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Kill the Bartender!
Inside the Chrysanthemum Saloon waits a French bartender polishing glasses, watching everything and seeing nothing, observing the room like a countdown.
New Orleans, 1888. At the table sits Freddy Lee, a gambling addict betting with the desperation of someone running from a secret that already knows his name. Across from him is Wayne Dickinson, well dressed, educated, and careful with every word—because words, like identities, are easiest to use when they aren’t yours.
When mercurial outlaw and Civil War veteran Joe Battle steps in out of the rain, the balance shifts. Whiskey is poured. Cards are dealt. Questions are asked that sound casual until they aren’t. As the storm seals the doors and the night stretches thin, lies begin to fail, old violence resurfaces, and the room reveals itself for what it really a place where men have come to hide—and where hiding is no longer an option.
What begins as a rainbound card game tightens into a pressure cooker of false names, buried crimes, and unfinished business—until all that remains is one devastating truth.
Told in three dramatically escalating acts, Kill the Bartender! is a dark Western noir chamber piece—ironic, brutal, and claustrophobic—about the masks men wear, the stories they tell to survive, and the price that comes due when those stories collapse.
Published through AGP’s Abbycat Black imprint ( The Ballad of Marcus Graves, Violent The Butcher of Westchester), this short story marks Jack Chase’s first return to short fiction since beginning publication in Spring 2025, following a run of epic-scale novels including Made in or The Tragedy of Billy Castle and Unexpected Absolution of Dean Willis and New Years' The Bastard of Taylor’s End.
Swapping spectacle for late nineteenth century cabin fever, Kill the Bartender! distills Chase’s premium prose, explosive characters, and signature themes—fatalism, moral consequence, and the weight of power—into a single violent night where nothing is left on the table.
Some storms pass.
Some settle accounts.
© 2025 Jack Chase
New Orleans, 1888. At the table sits Freddy Lee, a gambling addict betting with the desperation of someone running from a secret that already knows his name. Across from him is Wayne Dickinson, well dressed, educated, and careful with every word—because words, like identities, are easiest to use when they aren’t yours.
When mercurial outlaw and Civil War veteran Joe Battle steps in out of the rain, the balance shifts. Whiskey is poured. Cards are dealt. Questions are asked that sound casual until they aren’t. As the storm seals the doors and the night stretches thin, lies begin to fail, old violence resurfaces, and the room reveals itself for what it really a place where men have come to hide—and where hiding is no longer an option.
What begins as a rainbound card game tightens into a pressure cooker of false names, buried crimes, and unfinished business—until all that remains is one devastating truth.
Told in three dramatically escalating acts, Kill the Bartender! is a dark Western noir chamber piece—ironic, brutal, and claustrophobic—about the masks men wear, the stories they tell to survive, and the price that comes due when those stories collapse.
Published through AGP’s Abbycat Black imprint ( The Ballad of Marcus Graves, Violent The Butcher of Westchester), this short story marks Jack Chase’s first return to short fiction since beginning publication in Spring 2025, following a run of epic-scale novels including Made in or The Tragedy of Billy Castle and Unexpected Absolution of Dean Willis and New Years' The Bastard of Taylor’s End.
Swapping spectacle for late nineteenth century cabin fever, Kill the Bartender! distills Chase’s premium prose, explosive characters, and signature themes—fatalism, moral consequence, and the weight of power—into a single violent night where nothing is left on the table.
Some storms pass.
Some settle accounts.
© 2025 Jack Chase
46 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 9, 2026
About the author
Jack Chase
10 books1 followerJack Chase is an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and founder of ABBYCAT GROUP & PUBLISHING BRANDS, a boutique multi-imprint press where he writes, designs, and publishes each title independently.
He started in early 2025 with a couple of digital shorts that landed well enough to keep him going. Then came the paperback release of OVERTIME: THE BALLAD OF MARCUS GRAVES—a sharp black comedy about a law student-turned-drug dealer for Hollywood's elite, polished for years as a screenplay before becoming prose—which arrived to crickets. He pivoted immediately to VIOLENT CRIMES: THE BUTCHER OF WESTCHESTER, an Upstate murder mystery he calls an "anti-procedural": a meditation on paternal rage, generational trauma, and true evil, built on a commitment to blending realism with cinematic precision without sacrificing class. It started as a five-minute short film screenplay in his first-period film class senior year of high school—a depiction of what would become the foundation of the 2025 novel's devastating final act—which his teacher understandably shot down for being, in fact, "literally just a guy shooting someone." Seven years later, on Memorial Day 2025, it became his debut novel. In the definitive hardcover's afterword, he describes the process as "either the worst or greatest experience" of his writing life, one that required him to inhabit a proximity to darkness he believes he still hasn't fully shaken—but says was "worth it."
After VIOLENT CRIMES, he returned to the beginning: IMMUNDUS, his first publication, remastered and expanded into a hardcover novella nearly unrecognizable from the original—a nonlinear desert fever dream blending Navajo and eldritch horror, anchored by Justin, an ostracized, self-destructive screenwriter circling the drain in the Yucca Valley as he becomes the fixation of an ancient evil. Then came the big swing: MADE IN AMERICA: OR THE TRAGEDY OF BILLY CASTLE AND UNEXPECTED ABSOLUTION OF DEAN WILLIS, a Greek tragedy disguised as a 630-page crime epic. Four years in the making, it began as a 150-page screenplay written at 21 and was drafted into prose over a scorching 2025 summer in the Coachella Valley. Somewhere between pages—probably to soothe the burnout—he quietly revisited and significantly revised OVERTIME into "one of the funniest things" he's ever written, with a sequel planned for summer 2026 "whether anybody wants it or not."
He's since published a 10,000-word essay unpacking his intentions with MADE IN AMERICA's characters and storylines, along with an intimate memoir piece framing the novel as his north star through years of tragedy and dysfunction—from his hometown to Santa Monica to Hollywood to his eventual settling in Palm Desert. Then he went straight into production on THE BASTARD OF TAYLOR'S END, a 502-page Jacobean revenge epic about stolen lineage, power, and morality. The novel includes an original play-within-a-play entitled THE DRAGON AND THE PRINCE, composed by Chase in period-accurate diction, that mirrors both the staged performance in the narrative and the arcs of its numerous characters. Similar to its predecessor, it began as a screenplay, written and completed at the age of 19—just a month before the world shut down. Almost exactly five years later, the story found life as a major novel and was released in hardcover on December 31, 2025.
Eight books in, his catalog runs from crime to myth to the surreal—all of it built on fatalism, consequence, and people finding out who they really are when it costs them something. He has no plans to slow down and intends to expand AGP with the formation of ABBYCAT STUDIOS sometime in 2027.
He lives and works in Southern California with his tortoiseshell assistant, Mulan.
He started in early 2025 with a couple of digital shorts that landed well enough to keep him going. Then came the paperback release of OVERTIME: THE BALLAD OF MARCUS GRAVES—a sharp black comedy about a law student-turned-drug dealer for Hollywood's elite, polished for years as a screenplay before becoming prose—which arrived to crickets. He pivoted immediately to VIOLENT CRIMES: THE BUTCHER OF WESTCHESTER, an Upstate murder mystery he calls an "anti-procedural": a meditation on paternal rage, generational trauma, and true evil, built on a commitment to blending realism with cinematic precision without sacrificing class. It started as a five-minute short film screenplay in his first-period film class senior year of high school—a depiction of what would become the foundation of the 2025 novel's devastating final act—which his teacher understandably shot down for being, in fact, "literally just a guy shooting someone." Seven years later, on Memorial Day 2025, it became his debut novel. In the definitive hardcover's afterword, he describes the process as "either the worst or greatest experience" of his writing life, one that required him to inhabit a proximity to darkness he believes he still hasn't fully shaken—but says was "worth it."
After VIOLENT CRIMES, he returned to the beginning: IMMUNDUS, his first publication, remastered and expanded into a hardcover novella nearly unrecognizable from the original—a nonlinear desert fever dream blending Navajo and eldritch horror, anchored by Justin, an ostracized, self-destructive screenwriter circling the drain in the Yucca Valley as he becomes the fixation of an ancient evil. Then came the big swing: MADE IN AMERICA: OR THE TRAGEDY OF BILLY CASTLE AND UNEXPECTED ABSOLUTION OF DEAN WILLIS, a Greek tragedy disguised as a 630-page crime epic. Four years in the making, it began as a 150-page screenplay written at 21 and was drafted into prose over a scorching 2025 summer in the Coachella Valley. Somewhere between pages—probably to soothe the burnout—he quietly revisited and significantly revised OVERTIME into "one of the funniest things" he's ever written, with a sequel planned for summer 2026 "whether anybody wants it or not."
He's since published a 10,000-word essay unpacking his intentions with MADE IN AMERICA's characters and storylines, along with an intimate memoir piece framing the novel as his north star through years of tragedy and dysfunction—from his hometown to Santa Monica to Hollywood to his eventual settling in Palm Desert. Then he went straight into production on THE BASTARD OF TAYLOR'S END, a 502-page Jacobean revenge epic about stolen lineage, power, and morality. The novel includes an original play-within-a-play entitled THE DRAGON AND THE PRINCE, composed by Chase in period-accurate diction, that mirrors both the staged performance in the narrative and the arcs of its numerous characters. Similar to its predecessor, it began as a screenplay, written and completed at the age of 19—just a month before the world shut down. Almost exactly five years later, the story found life as a major novel and was released in hardcover on December 31, 2025.
Eight books in, his catalog runs from crime to myth to the surreal—all of it built on fatalism, consequence, and people finding out who they really are when it costs them something. He has no plans to slow down and intends to expand AGP with the formation of ABBYCAT STUDIOS sometime in 2027.
He lives and works in Southern California with his tortoiseshell assistant, Mulan.
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