Case Notes
bring out your boxes...
Apr. 12, 2026
The Box Man by Kōbō AbeMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I started this book at 3am yesterday and finished it this morning. Abe Kobo clearly takes influence from Kafka (enough so I would call this book something like his version of The Metamorphosis), but the storytelling is all his own.
The surrealism is off the charts the entire time (in the best way possible), and the book is short enough to sustain a decent amount of head-hopping, narrative triangulation, and time jumping (when there appears to be any preservation of time and space at all, because you're certainly going to have a lot of moments where you're wondering who the fuck is narrating, who that person really IS in this story, where we're at and when, if there are multiple speakers, what events are inventions of the narrator, etc.) without muddling things too much. You will feel constant dislocation and confusion, but you also can't put this book down. Abe tricks you into reading the next paragraph consistently, and before you know it, you'll be hitting the back cover.
Ostensibly, the text of the novel is being written by the eponymous box man, who may or may not be a person who shot ANOTHER guy living in a box outside his house with an air rifle (or maybe that's all the box man's fantasy about his pre-box-man self encountering who he is now, a lie to justify his decision to leave his home life and position in society to move into a box), who driven by guilt, constructs a dwelling out of a cardboard box and begins living on the streets of Ueno. But the box man isn't merely sheltering in a cardboard box; the box is a mobile dwelling he wears like a shell and never takes off, seeing the world only through a window he's cut in the front of it, the box reinforced with vinyl and wire, full of hangers to hold his possessions, tied to his body to keep it from moving too much as he carries on about his life, and of course covered with the text of the novel you're reading, which is written on the inside walls as well as in notebooks he carries (of course there is also a compartment built into the box for these notebooks).
The notebooks and writing in the box appear to be written by at least two people, maybe three or four, maybe it's all in the box man's head, or maybe all these people are representations of the box man at different periods of his life: it's a little bit of a choose your own adventure in that respect.
But don't let me scare you off by starting with the fact that this book is narrative soup, because I was blown away by how well Abe pulls it off. This book is truly a masterpiece. It's certainly a message book in the sense that the box man gives you social commentary and thoughts on the human condition and his own identity, but these are filtered through the character well enough they become believable instead of tedious.
One of my favorite sections is the box man describing (in one of the many revised narratives we get of exactly WHY tf he made and moved into the box, all of which might just be a lies he's telling the shady doctor and nurse trying to convince him to give up his box) how he became pitifully addicted to consuming news, always watching television and reading newspapers to such a degree that he even hung a radio inside his box so he could retreat fully into the news when he became a box-dwelling mendicant. The description of media obsession, while brief, is one of the rare instances where Abe grabs you by the scruff and stuffs your nose in his point.
For most of the book, he juxtaposes ideas and constructs the scenes in very impressionistic ways; you are carried through primarily on vibes and have to figure things out on your own, but you somehow leave with his particular (decidedly psychedelic) vision of alienation in 1970s Japan.
The box man, trying to escape the threatening and unbelievable present, plunges wholeheartedly into an even more confusing world of his own making. I'm sure you could read this book as a realist and say it's a story about a guy losing his mind in a box, but that's a pretty boring book, and also unfairly reduces what Abe is doing; I see this book as an attempt to come into conflict with an unreasonable society without copping out or reconciling. There won't be an "oh, that's what REALLY happened" moment where he gives you the answers or tells you what to think. Like real life, you're going to get more and more confused until it ends. There is beauty along the way, lots of frustration, also some very horny passages about voyeurism that pivot into a pretty good meditation on anonymity that resonates even more strongly now, considering the ubiquity of surveillance technology and social media.
I highly recommend this book knowing it's a controversial pick and will frustrate some people, but if you want a real mindbender you can read in a day, it's definitely worth your time.
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fever dreams about con men
Apr. 10, 2026
The Hamlet by William FaulknerMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I read this book in a week or so, which is pretty fast for a Faulkner novel, and I can't recommend it enough if you've been curious about reading Faulkner but daunted by his intimidating (and constantly morphing) style. You'll find the long sentences and digressions that he's known for, but in The Hamlet, the narrative remains tight throughout, and for the most part, you will be dealing with a linear story instead of disorienting time-hopping between past and present.
Right. So why would you want to read some boring novel like that?
Frankly, Faulkner's storytelling benefits from this straightforward approach. While it appears less complex than some of his notoriously difficult work (thinking The Sound and the Fury, Go Down, Moses, Absalom, Absalom!, etc.), The Hamlet makes up for it by drawing you into a richly-textured but smooth fever dream without falling flat like Sanctuary.
On its face, the story is simple: a stranger arrives in the small Mississippi town of Frenchman's Bend, buys a decaying mansion from the local bigshot who owns most of the town, and through cunning (and with the support of a hilarious, bizarre cast of misfit relatives) cons everyone in his path until he's fleeced the whole town. This story is told in a series of episodes, each one topping what came before until you wonder how far the Snopes family is willing to go to take over this town.
Who are the heroes? Well, that's the best part. There don't seem to be any, yet you will still find yourself unable to look away from this train wreck. Over the course of the novel, you watch the townspeople seduced one by one into the bread and circuses, flim-flam schemes of the Snopeses. At first they're skeptical, but the Snopes family's complete lack of taste and decorum lures them in: it's fun to watch this uncouth family destroy the fossilized sense of propriety of the impoverished post-Civil War South. (And let's just say they get WAAAAY out there in terms of bad taste. Faulkner doesn't shy away from the grotesque, but he also doesn't come straight out and tell you what's happening when it gets NC-17, if you catch my drift.) The protagonists succumb to the Snopes contagion like a zombie movie, and by about halfway through the book, you begin to wonder any time a character reappears if they've caught Snopes virus.
The closest you have to a main protagonist might be the traveling sewing machine salesman, a guy who everyone in town (and surrounding towns) does business with but razzes about being a con man himself. He's not only selling sewing machines but flipping anything he can get a hold of, and he has a reputation for being a snake. He's the ringleader of conspiratorial opposition to the Snopes family, mostly because they're cutting in on his bottom line, and he wants to preserve his reputation for being smarter than everybody else in town.
One of the best scenes in the novel comes close to the end, when a Texan cowboy shows up to sell wild horses to the people of Frenchman's Bend. The scene stretches from one setting to the next around the town over several hours as the cowboy (working with Flem Snopes, but only close enough to avoid either of them having any legal responsibility for the horses) tricks the townspeople into buying the horses in an impromptu auction, putting on a hilarious wild-west cowboy affect and mainlining gingersnaps long into the night. You can guess that it turns into a disaster: people get hurt and plenty of property destroyed, and it keeps snowballing like a Rube Goldberg machine designed specifically to humiliate the entire town.
Oh. Also it's pretty funny if you're paying attention.
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Why short novels?
Nov. 23, 2025
There's a reason I keep writing 65,000-word novels. And no, it's not to stiff the reader on word count. Die-hards will tell you quantity wins out: more pages, better book (they think the consumer thinks)!
But my favorite novels have always been short weird ones, novels with unorthodox storytelling or strange premises, that you can read in a couple afternoons. Weekend books. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is almost the prototype.
(I'm not here to gas you up about reading short books to maximize your free time or whatever. I don't read short books to make more time for other things. In fact, long novels are better for that because of the pacing. No. I'm the opposite of hustle culture. Fuck everything else. Spend all your time reading.)
What makes short novels such a beautiful form is a brief story being given enough space to have depth.
Kurt Vonnegut novels are great examples. He often takes a straightforward, simple plot and explores the characters and their world through an out-there lens. That's the whole formula, and it lands most of the time!
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie is one of the best short novels. Universally acclaimed. I challenge you to find someone who didn't enjoy reading it. Why? It bends your mind and only takes a couple afternoons to read. And you are locked-in until the end!
Ian Fleming is a master of short novels. My novels are heavily influenced by his James Bond novels(, despite in no way really resembling them). I read most of them when I was in high school. They were out of print back then, and I had to search used bookstores and libraries. I kept Ian Fleming on the list in the back of my mind, ready whenever I encountered a stash of old books up for grabs in the wild.
I can't say it was because I enjoyed the character of James Bond much. As a reader, I have trouble identifying with him. He doesn't really appeal to me(, even though Goldeneye64 very much appealed to me, and Goldeneye itself is one of the best movies in the franchise(, despite, like my novels, being almost nothing like the books)).
Ian Fleming knows how to tell a story. People should be studying this! He just hammers you with plot. Boom, boom, boom! Suddenly you're on the last page. It moves at the pace of a comic book or an action movie. His prose isn't fancy, but it's so smooth it disappears into the story, and he builds tension effortlessly.
Short novels have the advantage of a unity of experience that longer novels lose. You, the reader, change while you read a long novel. Weeks or months of your life might pass while you ingest it! But with a short novel, you immerse yourself in the entire story in a short time. You have a rock-steady, unwavering view to the narrative. It can be entrancing. One of the most satisfying reading experiences possible.
(Long way around to say I just like short novels, I guess.)
Uberization of the Novel
Nov. 1, 2025
Sorry I haven't blogged sooner. No excuses, right?
But I'll have you know I was writing new Cass and Artie stuff for you, and after finishing the first draft of that, I started working on a new manuscript for a standalone novel. Well, two actually. One's going to be a horror novel about a werewolf who is a world-renowned surgeon, and the other is a sort of locked room mystery novel. My immediate work is the mystery, which I'm hoping to release in December. New Cass and Artie should be later this month, and it's gonna be a banger! I had a lot of fun writing it.
As someone who thinks DIY stuff is fun, I love that authors can publish books really easily. But the deluge of people trying to squeeze the market for everything it's worth really mess it up.
Basically, you can type up your manuscript, convert it to an epub file, and upload that to Amazon for other people to read on their kindles. Honestly pretty cool. And maybe even cooler, with very little effort, you can receive payments from them to support your work.
But what's not so cool is the success bros and get rich quickers who churn out low effort, llm-generated garbage and put it on sale, creating obstacles to people finding things authors put time and effort into. Don't get me wrong, before llms there were human beings filling books manually with low effort garbage to make a quick buck, but now they can automate the process. High output. All that.
The garbage book spamming hurts authors, readers, and the quality of books in general. The ways it's harmful to authors and readers are pretty obvious. Potential readers have to wade through tons of crap to find a good book, which wastes their money and their time. For authors, they face a sort of uberization if they want to make a living writing.
I see digital publishing as different than the so-called golden age of magazines, but I think services like Kindle Direct Publishing are the current analog. There are tons of fun pulp novels there being sold for cheap by hardworking writers. And a bunch of word salad.
So that means if you want to write pulp for your living these days, you end up competing for a few bucks at a time with chat gpt and success bros and schemers. That is, if you're willing to dedicate the time to teach yourself about advertising, marketing, editing, layout, platform management, blah blah blah. Or you could pay someone to do it, I guess. Or can you?
Writers are famously wealthy. Just kidding everyone. Lots of writers make sacrifices for their books, spend money on trying to present them professionally to the public, buy ads to get them to readers who would enjoy them.
Oh yeah, I hear what you're saying Stockton, but why not just publish traditionally, let your publisher handle all that stuff? (Something publishers are increasingly less likely to do, instead asking authors to promote themselves. Guess you need an agent too.)
Yeah, well. Turns out reading stuff is kinda one big market if you think about it. Lots of people buy books, read magazines and newspapers, go to libraries, etc. So the low effort sludge churn isn't just affecting the ebook market on Amazon. It's kinda clogging up a chunk of the available reading material available the world over, and throwing itself into comparison with good books.
And you know how the old saying goes. One bad apple spoils the bunch. The transformation is already underway. You can generate garbage a lot faster than cool stuff, too, and boy are they churning it out!
So now it's the multihyphenate writer-advertiser-marketer-editor-designer-agent at war with the machines for pennies on the dollar. Somebody should write a book about it, huh?
That's enough for now.
Dr. Wolf, the Wolf Doctor
Nov. 1, 2025
The story goes something like this.
I very carefully dosed myself with cannabis. Like Dr. Frankenstein himself in my little home pharmacy, I zapped my sown-together corpse with the perfect mix, and settled down to watch a nice relaxing medical drama. Berlin ER, actually. Check it out.
With my uncannily heightened perception, I noticed that one of the protagonists had sort of wolfish features, and I began to think, but what if this was his human form, and like his other side IS the wolf. He's been hiding it from the hospital staff, but every full moon he transforms into a wolf and rampages.
Now, in Berlin ER, the character I'm talking about is addicted to opiates, so the Jekyll/Hyde thing is a salient conflict. Fortuitous, right? Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is basically a werewolf story with the supernatural elements attributed to science instead of magical or natural forces.
But we're getting sidetracked here. The point is I had that flash of inspiration, what if I tried to write a medical thriller with a werewolf/surgeon protagonist. Before long, he'd become a world-renowned surgeon, and he had a sorta creepy vibe. He's the hero in emergency room action sequences, but he can't shake that desire to bite and scratch while he's operating. Yikes!
The issue with werewolf stories is there are a ton of them, and the larger part of those are either repetitive, or remove what's most interesting about the werewolf, the cursedness.
So my goal is to play these three sides off each other: medical thrillers, traditional werewolf stories, and self-conscious narrative fragmentation.
Wait, what's that third one?
In my research about werewolves, I read some of The Nature of the Beast: Transformations of the Werewolf from the 1970s to the 21st Cetury, which discusses the evolution of the subjectivity of werewolf characters in fiction (movies, books, etc.). That's how it goes sometimes. You set out to write a medical thriller about a werewolf surgeon and end up reading an academic study of werewolf subjectivity in fiction. It's a cool book though.
That was the missing piece! The Nature of the Beast discusses the shift from early werewolf literature to the modern representations, where first, the werewolf is not a POV character in the text, and is presented as a natural antagonist, like a wolf. Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf is one of the earlier works that has a POV-character werewolf, but in the narrative, he isn't a literal werewolf but he understands himself as being like one. It's a metaphor, get it? But that werewolf is Jungian. The wolves without narrative subjectivity were Freudian. That's right, the guy who famously treated The Wolf Man! (iykyk.)
One of the first stories to have a werewolf with narrative subjectivity is the short story "Boobs" by Suzee Mckee Charnas. It's a pretty cool story. It's narrated by a teenage girl who discovers she's a werewolf during puberty, and it does not disappoint. It has some great drama and humor, but doesn't lose sight of the viciousness and scariness of werewolves. In fact, the protagonist sees her transformation as positive (she finds her wolf body beautiful in contrast to her typical feelings of dysmorphia and low self-esteem).
Carys Crossen, the author of Nature of the Beast, says that contemporary werewolves (2016) have a Deleuzian subjectivity. In other words, they have to come to terms with their wolf identity as a Multiplicity, which is a technical term used by Deleuze and Guattari in their philosophical work, A Thousand Plateaus. Basically, the new werewolf's identities are understood as continually fluxuating processes. Contrast that to Hesse's Jungian werewolf, who encounters his various identites as discrete entites, kinda like avatars occupying his mind.
Anyway, I'm trying to make this one something exciting for you guys. Not saying I am ever NOT trying to make my books fun for you to read, but I'm taking my time with this one to get sufficiently weird with it.
That's enough for now.
Why I love the Phantasm franchise
Sept. 25, 2025
Sometimes I get really side-tracked when I'm writing.
It's like the daydream gets a little too strong, and you begin to drift with it. And to compound matters, if you're working on a creative project, you're probably already thinking a little strangely.
Anyway. I've had an interesting person relationship with the Phantasm franchise. The first one I saw was Phantasm 3: Lord of the Dead. One of my best friends rang me up and told me to check out cable channel whatever, and I tuned in right in time to see someone get decapitated with a boomerang! I was sold, as any good elementary schooler would be.
Now Phantasm 3 is by no means the best in the series. When I got a little older, I used to scour DVD racks at different stores, and lucky for me, one day I happened to find Phantasm. The first one. So naturally, I bought it, having only a vague but nonetheless fond memory of the 3rd movie from childhood. It was like reuniting with a childhood friend!
I showed that movie to everyone I knew! One of my fondest memories is the time my friends and I, already graduated at this point, went to the student union at the nearby college to play video games. You see. We had a tv at home, but it was a lot smaller than the one at the union. Well, one thing led to another, and pretty soon we had carted my XBOX over to use that gigantic tv instead. Probably to play the beat-em-up game based on The Warriors.
We got bored after a while, and there's a good chance we were at least a little high, so we decided to pop in a movie. Phantasm was in my backpack. We played it in the student union on the big screen in a lounge. Hell, even some guy we'd never met pulled up to watch. Everyone was into it.
See the fun thing about the Phantasm series is it really goes off the rails. And in case you haven't seen it, the main characters discover at one point that the super strong, Jawa-looking creatures with blood like the inside of a glowstick are from another planet! Yeah! They're shrunken because of something about super strong gravity there? Regardless. The Tall Man's making an army of the dead in another dimension or planet or something! And it sorta goes on like this.
The whole franchise is like getting dropped off in a parallel dimension. The rules seem internally consistent, yet also beguiling as they're revealed. Now I have no idea if Don Coscarelli pantsed the whole thing or not. Either way, from film to film it gets wilder and wilder. By Phantasm 3, most of the people in the world--or at least the US--seem to be dead! But that's exactly what makes the franchise so good.
Every Phantasm movie is a unique experience. I couldn't imagine another person accidentally having the same idea. The plot winds through serious, intense beats, but the characters also have their funny moments, even as they face the end of the world, their chosen family being enslaved after death by the Tall Man in the weird super gravity dimension, etc. Somehow it keeps this perfect balance between being funny and serious enough to remain cool. And on top of everything, it's a tremendously weird story.
There's not much of a point here. Mostly thinking about points of inspiration. I don't write horror, but a lot of my favorite movies are horror movies. And I definitely take inspiration from them. Especially weird ones like Phantasm! I think maybe the Child's Play franchise is second to Phantasm's weirdness. That's another example of a series that remained the idiosyncratic bizzaro vision of its creator throughout.
I should finish this by saying weird art is the most fun. My opinion. While I can appreciate "good" art, I have to say that for me, as a trash connoisseur, the best art is the weirdest art. Stuff that makes you laugh when you see it, but you're laughing with the artist instead of at them. Stuff that makes you scratch your head or wonder later just exactly how all that worked out again. I try to write it as best I can in my own books. Inject that spike of weirdness that I think drives a novel or a movie right through to the next truck stop. Ah well.
That's enough for now though
The Labor Wars
Sept. 20, 2025
So I've been reading The Labor Wars by Sidney Lens, which is an overview of organized labor history in the US. Specifically things like the Molly Maguires, steel strikes, mining strikes, rail strikes. Most of those strikes have casualties. Like people get killed striking for eight hour work days, getting their pay back after it's docked, and because their jobs pay so little they are literally starving to death and can't afford housing.
Interestingly enough, even talking about labor organizing led to several prominent labor organizers going to court facing life sentences. Usually sedition laws were used as a pretense. Kinda like if you accused someone of being a terrorist today. People were framed and everything! Security companies like Pinkerton would infiltrate their organization and try to encourage bomb-making or just plant evidence to entrap people for organizing strikes for an eight hour work day! And on top of that, picketers got shot. And in each of those major strike campaigns, there were gunfights between strikers and a combination of National Guard, police, and Pinkertons.
But despite public campaigns to smear some of those organizers as insurrectionists, they still successfuly organized workers because the issues were so serious. If you can't eat, and your boss is starving you, then he calls in a favor and gets the National Guard to attack you... Well, you do the math. And people read about it in the papers too. Bad PR. So one of the strategies was to arrest organizers for speaking publically. You know. Because they're posing an economic and political threat.
Been thinking lately about free speech and how different people understand it too. About a hundred years ago, almost exactly, members of the Industrial Workers of the World staged "free speech fights" in cities around the country. As an organization, the wobblies were apolitical, but many of their most famous members were avowed leftists. And I don't mean democrats or democratic socialists or progressives or whatever. Self-defined communists, anarchists, and syndicalists. So the "free speech fights" were designed to fight against laws that prohibited labor organizing. In other words, a clear 1st amendment violation.
So wobblies would start speaking on a street corner, trying to get people to join their union, or speaking about upcoming strike plans against local abusive employers. And they'd let cops arrest them one by one, to fill up the local jail, making shutting down their speeches a huge resource drain. Organizers of those campaigns faced sedition charges as communists. Essentially the early twentieth century version of a terrorism designation in our time. So free speech faced one of its first major proletarian challenges as a result of labor organizers. Specifically Leftists. Other wobblies were thrown in prison for advocating abstention from WWI. Usually under the pretext of sedition and suspected (or proven) communism. But don't get confused. They were charged for speaking in favor of pacifism.
Interestingly, some people now accuse liberal of being against free speech. And many of them are. Against free speech that legitimately threatens political and economic institutions. This means things like organizing largescale direct actions. You know. The ones the police get called out to respond to. You've seen them on the news. In other words, liberal politicians (not voters necessarily) fit the bill of supporting limiting speech. But they are willing to let innocuous leftist speech go. Imagine things like academic studies that reach a small, specialized audience, versus the perceived threat of the George Floyd Uprising a few years ago, where a threat of long-term direct actions caused scaled police responses, US marshals were deployed, etc.
People were getting black bagged of the street and interrogated for protesting! But all that's to say, the content of the speech itself determines if it gets censored or not. You'll hear liberal and conservative views all day, despite their "much exaggerated" myriad "cancellations." That's because they are safe views. But what about far-right views? I hear they're being censored all the time. But you know what? They're not. That's why you KNOW ABOUT THEM! At this point, being "cancelled" is like a merit badge. But that's a discussion for another time. Too deep. Too off-topic.
The point is that no one really cares about repressing right-wing speech. Sure. Sometimes people protest an individual speaker. It rarely shuts them down. But right-wing views don't typically present any serious cultural or political challenges to government or business. Center to far right ideas are ubiquitous, and many people in power are willing to stoke them because they're much safer discussion topics than labor organizing, which DOES pose a threat to political and economic institutions. You know. The ones they run. When it comes to right-wingers and liberals feeding each other to the dogs, the only risk to them issocial instability. I mean. Worst comes to worst, they can deploy police and national guard (as we've seen more than once) across the country to beat up on journalists and angry citizens until they stop showing up. Sometimes it takes a while.
My point in all this is that free speech has been contentious for a long time. And some people actually fought and lost a lot of things to defend it. But the people I see crying about free-speech all the time now are millionaires who babble into microphones 3-5 hours per day. And sorry to break it to you. If you do your free speech fighting from a chair in front of a microphone talk radio style, one of the most oppressed demographics in the US (self-reported), you aren't doing any free speech fighting. You're just cosplaying it. For a paycheck! Stolen valor. All that. It's just another entertainment trope. Free speech? As limited as ever, but with worse optics than usual.
That's enough for now though
Working on the New Cass and Artie: Felonious Means
Sept. 16, 2025
Currently about 10,000 words into the third main Cass and Artie story, Felonious Means. This one tentatively speaking (as in I'm not completely sure yet) digs deeper into the machinations of the shady aristocracy hinted at in the first two books. Hopefully, the reader can get a deeper look into their motives. Each Cass and Artie story has those two layers: the direct antagonist--say the big bad in the story, and a secondary layer of antagonism, driven by the the so-far unknown motives of the group working behind the scenes. The real movers and shakers.
They got close in Benoni's Defense. Harry Fisher introduces them to the rules. We learn about the challenge system, where people of higher social class abide by a set of secret norms. When they have a grievance, they essentially challenge each other to a duel. Not necessarily to the death, so not like pistols at dawn. More like an arbitrary, agreed-upon challenge. This is a separate justice system outside laws but is nonetheless rule-governed in that it obeys the evolving norms of their social ingroup. Sort of vigilantism.
That's enough for now.