Q: Cool concept, but I don't know about the horror aspect. Will this book be too scary for me?
The tone is psychological horror with shades of the fantastic. There's not a lot of gore, although there are a few scenes of violence. If this were a movie, it'd probably be a hard PG-13. Content warnings for emotional manipulation, claustrophobia and getting lost, and an off-screen suicide attempt.
At its core, the story is about an unhealthy relationship pushed to the breaking point by a force that amplifies and projects it, not unlike the way The Shining uses fantastical trappings to explore how alcoholism destroys families. (There are no elevators of blood in Subcutanean, though.) I've also previously pitched this as Mythago Wood meets A Separate Peace. It's certainly dark and disturbing, but hopefully not traumatizing.
Q: Can you say more about the queer content in this novel?
The book centers around a same-sex crush and a complicated friendship that becomes too intense for either party, at times, to handle. It's not a romance novel: there's no sex scenes and nothing that would go beyond a PG-13 rating. But there's a lot of unrequited passion, physicality, and intense emotion. (It's not all dark, either: there's plenty of sweet moments throughout.)
I've written more about what the book means to me personally here.
Q: How different are the different versions, really?
Don't expect entirely different novels. Each version of Subcutanean has the same number of chapters, for instance, and each chapter has essentially the same beats: there's no branching paths or radically alternate endings. You might think of each version as a different draft of the same book. As a data point, my master copy with all possible versions is about 100,000 words long: any particular rendering will contain about 62,000 words.
This is not to say all the changes are purely cosmetic, though. Each of the 17 chapters has at least one major moment that differs from version to version: some versions might include extra scenes or entirely different ones, or have pivotal moments that can play out in meaningfully different ways. Some of these alternates have a 50/50 chance of showing up: others are more rare, maybe appearing in only one book out of ten. All told this makes for several hundred thousand possible combinations of the major variants alone—with countless more once you factor in all the smaller alternates, of which there are generally at least one per paragraph, sometimes far more.
Even these smaller variants can have a big impact on how you interpret the story. I wrote a blog post about the concept of "pivot words" that can alter how you feel about a whole scene. It's the difference between "I can forgive you" and "I can almost forgive you." Subcutanean uses these a lot, with the result that even very tiny changes can have a big impact on the story.
Q: How does the "Pair of Paperbacks" option work?
When you order a pair of books, two things happen. First, you save a little money. More interestingly, I use a special process when generating your copies that increases the chance each book will have text that differs from its companion. The way this works is that the code generates twenty random books, then does statistical analysis on the output text to find the two copies in that set of twenty which are least alike. Those are the two you get.
This doesn't guarantee your two books will be as different as possible, but it does significantly increase the chances that you'll notice some key variations between the two copies.
Q: I don't really care about all these different versions. I just want a good story.
Any given copy of Subcutanean will read exactly like a regular novel. There won't be anything indicating places where text can differ or what alternate versions might exist, so you shouldn't get FOMO about "what might have been." My hope, actually, is that once you start reading you'll forget all about the alternate versions and just be sucked into the story, as with any good book.
It's only when you start talking about the story with someone else that you might start to feel a little dizzy...
Q: Isn't $25 kind of a lot for a paperback?
It turns out printing bespoke one-off books is more difficult and costly than printing 1000 identical books. This is not only because of economies of scale but because most automated print-on-demand publishers only support books with an ISBN number, and you cannot legally change the text of a book without giving it a new ISBN number (which costs money to get). This means a project like Subcutanean is cut off from many of the most popular print-on-demand sites like Createspace or Lulu. Many of the sites that do allow books without ISBNs require ordering a proof copy after each change, or having a staff member manually review the change: having to find companies that don't require these things further reduces the pool of available printers.
Basically, this is a tricky project to do, and a lot of that trickiness involves extra time and expense to pull off. However, if you want to save a little money and don't mind getting a version that's not unique, you can grab one of three pre-generated copies on Amazon, which do have ISBNs and are cheaper to print: #30287, #33234, and #36619.
Q: Is there anything special about the three pre-generated versions on Amazon?
Nope. These are not "official versions" or "reference versions" or anything like that. The only thing special about them is that there are three major ways the climax of Subcutanean can play out, and the seeds were selected so each one features a different version of this sequence.
Q: Why is shipping outside the US so expensive?
Unfortunately, costs for international shipping have skyrocketed over the past few years, and there's a lot of uncertainty right now about their future. My margins are not very high on this project, so I can't afford to artificially subsidize shipping.
If the price is a dealbreaker, here are a couple alternatives:
Q: When was Subcutanean published?
The official release date was the palindromic date of 0202 | 2020.
Q: How long will it take my book to be delivered?
Because the ordering process for these custom printed books is complex, it takes somewhere between 2-3 weeks for your book to arrive. Orders outside the US may take up to an additional week to arrive.
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