BOOKS
We are but Monstrous Miracles
2024 by Jeremy Michaels
Three days before Christmas, a Goollip will find itself thrown into a cold and lonely dumpster. What’s a Goollip?
For a former drug addict, it’s just what she needs to reconnect with her estranged 10-year-old son. For an abusive and criminal parole officer, it’s the perfect present to give his daughter, sure to show up his ex-wife and the better man she now calls husband. For the owner of a little toy store, the Goollips are what he knows will finally help his middle class family catch a break. For a deified pastor with sadistic, messianic passions, who believes the path to salvation comes at the point of his holy .357, they are an image of perfect, simple, obedience.
For an angry and newly homeless man, the man who threw the Goollip in the trash, these ridiculously expensive, permanently infantilized freaks have become the defining symbol of a world that has lost its mind.
They are all characters at the mercy of their broken city and the misplaced morality of its population segregated by a wide gulf of wealth and built upon a foundation as weak and vulnerable as a pane of cracking glass. A foundation, which one Goollip, in a dumpster, is about to shatter and bring the whole thing down.
Redbird
2025 by Jeremy Michaels
In life, a man is lost. On a fog-shrouded highway, an unscheduled stop draws him into a bizarre act of violence he’s told is meant to liberate him.
In another life, he wakes to a day he aims to make his last.
In the recesses of his mind, both lives converge to occupy a singular space – isolated despair.
Detached from his family, he maps the traumatic signposts of a boy’s youth, of what it means to love, be loved, and ultimately destroy something unexpectedly beautiful and insistent in its existence.
The further he presses on, the deeper and darker the violence consuming his dual consciousness becomes until the light of his being in both realities fades and flickers to its weakest point. Light illuminates all: joy, hope, and vision for what comes next. Is all that he illuminates pain?
It’s a story as dark as a new moon sky. Hellfire redemption caught in the stockade. And yet, a love letter lies within.