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John Sundman
@jsundman.bsky.social
Biodigital novelist, mover of heavy objects, volunteer firefighter (retired), national treasure. "Sundman figures it out!" : johnsundman.substack.com/ JohnSundman.com
672 followers1.9k following1.8k posts
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Reposted by John Sundman
DMdanmcfadden.bsky.social

Trump's work to normalize violence among his supporters is working, even when the target is a fellow Republican. Look at what they are doing to *a lifelong Republican and two-time Trump voter* who merely said that Haitian workers at his business do a good job: www.nytimes.com/2024/09/30/u...

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Reposted by John Sundman
Kkashana.bsky.social

Love American disaster relief, where after you lose everything there’s a cop there to make sure you know that trying to save your own life is looting.

ONhystericalblkns.bsky.social

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Reposted by John Sundman
NSnoahshachtman.bsky.social

I knew Murdoch and the NY Post played a major role in making Eric Adams the mayor. I had no idea it was this big, or this incestuous. nymag.com/intelligence...

The Secretive Alliance Between the New York Post and Eric Adams
The Secretive Alliance Between the New York Post and Eric Adams

Rupert Murdoch’s paper helped elect the mayor and they haven’t quite given up on him yet.

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JSjsundman.bsky.social

Well I certainly hope you'll check out my "Awful mistake" essay, or Ash Deza's ghost story, or, better yet, both of them!

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Foreword, conclusion. end/

Yet the people who lived in the house after us put open bibles and crucifixes in every room and hired professional exorcists. What is one to make of that? Was my family just insensitive to ghosts, or were the new owners just very suggestible people? Who knows? What I do know is nothing I experienced in that house was half as ghostly or disturbing as what I read in Only the Living Feel Remorse. Good luck! John Sundman Martha’s Vineyard, 2024
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Foreword, part 6 of 7:

My wife and I lived in that house in Gardner for nearly nine years. I confess that on perhaps three occasions I experienced a kind of eerie feeling. Once, sitting in an armchair next to the fireplace in the living room, reading a novel well past midnight, I even said out loud “I know you’re there” to an invisible visitor. After my family had moved out of Gardner I learned that my nine year old daughter and her best friend used to sometimes go up the back stairs, down the hallway and then down the front stairs just to avoid having to go through the dining room — because they felt something was “off” about that part of the house. But it wasn’t like poltergeist, or the Amityville Horror, for Pete’s sake. We lived there happily for nearly nine years.
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Foreword, part 6 of 7:

My wife and I lived in that house in Gardner for nearly nine years. I confess that on perhaps three occasions I experienced a kind of eerie feeling. Once, sitting in an armchair next to the fireplace in the living room, reading a novel well past midnight, I even said out loud “I know you’re there” to an invisible visitor. After my family had moved out of Gardner I learned that my nine year old daughter and her best friend used to sometimes go up the back stairs, down the hallway and then down the front stairs just to avoid having to go through the dining room — because they felt something was “off” about that part of the house. But it wasn’t like poltergeist, or the Amityville Horror, for Pete’s sake. We lived there happily for nearly nine years.
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Foreword, part 5 of 7:

Tormented by an ever more relentless ghost, consumed with guilt, our narrator finally does something sensible — he asks a wise person — the only one he knows — for help. But when he hears what this person has to say, their very reasonable counsel burns him like a hot iron. This is a man who really is his own worst enemy. Instead of taking the help on offer he goes looking for pagans to rid him of his ghost. Pagans. And that’s when the story starts to get really scary. Ghost stories, almost by definition, make you question what’s real and what’s not. Think of The Shining for just one example. Are all those scary things really happening in that remote, empty hotel? Or are they hallucinations brought on by isolation, dread, alcoholic self-absorption?
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Foreword, part 4 of 7:

Well, it’s not quite true that he has no friends. He had two: John, his best friend through high school, and Suzie, who was once his own true love — until he drove her away. Now John is dead and Suzie might as well be, and our narrator knows that he is responsible. And John’s ghost knows it too. All this is set up in the first 42 pages of Only the Living Feel Remorse. In the early chapters we meet our narrator and John and Suzie in happier times, and we feel the tension building as the story unfolds and our narrator’s self-loathing and resentment build to a head. This setup is finely drawn by Ash Deza, but, frankly, I was wondering how he was going to get a whole novella out of it. It all seemed pretty straightforward. Until.
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Foreword, part 3:

That majestic old house looked exactly like the kind of place you would set a ghost story, and years after we sold it we heard that it had been featured in one of those TV shows about paranormal stuff. It had all the right trappings. Only the Living Feel Remorse has none of those classic ghost story trappings. It’s set in a grimy, go-nowhere industrial town known to locals as Shithole. Our haunted narrator is nothing like an exotic wealthy industrialist or a backstairs servant that you might find in a more conventional story. He’s a guy who drinks too much, works dead-end jobs, sleeps in his clothes. He has no friends — unless you count the bottles of cheap booze that clutter his low-rent apartment.
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John Sundman
@jsundman.bsky.social
Biodigital novelist, mover of heavy objects, volunteer firefighter (retired), national treasure. "Sundman figures it out!" : johnsundman.substack.com/ JohnSundman.com
672 followers1.9k following1.8k posts
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