Bad Times with Julian Mercer

The debut publication from Julian Mercer
With contributions from Jack Chase (author of Made in America, The Bastard of Taylor's End)*
Presented by Abbycat Liminal

A fractured debut of interlinked stories set across desert test towns, roadside motels, and postwar Hollywood, this collection explores isolation, obsession, and the quiet violence of American interior lives.

In a desert town built for nuclear testing, a sleepless engineer watches his silverware vanish piece by piece.

A man on the run checks into a motel room that already belongs to someone else.

A woman calls her boyfriend ninety-seven times from a roadside motel after a fight. When he finally arrives, she's calmer and kinder than he's ever seen her—and knows things she shouldn't.

On the night of January 9, 1947, a sleepless cartoonist shares coffee with a young woman in a Hollywood diner—hours before she becomes the most infamous murder victim in Los Angeles history.

A group of teenagers celebrate graduation at a mountain cabin, where a stranger appears on the trail and behaves like a lifelong friend.

Spare, unsettling, and quietly devastating, this debut marks the emergence of a singular voice operating between noir, psychological realism, and American myth.