HolyLand U.S.A. and Other Stories

HolyLand U.S.A. and Other Stories is a collection of voice-driven, satirical short stories, many speculative in mode, whose settings—a religious theme park, a Japanese game show, a far-future conglomo-corp supercity—are sites of spectacle and performance against which its characters, whether from misperceptions or a self-destructive impulse, fail despite—and often because of—their best efforts to succeed. These settings are, more so than the other, supporting characters, the primary source of conflict advancing the story. Often the stories include invented technologies, both to build out an unconventional world and to serve as the means through which a society's value system is interrogated. In my short story "Psychomanteus"—in which a private investigator who solves the unfinished business of the dystopian city's ghost population must, in order to save the spirit of his late husband, sacrifice his better principles and harvest ghosts who are in the process of passing on—embedded temple implants that run on the power of ectoplasm facilitate much of the story's themes of grief and being stuck in the past. In "Phronk Breaks His Cycle," elaborate staging contraptions called Cycle-o-Ramas™ enable employees working in a far-future emporium to perform an infinitude of hypothetical gig favors to appeal to their viewing customers.