Sam Flynn's Blog

I’m proud to present the cover for my next book Dweller in Darkness! I’m forever grateful to the readers who encouraged me to continue the story started in The Mystery of the Pale King and to go further, deeper, and darker in the telling.

Are you a reviewer, bookseller, or publishing professional interested in an ARC? Request one using the GoogleForm via the link or at the bottom of the post.

Cover art by Greg Chapman

All of Cassius Marius’ life has been spent in service to the Pale King. Ever since his birth sixteen years ago on the night the Hero of Hathur died, his mother prepared him to join the Lightbringers: seven young men selected every equinox by the Church of the Pale King to descend underground to hunt and destroy the Dweller in Darkness, a chthonic entity the Church names as source of an unnatural blight ravaging Hathur and beyond, year after year.

Cassius has known since he could speak that he was destined to destroy the great evil poisoning his home. His inevitable confrontation with the Dweller on his holy descent changes him inside and out and puts him on a collision course with the Pale King he once worshipped. With his world and body crumbling around him, Cassius must choose between loyalty and honor, family and humanity, not to save his home. But to destroy it.

The sequel to The Mystery of the Pale King and conclusion of the Deadlights Duology, Dweller in Darkness traverses a doomed empire polluted by corruption to ask if the world was ending, what would you save? And what would you leave behind?

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Memory Lane follows a petty criminal on the run after a robbery gone wrong who finds himself trapped in a nightmarish hotel and tormented by his past – oh, and slug monsters.

I wanted to celebrate the announcement of my next book Dweller in Darkness with a thank you to all my readers who propelled me here and what better way than with a new story? Memory Lane was one of the first short stories I wrote when I decided to try and write professionally. It exists both as a time capsule of my earlier work and an example of my progression as writer, as I explain in the post:

This horror short story began way back in spring 2018. The first draft was written for a contest with the theme “reflections” hence the title and focus on memory. It was decent but both too weird and not weird enough. Still, the seed of the idea stuck with me. I revisited it in 2023, inspired by the film Lost Highway (1997) to make it more Lynchian (RIP David Lynch) and to sprinkle in amnesiac noir-ish elements a la the film Memento (2001) that weren’t there in the first draft. I like stories that mimic puzzles and this is my stab at that.

Available for all Patreon subscribers, as well as non-subscribers for $3. Tip: you can buy my whole short story collection for $4.

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The Mystery of the Pale King is now the Deadlights Duology and the just-announced sequel Dweller in Darkness will hit shelves real and virtual in Q4 2026!

Check out the announcement below! Many thanks to my publisher Timber Ghost Press for their continued support of this author. I highly recommend their other releases, including the upcoming sci-fi/horror novella The Neon Revelation by T.T. Madden out December 16.

Want to know more about Dweller in Darkness, like a sneak peek at the synopsis and writing process? My Patreon subscribers already got both waaay back in June – as you can see above – where I secretly revealed the sequel to my patrons. Part II coming soon. For a hint at the soundscape I wrote in , here’ s a YouTube Music playlist of songs that inspired my writing.

Sign up for Patreon or my free quarterly newsletter to get future secrets

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The post SEQUEL! appeared first on Sam Flynn's Slog.

Title says it all! Pick up your audiobook copy over on Audible or you can support me directly by purchasing on Patreon! Thank you to Sylvia Langille of Timber Ghost Press for her support, Greg Chapman for adapting his cover design for the audiobook, and especially David Peoples for making it all possible as audio engineer since I know fuck-all about that.

And, since I have you here, now is the perfect time to share that I have almost finished the sequel to The Mystery of the Pale King, titled DWELLER IN DARKNESS, which will complete what I’ve taken to calling the Deadlights Duology. Stay tuned for much more soon. In the meantime, enjoy the audiobook!

The post Audiobook Lovers Rejoice! ‘The Mystery of Pale King’ Audiobook Is Here! appeared first on Sam Flynn's Slog.

Join Us follows an imprisoned space labor activist locked in a battle of wills with his fascist interrogator.

Brand-spankin’ new sci-fi short story up on Patreon! Join Us opens with space labor unionist Dirk Larsen imprisoned on the planet T’Lairen and interrogated by a faceless crony of the fascist government. As attempts to break his will fail, the roles of jailed and jailer blur, and Dirk plots escape while grappling with the ideals he’s willing to sacrifice to do so. As I go into with more detail in the post, I originally wrote this in spring 2021 with the January 6th insurrection fresh on my mind, hence the photo. Tragically, it’s only grown more relevant (Seeing a fascist militia arrest its political opposition IRL this week was not on my promotional list).

Available for all Patreon subscribers, as well as non-subscribers for $3. All proceeds are part of a $5,000 fundraiser my wife Angela and I are running to pay for surgery to heal our beloved dog Harley Quinn’s torn CCLs. Sign up for my Patreon at any tier to read Join Us plus the first ten new subscribers will get a free copy of the upcoming audiobook of The Mystery of the Pale King, narrated by yours truly. Want to make a one-time donation instead of a recurring one? No prob! I’m grateful for every donation made via PayPal (@samflynn1992) or Venmo (Sam-Flynn-7). Thank you to everyone who already pledged and donated. Since we started our fundraiser last week, we’ve already raised almost $1,000. Me, Angie and especially Harley are grateful for every bit of support.

MAKING A LIVING ON PATREON

Last year, Timber Ghost Press published my debut fantasy/horror novella The Mystery of the Pale King which Grimdark Magazine named one of the best reads of 2024. This year, I am focused on querying my next book, the epic fantasy/mystery novel The Darkest Fate. But behind the scenes, for almost a decade now since I graduated college, I’ve worked the night shift at the superb locally-owned restaurant O’Betty’s Red Hot. A night owl long before I started working there, the job allowed (and continues to allow) me to write on my own time and pursue my dream of becoming author. For a decade, the arrangement worked.

Then my 20s became my 30s. I’ll be 33 this year. Life gets more expensive, for all of us, and that’s particularly true in the service industry. Add being an independent artist to it and you can see the cash flow problems. Thing is, at some point, my wife and I would like to have kids. Kids cost money. If I’m going to attempt to write full-time, the time is now, when my responsibilities are as limited as they will ever be, even while costs are higher than ever.

That is why, following the example of some of my favorite authors including N.K. Jemisin and Monica Byrne, my new goal is to crowdfund a working salary, to be used for living expenses such as groceries, rent, transportation, and healthcare. More immediately, our beloved seven year-old dog Harley requires surgery on both her hind legs to repair torn CCLs. Raising $5,000 for her is paramount, which is why proceeds raised on Patreon and from the forthcoming audiobook release of The Mystery of the Pale King (coming soon to Audible) are so important. In addition to exclusive fiction such as Join Us, each tier comes with its own benefits such as e-books, signed copies, and behind-the-scenes insight on the world of SFFH publishing. As always, thank you for reading.

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If totalitarian takeovers, climate disaster and mass migration is indeed the future of human – not just American – civilization, I am reminded of another favorite poem:

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

– Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Hundreds of thousands of civilizations have existed. We know about maybe .01 percent. The most powerful at their peak all thought they were eternal empires without end. The inability to conceive of alternate futures is a weakness that befalls those who fear to lose what they have. To lose what you have, you first have to have it. Just let it go – and be truly free.

At least, that’s what I’m telling myself in the lead up to Election Day (Week really, thanks to fascist Republicans deliberately delaying vote counts to purposefully sow doubt about the election). What happens after is anyone’s guess. I pray for a Harris victory. But her presidency won’t heal the long-festering wounds repeatedly stitched and ripped open over the course of the country’s history.

Those can only be addressed at the bottom, among the people who truly make up a nation. Are they grievance-poisoned loners who want to watch the world burn? Or are they people who value humility, judgment, and good character?

The good news: the latter outnumber the former by a wide margin. The bad news: given the aforementioned skewing of American democracy via archaic carve-outs for slaveholders, America is on the precipice of permanent minority rule – that minority being, of course, white land-owning men.

Do I think we’ll see a world without this toxic conception of property? We have before. There’s nothing to suggest we can’t again. The broader point is, the world will change, with or without us, often in directions we did not choose.

All we get to decide is how we adapt, what we bring with us – and what we leave behind.

The post The Original Sin of America, Part VI: Good Night, and Good Luck appeared first on Sam Flynn's Slog.

Even if Harris/Walz wins, I have begun to reckon with the idea that my country as I’ve known her is dying, if not dead already. That America cannot overcome its original sin. That the center cannot hold.

READ: Parts I, II, III & IV

There’s a saying people like to whip out because it makes them sound smart.

“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times.”

Thing is, it’s not true. It’s never been true. It’s, as this Reddit post says better than me, an ancient and “utterly baseless morality tale.”

Because what the saying conveys isn’t truth but confirmation bias. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. A conspiracy theory. A comforting mask placed over the face of an unknowable future.

But what’s scarier isn’t the lickspittle collaborators willfully blind to the evil they launder. It is the true believers bringing about the white supremacist project with lust and zeal, for whom the future is not unknowable but a single rigid line leading to a preordained outcome.

Revelation.

The white supremacist project and its goal of a Christofascist ethno-state in America is based on the support from Christian evangelicals, nothing less than an apocalypse cult at the colonial root of the American experiment (see also Puritans and Millerites).

To hold the Bible to be the literal Word of God is to believe that Israel is central to the end times when Jesus does his Second Coming blah blah blah.

“One main strand of evangelical theology holds that the return of Jews to the region starts the clock ticking on a seven-year armageddon, after which Jesus Christ will return.” (The Guardian)

This ideology enslaves the land and taxes the environment and biosphere, rather than coexisting in any sort of harmony, because why bother, the world’s gonna end, so get while the gettings good.

As the climate degrades, it is hard not to see the extreme weather events as Earth’s vengeful retaliation for years of abuse while at the same time feeling heartbreak that the worst consequences will be visited on the most vulnerable and least deserving. This will be seen by the white supremacists and their Christian evangelical allies as further confirmation of their beliefs.

Yet another self-fulfilling prophecy.

TOMORROW: The Original Sin of America, Part VI: Good Night, and Good Luck

The post The Original Sin of America, Part V: Lull of Paradise, Promise of Revelation appeared first on Sam Flynn's Slog.

With Trump/Vance now at the head of the venomous snake that is the white supremacist project, who is in opposition?

I wish it could say it is the Democratic Party but to believe that the American system is founded on the basic inequalities outlined previously necessitates a different conversation than left vs. right.

Today, the defenders of the American experiment – a multi-racial democracy premised on equality, tolerance, and freedom – are threatened by a) racial animus and b) widespread delusion.

On one hand, true lefties hate the Democratic Party, a hatred that’s only intensified during Israel’s vengeful slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. This wholesale murder is abhorrent, just as 10/7/23 was abhorrent, and the Israeli policies and actions under Benjamin Netanyahu to perpetuate the war are disastrous. To stop the bloodshed, the political calculation I personally agree with is the one pointed out by Mehdi Hasan:

Not sure who is making the argument that ‘four more years of this will fix things’; the argument being made by AOC, Ilhan, Bernie, and others on the left is that we have a (tiny) chance of ending this under one candidate and zero chance under the other. That’s the argument. https://t.co/yrXN6y6TMc

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) October 20, 2024

On the other hand, the Republican Party has shamelessly embraced its fascist wing due to fear and greed. This fundamental asymmetry in levers of support – one party values morality, the other power – fuels the death spiral of centrism, which requires both morality and power, and brings to mind the first stanza of my favorite poem, written over one hundred years ago during a similar age of tumult.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”

Centrism still existed in 2008, the year Barack Obama was elected on a platform of hope and change. The first Black man elected to the Presidency. Hillary Clinton tried to ride his coattails in 2016 to become the first woman president.

But America’s original sin struck.

How dare a Black man assume the White House. He must be un-American. Literally, he must have been born elsewhere.

It is no coincidence that the opposition candidate – later President – after Obama was the one who originated and continues to propagate birther lies became a fascist avatar of the white supremacist project.

This is what animates people who support the modern GOP, whether they admit it or not. To punish is what they want and any amount of violence is justified to “save” the country.

As much as I hope and pray for Trump to lose and lose badly, I fear his loss in the 2024 election will propel his radicalized supporters to violence that makes January 6, 2021 pale in comparison.

And if that is the case – if, for enough Republicans, civil war is the answer – then a Harris /Walz presidency will not save us. The Democratic Party won’t save us. The only thing that will is each other.

TOMORROW: The Original Sin of America, Part V: Lull of Paradise, Promise of Revelation.

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Let’s unravel this racist/property bullshit, starting with the word “Aryan.”

READ Part I and Part II.

Now associated solely with the white supremacist project (i.e. the Aryan Brotherhood), the Proto-Indo-Iranian word was at its root an ethnic self-designation used by various peoples in Iran and India thousands of years ago, when humanity spread through Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus River Valley and beyond. Likewise the swastika, now a universal symbol of fascism thanks to Nazi Germany, was similarly stolen from Hinduism.

So why did words and symbols from Asia get hijacked by bunch of Europeans obsessed with being white?

Well, archaeology indisputably places humanity’s origin in Africa, as well as our earliest advanced civilizations outside of Europe, facts that conflicts with the white supremacist delusion of racial superiority. So European racists imagined that these words and symbols were secretly white knowledge, that there was secret migration of Europeans in the historical record that deposited that knowledge in the region then left again.

As the kids say, pure copium.

As contemporary Iranian-German historian David Motadel explains, these German thinkers believed that ‘Aryans’ had moved from Europe to Asia “and founded the ancient civilizations of the East” while “on the Asian fringes they degenerated through mixing with foreign races”. This meant that by the 20th century, “only the ‘Nordic race’, the core race in central and northern Europe, remained purely ‘Aryan’.” (Iranwire)

Under this mass racial delusion, everything is white, even and especially the things that are not. It is a reactionary ideology of lack, its foundation an insistent fear and insecurity at one’s position in the world. This pernicious lie props up the cultural and material plunder that continues to this day.

The fancy word is colonialism. The plain one is theft. You see the theme?

TOMORROW: The Original Sin of America, Part IV: The Lies We Tell Ourselves

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“Property” is not a naturally-occurring phenomenon. Some human had to invent the notion. More importantly, others had to agree to it.

Countless other civilizations got along fine with entirely different relationships to the material world . It is not an inevitable feature of reality but a construct, same as all human ideas, in this case a binary frame: “mine and thine.”

Which brings us to Roman law, habeas corpus, casus belli, etc. the basis for Western legal theory. You might think, as a more younger, more innocent me once did, that the law was about truth and justice.

You moron. You fucking imbecile.

Our laws were not based on highfalutin ideas like “fairness” and “equality.” No, the Roman law from which our legal system evolved is entirely premised on property. Not just any property. Human chattel. Slaves. The reason Romans based their laws on property was to protect the interests of slaveowners, to whom people were property, a pattern that would repeat in America thousands of years later.

“The main distinction in the law of persons,” said the 2nd-century jurist Gaius, “is that all men are either free or slaves.”

This notion was then recycled into European legal tradition in the 17th and 18th centuries, most notably by John Locke who conceived property as one of his Natural Rights, his philosophy directly influencing the American Revolution, the establishment of the U.S. Constitution in 1789, and modern liberalism.

Thus a mercantilist ideology replaced feudalism as the societal shield between the owners and the owned and what’s more, conflated the idea of freedom to pursue one’s own destiny with ownership of peoples’ bodies, particularly women.

Hence, the United States, for its first 200 years, denied full rights to citizenry entirely on basis of them being born Black, a woman, an immigrant, or poor.

In 1920, (White) women won the right to suffrage. Black Americans did the same in 1968. Roe v. Wade codified a woman’s right to an abortion in 1973. Barack Obama won two terms as the first Black president of the U.S. All these things are seen by the white supremacist project as mortal threats.

The 2022 overturn of Roe v. Wade and racist obsessions with nonsense like Great Replacement Theory are simply the latest iterations of the white supremacist project’s delusional quest for a white Christofascist ethno-state that would put The Handmaid’s Tale to shame.

TOMORROW: The Original Sin of America, Part III: The White Supremacist Project

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