American Fury: An Epic Political Thriller
The novel which has consumed my goddamn soul finally nears completion
FOR THE PAST fourteen months I’ve been obsessively scrawling away at my novel American Fury, an epic political thriller which began as a story about white supremacy and the murder of liberal democracy and became much more than that. Primarily, it’s a story about a man forced by his past decisions to infiltrate a far-right terrorist organization whose leader was, a long time ago, his best friend. There’s a whole lot more, but I’ll save the descriptions for a later time. In its own way, I think it came to summarize how it feels, to me at least, to live through the collapse of the empire whose shadow has loomed so long over everything.
At Christmas I finally finished the first draft. It feels crazy to me to have reached the “end,” especially because this story has existed in concept for much longer. And get this: that first draft was 1,100 pages. I shit you not.
Okay, to be more accurate, this book is written in a fast-paced, minimal style with lots of paragraphs, more than a few of them one sentence long, so it’s not quite as long as 1,100 pages implies. The word count of this first draft did climb to 290,000 by the end, though. Clearly, I lost my mind.
In recent weeks I ripped out a few hundred pages, stitched in a couple new scenes, and will soon, finally, begin language editing. The task then will be to hack at it ruthlessly until every letter and punctuation mark earns its place. I hope to cut the word count in half. Write demented; edit ruthlessly.
All this to say: American Fury is coming your way soon, and, friends, I’ve got something on my hands with this one. Stay tuned.
