Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

We needed a Lincoln
A Roosevelt, either one would do
Washington, astride his horse, his troops
This was the moment for it
Instead, a Millard Fillmore
A Franklin Pierce, with no characteristics
James Buchanan, affable and helpless
The lion’s share of the blame goes out
To the new Confederates and their slow, quiet coup
The fire not started but for their match
But we must, in retrospect look back
At those with firehose in hand
Who shrugged helplessly
And let the blaze consume us

Hart continued to lead the investment group into the next, adjacent development, stopping in front of a large sign. “The investors have called this Morningwoods Estate, and I think you’ll agree that it’s stiff competition for any other complex in this area.”

“Oh my god,” whispered Janine. “Oh my god. Does he…does he not know? He’s got to know, right?”

“Shh, shh,” Aaron said back. “I want to see where he’s going. Does he know, or does he care, that they named this place after an AM stiffy?”

“Okay, yeah,” said Janine. “We’ll see if he lets anything slip. Keep a straight face.”

With a sweeping gesture, Hart indicted the nearly-complete senior living apartments that made up the heard of the complex. “Now, the erection was a grueling process. We had a lot of things arise that threatened to leave the entire staff impotent.”

“He’s got to know,” Janine said. “Oh my god, he has got to know. He has got to be putting this on for his own amusement.”

“But,” Hart continued, oblivious to the muffled snickers of at least two of his potential investors, “I’m sure you’ll agree that we rose to the occasion, and once people begin to join, our members will be the envy of everyone in the area.”

“Look at that straight face!” Aaron hissed. “He has no idea! He’s clueless!”

“Of course, that’s just the beginning,” Hart said. “We’re very interested in growing and extending things, and to that end we have left some holes here that things can go into.”

“Oh god,” Janine was red in the face, biting her lip. Tears were streaming down her face as she tried to contain the irrepressible mirth bubbling up inside her. “I’m gonna die. I’m literally gonna die, right here.”

“Light retail and medical is what we’re thinking. We’ve already got interest from a urologist, a masseuse, and a proctologist.”

“There is no way that’s a coincidence,” Aaron said, unconvincingly, struggling to keep a giant, goofy grin from taking over his face. “He’s got to be messing with us”

“And then, if all goes well: condominiums. I think you’ll agree that seeing condos stretched over Morningwoods will be quite the sight to behold.”

That was it; there was no coming back for Janine or Aaron. They collapsed, shrieking with laughter, as the other investors looked on in confusion.

“”Some people just can’t keep it up, I suppose,” said Hart.

Of course, Stephen King has long been considered the most important writer of the Pre-Fall period–stories that have entered the lexicon and endured over centuries. We’ve all had a high school production of Carrie or Maximum Overdrive, even as the now-archaic language in the books is sometimes derided as stuffy and overly formal. But despite the longevity of his timeless tales and characters, historical information about King himself is frustratingly hard to come by. Other than a civil register for his marriage and the births of his children, as well as an official obituary and of course his lavish tomb in St. John’s in Bangor, complete with effigy of the author at his typewriter.

Indeed, only a handful of images of the author survive as well. The tomb effigy, of course, though some claim the veined marble is a crude likeness. The King First Fifteen Folios, the omnibus of the author’s collected novels and short stories, also features an illustration of the author on its back jacket, but it is done in an artistic and minimalist ink style and is often ignored. Various other images, such as the Simpsons Cel and the Overdrive Trailer Frame, have been claimed to represent or depict King, but they are rent with controversy. It’s thought that many images may once have existed but were lost in the Fall–or at least, that is the current academic consensus.

But there is a small but vociferous minority who insist that the known details of King’s life do not correspond with the man who wrote his works. Any such author, they argue, would necessarily have needed extensive literary training at the college level, a lengthy apprenticeship in a practical writing field such as journalism, and connections to high society and the publishing world–none of which are present in the few biographical details that are extant. They insist that the historical King either was a fabrication or a patsy used to hide the actual author of the King canon.

A number of candidates have been put forward. One popular candidate was dairy farmer Richard Bachman, whose novels adherents claim to be extremely similar to King’s despite being written by an older man living two states away. While this was once in vogue–enough so that a King-Bachman Society existed for a time–there are irreconcilable problems with the theory that have led to its gradual abandonment. For one, Bachman–a former sailor–had even less of a literary background than King. For another, Bachman died in 1985, decades before King and in advance of many of King’s most popular novels. The popular reply–that Bachman had written all the King books before his death and they were published posthumously, or that his 1985 death was incorrect, with some evidence that he survived as late as 2007–has often failed to convince.

The most popular “alternative candidate” for the “true author” of King’s oeuvre is Dean Koontz, a college-educated and prize-winning author who also worked as a writing teacher before turning his hand to fiction. In Koontz, proponents see an older and more educated author whose many works share distinct similarities in theme and tone to King’s writing. Of course, as with Bachman, there are a number of problems with the hypothesis–one being why Koontz needed to use a pseudonym at all, and why he would have chosen the historical King as his patsy. The current leading explanation presented by the Koontz-King Society is that King was actually Koontz’s literary agent, and the deception was created to allow Koontz to publish additional books per year without cannibalizing his own market.

Without the discovery of more physical records from the Pre-Fall era, the controversy–such as it is–cannot be resolved. Academics and experts on King insist that there is no controversy, naturally, but the Koontz and even the Bachman camp have adherents to this day, as the producers of the biopic The False King have demonstrated.

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Swamp sparrows, hermit thrushes
In bird sanctuary wilds
Their colors very russet
Their temperaments very mild
Red islands of jollity
In depths of winter’s grim
This year they’re ever needed
Their songs our soothing hymn

We saw you last week
On a blizzard’s wings
Tromping through fresh snow
With a mixed blackbird flock
Ten in total, compared to dozens
Outnumbered three to one
Grackles, cowbirds, starlings
But only a few rusty blackbirds
Coats shining in the sun
Yellow eyes wide
98% have vanished since 1980
And no one knows why
I peer out the window
Quietly counting
And wondering if this
Is the last time
I’ll ever see you

Uncertain future
Grows more so with time
When good news arrives
It doesn’t feel mine

Legal Counsel Samiyuki: So, legally, barely viable humans have way more rights. As a severed head or disembodied consciousness you’re considered a tradeable organ.

That’s not to say you can’t earn enough to purchase yourself, of course! But even then you’re more like the tree that owns itself rather than a viable person. People will play along because they think it’s cute. Read up on tree law if you want to know the whole story.

Warblogger Tomas: Is any truth to the rumor that people sell their body for cash because it was holding them back?

Legal Counsel Samiyuki: I’ve seen the bodies in question and no one is buying what they would be selling.

Insurance Adjuster Oscarborg: Okay, we’ve finished installing the cybernetics and we also swapped out your eye, left kidney, and right lung that had failed during cryostasis. At market prices, the cost is $112,224,994.37, and we have taken the liberty of securing a bank loan in your name to cover the principal at a market-beating interest rate of 17.7%.

Your first payment is due in one month, and there is a generous three-day grace period before repossession. Do keep in mind that you are ‘on the hook’ for the full cost, as it were, even if the replacements are damaged.

Now don’t worry. I know we’ve all heard about the “repo men” who carve organs out of those whose payments are in arrears, and I can assure you that no one is going to do that here. In the case of a repossession, we will take ownership of the entire body and it will be parted out to pay down your debt while your consciousness will be downloaded into our neural net to work pro-bono for the remainder of the principal.

Most are hired out to work for large-language models, but running a household smart device or sweet oblivion as a constituent part of an AI are also on the table in some instances.

CARL: This is Carl Drake, play-by-play commentator for NBS Broadcasting, coming at you live from the Action Weather Center for The Barometric Network.

TOM: That’s right, Carl. This is Tom Hicks, color commentator for NBS Broadcasting, and for those who are just joining us, Carl and I are filling in for the usual The Barometric Network anchors, Hank Swolemann and Bettina Karenagle, as Winter Storm Omega bears down upon the unsuspecting American south.

CARL: Hank is snowed in; on the last call I had with him he was trying to melt his way out of his garage with a blowtorch that his wife uses for flambeau.

TOM: That’s right, Carl, and Bettina does a mega-commute from her second home in Pasadena, which she is currently in the process of defending from a wildfire. Our latest update from Fire Storm Sigma will come after the break, but for those of you looking for a taste, Bettina tells us that the fire has been stopped at the first line of trenches but that reinforcements are desperately needed to prevent a breakthrough.

CARL: Here’s hoping those reserves can be located before the fire attempts a flanking maneuver. Now, it was my understanding that Pasadena had recently cut its firefighting budget in order to increase its police budget, in order to provide badly needed assault vehicles and high-capacity magazines for automatic weapons.

TOM: That’s right, Carl. Bettina tells me that the police have been summoned into the fight against Fire Storm Sigma and that they are currently shooting at it from multiple angles while using water hoses to disperse suspected looters.

CARL: Fighting fire with fire. Only time will tell if the strategy is successful.

TOM: That’s right, Carl. But onto Winter Storm Omega: current predictions are for half an inch of sleet followed by 4-8 inches of snowfall across the American South, leading to martial law, a collapse of civil society, and the regression of those in the affected area to feral or “wolflike” states of behavior.

CARL: Authorities are scrambling to prepare for the onslaught by spreading sand on roads, repurposing heavy construction equipment as ersatz plows, and closing all non-essential facilities, non-essential in this case being defined as places where state legislators or their close family and friends work.

TOM: That’s right, Carl. It has long been a known fact that the American South can’t deal with cold and snow anymore than the American North can deal with heat. The infrastructure just isn’t there.

CARL: Though considering the onslaught of Winter Storm Iota this time last year, one could be forgiven for wondering why road salt and plow trucks hadn’t been purchased anyplace, especially in light of Winter Storm Qoppa two years ago this week.

TOM: That’s right, Carl, one would think that the third year in a row would form a pattern, but apparently not. Perhaps it’s simpler and cheaper to simply throw every man, woman, and child in the state under the bus for climate change?

CARL: Easy, Tom, you know we can’t say the CC-words on this network. They’re going to have to bleep that.

TOM: That’s right, Carl, forgive me. What I meant was perhaps it’s simpler and cheaper to simply throw every man, woman, and child in the state under the bus for completely unprecedented rogue weather patterns that can be neither predicted nor combated.

CARL: That’s more like it, Tom. And now a word from our sponsors, FossilCo Fuels, before we go into your FossilCo Presents Local Weather on the 7s, here on The Barometric Channel.