Zone 23

Today is the day.

The new Arcade Publishing hardcover edition of my satirical dystopian novel Zone 23 was released in the USA this morning, and is now available wherever books are sold.

I wrote this novel back in 2015-2016. I self-published a paperback edition in 2017. That old edition is officially out-of-print, destined, hopefully, to become a curio.

Arcade Publishing has published this handsome new hardcover edition because, well, presumably because they believe that enough readers like you will want to buy it, and read it, and because Arcade Publishing is one of the few publishers willing to publish novels that would never make it past the sensitivity editors at the big five publishers.

Arcade Publishing is the literary imprint of Tony Lyons’ Skyhorse Publishing, which specializes in publishing books that the big five publishers won’t publish.

Zone 23 is one such book, which is why I self-published it back in 2017.

I’m grateful to Tony Lyons and Arcade for publishing this new edition.

And I’m grateful to all of you who pre-ordered a copy!

If you’re one of my tens of thousands of non-paying subscribers, who read all my non-paywalled Substack columns free-of-charge, and you didn’t pre-order a copy as I asked (or pressured) you to do in my recent post, well, this is your chance to step up and help me and my publishers buck the prevailing cultural trends, and infuriate (or marginally annoy) the Mandarins of Mediocrity employed by the Simulated Aristocracy to ensure that their Simulacrum of Culture does not get invaded by literary barbarians who give not one shit for their increasingly suffocating, soulless, corporatist brand of literature.

I explained all that in my recent post …

Seriously, if you’re sick of art that resembles the crap they hang in the reception areas of corporate offices, and sensitivity-edited “literature” that is about as challenging as a memo from Human Resources, well, this is how we change that … one little step at a time. I’m sorry that it’s not as exciting as rooting for some heroic “savior” to swoop in and put the world to rights, but it’s how cultures have evolved throughout history, i.e., not through some top-down “cultural revolution” (the artifacts of which tend to get erased or repurposed as consumable kitsch by the next “revolution”) but through the seemingly inconsequential actions of people choosing what kind of art and literature they want, and what kind they do not want.

So, please, read my earlier post, if you haven’t already, and then buy this book.

If you’re one of my subscribers, you’ll probably even enjoy it.

And if you’re one of the many readers who have already read it, and enjoyed it, please help spread the word. I’m severely “visibility-filtered” by “Free-speech X,” which was my main social-media platform until Musk took over, and Facebook, which has been “visibility-filtering” me since 2020, so my non-Substack reach is rather limited these days.

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“Zone 23 is a razor-sharp, painfully hilarious satire on a future society in which authoritarianism rules beneath the mask of peace. It’s full of heart, humanity, humour and riotous defiance. As a warning and provocation it sits alongside the literary sci-fi classics by Vonnegut, Bradbury and Pynchon.”—Ewan Morrison, author of For Emma

"A big, bold novel that's funny and harrowing and funny again . . . an unflinching portrait of a genetically-modified, fact-checked, sensitivity-edited, corporate-controlled future that feels all too familiar—because we're living in it."—Gavin de Becker, bestselling author of The Gift of Fear

“[A] witty, nasty, erudite, Pynchonesque narrative, full of fleshed-out sleazy characters and a hyper-detailed alternative world . . . ZONE 23 has a place on a list of several classic dystopian novels that have taken on similar themes."—V. N. Alexander, Dactyl Review

"Zone 23 reads like one of the mind-bending compounds discovered by the infamous, legendary psychopharmacologist Alexander Shulgin -strangely, the book itself is the antidote for the very depression it induces. It’s also wildly prophetic, scary, and scabrously funny."—Bruce Wagner

P.S. To the many readers who have asked, yes, I am at work on my next novel (again), which takes place in the same dystopian world as Zone 23, but in a different “age.” It isn’t a sequel. I am sorry that it is taking so long, but I have been sidetracked several times over the past five years by … well, you know.

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