This one’s been a longtime coming.

“For my next book, I want full control,” I declared on Christmas eve 2022, announcing a “Festivus for the Rest of Us: An Author Buys Back the Rights to His Own Book.”1

The post concluded with these words:

Despite referring to a silly Seinfeld holiday as a convenient comedic device, I actually meant what I said back then and I still mean it now, and I think and the entire team does, too: authors should have the option to hold majority rights to their own work.

So who are Slim and The Beast, anyway? Two best friends, a country bar, a famous burger, and a bloodstained floor.

This coming-of-age tale isn’t for the faint of heart. Sergeant Chandler Dykes is obsessed with two misfits: Slim, a disillusioned war veteran with a brutal neck scar, and Hugh Dawton-Fields, AKA The Beast, a seven-foot UNC basketball player with a proclivity for Southern cooking.

With unflinching humor and dexterous prose recalling the Coen Brothers’ wit and Tom Robbins’ iconoclasm, the narrator observes the approaching hurricane and the ghosts it seems to be dredging up, laying out what’s at stake in a friendship forged during the calm before the storm of the contemporary USA.

Slim and The Beast is an adult American fable set in 2010 North Carolina about male intimacy, the pursuit of passion, and the myriad ways in which young men in the USA can either transcend or succumb to that nation’s unresolved and violent past.

How is this version different from the 2015 edition?

Over the past six months, the Kingdom Anywhere team has been editing revising Slim and The Beast for a definitive 10th Anniversary Edition, making it the version it was meant to be all along.

Kingdom Anywhere’s editorial team has a knack for narrative structure and syntax that my previous editors, who were also working on dozens of other books, simply didn’t have the bandwidth to provide. Working closely with trusted editors who also now “get me” means we’ve tightened up the novel from front to back, cutting dozen of pages while adding to the narrative (we cleared up one major plot hole that the original editors missed), culminating in a much more fluid and concise edition at a sultry 158 pages.

Secondly, the book’s designers are, quite frankly, singular talents whose vision is far more in-line with what I envisioned for Slim and The Beast from the beginning. The 10th Anniversary Edition includes updated, hi-res chapter illustrations, an author portrait, and a one-of-a-kind mural at the beginning of the book, all of it illustrated by none other than my twin brother, .

Thanks to ’s design and layout skills and my father-in-law’s unrivalled ability to finesse inDesign—shout out to Ken and Lil Bit!—Slim and The Beast now reads like a classic American paperback that you can fit in your back pocket.

The updated cover design by the London-based illustrator Saskia Meiling, who we worked with for The Requisitions, is simply iconic, particularly because it conveys exactly what I hoped for a picaresque novel about a basketball player with a secret passion for cooking, his friendship with a disillusioned war veteran, and a deranged military man who won’t leave them alone.

Substack readers can get the jump on Slim and The Beast: 10th Anniversary Edition before it hits global bookshelves on November 8, 2025:

For a limited time (until November 8) new annual subscribers will receive a physical copy + eBook

Subscribe now

Current paying subscribers: leave a comment on this post / send me an email and I will send you an eBook + a discount link for the novel (shipping from France has become prohibitive because of the current US administration)

Beginning Sunday, October 26 (circa 10pm Paris time), I will use Substack Live to record Sunday Night Readings of Slim and The Beast (think of them as fireside chats, a story time before bed—not safe for children)

Free subscribers can watch live, but only paying subscribers can watch recordings

Beginning next week, October 21, I will begin serializing the novel on Substack (including audio) on Tuesdays, culminating in a professional-grade audio book complete with musical elements (I sing and play harmonica in a band we named Slim & The Beast; here’s a Sofar Sounds cover of “Harvest Moon” to whet your whistle)

Finally, if you’re not interested in subscribing right now, you can still order and Advance Reader Copy via this link (shipping included; please provide an address so I know where to send it).

Bookstores can follow this link for the press release, and I really do hope those of you in the far flung corners of the USA (I grew up in North Carolina, and Slim and The Beast is a southern “rural” novel) might consider telling your local bookstore about ordering a few copies.

Finally, anyone right here on Substack interested in reviewing the book can comment / email me and I will get you a copy free of charge (digital and/or print).

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A year after I paid $1000 to buy back the rights to my own book, I queried my Substack readers about independently publishing my second novel, “The Requisitions: A Query to the Substack Community,” and the response was immediately positive, resulting in a sold-out 1st edition via Kingdom Anywhere, an imprint I founded with . That book also won ’s Book of the Year Award, and was called “a strangely and luminously hopeful novel” by Substack’s own .