October magic

California road tripping and Joshua Mohr's Saint the Terrifying

Greetings from Emeryville!

Last week I took a trip up the California coast to visit with friends in Morro Bay (Hi Sean!) and in Soquel (Hi Ben!) before spending a long weekend visiting my daughter Annie at UC Davis.

I go up for a visit once or twice a year and I’ve come to love this charming little college town to the point where I have my favorite cafes, restaurants, and things to do in and around Davis.

This time we went into Sacramento for a Halloween Zine Fest in Oak Park and played board games at There and Back Café, where I left my backpack, prompting a last minute dash back to the capital to retrieve my laptop before the café closed. Other than that it was a mellow visit. We went to the farmer’s market, cooked beans together, and even watched some football. But my favorite moments were walking the leaf-strewn streets and talking about the past, present, and future.

We’ve both come a long way from when I dropped Annie off at her musty dorm room in the fall of 2021 and basically wished her good luck. Now she lives in a big house with lots of friends directly across from campus where she tutors students looking for help with their lower division Economics classes.

A lot of you remember Annie as the kid who always had a book in her hand at Vermin on the Mount or at the LA Times Festival of Books. Now she’s in her final year of school, making plans for the real world, which feels a little too real, as it always does during an election year.

I’m in Emeryville for a secret mission this afternoon, which I’ll tell you about next week, but the anchor for the trip was the launch of Joshua Mohr’s Saint the Terrifying at the Make-Out Room in the Mission last night, which including a reading, a performance by the band Slummy, and a Q&A with Peter Maravelis of City Lights.

Saint the Terrifying is the first of three books in a punk rock Viking saga set in the East Bay. It’s not like anything you’ve ever read before. It’s dark and violent and strange. It’s also very funny. Josh isn’t concerned with genre so much as he loves literature with blood in its veins. This interview with Jane Ciabattari has everything you need to know about the project, and includes the opening lines, which are astonishing:

You’re the person who has this story forming in the mind’s eye, that marvelous imagination, that wonder hunter, that thunderstorm, that haunted house filled with the fertilizer of childhood, that drive-in showing dirty movies, that therapist couch, that dive bar, that frantic machine, that solitary confinement, the butcher cleaving your memories to meat, that manic depressive, that flat saxophone, that anxious child, that father’s gnarled love, that mother’s cusses and knuckles hustling around your skull, punishing, still punishing, and why can’t we ever shush the roars from our…
Wait.
What were we talking about?
Yeah. Right. The day I “killed” Got Jokes.

I hope everyone engaged in making art has a chance to listen to Josh talk about writing someday. Josh doesn’t do pep talks. He’s not the kind of writer who will tell you “If I can do it, you can do it.” When he talks about art, it feels like he’s speaking directly to the people who have to make it, the people who have no choice in the matter, the people whose lives depend on it.

Josh reading Saint the Terrifying, with Peter Marvels, and with Slummy

Sometime during the aftermath of COVID, Josh told me that one thing the pandemic had taught him was there are no rules. Close the schools? Sure. Work from home? Why not. To-go cups at bars? Fucking go for it. He said, and I’m paraphrasing, “Now is the time to make the art you were born to make.” In other words, the pandemic was a reminder that the rules that govern our lives are mostly illusory and self-imposed. Adhering to these rules is probably good for society, but death for the artist. It was Josh’s words that gave me the courage to write Black Van, a book no one asked for and I was convinced no one would want to read. Now that it’s done, I can see its appeal, it’s power, but I couldn’t then. I have Josh to thank for that.

By now you should know if Saint the Terrifying is for you, and if it is you can preorder it right here. The icing on the cake was also seeing crime writer Joe Clifford, former SD pal Adrian Roe, and long-time friend and loyal reader of Message from the Underworld, Eric Raymond (Hi Eric!).

Ten years of Salad Days

This is your reminder that I’ll be doing a Q&A with Scott Crawford after a screening of the director’s cut of Salad Days at Braindead Studios on Thursday October 24 at 8pm. You can only see this version of the seminal documentary about the DC punk scene in theaters. Also, I’ll have books to sign and sell. See you there!

The Best American Mystery & Suspense 2024

I have a bit of good news to share. My story “The House on Dead Confederate Street,” which was published by Aaron Burch in Long Story, Short was named an Other Distinguished Mystery and Suspense of 2023 by guest editor S.A. Cosby and series editor Steph Cha. Even cooler? Jac Jemc’s story, which was also published in Long Store, Short, was also named, as was Tod Goldberg. Very nice company to be in.

There are way more lows than highs when writing and submitting short stories—I kid you not, as I was writing this I received a rejection for a story I’ve been trying to place for years—so it feels good to know that this particular story was read and admired by writers that I admire. You can read the story here. It’s set in a haunted house, so what better time than now?

Thanks for reading. I hope this week is full of October magic. I’m grateful for the distraction of the World Series starting on Friday. A few weeks ago I was standing in the bleachers watching Miguel Rojas ground into a game-ending triple play against the Padres and now the Dodgers are in the World Series, which comes on the heels of the passing of Dodgers legend Fernando Valenzuela. I’ll leave you with this iconic Fleetwood Mac video filmed at Chavez Ravine.

If you liked this newsletter you might also like my latest novel Make It Stop, or the paperback edition of Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records, or my book with Bad Religion, or my book with Keith Morris. I have more books and zines for sale here. And if you’ve read all of those, consider ordering my latest collaboration The Witch’s Door and preordering the anthology Eight Very Bad Nights.

Message from the Underworld comes out every Wednesday and is always available for free, but paid subscribers also get my deepest gratitude and Orca Alert! on most Sundays. It’s a weekly round-up of links about art, culture, crime, and killer whales.