Ebook, Life Eater, Godfather

Welcome to the Stone Soup Weekly Digest! This is where I share what I'm up to and some of my favorite things from around the internet. Subscribe to Stone Soup to get this in your inbox every week.

In just a couple of weeks, Have You Eaten comes out as an ebook! This full collection of the serialized novella will include original recipes from me and incredible original art from the legendary Shing Yin Khor. 

This collected ebook only costs $2. When you place your preorder, you’re not just supporting me and my career – you’re also sending a message to Reactor, the publisher that decided to take a chance on this weird, experimental storytelling format. The message you’re sending is this: It’s worth taking chances. It’s worth the risk of expending resources on strange, original stories that play with format and structure. It’s worth the time and money you put into projects like this.

This is one of those rare moments when you can use your purchasing power to let publishers know that it’s a good idea to take risks. The kinds of risks that venues like Fireside Fiction and Shimmer took for so many years; the kinds of risks that keep the world of short fiction strange and thrilling. It’s my deep, sincere hope that if this project succeeds – for definitions of “success” that include “profit” – publishing will hear you, and keep facilitating these weird stories. Maybe, if we let them know we want them to, Reactor and publishers like them will take similar risks on newer authors, on even more unwieldy formats, on even wilder concepts. Your $2 could move the needle toward that future. I hope you’ll consider it.

Either way, thank you for reading. You’re the reason I do any of this at all.

—Gailey

Support Your Community

Go get vaccinated! You can get an updated COVID-19 vaccine, a flu shot, and a monkeypox vaccine. 

• Find pharmacies near you and get help scheduling appointments
• Stay up to date on the latest information from the CDC
• Educate your communities with free educational materials

For the past several months, I have been sharing links and resources with you to support our neighbors around the world who are currently being attacked by the government of Israel. In addition to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, violence is mounting in the West Bank, and now in Lebanon. We have the power to help the people who need us right now. Here are a few ways you can do your part.

• A collection of ways to help Lebanese communities here
• Support the United Nations relief efforts in Palestine here
• Donate to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF) here
• Purchase from Palestinian-owned business – here’s 15 Palestinian brands, 8 Palestinian Etsy Shops, and a portal full of Palestinian goods 
• 6 ways you can support Palestinians in Gaza
• Gaza Funds, a website that gathers crowdfunding campaigns from people in need in Gaza
• Check out Operation Olive Branch, which helps fund medical evacuations
• Connect with Jewish Voice for Peace
• Use Resistbot to contact your representatives

Finally! You may be aware that in November, the United States will hold an election. If you are eligible to vote in this election, it’s absolutely vital that you confirm your voter registration status. Voter rolls are being purged and tampered with on a regular basis throughout the United States, so being previously registered to vote is not a guarantee of your current status. 

• Click here to learn your current voter registration status
• Click here to register to vote in your state

Alasdair Stuart Reviews: Life Eater

The incredibly insightful Alasdair Stuart is a pop culture genius, reviewer extraordinaire, and regular Digest contributor. Be sure to subscribe to The Full Lid for more brilliant pop culture analysis.

The first thing you should know is that any game Strange Scaffolding creates is worth your time. The second is that none of those games will be the same. This is the company behind An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs. This is the company behind Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator. This is the company behind incredibly creepy viral hit Clickolding. The only common ground between those three games is the feral, gleefully unfettered creativity of a team who will live, and die, for the bit.

Life Eater is one of their best games so far and, by some distance, one of the most disturbing.

Life Eater is a calendar that helps you kill people. You play the archetypal quiet man who keeps himself to himself. Anonymous beard. Anonymous trucker cap. A shadow haunting a flyover town and comfortable within that warm, soft anonymity. You’re any one of a million men, the sort of people you see behind you at the coffee shop, in line at the cinema, in traffic.  But in Life Eater, your anonymity is your shield and hiding behind it is the instrument of a spitefully fastidious god. You will kill someone for them, every year. Someone specific. If you don’t, the world ends. If you do, you dismember someone for the good of the planet.

The game breaks down into ten chapters, tracking ten years in the life of this contemptible, doomed monster of a man. Each one opens with a visitation from your god, an order defining exactly what atrocity they wish to sample that year. Then, you open your calendar and sharpen your blade.

The genius of Life Eater lies in the way it uses mundanity. You have a set time to kill your targets, and must hunt them to get an idea of their routine. You do this by slowly uncovering parts of their week. You sneak into their house, make fake calls at their work, cut power, make false accusations. If you’re too zealous, you get spotted. If you get spotted three times, the world ends. 

If you succeed then a human life is rendered down to organs and trivia. You must remove the correct rib based on hair colour, cut the right intestine based on age. Do it wrong, the world ends and your victim is dead. Do it right  and your victim is still dead.

The banality of brutality haunts Life Eater like a trucker-capped Banquo. You gain a…friend…in a store clerk you’re forced to kidnap. You have no illusions about what you’re doing and who you’re doing it to. After a while, the repetitious nature of the questions dulls the edge of the horror. You find yourself annoyed rather than horrified, overjoyed when you succeed even with what that means. You know what you are but the mundanity still deadens the blow, for a while.

Until it doesn’t.

Life Eater pulls no punches. It unfolds across static screens, one covered in viscera, one in static. You peel both away to get to the truth and when you do, the truth stares right back at you from under an anonymous trucker cap and behind an anonymous beard. A shadow haunting a flyover town. A killer. A victim. A disciple. A monster. You.

Life Eater is brutal, smart horror of a sort you don’t see enough of. If you’ve got the stomach for it, you’ll never forget it.

• Life Eater
• Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator
• An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs
• Clickolding
• Strange Scaffold

Currently Reading: The Godfather by Mario Puzo

With its brilliant and brutal portrayal of the Corleone family, The Godfather burned its way into our national consciousness. This unforgettable saga of crime and corruption, passion and loyalty continues to stand the test of time, as the definitive novel of the Mafia underworld.

I reread this book every year. This will be my twentieth time doing so. It’s a book that has fundamentally shaped me as a person. It’s also wildly problematic on just about every vector. I can’t recommend it, and I can’t recommend it enough. If you decide to read it along with me, I hope you have the time of your life – I know I am.

Barnes & Noble | Bad River Website | Local Library | Find an Indie Bookstore

Lucy Undying: A Dracula Novel by Kiersten White

Her name was written in the pages of someone else’s story: Lucy Westenra was one of Dracula’s first victims.

But her death was only the beginning. Lucy rose from the grave a vampire and has spent her immortal life trying to escape from Dracula’s clutches—and trying to discover who she really is and what she truly wants.

Her undead life takes an unexpected turn in twenty-first-century London, when she meets another woman, Iris, who is also yearning to break free from her past. Iris’s family has built a health empire based on a sinister secret, and they’ll do anything to stay in power.

Lucy has long believed she would never love again. Yet she finds herself compelled by the charming Iris while Iris is equally mesmerized by the confident and glamorous Lucy. But their intense connection and blossoming love is threatened by outside forces. Iris’s mother won’t let go of her without a fight, and Lucy’s past still has fangs: Dracula is on the prowl once more.

Lucy Westenra has been a tragically murdered teen, a lonesome adventurer, and a fearsome hunter, but happiness has always eluded her. Can she find the strength to destroy Dracula once and for all, or will her heart once again be her undoing?

Barnes & Noble | Bad River Website | Local Library | Find an Indie Bookstore

If you’re a paying subscriber, this month’s Supper Club members got a surprise gift from me! If you’re not in the Supper Club yet, sign up now to access the September post, which includes something delicious for you to enjoy. 

—Gailey