Mercy

by Kelby Losack

A man trades his heart for a gun rumored to kill gods. A boy with an arm made of iron hopes to bond with his distant father on a hunting trip. And deep in the lunar radiation hills beyond a city dripping neon and blood, a deity demanding sacrifice from both old and young is about to wake.

Genres: Science Fiction

90 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 9, 2022

About the author

Kelby Losack is the author of Texas Tea, God Is Wearing Black, Mercy, Letting Out the Devils, and several other books. Co-host of the Agitator podcast with J David Osborne. He works in construction and lives with his wife and their boys in Gulf Coast Texas.

Reviews

[Grant Wamack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably my favorite Kelby Losack book of all time and that's saying a lot with his stellar catalog. Mercy is essentially the story of a father and son going on a hunting trip into a cyberpunk wilderness to appease a blood-thirsty god. It reminded me of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, but it's so much more than that.

Candy-painted mods, futuristic drugs, mutant deer, and abandoned theme parks give shape to this desolate world. It's poignant, touching, tender, powerful, and badass. And the sex scene is top-notch. Please do yourself a favor and pick up Mercy if you want something fresh, you dig anime, and you want to feel something on deep levels.

[Tomasz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Plenty of powerful, mythic-grade goodness here. Nothing exactly explained, this is a world for every reader to unpack on their own. Hope there is more on the way.

[Bob Comparda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Was skeptical of Kelby Losack going cyberpunk, mostly because I'm not a huge reader of cyberpunk, however I wasn't much a reader or crime novels either until I discovered Losack. Mercy reads just like any of the authors other books with the same refreshing style, except this book is on a whole nother level. The amount of detail he puts into the world he's created in 120 pages, while still telling an interesting and exciting story is insane. It's a post apocalyptic world of technology, body mods, drugs, guns, and gods. A boy and his father go into the woods for a hunt, but the father has another reason for taking him there besides to tag some mutant deer. Story as well as the ending were flawless.

[Ryan Jackson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A kid with a robotic arm and a giant fucking gun sets out to kill a God. It's cyberpunk meets Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Mercy is Kelby's best work yet.

[Scott Cumming · Rating 5 out of 5]

Losack goes cyberpunk mixed with, to me, a medieval vibe as a father and son go on a hunt that is really is a human offering to an ancient god.

This one is a full on hallucinatory trip of a novella mixing elements of a dystopian cyber world with a world that has delved into the dark ages using pelts as jackets and relying on religion of sorts to look for signs and keep bad tidings at bay.

I already thought this was a helluva of a book, but the insight of the making of the book added another level to that. This is Losack working at another level beyond the dime bags and hood rats and melding together a book strong on emotion and imagery that'll take some beating as one of my favourites from the year certainly and probably beyond as it is begging for re-reads.

It's Cormac McCarthy's The Road for the cool kids.

[Tyler Tracey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Provoking narrative theme and a fun ride. Kelby remains an amicable story teller with short tales I enjoy repeating, a playlist of tragedy I can chill to.

[Books For Decaying Millennials · Rating 5 out of 5]

I purchased a copy of this book, while attending VOIDCON, this past September. All views and opinions are my own.
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It was only after I started reading this book, that I realized I had another book by Kelby Losack, on my TBR shelf. After reading this book, I can tell you, I will be reading that other volume soon.

Mercy is a parable of a doomed future. It's a journey across a poisoned land, where the flame of humanity flickers in strange colors. Here a Father and Son, wrestle with loss, and the heavy burdens that weight heavy on the shoulders, and on the heart. Kelby Losack has woven a tale that is perpetually tipped beyond the edge of a great chasm. It's a reminder that even in the dim epilogue of our species, there will be change, hardship, love, sacrifice and rebirth. Fans of Matthew Mitchell's Chain Devils and the Richard Stanley film "Hardware", will find much enjoyment in this novella. Losack's prose are infused with blood, slippery with machine oil and pulsing with a strange life.

[Matt Neil Neil · Rating 5 out of 5]

First thoughts, two minutes after finishing the book? Kelby Losack proving yet again why I'll put whatever else I'm reading aside whenever he drops a new book.

The Cyberpunk city looks and feels how it should, but for me this book went next level because it's predominantly set in the wilderness, the lost world of dirt and mutant deer and abandoned theme parks and cruel, hungry mountain gods.

There's also some true beauty among the decay and mutilation and oceans of blood, some very touching explorations of what it means to be a father, a son. There's a mythological feel to the book, and I feel like this new phase in his development as a writer is going to be SO interesting to watch.

So, yeah, another banger from Kelby. Bring on the rest of the Cyberpunk cycle, the new mythology of the moon-poisoned future.

[Steven William William · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cyberpunk Mythology

Cyberpunk post-apocalypse, stylistic as hell, unique and beautiful.

Mercy is a father son trek across a strange wasteland with god-killing gun, corpse catapults, cyberpunk aesthetics and a boy wearing his father's torso as a backpack.

The prose is beautiful, sparse, poetic and deliberate. It drops a lot of no-no words and graphic sex scenes, sprinkled in with a distant heart-aching story about sacrifice, nihilism, and hope. It pulls none of its punches, it feels brave and honest.

It's wonderfully short, but packs a lot into a small space, maximally efficient and evocative. It's exactly what I look for in a writer, and I was blown away.

[Matthew Meade · Rating 5 out of 5]

A mean and effective book, far weighter than its 129 pages would suggest, about fathers and sons, what they know about each other and what they don't, what they want from each other and what they are willing to give.

Kelby Losack hand sold this book to me, asking me if I liked weird books. I challenged him to sell me something that would surprise me and he did so with this Appalachian cyberpunk parable that borrows from a well-known bible story (though you'll have to read it to guess which one).

Strange, gritty, and risk-taking, the book is filled with striking images and wisdom that feels like it was earned from some other dimension. Kelby Losack is worth your time.

[Edward · Rating 4 out of 5]

A weird trippy cyberpunk tale about a man and his son and a gun that kills gods. I really enjoyed this. It had a style all its own with an ending that may rival the biggest anime I’ve seen. I like how it isn’t typical cyberpunk and sits on the edges of that world. The writing is crisp and clear and wastes no words. If you’re looking for something altogether different with excellent writing I highly recommend Mercy.

[Daniel Quinn · Rating 4 out of 5]

red roses full of meat and bone blooming out

[G.D. Bowlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mercy is an incredible exercise in world building. The land of Mercy is colorful and dark, it's grimy, it's beautiful. It's the human condition packed into 120+ pages. There's tons of cyberpunk fun to be had, with lots of insane body mods, new uses for old tech, and flourishes of what I think you'd call magical realism in the form of a religion that is shockingly real. I'm gonna call it magical realism. And I like magical realism. So there ya go.

The core of this book though, like all of Kelby's books, is the heart. The connection between the father and son is powerful and deep, subtly unfolding over the span of what feels like just a few chapters. Our characters may exist in a strange, heightened world, but their desires and feelings are incredibly relatable. This one hits.

[Downward · Rating 3 out of 5]

fun in a world building way, with anime aesthetics and a kind of fantasy feel melted onto the language of a modern world. this is resolutely not my thing, but for it being not my thing I enjoyed it and would encourage others to read it bc I can imagine that for those whose things it IS, this would be a huge book for them. it's also short, with some chapters being only a sentence or two long, which is an aesthetic choice that sometimes really falls short, but in this case is usually propulsive because it's structured with clear intent.

[John The Crippledgimp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well this was a little different from what Losack usually writes but it doesn't matter cuz Kelby Losack fuckin rules and is just a bad ass storyteller and writer. If you haven't read Losack you fuckin need to. Highly recommend this and everything Losack writes

[jasper · Rating 2 out of 5]

this was so hard to rate because pretty much the only thing I liked was the world itself/the cyberpunk setting, and I wasn't sure how much leeway I should give for that