted to do a brief review and recommend other shows connected to Squid Game. You know, like tentacles from a squid’s body.

Who doesn’t like calamari?

Squid Game: The Death Game subgenre of horror benefits greatly from this K-drama treatment, with its heavy focus on plot and character development. The genre doesn’t work if you don’t care at least a little bit about the characters, and the K-drama format excels at making even the antagonists sympathetic. Squid Game does a great job of keeping you watching episode by episode, building dread, and even if there aren’t a lot of surprises, you can’t turn away. Extremely gory, with an unnecessary sex scene for the American Netflix audience, it entertains throughout. Just don’t expect a fully satisfying ending.

Lee Jung-jae, the male lead of Squid Game, starred in a terrific show called Chief of Staff. Here he plays the polar opposite of the scummy character from Squid Game: a refined, educated chief of staff to a particularly disgusting lawmaker. A lot comes together in this show: politics, the press, espionage, and class distinctions. If you’re not familiar with South Korea’s politics (I’m not), some of it can be a bit confusing at first, but the emphasis on personal relationships, character, and ethics makes it a gripping watch. Two seasons, ten episodes each. Definitely worth your time if you dig high intrigue and politicking.

Wi Ja-hoon, who played the cop in Squid Game, starred in Something in the Rain, a romantic drama in which he played the female lead’s younger brother. Something in the Rain tells the story of an older woman (early 40’s) who gets romantically involved with her younger brother’s best friend, and the complications that arise from it. Themes of socioeconomic class, family responsibility, and social pressure take center stage. There’s a subplot about workplace sexual harassment that kind of goes nowhere, and the middle-to-end of the 16 episode-long story drags until it runs out of ideas. I kind of liked it, I watched all of it, and I wish it had a better conclusion.

O Yeong-su, who was Squid Game‘s player 001, had a smallish part in the romantic K-drama Chocolate as, what else, a very old man at death’s door. I really wanted to like Chocolate. It was about food and medicine and family discord and romance, but it did none of them well except for the food. I wanted to like it so much that I endured all 16 episodes of it. But it just never ignited. The female lead was entirely passive, even somnolent throughout, and the male lead didn’t manage to develop any chemistry with either her or the viewer. You’d think a show featuring a former brain surgeon who reluctantly goes to work at a hospice would excite some affect at some point. It didn’t. Still, the views of Greece were nice, and the food photography was vibrant.

There’s a lot more from South Korea besides Squid Game, and if you dug that, you’ve got a lot of great TV to watch.

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Stewards of the Earth

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(I wrote a piece in 2020 for the site Romans One about stewardship of the Earth. Unfortunately, Romans One has closed, but the piece is a good one, so I’m reposting it here.)

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“God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” — Genesis 1:28

There it is in black and white: God commanding us to be stewards of the Earth. What are you going to do, argue with Him? Of course not. But what’s the nature of that stewardship? What’s good enough?

If we’re to rule over the fish and birds and livestock, it’s up to us to determine the character and nature of that rule, aided by the Bible. The Earth and all that live upon it belong to God. We’re rulers, we’re governors, we’re stewards, but as God says in Leviticus 25:23, “The land is mine.” So we’re to take good care of the Earth because it doesn’t belong to us. This care includes stewardship of both land and beast.

An old joke goes something like this: “There’s plenty of room for all God’s creatures…right next to the mashed potatoes.” We were no longer enjoined to live as vegetarians since the day Noah landed on Mount Ararat. Which is good, because animals from chickens to pigs to cows are really quite tasty, and they provide us with nutrients that can be otherwise difficult to acquire.

Currently, the way we produce the majority of livestock is through CAFO farms. CAFO stands for Controlled Animal Feeding Operation, and it’s as awful as it sounds. In a CAFO, animals are confined to tiny cages for much of their short, miserable lives; fed substances to artificially increase desirable qualities that have nothing to do with nutrition; pumped full of antibiotics to keep them from dying of illnesses contracted through standing all day in their own waste; and mutilated to prevent them from injuring themselves. Chickens, for example, will occasionally tear out their own feathers when under stress, so the CAFO solution is to de-beak them.

The amount of waste that CAFOs produce is enormous, and negatively impacts both air and water quality in surrounding areas. Effluvium sometimes pollutes nearby groundwater, causing illness in wildlife and human populations. Airborne pathogens, including antibiotic-resistant bacteria, blow downwind from these farm-like industries.

What we feed our abused animals is not good for them, either, and most of it is corn. Monoculture corn that can only grow in chemically-fertilized fields lacks nutrients that food grown in properly composted soil can provide. So we feed our abused animals corn that makes them unhealthy, and then we eat these unhealthy animals to feed ourselves. Garbage in, garbage out.

Is that good stewardship? Did God mean for us to treat animals this way? And is this good for us?

It’s not all bad. We feed hundreds of millions of people through CAFOs. Our country has an obesity problem. So somehow we, for the most part, are eating, even if what we’re eating isn’t always nutritious. We can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. What we do now is preferable to mass starvation.

As consumers, our alternative to the CAFO food-producing industry is buying humanely-raised animals and animal products, usually from local farms. Cows that eat grass are healthier to consume than corn-raised cattle. Chickens that have the freedom to run around and eat bugs, seeds, and the occasional bit of vegetation lay tastier, more nutritious eggs, and so forth. Good stuff in, good stuff out.

Buying pasture-raised livestock is, unfortunately, a luxury reserved for those of us who can afford it. When money’s tight, are you going to buy a dozen regular eggs for $1.19, or spring for the organic brown eggs from Birkenstock Farms for $5.99? There’s a convenience angle, too: maybe you don’t have a health food store like Whole Foods within reasonable driving distance. Or perhaps you just have a craving for homemade barbecue, and the Piggly Wiggly doesn’t stock organic pork ribs. Or organic anything. And what about eating out? You’re not going to be that person, are you? The one who asks the waitress, “Is the chicken in your bacon-guacamole pepperjack club sandwich humanely raised?” You’re embarrassing the kids. Cue the Sarah McLachlan music.

The answer is that you do the best you can and let your interpretation of good stewardship, as commanded by God, be your guide. If it’s important to you, you’ll find ways to fit it into your budget. Maybe not everything pasture-raised, but some. A little. Here and there. The kids’ yogurt may be Kraft brand, but we’re having sloppy joes for dinner tonight, and that’s from pasture-raised cows. Whatever works. Make the effort where possible, and stretch the definition of convenience to include your conscience.

Once you start doing that, spending more on quality food, you find yourself more reluctant to waste it. If it costs less to buy a carton of eggs than it does to pick up one of those delicious coffee treats from the progressive green mermaid, why not just chuck them in the trash once they’re a day past the expiration date? Did you do the float test? Do you know what the float test is? It’s different when the eggs cost a bit more. Then it’s frittata for breakfast and lunch.

Deciding to encompass good stewardship of the Earth as part of living Biblical principles is a difficult task, but nothing easy is worthwhile. It involves being more thoughtful about issues you’d rather just put on autopilot, like what’s for dinner, and spending more time acquiring and preparing what amoral advertisers have spent decades telling us should be instant, cheap, and convenient: food.

Or you could go vegetarian. Hope you like soy.

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The Best of Appalling Stories: The Inside Story

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Several months ago I pulled the Appalling Stories four-book series from publication. There are a few physical copies available from Amazon, but that’s it. I did this because sales were low across the board, particularly for the later volumes. The cost of advertising and paying tiny royalties, plus the tax burden, made yanking them from the store an easy decision.

And yet there’s good work in there. So Ray Zacek and I collated our favorite individual stories from the entire series, added some new ones, and included the novella Escape from Trumplandia to create a new book called The Best of Appalling Stories: Tales from the Wrong Side of History. This volume includes an excellent foreword from Gordon Kushner, host of the podcast Another Bleeping Podcast. I’m proud of the book: it has several stories that I’d hate to see vanish, particularly my Her Bodies, Her Choice and Ray’s Detainer, both of which do exactly what a short story is supposed to do.

The new stories include Ray’s crime joint Wet City, which includes the unforgettable character Thugga T, and Happy Wife, Happy Life by me. I’d been working on and off on Happy Wife, Happy Life for some time; it was originally intended to be part of 2017’s Appalling Stories release under the title Bully, but I couldn’t come up with an ending that satisfied either me or the reader, so I scrapped it in favor of Cultural Overtones. It sat for years in a drawer before I could develop a conclusion to the thing, something that wrapped up the story while unsettling the reader, and in that I succeeded.

Sometimes, what’s interesting about a Best Of collection is what isn’t included. I didn’t include the bee stories, of which there are three, because some day I’d like to fold them into a short novel. If you’ve read The Bitterness of Honey, Dear Dad from the now-defunct CinderQ literary magazine, or My Lai, you know how strange they are; they should be (bee) together in some lengthier format. So they were out. Cultural Overtones, while it said what I wanted it to say, never seemed to grab anybody; the concept was there, the story worked, but for whatever reason it wasn’t a notable work. Ray originally wanted to leave out his The Orishas, but I persuaded him otherwise because it’s such a good, fun story that sticks with you.

We had to include my Deprogram and Ray’s Obsolete Man, because they remain topical years later. The majority of the blurbs we got for the entire series describe how the stories are prophetic, which is true on a certain level: we took cultural trends and extended them to their logical conclusions. Our driving intent, however, was to entertain readers by turning the people you’re not supposed to make fun of into antagonists. If there’s a protected class, we wanted to skewer it, and we did.

The one story I waffled on including was my Bake Me a Cake: it either turns you off the book completely or has you snickering. It was originally the first story in the first volume of the Appalling Stories series, and set the tone for the book being aggressively anti-PC. As broad satire, the point was to be on-the-nose and in-your-face. It’s the “go big or go home” of Appalling Stories, and I’m still proud of it. So it’s in. It’s supposed to disgust you.

Whether you find the themes troubling or not, The Best of Appalling Stories is an entertaining foray into the current cultural moment. I think you’ll enjoy it.

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