BLUE
Login
Profile banner
JS
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
673 followers1.9k following1.8k posts
JSjsundman.bsky.social

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.
1
JSjsundman.bsky.social

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.
1
Profile banner
JS
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
673 followers1.9k following1.8k posts
HomePopularExplore