Top "Fiction" of 2010

thanks to Stride Magazine, of the UK, for selecting Nightmare Trails for their Best of 2010 "Fiction" list

Individual Pamphlets + Graphics

The end . . . for now. Issue #12 wraps the story up.

Thank you to all the loyal readers who made this an adventure not only for Ephraim P. Noble, but for me as well.

The project is explained here.

Check back for updates. Ephraim is gone, depending on how you define "gone"...

Here are cover scans for each issue, except for #1.

#2 / "The car stopped in the glow. The tall one cut the engine and got out. The hunchback followed."

#3 / "And yet there were still stray memories that floated up, like small, soft underinflated balloons."

#4 / "What have they done to you, Hutton?"

#5 (SOLD OUT)

#6 / "Electric thoughts raced between their heads."

#7 / "Oh, Mary, Noble thought, on the ladder, clutching the clock hand. Oh God Mary."

#8 / (An oversized graphic illustration, only 1/2 shown here, + 1 narrative page) / "Ephraim scans the hall for the terminal door." (SOLD OUT)

#9 (marked as 8) / "You are in deep and dark water now."

#10 (an oversized graphic illustration, only 1/2 shown, w/ text on back--a one-sheet) / "America America is killing its youth."

#11 / "This is like a campfire story, isn't it?"

#12 / "Don't forget the good, Noble." [The final installment]

The Comedies of Ephraim P. Noble

True, and pure of spirit. Here.

Nightmare Trails at Knifepoint

Greetings, dear reader.

Welcome to Nightmare Trails at Knifepoint.

Nightmare Trails is a lightning-flashed noir, a haunted detective novel for our disordered age. Ephraim P. Noble is a new kind of hero who must face the incoherence of a vast underground tunnel system built at the same time as the interstate highway system in the 1950s, a clock that doesn't keep time but creates it, his doppelganger, a mad (as in sanatorium) hunchback, a shadowy woman with long fingers whom he just happens to love, and a dark mystery as complicated as life itself. Ephraim, in fact, collaborated with me on portions of A Cultural Dictionary of Punk, 1974-1982 (Continuum Publishers, 2009), where he made his first public appearance.

Each monthly installment follows Ephraim as he journeys deeper into the tunnels, where a vast machine awaits him. Is it possible to escape one's fate? This, and other mysteries, lay at the heart of Nightmare Trails. The plot thickens in each installment, until it reaches is resolution in the final pamphlet (December 2010).

As a lover of sequential, serialized narrative, I found that the most natural way to publish Ephraim's strange odyssey was through a series of pamphlets, each one between 6 to 20 pages long, and each with a cliffhanger ending. (Well, seeing as there are no cliffs per se in this part of Michigan, let's just call them ravine-hanger endings.) I also loved the idea of telling his story in paper format, so that the story being told is more than the story itself, but also the medium of its publication. In other words, the pamphlets are worth keeping, featuring full-color covers and, sometimes, inserts.