One Amazon delivery stolen from a neighbor’s porch leads to plenty more. To keep the show going, a balding sitcom actress tries out a new wig and discovers a hunger for life. Jesus Christ claims the office’s coveted HR department vacancy, earning him a bitter detractor. A famous sculptor locks himself in a glass apartment in the park, turning his entire life into an exhibit. A young cashier takes his lumps to endure his small town’s mandatory fight club.

Is fate a construct of the gods? Do we feel safe relying on the maintenance guy? When memories themselves become drugs, what chance does the present have of keeping us tethered? Is our future influenced by unseen forces or are we all just going mad?

John Chrostek’s collection Boxcutters packs together thirteen stories of fools, freaks and fallen stars slamming against the boundary lines, desperate to push through grief and terror to find something close to freedom. With sharp, funny and incisive prose, this collection carves a through-line through the past, present, mythic and mundane to figure out how the hell we got here and whether there’s any chance at all we might get to break out.

"If George Saunders injected more horror into his stories…if Philip K Dick was writing about the socio-economic problems plaguing today, or if Ligotti was a little less bleak…that's John Chrostek's Boxcutters! It's a beautiful and wild mix of myth and hope and utter sadness, strung together poetically to burrow beneath your skin. If you love writers who blend genres with seamless ease. Chrostek is the guy for you!"

—Corey Farrenkopf, author of Haunted Ecologies and Living in Cemeteries

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