David Dubrow

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The Best of Appalling Stories: The Inside Story

June 4, 2021 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

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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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: appalling stories, me me me, publishing, short fiction

Podcast Interview: Another Bleeping Podcast

October 8, 2019 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

I was recently interviewed on a podcast titled Another #@%*! Podcast on KLRN Radio. This was a live interview, no do-overs or editing.

Despite that, I killed it, of course. I discussed my Armageddon series, the Appalling Stories series, publishing in general, and some of the inherent problems with conservative media that prevent books like Appalling Stories from getting wider distribution on the right. Plus, as an added bonus, I described, for the first time in any public forum, what I’m working on right now!

Click here to listen. It’s the best 30 minutes of audio you’ll hear all day!

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: appalling stories, armageddon, interview, me me me, podcast

Appalling Stories 2: The Inside Story

January 18, 2019 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

For Appalling Stories 2: More Appalling Stories of Social Injustice, the book’s subtitle preceded the content. I chose to interpret it this way: my contributions needed to be more appalling in this second volume. I wanted to push the envelope without devolving into a tiresome description of disgusting circumstances, which is typical in so-called “extreme horror” stories. Appalling Stories 2 isn’t extreme horror, though many of the events described therein are pretty horrible.

People like to ask writers, “Where do you get your ideas?” I never know how to answer this question. Even my dental hygienist asked me once. I replied, “In the dentist chair,” which elicited the hoped-for laugh. A novel has to have more than one idea. You can get away with just one in a short story.

For the story Her Bodies, Her Choice, I didn’t come up with the idea myself. Rick Canton, a friend of mine who I used to work with on the website The Loftus Party provided the central concept. On Twitter he asked a prominent feminist, “Why’re you so excited for abortion? Do you eat aborted babies or something?” I’m paraphrasing, but that’s the idea. He’s since been kicked off of Twitter for similar offenses. But his question planted the seed: feminists eating fetuses. Disgusting. Horrifying. Compelling. But I had to flesh it out. It had to make sense, it had to entertain, and it had to fit within the theme of the Appalling Stories anthology. The story I eventually came up with takes this idea and runs with it, turning it into a dreadful, far-reaching conspiracy. It even includes a description of a photo I saw in a book on witchcraft decades ago: a woman’s skeleton, freshly disinterred, with huge, heavy screws at her knees and elbows. They’d screwed her bones together to keep her from rising from the grave. That’s how much they feared her, even in death.

My other story, The Deprogram, came as a result of watching the 1982 movie Split Image, starring James Woods and Brian Dennehy. In it, a young man enters a Bhagwan-style cult and his desperate parents try to get him out. The same author who gave me the idea for the Bake Me a Cake story in the first Appalling Stories anthology suggested I watch it, though I can’t remember the context. The movie wasn’t bad, everyone played to type, and it provided fertile ground for a story: in a social justice future, people would have to be brainwashed to accept ludicrous notions like gender being a social construct instead of a biological fact of nature. Political correctness not just run amok, but extended into its necessarily oppressive and unpleasant future, where certain ideas are criminalized and rebelling against the accepted mode of thinking is punishable by government-issued lobotomy. But it had to be realistic. Like the previous story, it had to make sense and fit the theme.

You, the reader, will have to decide if either story was appalling enough, or even more appalling than the previous volume. And I’m not talking about the writing.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: appalling stories, appalling stories 2, deprogram, her bodies her choice, me me me

Appalling Stories 2 Is Live!

December 12, 2018 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

Appalling Stories 2: More Appalling Tales of Social Injustice is live at Amazon for only $2.99! This is the spiritual sequel to the top-selling short story anthology Appalling Stories, and carries on the tradition of ripped-from-the-headlines short fiction written to entertain, amuse, and even horrify. 

In Appalling Stories 2, we sent out a call to writers to produce stories appropriate to the theme, and were amazed at the number of submissions. After a lengthy and occasionally blistering winnowing process, we settled on the ten best stories for this volume. From hilarious cautionary tales to science fiction yarns, from searing satire to supernatural horror, it’s a smorgasbord of fiction that represents the new counterculture, not the focus-grouped, watered-down PC trash that’s infested the literary market.

With a foreword from Christian Toto, editor of HollywoodInToto.com, Appalling Stories 2 is the perfect antidote to today’s aggressively woke times. Check out the book that Daniel Greenfield of Sultan Knish called, “A grim, hilarious and no-holds-barred dive into the terrible social justice future and its even more terrible present!”

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: appalling stories, appalling stories 2, me me me, new release, short stories

Appalling Stories 2 Excerpt: Her Bodies, Her Choice

November 15, 2018 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

Appalling Stories 2, sequel to Appalling Stories: 13 Tales of Social Injustice, will be released in December of 2018. What follows is a sneak peek at the short story Her Bodies, Her Choice.

—

Hey, it’s me. Don’t turn it off! Just…just hear me out.

My notes are written on legal pads and spiral notebooks. I did everything offline. I’ll let you know where I hid the original copies at the end of this video, but don’t just click to the end, okay? Watch the whole thing first. Do this for me. I know you hate me and think I’m a bitch and I don’t blame you, but please. Please. I can’t trust my parents. They’re probably part of this.

It sounds crazy and over-dramatic like…like in a movie, but the only reason you’re watching this is because I’m dead. It means they got me. My former friends and colleagues. If you’d seen my phone…I had writers from The Atlantic to The New York Times who’d take my calls on the first ring. Me. Not even 27 years old and people with bylines in The Daily Beast and The New Yorker knew my name. I was kind of a big shot. But one of them ratted me out for bringing them the story of the century. The millennium. Probably all of them did.

So yeah, I’m dead. It scares the hell out of me, but—

You know what? Forget it. I don’t know if you’re happy I’m dead or what. Maybe you are. I broke your heart, after all. I regret that. Not ending the engagement. Just hurting you. You didn’t deserve that. But I saw your wedding pictures on Instagram like two years after we split up, so I guess you weren’t too, well, broken up about it. She’s pretty. You two look happy.

—

I guess if you hadn’t broken things off with me for taking care of our little…indiscretion, I’d’ve split up with you. It makes sense now, but back then I just felt hurt. With a degree in Women’s Studies from Vassar, pretty much the only option I had after graduation was VP of HR at a Nestle subsidiary while you saved the world one hedge fund at a time. But not long after you proposed, my senior adviser introduced me to some friends of hers, who introduced me to some friends of theirs, and, well, I could either follow your plan for us, or my plan for me.

So I went with me. The abortion and your throwing me out of your life over it was just the icing on the cake. But it launched me into my new career.

I started as an intern. Paying my dues. It sucked because I had to keep asking my parents for money to afford rent and food, but I learned a lot that first year. At Planned Parenthood you can’t claim that sexism in the workplace is keeping you from earning a living wage. I think they were monitoring me. Seeing how committed I was, how hard I’d work. After burning my bridges with you I had nothing else to do, so I threw myself into it.

—

Stay tuned for more information on Appalling Stories 2: More Appalling Tales of Social Injustice!Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: appalling stories, appalling stories 2, her bodies her choice, horror, me me me, short fiction, short story

Appalling Stories 2: Call for Submissions

May 1, 2018 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

That’s right, shoppers: Obsidian Point is putting together the second volume in the Appalling Stories series, and you can be a part of it!

Do you have a story, or at least the idea of a story that you don’t think the Social Justice Warrior-led publishing industry would want to touch with a ten-foot pole? Do your eyes roll into the back of your skull at the mention of terms like “representation,” “white privilege,” “cultural appropriation,” and “microaggression”? Do you have a ripped-from-the-headlines piece of short fiction that’s just aching to be told?

Now’s your chance to be part of something amazing. Write a non-PC tale for Appalling Stories 2!

Details can be found right here at the link.Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: appalling stories, appalling stories 2, me me me, short fiction

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"It began to drizzle rain and he turned on the windshield wipers; they made a great clatter like two idiots clapping in church." --Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood

"Squop chicken? I never get enough to eat when I eat squop chicken. I told you that when we sat down. You gotta give me that. I told you when we sat down, I said frankly I said this is not my idea of a meal, squop chicken. I'm a big eater." --John O'Hara, BUtterfield 8

I saw the 1977 cartoon The Hobbit as a little boy, and it kindled a love of heroic fantasy that has never left me. Orson Bean's passing is terrible news. Rest in peace.

Obviously, these young people have been poorly served by their parents, but the honest search for practical information should be lauded, not contemned.

You shouldn't look at or use Twitter, and this story is another perfect example. There's so much that's wrong here that it would take a battalion of clergy, philosophers, and psychologists to fully map it out, let alone treat the issue.

This is the advertising copy for Ilana Glazer's stand-up comedy special The Planet Is Burning: "Ilana Glazer‘s debut standup special is trés lol, and turns out - she one funny b. Check out Ilana’s thoughts on partnership, being a successful stoner adult, Nazis, Diva Cups, and more. Hold on to your nuts cuz this hour proves how useless the patriarchy is. For Christ’s sake, The Planet Is Burning, and it’s time a short, queer, hairy New York Jew screams it in your face!" This is written to make you want to watch it.

In the midst of reading books about modern farming, the 6,000 year history of bread, and ancient grains, I found this just-published piece by farmer and scholar Victor Davis Hanson: Remembering the Farming Way.

"I then confront the decreasing power of the movement in order to demonstrate the need for increased theorizations of the reflexive capacities of institutionalized power structures to sustain oppositional education social movements." Yes. Of course.

You should definitely check out Atomickristin's sci-fi story Women in Fridges.

As it turns out, there may yet be some kind of personal cost for attempting to incite a social media mob into violence against a teenage boy you don't know, but decided to hate anyway because reasons.

One of the biggest problems with internet content is that the vast majority of sites don't pay their writers, and it shows in the lack of quality writing. It's hard to find decent writers, and harder to scrape up the cash to pay them. This piece is a shining example of the problem of free content: it's worth what you pay for.

If you're interested in understanding our current cultural insanity, the best primer available is Douglas Murray's The Madness of Crowds. Thoughtful, entertaining, and incisive.

More laws are dumb. More law enforcement is dumb. The only proper response to violence is overwhelming violence. End the assault. There's a rising anti-semitism problem in New York because Jews who act like victims are being victimized by predators. None of these attacks are random. Carry a weapon and practice deploying it under duress. Be alert and aware. I don't understand why the women Tiffany Harris attacked didn't flatten her face into the pavement, but once word gets around that the consequences of violence are grave, the violence will lessen.

When are you assholes going to understand that this stupidity doesn't work any longer? Nobody gives much of a damn if you think we're sexist because we don't want to see a movie you think we should see. It only makes us dislike you that much more, and you started out being an unlikable asshole. Find a new way to shame normal people.

The movie Terms of Endearment still holds up more than 35 years later, and if you're looking for a tearjerker, this is your jam. One element that didn't get a lot of mention is, at the end, when Flap, with a shrug, decides that his mother-in-law will become the mother of his children once Emma dies. He abandons them, and nothing is made of it. This always troubled me.

You need to read this story the next time you feel the urge to complain. And if you need a shot of admiration for another family's courage, check this out.

Progressive political activist and children's author J.K. Rowling finds herself on the wrong side of a mob she helped to create. The Woke Sandwich she's been trying to force-feed others since she earned enough f-you money doesn't taste as good as it looks when she's obliged to take a bite.

I need you to check out The Kohen Chronicles and pray for this family. Their 5-year-old son has cancer.

Currently, the movie Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker stands at 55% at Rotten Tomatoes. Don't forget that these are the same reviewers who not only adored the absolutely execrable The Last Jedi, but insisted that you were a MAGA hat-wearing incel white supremacist manbaby for not loving The Last Jedi. So either The Rise of Skywalker is an objectively bad film, or it simply wasn't woke enough to earn plaudits from our movie-reviewing moral and intellectual betters.

It's easy to hate the older pop bands like Genesis for their popularity, but they were capable of genius, and it shows in No Son of Mine.

If you want to know which identity group has more clout, read this story of the Zola ads on the Hallmark Channel.

Rest in peace, René Auberjonois. I remember you from Benson as a kid. As an adult, I remember you as Janos Audron in the Legacy of Kain video game series. You made every role you were in a classic.

Elf on a Shelf Follies, Part 2:
8-year-old: I wrote the elf a note! I hope he writes back.
Me: What did you write?
8yo: I asked if he has any friends.
Me: What if he says it's none of your business?
8yo: *eyes grow dark and glittering* Then I'll...touch him.
Me: Ah. Mutually assured destruction, then.

Elf on a Shelf Follies, Part 1: My 8-year-old got an Elf on the Shelf the other day. The book it came with tells a story in doggerel about this elf's purpose, which is to spy on the kid and report his doings to Santa Claus, who would then determine if the kid is worthy for Christmas presents this year. The book also said for the kid not to touch him, or the magic would fade, and for the family to give the elf a name. I wanted to name him Stasi. I was outvoted.

Actor Billy Dee Williams calls himself a man or a woman, depending on whim; his character Lando Calrissian is "pansexual," and his writer implies that he'd become intimate with anyone or anything, including, one presumes, a dog, a toaster, or a baby. J.J. Abrams is very concerned about LGBTQ representation in the Star Wars universe. This is Hollywood. This is Star Wars. This is what's important to the people in charge of your cinematic entertainment. Are you not entertained?

The funniest thing on the internet today is the number of people angry over an exercise bike commercial. Public outrage is always funny. Always.

One of the biggest mistakes the United States has ever made since WWII was recruiting for clandestine and federal law enforcement organizations at Ivy League schools. The best talent pools were/are available from local law enforcement and military veterans, with their maturity and, most importantly, field experience. We've been reaping the costs of these terrible decisions for decades, culminating in a hopelessly politicized, sub-competent FBI and CIA.

Watching Fauda seasons 1 and 2 again in preparation for season 3 to be broadcast, one hopes, in early 2020. Here's my back-of-the-matchbook review of season 2.

Every day I try to be grateful for what I have, even in the face of the petty frustrations and troubles that pockmark a day spent outside of one's living room, binge-watching Netflix. We live lives of ease in 21st century America, making it enormously difficult to do anything but take one's countless blessings for granted. Holidays like the just-passed Thanksgiving are helpful reminders. There's a reason why people call the attitude of a thankful heart practicing gratitude, not just feeling grateful. You have to practice it. You have to remind yourself of what you have. It's the work of a lifetime.

Held Back: A Recent Conversation.
8-year-old: Oh, and Jamie was there, too. He was in my first grade class two years ago.
Me: Wasn't he held back a year?
8yo: Yeah. It's because he kept going to the bathroom with the door open.
Me: No way!
8yo: And girls saw.
Me: That's not right. They're not going to hold a kid back a whole year over that.
8yo: Well, that's what he told me.
Me: Sounds fishy.
8yo: I believe him.
~fin~

It's right and good to push a raft of politically correct social justice policies on everything else under the sun, but when social justice invades Hollywood, that's just a bridge too far, says Terry Gilliam. Sorry, Terry: you helped make this sandwich. EAT IT.

Rob Henderson's piece on luxury beliefs will have you nodding your head over and over again...unless you subscribe to these luxury beliefs, in which case you'll get mad.

I've made the Saturday bread from Flour Water Salt Yeast so often that I've memorized the recipe. It never disappoints. Never. The same recipe works well for pizza, too.

Liberty doesn't mean the freedom to do anything you want. The true definition of liberty is the ability to choose the good. Anything less is libertinism.

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