Sometimes I worry that I have a stunted imagination.

If you’ve read my work before, it’s likely that you’ve noticed that I have some themes that I return to over and over again:

  • Conspiracies of seemingly powerless but imaginative people thwarting evil and darkness
  • Nostalgia distilled to its metaphorical root
  • People who are wrong about the universe in interesting ways for interesting reasons
  • People who pursue their delusional theories off a cliff and suffer the consequences
  • Strange phenomena that turn out not to be random

A Scout is Brave (coming in July 2024!) has all five of those things, and as I read through it again a few weeks ago for a quick line edit, I wondered:

Am I imaginative enough for this business?

Though I often read and enjoy flamboyantly visionary mind-blowing fiction with wild ideas (Philip K. Dick, let’s say, or Ted Chiang), I seem to have a strange fuse in my mind that stops me from writing it. I’m not comfortable building castles in the air with nothing underneath them.

Will Ludwigsen with a copy of Missing! by Daniel Cohen
Like this book I recently found from my childhood.

Much of my early reading was what I jokingly refer to as “horror non-fiction,” things like ghosts and vampires putatively told as true. There was a participatory aspect to it for me, an idea that if I looked around the right corner fast enough, I’d see something wondrous.

I could imagine seeing Bigfoot in the woods, but not a dragon. That blows the fuse, unfortunately, which is why I’ll probably never write a heroic fantasy story.

And while I enjoy visionary writers like Clark Ashton Smith and Thomas Ligotti and Arthur C. Clarke who really press the gas pedal on going to the frontiers of their stories, I just can’t write that way.

Dog with a doll's head, why do you ask?
An image I created after a dream.

I’m more of a weirdener.

I take normal things and make them plausibly weird because I hope to this day that I’ll come around a corner and see something wondrous. I’ll never ride aboard a starship or fend off an army of orcs at Helm’s Deep, but man, I will find my way into a secluded place in the woods or an abandoned mental institution.

You need a story about a house creeping slowly across the landscape? I’m your guy. You want to read about a television show that’s production was as strange as its content? I got you covered. You curious about what the Zodiac killer thought of the Moon landing? I’m on it.

David Lynch isn’t asking me to write a fourth season or feature film of Twin Peaks, but if he did, a question I’d have to answer for myself would be whether the whole world was “Twin Peaks-y” or if it only happened in odd Lynchian pockets. I’d prefer the latter because we’d all have known by now if we were living in a 100% Lynchian world, but if we could come upon that strangeness in certain places and times, it would give us a lot more hope that we could still be surprised by reality.

I think that’s how my stories, including A Scout is Brave, work. They’re all about the 10% chance that they aren’t completely untrue, a combination of cultivating our garden and fertilizing it with the strange.

You know, weirdening.