#hiding — Public Fediverse posts

Ischia is Burning: The Novel I Have Been Writing for Thirty-Six Years

Most books are written. A few are excavated. Ischia is Burning is a book I excavated from a steel filing cabinet in a Manhattan apartment, where it had been sitting for more than three decades inside a folder marked Ischia, in the form of a screenplay I wrote at twenty-five years old in the second year of an MFA program at Columbia. The novel that has just been published is what happened when I sat down with that folder in May, found the staples rusted and half the dialogue wincing, and wrote what the twenty-five-year-old version could not yet write. The novel is now available as a paperback and a Kindle edition, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com.

I need to tell you where this started, because the thirty-six years between the conception and the delivery are the form of the book, not biographical trivia.

The Steel Filing Cabinet

In the spring of 1990 I was a graduate student in the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Graduate Theatre Studies at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, in the dramatic writing concentration, working on a thesis screenplay for a class taught by Grafton Nunes. Grafton had produced Kathryn Bigelow’s first feature, The Loveless, with Willem Dafoe in his first leading role. He had spent his early career at Paramount. He knew what a film script was supposed to do and he knew when one was doing it.

I wrote a screenplay called Ischia is Burning. The country I had visited once. The island I had never seen. What I had read about it concerned the Greek colonial site at Pithekoussai, the oldest western Greek settlement in the central Mediterranean, founded in the eighth century before Christ on a volcanic island twelve miles off the Bay of Naples. The island had a basin. The basin had a name. I gave the basin sixteen children and four adults, and I gave the four adults eighteen years to build an Iron Age village around the children, and I gave the village a contamination event in the groundwater that would not have happened in the Iron Age.

Grafton read the screenplay. He told me it was the best student screenplay he had ever read. With a teacher’s specificity, he named the adjustments he wanted me to make. Blockbuster was the word he reached for, as if he were predicting a weather event.

I did not make the adjustments.

I gave the screenplay to Sam Crothers at The Producer Circle. Sam read it. He told me he loved it. The cohesion problems were the second thing he raised. After that came the matter of money, which Grafton had not raised at all. The last thing Sam asked me was what I was willing to wait for. Sam got sick within the year. He retired to Florida. We did not speak again. Marty Richards, who ran the Producer Circle, died in November 2012. Sam followed him in April 2013. Neither lived to see the novel.

I put the screenplay in a steel filing cabinet in an apartment on East 13th Street. It stayed there for thirty-six years. From time to time I took it out, read the first ten pages, and put it back. The notebook in which I had written down Grafton’s adjustments was lost in a move sometime in the late 1990s, and after that I told myself for a long set of years that I could not begin the novel because I could not remember what Grafton had said, and to begin without remembering would be to disrespect what he had given me.

I see now that the unremembered adjustments were the alibi. The actual reason was simpler. At twenty-five I was not old enough to write what finding out costs a child. Nor was I old enough to write what finding out costs the adults who have spent eighteen years not telling.

The Basin on Pithekoussai

The novel opens in the autumn of 1986 in a basin on the western flank of the Italian island of Ischia, in a place called Mezzavia. Mezzavia does not exist on any map I have been able to locate, although the road of that name does run between the towns of Forio and Casamicciola Terme on the actual island. In the novel, the basin holds four adults and sixteen children. The children range in age from six to seventeen. The adults are, by training, an anthropologist, a physician, a pilot, and a linguist. They have spent eighteen years building a closed Iron Age village around the children, complete with hand-woven clothing, a small iron mill the children themselves operate, a constructed Germanic dialect rooted in Old Norse and Old High German, an invented cosmology with four gods and eight constellations, and a sky with no airplanes in it.

The children believe they are living in the Iron Age. They believe this because the four adults have withheld twenty-four years of European history from them. No radios enter the basin. No printed page betrays the year. The antibiotic that would tell a child the world contains chemistry beyond the herbal poultice does not exist there.

In September of 1986, a cesium-137 contamination event begins to appear in the basin’s groundwater. The four adults face the question they have spent eighteen years not asking, which is what to do when the constructed world you have built around children begins to poison them, and the only treatment you can offer comes from a century the children are not allowed to know exists.

The title of the book is also a transmitted phrase. A pilot speaks it into a dispatch microphone at zero four sixteen on a Thursday in September 1986, from the cockpit of a plane climbing out of the American air base at Aviano in northeastern Italy. The book takes its thirty-three chapters to answer three questions about that phrase: what is burning, who is speaking it, and where the radio signal is going.

The novel is the answer the four adults arrive at.

The Temptation

The book moves at the velocity of a thriller and the moral architecture of an inquiry, which is what keeps it from settling cleanly into either form. What it pursues is a question older than the basin and older than the Iron Age the basin pretends to be. The question is what happens when a small group of educated people, looking at a larger group of human beings, decides in private that the larger group cannot be trusted with the truth and must be administered the world on a schedule the educated group will determine.

That question runs through the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Willowbrook hepatitis study, Decree 770 of the Socialist Republic of Romania, the Stanford prison experiment of 1971, the closed religious compounds of the American Southwest, and a hundred other documented projects in which one group of people decided what another group would be permitted to know. The Notes on Sources at the back of the novel walks through the historical anchors. Inside the novel itself, those anchors are kept off the page. What sits on the page is fiction. The four adults and the sixteen children of Mezzavia are inventions. What is not invented is the temptation that built them.

I am calling it temptation, and I want to be precise about the word. The four adults are educated, careful, well-spoken people who can defend every individual decision they made, which is precisely why naming them as monsters would let the reader off the hook. The novel is interested in how educated, careful, well-spoken people arrive at a project that, taken in aggregate, looks like the thing they would never have built if they had been able to see the whole shape of it from the outside. What the novel refuses to do is let them off the hook for what they built. It refuses, at the same time, the easy out of calling them monsters, because calling them monsters would close the question of how their colleagues, students, and followers found them defensible while the work was being done.

An Addendum the Way I Wrote It at Twenty-Five

The original 1990 screenplay is reproduced unaltered in the back of the book as Addendum I. The dialogue I made wince in May has been preserved exactly as I committed it in 1990, with its small infelicities and its young confidence both intact. I considered editing the screenplay. I decided against it. The point of including the screenplay at the back of the book is to show the reader the gap, in technique and in moral attention, between what I could write at twenty-five and what I could write at sixty-one, rather than to display the early version as a finished object. The story is identical across both versions, along with the four scientists, the sixteen children, the basin, and the fire. Two different writers, separated by thirty-six years, were working on the same material.

If a reader of the novel goes to the addendum and finds that the screenplay version reaches conclusions the novel does not reach, and lands its moral judgments where the novel will not land its moral judgments, that is the point. The young writer was bolder. The old writer is more careful, and more wounded, and less willing to tell the reader who the villain is.

For the Children Who Were Never Told

The dedication of the book is one sentence long. It reads, For the children who were never told.

I want to be clear about who that dedication is for. First, the sixteen fictional children of the basin on Pithekoussai, who are inventions, although the patterns of behavior they live inside are documented in places that were not inventions. Beyond them, the dedication names every reader who has ever sat across from a parent, or a doctor, or a government, and realized that the version of the world they had been given was a redacted version, edited by someone who had decided, on their behalf, what they could carry. The book is also for the adults who decided. Those four scientists in the basin can defend every individual decision they made. What the novel is interested in is why their defenses sound the way they do, and why those defenses have sounded the same way in every century in which someone has been entrusted with a knowledge that someone else has decided will not be shared.

How to Read the Book

The novel runs around 130,000 words across thirty-three chapters and a closing addendum. Paperback and Kindle edition are available now at Amazon, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com, where the full bibliography of David Boles Books is also indexed. The Foreword tells the thirty-six-year story I have only summarized here. A Notes on Sources section walks through the historical record the novel draws on. Readers who want to put the book down and argue with somebody about it will find a Reading Group Discussion Guide in the back, which is the use I would most like the book to be put to.

I will be writing about Ischia is Burning at length over the coming weeks, including a Human Meme podcast episode on the moral physics of withheld knowledge, a Prairie Voice investigative piece on the documented American history of closed communities, and a conversation series on BolesBlogs.com about the book’s relationship to the Institutional Autopsy trilogy and to the question of what fiction can do that documentary work cannot. The conversation continues. The book is the entrance into it.

Sam Crothers asked me, in 1990, what I was willing to wait for. The answer arrived thirty-six years later. The book exists.

David Boles is the founder of David Boles Books and the editor of Prairie Voice. His Institutional Autopsy trilogy was completed in March 2026 with the publication of Underwritten. He lives in New York City with the Deaf ASL educator Janna Sweenie and two British Shorthair cats.

Ischia is Burning: The Novel I Have Been Writing for Thirty-Six Years

Most books are written. A few are excavated. Ischia is Burning is a book I excavated from a steel filing cabinet in a Manhattan apartment, where it had been sitting for more than three decades inside a folder marked Ischia, in the form of a screenplay I wrote at twenty-five years old in the second year of an MFA program at Columbia. The novel that has just been published is what happened when I sat down with that folder in May, found the staples rusted and half the dialogue wincing, and wrote what the twenty-five-year-old version could not yet write. The novel is now available as a paperback and a Kindle edition, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com.

I need to tell you where this started, because the thirty-six years between the conception and the delivery are the form of the book, not biographical trivia.

The Steel Filing Cabinet

In the spring of 1990 I was a graduate student in the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Graduate Theatre Studies at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, in the dramatic writing concentration, working on a thesis screenplay for a class taught by Grafton Nunes. Grafton had produced Kathryn Bigelow’s first feature, The Loveless, with Willem Dafoe in his first leading role. He had spent his early career at Paramount. He knew what a film script was supposed to do and he knew when one was doing it.

I wrote a screenplay called Ischia is Burning. The country I had visited once. The island I had never seen. What I had read about it concerned the Greek colonial site at Pithekoussai, the oldest western Greek settlement in the central Mediterranean, founded in the eighth century before Christ on a volcanic island twelve miles off the Bay of Naples. The island had a basin. The basin had a name. I gave the basin sixteen children and four adults, and I gave the four adults eighteen years to build an Iron Age village around the children, and I gave the village a contamination event in the groundwater that would not have happened in the Iron Age.

Grafton read the screenplay. He told me it was the best student screenplay he had ever read. With a teacher’s specificity, he named the adjustments he wanted me to make. Blockbuster was the word he reached for, as if he were predicting a weather event.

I did not make the adjustments.

I gave the screenplay to Sam Crothers at The Producer Circle. Sam read it. He told me he loved it. The cohesion problems were the second thing he raised. After that came the matter of money, which Grafton had not raised at all. The last thing Sam asked me was what I was willing to wait for. Sam got sick within the year. He retired to Florida. We did not speak again. Marty Richards, who ran the Producer Circle, died in November 2012. Sam followed him in April 2013. Neither lived to see the novel.

I put the screenplay in a steel filing cabinet in an apartment on East 13th Street. It stayed there for thirty-six years. From time to time I took it out, read the first ten pages, and put it back. The notebook in which I had written down Grafton’s adjustments was lost in a move sometime in the late 1990s, and after that I told myself for a long set of years that I could not begin the novel because I could not remember what Grafton had said, and to begin without remembering would be to disrespect what he had given me.

I see now that the unremembered adjustments were the alibi. The actual reason was simpler. At twenty-five I was not old enough to write what finding out costs a child. Nor was I old enough to write what finding out costs the adults who have spent eighteen years not telling.

The Basin on Pithekoussai

The novel opens in the autumn of 1986 in a basin on the western flank of the Italian island of Ischia, in a place called Mezzavia. Mezzavia does not exist on any map I have been able to locate, although the road of that name does run between the towns of Forio and Casamicciola Terme on the actual island. In the novel, the basin holds four adults and sixteen children. The children range in age from six to seventeen. The adults are, by training, an anthropologist, a physician, a pilot, and a linguist. They have spent eighteen years building a closed Iron Age village around the children, complete with hand-woven clothing, a small iron mill the children themselves operate, a constructed Germanic dialect rooted in Old Norse and Old High German, an invented cosmology with four gods and eight constellations, and a sky with no airplanes in it.

The children believe they are living in the Iron Age. They believe this because the four adults have withheld twenty-four years of European history from them. No radios enter the basin. No printed page betrays the year. The antibiotic that would tell a child the world contains chemistry beyond the herbal poultice does not exist there.

In September of 1986, a cesium-137 contamination event begins to appear in the basin’s groundwater. The four adults face the question they have spent eighteen years not asking, which is what to do when the constructed world you have built around children begins to poison them, and the only treatment you can offer comes from a century the children are not allowed to know exists.

The title of the book is also a transmitted phrase. A pilot speaks it into a dispatch microphone at zero four sixteen on a Thursday in September 1986, from the cockpit of a plane climbing out of the American air base at Aviano in northeastern Italy. The book takes its thirty-three chapters to answer three questions about that phrase: what is burning, who is speaking it, and where the radio signal is going.

The novel is the answer the four adults arrive at.

The Temptation

The book moves at the velocity of a thriller and the moral architecture of an inquiry, which is what keeps it from settling cleanly into either form. What it pursues is a question older than the basin and older than the Iron Age the basin pretends to be. The question is what happens when a small group of educated people, looking at a larger group of human beings, decides in private that the larger group cannot be trusted with the truth and must be administered the world on a schedule the educated group will determine.

That question runs through the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Willowbrook hepatitis study, Decree 770 of the Socialist Republic of Romania, the Stanford prison experiment of 1971, the closed religious compounds of the American Southwest, and a hundred other documented projects in which one group of people decided what another group would be permitted to know. The Notes on Sources at the back of the novel walks through the historical anchors. Inside the novel itself, those anchors are kept off the page. What sits on the page is fiction. The four adults and the sixteen children of Mezzavia are inventions. What is not invented is the temptation that built them.

I am calling it temptation, and I want to be precise about the word. The four adults are educated, careful, well-spoken people who can defend every individual decision they made, which is precisely why naming them as monsters would let the reader off the hook. The novel is interested in how educated, careful, well-spoken people arrive at a project that, taken in aggregate, looks like the thing they would never have built if they had been able to see the whole shape of it from the outside. What the novel refuses to do is let them off the hook for what they built. It refuses, at the same time, the easy out of calling them monsters, because calling them monsters would close the question of how their colleagues, students, and followers found them defensible while the work was being done.

An Addendum the Way I Wrote It at Twenty-Five

The original 1990 screenplay is reproduced unaltered in the back of the book as Addendum I. The dialogue I made wince in May has been preserved exactly as I committed it in 1990, with its small infelicities and its young confidence both intact. I considered editing the screenplay. I decided against it. The point of including the screenplay at the back of the book is to show the reader the gap, in technique and in moral attention, between what I could write at twenty-five and what I could write at sixty-one, rather than to display the early version as a finished object. The story is identical across both versions, along with the four scientists, the sixteen children, the basin, and the fire. Two different writers, separated by thirty-six years, were working on the same material.

If a reader of the novel goes to the addendum and finds that the screenplay version reaches conclusions the novel does not reach, and lands its moral judgments where the novel will not land its moral judgments, that is the point. The young writer was bolder. The old writer is more careful, and more wounded, and less willing to tell the reader who the villain is.

For the Children Who Were Never Told

The dedication of the book is one sentence long. It reads, For the children who were never told.

I want to be clear about who that dedication is for. First, the sixteen fictional children of the basin on Pithekoussai, who are inventions, although the patterns of behavior they live inside are documented in places that were not inventions. Beyond them, the dedication names every reader who has ever sat across from a parent, or a doctor, or a government, and realized that the version of the world they had been given was a redacted version, edited by someone who had decided, on their behalf, what they could carry. The book is also for the adults who decided. Those four scientists in the basin can defend every individual decision they made. What the novel is interested in is why their defenses sound the way they do, and why those defenses have sounded the same way in every century in which someone has been entrusted with a knowledge that someone else has decided will not be shared.

How to Read the Book

The novel runs around 130,000 words across thirty-three chapters and a closing addendum. Paperback and Kindle edition are available now at Amazon, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com, where the full bibliography of David Boles Books is also indexed. The Foreword tells the thirty-six-year story I have only summarized here. A Notes on Sources section walks through the historical record the novel draws on. Readers who want to put the book down and argue with somebody about it will find a Reading Group Discussion Guide in the back, which is the use I would most like the book to be put to.

I will be writing about Ischia is Burning at length over the coming weeks, including a Human Meme podcast episode on the moral physics of withheld knowledge, a Prairie Voice investigative piece on the documented American history of closed communities, and a conversation series on BolesBlogs.com about the book’s relationship to the Institutional Autopsy trilogy and to the question of what fiction can do that documentary work cannot. The conversation continues. The book is the entrance into it.

Sam Crothers asked me, in 1990, what I was willing to wait for. The answer arrived thirty-six years later. The book exists.

David Boles is the founder of David Boles Books and the editor of Prairie Voice. His Institutional Autopsy trilogy was completed in March 2026 with the publication of Underwritten. He lives in New York City with the Deaf ASL educator Janna Sweenie and two British Shorthair cats.

Ischia is Burning: The Novel I Have Been Writing for Thirty-Six Years

Most books are written. A few are excavated. Ischia is Burning is a book I excavated from a steel filing cabinet in a Manhattan apartment, where it had been sitting for more than three decades inside a folder marked Ischia, in the form of a screenplay I wrote at twenty-five years old in the second year of an MFA program at Columbia. The novel that has just been published is what happened when I sat down with that folder in May, found the staples rusted and half the dialogue wincing, and wrote what the twenty-five-year-old version could not yet write. The novel is now available as a paperback and a Kindle edition, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com.

I need to tell you where this started, because the thirty-six years between the conception and the delivery are the form of the book, not biographical trivia.

The Steel Filing Cabinet

In the spring of 1990 I was a graduate student in the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Graduate Theatre Studies at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, in the dramatic writing concentration, working on a thesis screenplay for a class taught by Grafton Nunes. Grafton had produced Kathryn Bigelow’s first feature, The Loveless, with Willem Dafoe in his first leading role. He had spent his early career at Paramount. He knew what a film script was supposed to do and he knew when one was doing it.

I wrote a screenplay called Ischia is Burning. The country I had visited once. The island I had never seen. What I had read about it concerned the Greek colonial site at Pithekoussai, the oldest western Greek settlement in the central Mediterranean, founded in the eighth century before Christ on a volcanic island twelve miles off the Bay of Naples. The island had a basin. The basin had a name. I gave the basin sixteen children and four adults, and I gave the four adults eighteen years to build an Iron Age village around the children, and I gave the village a contamination event in the groundwater that would not have happened in the Iron Age.

Grafton read the screenplay. He told me it was the best student screenplay he had ever read. With a teacher’s specificity, he named the adjustments he wanted me to make. Blockbuster was the word he reached for, as if he were predicting a weather event.

I did not make the adjustments.

I gave the screenplay to Sam Crothers at The Producer Circle. Sam read it. He told me he loved it. The cohesion problems were the second thing he raised. After that came the matter of money, which Grafton had not raised at all. The last thing Sam asked me was what I was willing to wait for. Sam got sick within the year. He retired to Florida. We did not speak again. Marty Richards, who ran the Producer Circle, died in November 2012. Sam followed him in April 2013. Neither lived to see the novel.

I put the screenplay in a steel filing cabinet in an apartment on East 13th Street. It stayed there for thirty-six years. From time to time I took it out, read the first ten pages, and put it back. The notebook in which I had written down Grafton’s adjustments was lost in a move sometime in the late 1990s, and after that I told myself for a long set of years that I could not begin the novel because I could not remember what Grafton had said, and to begin without remembering would be to disrespect what he had given me.

I see now that the unremembered adjustments were the alibi. The actual reason was simpler. At twenty-five I was not old enough to write what finding out costs a child. Nor was I old enough to write what finding out costs the adults who have spent eighteen years not telling.

The Basin on Pithekoussai

The novel opens in the autumn of 1986 in a basin on the western flank of the Italian island of Ischia, in a place called Mezzavia. Mezzavia does not exist on any map I have been able to locate, although the road of that name does run between the towns of Forio and Casamicciola Terme on the actual island. In the novel, the basin holds four adults and sixteen children. The children range in age from six to seventeen. The adults are, by training, an anthropologist, a physician, a pilot, and a linguist. They have spent eighteen years building a closed Iron Age village around the children, complete with hand-woven clothing, a small iron mill the children themselves operate, a constructed Germanic dialect rooted in Old Norse and Old High German, an invented cosmology with four gods and eight constellations, and a sky with no airplanes in it.

The children believe they are living in the Iron Age. They believe this because the four adults have withheld twenty-four years of European history from them. No radios enter the basin. No printed page betrays the year. The antibiotic that would tell a child the world contains chemistry beyond the herbal poultice does not exist there.

In September of 1986, a cesium-137 contamination event begins to appear in the basin’s groundwater. The four adults face the question they have spent eighteen years not asking, which is what to do when the constructed world you have built around children begins to poison them, and the only treatment you can offer comes from a century the children are not allowed to know exists.

The title of the book is also a transmitted phrase. A pilot speaks it into a dispatch microphone at zero four sixteen on a Thursday in September 1986, from the cockpit of a plane climbing out of the American air base at Aviano in northeastern Italy. The book takes its thirty-three chapters to answer three questions about that phrase: what is burning, who is speaking it, and where the radio signal is going.

The novel is the answer the four adults arrive at.

The Temptation

The book moves at the velocity of a thriller and the moral architecture of an inquiry, which is what keeps it from settling cleanly into either form. What it pursues is a question older than the basin and older than the Iron Age the basin pretends to be. The question is what happens when a small group of educated people, looking at a larger group of human beings, decides in private that the larger group cannot be trusted with the truth and must be administered the world on a schedule the educated group will determine.

That question runs through the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Willowbrook hepatitis study, Decree 770 of the Socialist Republic of Romania, the Stanford prison experiment of 1971, the closed religious compounds of the American Southwest, and a hundred other documented projects in which one group of people decided what another group would be permitted to know. The Notes on Sources at the back of the novel walks through the historical anchors. Inside the novel itself, those anchors are kept off the page. What sits on the page is fiction. The four adults and the sixteen children of Mezzavia are inventions. What is not invented is the temptation that built them.

I am calling it temptation, and I want to be precise about the word. The four adults are educated, careful, well-spoken people who can defend every individual decision they made, which is precisely why naming them as monsters would let the reader off the hook. The novel is interested in how educated, careful, well-spoken people arrive at a project that, taken in aggregate, looks like the thing they would never have built if they had been able to see the whole shape of it from the outside. What the novel refuses to do is let them off the hook for what they built. It refuses, at the same time, the easy out of calling them monsters, because calling them monsters would close the question of how their colleagues, students, and followers found them defensible while the work was being done.

An Addendum the Way I Wrote It at Twenty-Five

The original 1990 screenplay is reproduced unaltered in the back of the book as Addendum I. The dialogue I made wince in May has been preserved exactly as I committed it in 1990, with its small infelicities and its young confidence both intact. I considered editing the screenplay. I decided against it. The point of including the screenplay at the back of the book is to show the reader the gap, in technique and in moral attention, between what I could write at twenty-five and what I could write at sixty-one, rather than to display the early version as a finished object. The story is identical across both versions, along with the four scientists, the sixteen children, the basin, and the fire. Two different writers, separated by thirty-six years, were working on the same material.

If a reader of the novel goes to the addendum and finds that the screenplay version reaches conclusions the novel does not reach, and lands its moral judgments where the novel will not land its moral judgments, that is the point. The young writer was bolder. The old writer is more careful, and more wounded, and less willing to tell the reader who the villain is.

For the Children Who Were Never Told

The dedication of the book is one sentence long. It reads, For the children who were never told.

I want to be clear about who that dedication is for. First, the sixteen fictional children of the basin on Pithekoussai, who are inventions, although the patterns of behavior they live inside are documented in places that were not inventions. Beyond them, the dedication names every reader who has ever sat across from a parent, or a doctor, or a government, and realized that the version of the world they had been given was a redacted version, edited by someone who had decided, on their behalf, what they could carry. The book is also for the adults who decided. Those four scientists in the basin can defend every individual decision they made. What the novel is interested in is why their defenses sound the way they do, and why those defenses have sounded the same way in every century in which someone has been entrusted with a knowledge that someone else has decided will not be shared.

How to Read the Book

The novel runs around 130,000 words across thirty-three chapters and a closing addendum. Paperback and Kindle edition are available now at Amazon, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com, where the full bibliography of David Boles Books is also indexed. The Foreword tells the thirty-six-year story I have only summarized here. A Notes on Sources section walks through the historical record the novel draws on. Readers who want to put the book down and argue with somebody about it will find a Reading Group Discussion Guide in the back, which is the use I would most like the book to be put to.

I will be writing about Ischia is Burning at length over the coming weeks, including a Human Meme podcast episode on the moral physics of withheld knowledge, a Prairie Voice investigative piece on the documented American history of closed communities, and a conversation series on BolesBlogs.com about the book’s relationship to the Institutional Autopsy trilogy and to the question of what fiction can do that documentary work cannot. The conversation continues. The book is the entrance into it.

Sam Crothers asked me, in 1990, what I was willing to wait for. The answer arrived thirty-six years later. The book exists.

David Boles is the founder of David Boles Books and the editor of Prairie Voice. His Institutional Autopsy trilogy was completed in March 2026 with the publication of Underwritten. He lives in New York City with the Deaf ASL educator Janna Sweenie and two British Shorthair cats.

Ischia is Burning: The Novel I Have Been Writing for Thirty-Six Years

Most books are written. A few are excavated. Ischia is Burning is a book I excavated from a steel filing cabinet in a Manhattan apartment, where it had been sitting for more than three decades inside a folder marked Ischia, in the form of a screenplay I wrote at twenty-five years old in the second year of an MFA program at Columbia. The novel that has just been published is what happened when I sat down with that folder in May, found the staples rusted and half the dialogue wincing, and wrote what the twenty-five-year-old version could not yet write. The novel is now available as a paperback and a Kindle edition, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com.

I need to tell you where this started, because the thirty-six years between the conception and the delivery are the form of the book, not biographical trivia.

The Steel Filing Cabinet

In the spring of 1990 I was a graduate student in the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Graduate Theatre Studies at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, in the dramatic writing concentration, working on a thesis screenplay for a class taught by Grafton Nunes. Grafton had produced Kathryn Bigelow’s first feature, The Loveless, with Willem Dafoe in his first leading role. He had spent his early career at Paramount. He knew what a film script was supposed to do and he knew when one was doing it.

I wrote a screenplay called Ischia is Burning. The country I had visited once. The island I had never seen. What I had read about it concerned the Greek colonial site at Pithekoussai, the oldest western Greek settlement in the central Mediterranean, founded in the eighth century before Christ on a volcanic island twelve miles off the Bay of Naples. The island had a basin. The basin had a name. I gave the basin sixteen children and four adults, and I gave the four adults eighteen years to build an Iron Age village around the children, and I gave the village a contamination event in the groundwater that would not have happened in the Iron Age.

Grafton read the screenplay. He told me it was the best student screenplay he had ever read. With a teacher’s specificity, he named the adjustments he wanted me to make. Blockbuster was the word he reached for, as if he were predicting a weather event.

I did not make the adjustments.

I gave the screenplay to Sam Crothers at The Producer Circle. Sam read it. He told me he loved it. The cohesion problems were the second thing he raised. After that came the matter of money, which Grafton had not raised at all. The last thing Sam asked me was what I was willing to wait for. Sam got sick within the year. He retired to Florida. We did not speak again. Marty Richards, who ran the Producer Circle, died in November 2012. Sam followed him in April 2013. Neither lived to see the novel.

I put the screenplay in a steel filing cabinet in an apartment on East 13th Street. It stayed there for thirty-six years. From time to time I took it out, read the first ten pages, and put it back. The notebook in which I had written down Grafton’s adjustments was lost in a move sometime in the late 1990s, and after that I told myself for a long set of years that I could not begin the novel because I could not remember what Grafton had said, and to begin without remembering would be to disrespect what he had given me.

I see now that the unremembered adjustments were the alibi. The actual reason was simpler. At twenty-five I was not old enough to write what finding out costs a child. Nor was I old enough to write what finding out costs the adults who have spent eighteen years not telling.

The Basin on Pithekoussai

The novel opens in the autumn of 1986 in a basin on the western flank of the Italian island of Ischia, in a place called Mezzavia. Mezzavia does not exist on any map I have been able to locate, although the road of that name does run between the towns of Forio and Casamicciola Terme on the actual island. In the novel, the basin holds four adults and sixteen children. The children range in age from six to seventeen. The adults are, by training, an anthropologist, a physician, a pilot, and a linguist. They have spent eighteen years building a closed Iron Age village around the children, complete with hand-woven clothing, a small iron mill the children themselves operate, a constructed Germanic dialect rooted in Old Norse and Old High German, an invented cosmology with four gods and eight constellations, and a sky with no airplanes in it.

The children believe they are living in the Iron Age. They believe this because the four adults have withheld twenty-four years of European history from them. No radios enter the basin. No printed page betrays the year. The antibiotic that would tell a child the world contains chemistry beyond the herbal poultice does not exist there.

In September of 1986, a cesium-137 contamination event begins to appear in the basin’s groundwater. The four adults face the question they have spent eighteen years not asking, which is what to do when the constructed world you have built around children begins to poison them, and the only treatment you can offer comes from a century the children are not allowed to know exists.

The title of the book is also a transmitted phrase. A pilot speaks it into a dispatch microphone at zero four sixteen on a Thursday in September 1986, from the cockpit of a plane climbing out of the American air base at Aviano in northeastern Italy. The book takes its thirty-three chapters to answer three questions about that phrase: what is burning, who is speaking it, and where the radio signal is going.

The novel is the answer the four adults arrive at.

The Temptation

The book moves at the velocity of a thriller and the moral architecture of an inquiry, which is what keeps it from settling cleanly into either form. What it pursues is a question older than the basin and older than the Iron Age the basin pretends to be. The question is what happens when a small group of educated people, looking at a larger group of human beings, decides in private that the larger group cannot be trusted with the truth and must be administered the world on a schedule the educated group will determine.

That question runs through the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Willowbrook hepatitis study, Decree 770 of the Socialist Republic of Romania, the Stanford prison experiment of 1971, the closed religious compounds of the American Southwest, and a hundred other documented projects in which one group of people decided what another group would be permitted to know. The Notes on Sources at the back of the novel walks through the historical anchors. Inside the novel itself, those anchors are kept off the page. What sits on the page is fiction. The four adults and the sixteen children of Mezzavia are inventions. What is not invented is the temptation that built them.

I am calling it temptation, and I want to be precise about the word. The four adults are educated, careful, well-spoken people who can defend every individual decision they made, which is precisely why naming them as monsters would let the reader off the hook. The novel is interested in how educated, careful, well-spoken people arrive at a project that, taken in aggregate, looks like the thing they would never have built if they had been able to see the whole shape of it from the outside. What the novel refuses to do is let them off the hook for what they built. It refuses, at the same time, the easy out of calling them monsters, because calling them monsters would close the question of how their colleagues, students, and followers found them defensible while the work was being done.

An Addendum the Way I Wrote It at Twenty-Five

The original 1990 screenplay is reproduced unaltered in the back of the book as Addendum I. The dialogue I made wince in May has been preserved exactly as I committed it in 1990, with its small infelicities and its young confidence both intact. I considered editing the screenplay. I decided against it. The point of including the screenplay at the back of the book is to show the reader the gap, in technique and in moral attention, between what I could write at twenty-five and what I could write at sixty-one, rather than to display the early version as a finished object. The story is identical across both versions, along with the four scientists, the sixteen children, the basin, and the fire. Two different writers, separated by thirty-six years, were working on the same material.

If a reader of the novel goes to the addendum and finds that the screenplay version reaches conclusions the novel does not reach, and lands its moral judgments where the novel will not land its moral judgments, that is the point. The young writer was bolder. The old writer is more careful, and more wounded, and less willing to tell the reader who the villain is.

For the Children Who Were Never Told

The dedication of the book is one sentence long. It reads, For the children who were never told.

I want to be clear about who that dedication is for. First, the sixteen fictional children of the basin on Pithekoussai, who are inventions, although the patterns of behavior they live inside are documented in places that were not inventions. Beyond them, the dedication names every reader who has ever sat across from a parent, or a doctor, or a government, and realized that the version of the world they had been given was a redacted version, edited by someone who had decided, on their behalf, what they could carry. The book is also for the adults who decided. Those four scientists in the basin can defend every individual decision they made. What the novel is interested in is why their defenses sound the way they do, and why those defenses have sounded the same way in every century in which someone has been entrusted with a knowledge that someone else has decided will not be shared.

How to Read the Book

The novel runs around 130,000 words across thirty-three chapters and a closing addendum. Paperback and Kindle edition are available now at Amazon, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com, where the full bibliography of David Boles Books is also indexed. The Foreword tells the thirty-six-year story I have only summarized here. A Notes on Sources section walks through the historical record the novel draws on. Readers who want to put the book down and argue with somebody about it will find a Reading Group Discussion Guide in the back, which is the use I would most like the book to be put to.

I will be writing about Ischia is Burning at length over the coming weeks, including a Human Meme podcast episode on the moral physics of withheld knowledge, a Prairie Voice investigative piece on the documented American history of closed communities, and a conversation series on BolesBlogs.com about the book’s relationship to the Institutional Autopsy trilogy and to the question of what fiction can do that documentary work cannot. The conversation continues. The book is the entrance into it.

Sam Crothers asked me, in 1990, what I was willing to wait for. The answer arrived thirty-six years later. The book exists.

David Boles is the founder of David Boles Books and the editor of Prairie Voice. His Institutional Autopsy trilogy was completed in March 2026 with the publication of Underwritten. He lives in New York City with the Deaf ASL educator Janna Sweenie and two British Shorthair cats.

Ischia is Burning: The Novel I Have Been Writing for Thirty-Six Years

Most books are written. A few are excavated. Ischia is Burning is a book I excavated from a steel filing cabinet in a Manhattan apartment, where it had been sitting for more than three decades inside a folder marked Ischia, in the form of a screenplay I wrote at twenty-five years old in the second year of an MFA program at Columbia. The novel that has just been published is what happened when I sat down with that folder in May, found the staples rusted and half the dialogue wincing, and wrote what the twenty-five-year-old version could not yet write. The novel is now available as a paperback and a Kindle edition, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com.

I need to tell you where this started, because the thirty-six years between the conception and the delivery are the form of the book, not biographical trivia.

The Steel Filing Cabinet

In the spring of 1990 I was a graduate student in the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Graduate Theatre Studies at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, in the dramatic writing concentration, working on a thesis screenplay for a class taught by Grafton Nunes. Grafton had produced Kathryn Bigelow’s first feature, The Loveless, with Willem Dafoe in his first leading role. He had spent his early career at Paramount. He knew what a film script was supposed to do and he knew when one was doing it.

I wrote a screenplay called Ischia is Burning. The country I had visited once. The island I had never seen. What I had read about it concerned the Greek colonial site at Pithekoussai, the oldest western Greek settlement in the central Mediterranean, founded in the eighth century before Christ on a volcanic island twelve miles off the Bay of Naples. The island had a basin. The basin had a name. I gave the basin sixteen children and four adults, and I gave the four adults eighteen years to build an Iron Age village around the children, and I gave the village a contamination event in the groundwater that would not have happened in the Iron Age.

Grafton read the screenplay. He told me it was the best student screenplay he had ever read. With a teacher’s specificity, he named the adjustments he wanted me to make. Blockbuster was the word he reached for, as if he were predicting a weather event.

I did not make the adjustments.

I gave the screenplay to Sam Crothers at The Producer Circle. Sam read it. He told me he loved it. The cohesion problems were the second thing he raised. After that came the matter of money, which Grafton had not raised at all. The last thing Sam asked me was what I was willing to wait for. Sam got sick within the year. He retired to Florida. We did not speak again. Marty Richards, who ran the Producer Circle, died in November 2012. Sam followed him in April 2013. Neither lived to see the novel.

I put the screenplay in a steel filing cabinet in an apartment on East 13th Street. It stayed there for thirty-six years. From time to time I took it out, read the first ten pages, and put it back. The notebook in which I had written down Grafton’s adjustments was lost in a move sometime in the late 1990s, and after that I told myself for a long set of years that I could not begin the novel because I could not remember what Grafton had said, and to begin without remembering would be to disrespect what he had given me.

I see now that the unremembered adjustments were the alibi. The actual reason was simpler. At twenty-five I was not old enough to write what finding out costs a child. Nor was I old enough to write what finding out costs the adults who have spent eighteen years not telling.

The Basin on Pithekoussai

The novel opens in the autumn of 1986 in a basin on the western flank of the Italian island of Ischia, in a place called Mezzavia. Mezzavia does not exist on any map I have been able to locate, although the road of that name does run between the towns of Forio and Casamicciola Terme on the actual island. In the novel, the basin holds four adults and sixteen children. The children range in age from six to seventeen. The adults are, by training, an anthropologist, a physician, a pilot, and a linguist. They have spent eighteen years building a closed Iron Age village around the children, complete with hand-woven clothing, a small iron mill the children themselves operate, a constructed Germanic dialect rooted in Old Norse and Old High German, an invented cosmology with four gods and eight constellations, and a sky with no airplanes in it.

The children believe they are living in the Iron Age. They believe this because the four adults have withheld twenty-four years of European history from them. No radios enter the basin. No printed page betrays the year. The antibiotic that would tell a child the world contains chemistry beyond the herbal poultice does not exist there.

In September of 1986, a cesium-137 contamination event begins to appear in the basin’s groundwater. The four adults face the question they have spent eighteen years not asking, which is what to do when the constructed world you have built around children begins to poison them, and the only treatment you can offer comes from a century the children are not allowed to know exists.

The title of the book is also a transmitted phrase. A pilot speaks it into a dispatch microphone at zero four sixteen on a Thursday in September 1986, from the cockpit of a plane climbing out of the American air base at Aviano in northeastern Italy. The book takes its thirty-three chapters to answer three questions about that phrase: what is burning, who is speaking it, and where the radio signal is going.

The novel is the answer the four adults arrive at.

The Temptation

The book moves at the velocity of a thriller and the moral architecture of an inquiry, which is what keeps it from settling cleanly into either form. What it pursues is a question older than the basin and older than the Iron Age the basin pretends to be. The question is what happens when a small group of educated people, looking at a larger group of human beings, decides in private that the larger group cannot be trusted with the truth and must be administered the world on a schedule the educated group will determine.

That question runs through the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Willowbrook hepatitis study, Decree 770 of the Socialist Republic of Romania, the Stanford prison experiment of 1971, the closed religious compounds of the American Southwest, and a hundred other documented projects in which one group of people decided what another group would be permitted to know. The Notes on Sources at the back of the novel walks through the historical anchors. Inside the novel itself, those anchors are kept off the page. What sits on the page is fiction. The four adults and the sixteen children of Mezzavia are inventions. What is not invented is the temptation that built them.

I am calling it temptation, and I want to be precise about the word. The four adults are educated, careful, well-spoken people who can defend every individual decision they made, which is precisely why naming them as monsters would let the reader off the hook. The novel is interested in how educated, careful, well-spoken people arrive at a project that, taken in aggregate, looks like the thing they would never have built if they had been able to see the whole shape of it from the outside. What the novel refuses to do is let them off the hook for what they built. It refuses, at the same time, the easy out of calling them monsters, because calling them monsters would close the question of how their colleagues, students, and followers found them defensible while the work was being done.

An Addendum the Way I Wrote It at Twenty-Five

The original 1990 screenplay is reproduced unaltered in the back of the book as Addendum I. The dialogue I made wince in May has been preserved exactly as I committed it in 1990, with its small infelicities and its young confidence both intact. I considered editing the screenplay. I decided against it. The point of including the screenplay at the back of the book is to show the reader the gap, in technique and in moral attention, between what I could write at twenty-five and what I could write at sixty-one, rather than to display the early version as a finished object. The story is identical across both versions, along with the four scientists, the sixteen children, the basin, and the fire. Two different writers, separated by thirty-six years, were working on the same material.

If a reader of the novel goes to the addendum and finds that the screenplay version reaches conclusions the novel does not reach, and lands its moral judgments where the novel will not land its moral judgments, that is the point. The young writer was bolder. The old writer is more careful, and more wounded, and less willing to tell the reader who the villain is.

For the Children Who Were Never Told

The dedication of the book is one sentence long. It reads, For the children who were never told.

I want to be clear about who that dedication is for. First, the sixteen fictional children of the basin on Pithekoussai, who are inventions, although the patterns of behavior they live inside are documented in places that were not inventions. Beyond them, the dedication names every reader who has ever sat across from a parent, or a doctor, or a government, and realized that the version of the world they had been given was a redacted version, edited by someone who had decided, on their behalf, what they could carry. The book is also for the adults who decided. Those four scientists in the basin can defend every individual decision they made. What the novel is interested in is why their defenses sound the way they do, and why those defenses have sounded the same way in every century in which someone has been entrusted with a knowledge that someone else has decided will not be shared.

How to Read the Book

The novel runs around 130,000 words across thirty-three chapters and a closing addendum. Paperback and Kindle edition are available now at Amazon, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com, where the full bibliography of David Boles Books is also indexed. The Foreword tells the thirty-six-year story I have only summarized here. A Notes on Sources section walks through the historical record the novel draws on. Readers who want to put the book down and argue with somebody about it will find a Reading Group Discussion Guide in the back, which is the use I would most like the book to be put to.

I will be writing about Ischia is Burning at length over the coming weeks, including a Human Meme podcast episode on the moral physics of withheld knowledge, a Prairie Voice investigative piece on the documented American history of closed communities, and a conversation series on BolesBlogs.com about the book’s relationship to the Institutional Autopsy trilogy and to the question of what fiction can do that documentary work cannot. The conversation continues. The book is the entrance into it.

Sam Crothers asked me, in 1990, what I was willing to wait for. The answer arrived thirty-six years later. The book exists.

David Boles is the founder of David Boles Books and the editor of Prairie Voice. His Institutional Autopsy trilogy was completed in March 2026 with the publication of Underwritten. He lives in New York City with the Deaf ASL educator Janna Sweenie and two British Shorthair cats.

#HIDING #OUT aepiot.ro/advanced-sea... 2025 26 A #LIGA multi-search-tag-explorer.aepiot.ro/advanced-sea... radar.cloudflare.com/domains/doma... aePiot: Mapping the stars of Web 4.0. Build nodes, lead SEO.

MultiSearch Tag Explorer

#HIDING #OUT aepiot.ro/advanced-sea... 2025 26 A #LIGA multi-search-tag-explorer.aepiot.ro/advanced-sea... radar.cloudflare.com/domains/doma... aePiot: Mapping the stars of Web 4.0. Build nodes, lead SEO.

MultiSearch Tag Explorer

Scientists found 10,000 possible exoplanets hiding in NASA data
https://atlas.whatip.xyz/post.php?slug=scientists-found-10000-possible-exoplanets-hiding-in-nasa-data
<p>It would appear we now have 10,091 candidate exoplanets to go through and confirm.</p>
#exoplanets #scientists #possible #hiding

Scientists found 10,000 possible exoplanets hiding in NASA data
https://atlas.whatip.xyz/post.php?slug=scientists-found-10000-possible-exoplanets-hiding-in-nasa-data
<p>It would appear we now have 10,091 candidate exoplanets to go through and confirm.</p>
#exoplanets #scientists #possible #hiding

A giant back step. How thinking that security by hiding could be a security solution and live happily. 😎

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/05/nhs-goes-to-war-against-open-source/

#security #hiding #magic #illusions #madness

The #Mass of #Light : Medium

How your #Heartbeat could keep #Cancer at bay : Nature

#Dangerous #Microbes may be #Hiding in #Drought-stricken #Soils : Sci Am

Latest #KnowledgeLinks

https://knowledgezone.co.in/resources/bookmarks

The #Mass of #Light : Medium

How your #Heartbeat could keep #Cancer at bay : Nature

#Dangerous #Microbes may be #Hiding in #Drought-stricken #Soils : Sci Am

Latest #KnowledgeLinks

https://knowledgezone.co.in/resources/bookmarks

The #Mass of #Light : Medium

How your #Heartbeat could keep #Cancer at bay : Nature

#Dangerous #Microbes may be #Hiding in #Drought-stricken #Soils : Sci Am

Latest #KnowledgeLinks

https://knowledgezone.co.in/resources/bookmarks

The #Mass of #Light : Medium

How your #Heartbeat could keep #Cancer at bay : Nature

#Dangerous #Microbes may be #Hiding in #Drought-stricken #Soils : Sci Am

Latest #KnowledgeLinks

https://knowledgezone.co.in/resources/bookmarks

The #Mass of #Light : Medium

How your #Heartbeat could keep #Cancer at bay : Nature

#Dangerous #Microbes may be #Hiding in #Drought-stricken #Soils : Sci Am

Latest #KnowledgeLinks

https://knowledgezone.co.in/resources/bookmarks

Old Advice: Hiding Content Has No Effect on Accessible Name or Description Calculation, by @SteveFaulkner:

https://html5accessibility.com/stuff/2026/04/07/old-advice-hiding-content-has-no-effect-on-accessible-name-or-description-calculation/

#accessibility #hiding #aria #html

two dozen drumsticks,

two dozen drumsticks, 
marinated overnight 
for the first cookout 

of the season, carolina 
reapers hiding in your future
.
20260418:1030
y

The Borrowed Saint: The Book That Watched Me Back

I have been thinking about mirrors for forty-eight years. The thinking started in a dressing room at a community playhouse in Lincoln, Nebraska, where a row of mirrors lined the wall above a counter cluttered with spirit gum and cold cream and the residue of faces that had been built and removed hundreds of times. I was thirteen years old and I was watching an actor apply a prosthetic nose, and the thing that struck me was the moment when his own face disappeared under the new architecture. His eyes changed. The man in the mirror stopped being the person I had been talking to thirty seconds earlier and became someone whose bone structure carried a different social signal, a different set of expectations, a different gravitational field. Same eyes. Different face. Different world.

That image has been sitting in my head for nearly five decades, paying rent in the form of a question I could not discharge: what is the relationship between the face and the person behind it? Is the face a window or a wall? If it is a window, what passes through it, and in which direction? If it is a wall, who built it, and what is it defending?

The Borrowed Saint: A Horror in Five Skins is now available from David Boles Books Writing and Publishing as a Kindle ebook and a trade paperback. It is the answer to that question, and the answer is worse than I expected.

The Mechanism

Asa Greer is five years old when he stands in a bathroom in Decker, Ohio and watches his reflection change. His cheekbones soften. His jaw loses its angles. For three seconds, he is wearing the face of the boy next door on his own skull. Then the face collapses, his features rush back, and the bathroom is loud again.

Asa can copy any face he sees. He can build composites from dozens of sources. He can walk through a room wearing the face that room requires, and the room will respond to the face without checking whether anything exists behind it. Each transformation extracts a sensory capacity he will never recover. Over fifty years, the ledger of things he can no longer smell, taste, feel, or hear grows longer than the ledger of things he retains.

I wanted the horror to be specific. Each loss is granular and irreplaceable: the smell of his own skin, the texture of his winter coat, the taste of tap water, his heartbeat’s internal sensation, the tonal distinctions that give melody its emotional contour. These are the small, unremarkable anchors that tether a person to the life they are living as opposed to any other life, and Asa severs them one by one and replaces them with borrowed faces that connect him to other people’s responses and sever him from his own existence.

The mechanism is supernatural. The cost is not.

The Kindness Problem

At twenty-eight, Asa discovers that performed goodness is the most powerful face he can build. Competence generates compliance. Charisma generates admiration. Authority generates obedience. Goodness generates worship. A room that witnesses an act of apparent compassion will defend the person who performed it against any attack, because the attack threatens the room’s belief that compassion exists.

Asa builds a kindness persona. He deploys it across a career that ascends from political consulting to the corridors of institutional power. The warmth that other people’s trust generates in his body is narcotic. His body is allergic to it. Every deployment produces an inflammatory response that begins at the jaw hinge and spreads through the muscles the performance recruits. The threshold contracts with each use. By his fifties, the margin between the face the world needs and the face his body can sustain is measured in minutes.

Writing this section of the book required me to think carefully about something I have observed across thirty years in theatre, publishing, and public life: the distance between a person’s performed concern and their actual capacity for being affected by another human being. Asa is an extreme case. The condition is not extreme. Every public figure, every institutional spokesperson, every person who has stood at a podium and projected the appearance of caring about something they were hired to manage rather than moved to address, operates on the same spectrum. Asa sits at the far end. The spectrum itself is ordinary.

Harlan Moeck and the Ditch

Every book needs a counter-argument, and this book’s counter-argument is a boy named Harlan Moeck who sits in the front row of Asa’s second-grade classroom and performs no performance at all. Harlan is kind because Harlan is kind, the way a heart beats because a heart beats. Asa can see it. He can catalog it. He cannot replicate it. He tries. The result is a window painted on a wall. Every measurement is precise. Light does not pass through.

Harlan appears three times across fifty years. Each appearance finds him doing invisible work: maintaining water systems, testing samples, keeping the infrastructure alive that the public consumes without awareness of the labor that produced it. The dedication reads: For the good men who dig the ditches. The water flows. No one applauds.

I have known Harlan Moecks. Every writer has. They are the people who do the work that makes the visible work possible, whose names appear in no coverage, whose labor sustains the systems that the public credits to the faces standing in front of cameras. I wrote Harlan because the book needed someone whose goodness was structural rather than performed, and because the horror of Asa’s condition is legible only when measured against a person for whom goodness is a condition of being alive rather than an overlay applied to a composite.

Cordelia’s Secret

Asa’s mother, Cordelia Greer, runs the household with efficiency and without affection. Touching her son only when logistics require it. Pushing his hair from his forehead with the heel of her hand. Washing a glass that is already clean, alone, in the dark, in the middle of the night, while the rest of the house sleeps.

The book’s final section, On the Lability, includes a clinical appendix: case notes of uncertain provenance describing Asa’s condition in medical language. Filed separately, an addendum describes a woman who presented at a clinic in 1987 asking whether the condition could be passed to a child. She said her father had possessed the ability to move his face and that it had eaten him from inside. She had spent her life holding still so it would not start.

That woman is Cordelia. The reader connects the dates and the details without being told. Every scene of emotional distance, every closed face, every hand that withdrew, is retroactively reframed. Cordelia was containing the same condition that consumed her son. The holding still was an act of will maintained across an entire lifetime. The coldness was a firewall.

I am proudest of this element of the book. The revelation arrives in a clinical register that has no capacity for grief, which is exactly why the grief hits as hard as it does. The driest language in the book carries the heaviest weight. If the mechanism works, the reader finishes the appendix and then sits for a moment and thinks about Cordelia washing the glass.

The Mirror on the Back Cover

One design detail I want to mention. On the paperback’s back cover, the title of the book appears reversed, as a mirror image. Letters flipped. Name reading backward. Below the reversed title, two amber eyes stare out, the same eyes that appear in the dissolving face on the front cover. Asa Greer is five years old in the first scene, standing in a bathroom, looking at a mirror. Turn the book over, and the mirror looks back.

The Borrowed Saint: A Horror in Five Skins is available now from David Boles Books Writing and Publishing at BolesBooks.com. Kindle eBook and paperback.

David Boles is a writer, dramatist, editor, and publisher. A member of the Dramatists Guild since 1984 and a graduate of the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies at Columbia University, he has published novels, nonfiction, and dramatic works through David Boles Books Writing and Publishing since 1975. He lives in New York City.

The Borrowed Saint: The Book That Watched Me Back

I have been thinking about mirrors for forty-eight years. The thinking started in a dressing room at a community playhouse in Lincoln, Nebraska, where a row of mirrors lined the wall above a counter cluttered with spirit gum and cold cream and the residue of faces that had been built and removed hundreds of times. I was thirteen years old and I was watching an actor apply a prosthetic nose, and the thing that struck me was the moment when his own face disappeared under the new architecture. His eyes changed. The man in the mirror stopped being the person I had been talking to thirty seconds earlier and became someone whose bone structure carried a different social signal, a different set of expectations, a different gravitational field. Same eyes. Different face. Different world.

That image has been sitting in my head for nearly five decades, paying rent in the form of a question I could not discharge: what is the relationship between the face and the person behind it? Is the face a window or a wall? If it is a window, what passes through it, and in which direction? If it is a wall, who built it, and what is it defending?

The Borrowed Saint: A Horror in Five Skins is now available from David Boles Books Writing and Publishing as a Kindle ebook and a trade paperback. It is the answer to that question, and the answer is worse than I expected.

The Mechanism

Asa Greer is five years old when he stands in a bathroom in Decker, Ohio and watches his reflection change. His cheekbones soften. His jaw loses its angles. For three seconds, he is wearing the face of the boy next door on his own skull. Then the face collapses, his features rush back, and the bathroom is loud again.

Asa can copy any face he sees. He can build composites from dozens of sources. He can walk through a room wearing the face that room requires, and the room will respond to the face without checking whether anything exists behind it. Each transformation extracts a sensory capacity he will never recover. Over fifty years, the ledger of things he can no longer smell, taste, feel, or hear grows longer than the ledger of things he retains.

I wanted the horror to be specific. Each loss is granular and irreplaceable: the smell of his own skin, the texture of his winter coat, the taste of tap water, his heartbeat’s internal sensation, the tonal distinctions that give melody its emotional contour. These are the small, unremarkable anchors that tether a person to the life they are living as opposed to any other life, and Asa severs them one by one and replaces them with borrowed faces that connect him to other people’s responses and sever him from his own existence.

The mechanism is supernatural. The cost is not.

The Kindness Problem

At twenty-eight, Asa discovers that performed goodness is the most powerful face he can build. Competence generates compliance. Charisma generates admiration. Authority generates obedience. Goodness generates worship. A room that witnesses an act of apparent compassion will defend the person who performed it against any attack, because the attack threatens the room’s belief that compassion exists.

Asa builds a kindness persona. He deploys it across a career that ascends from political consulting to the corridors of institutional power. The warmth that other people’s trust generates in his body is narcotic. His body is allergic to it. Every deployment produces an inflammatory response that begins at the jaw hinge and spreads through the muscles the performance recruits. The threshold contracts with each use. By his fifties, the margin between the face the world needs and the face his body can sustain is measured in minutes.

Writing this section of the book required me to think carefully about something I have observed across thirty years in theatre, publishing, and public life: the distance between a person’s performed concern and their actual capacity for being affected by another human being. Asa is an extreme case. The condition is not extreme. Every public figure, every institutional spokesperson, every person who has stood at a podium and projected the appearance of caring about something they were hired to manage rather than moved to address, operates on the same spectrum. Asa sits at the far end. The spectrum itself is ordinary.

Harlan Moeck and the Ditch

Every book needs a counter-argument, and this book’s counter-argument is a boy named Harlan Moeck who sits in the front row of Asa’s second-grade classroom and performs no performance at all. Harlan is kind because Harlan is kind, the way a heart beats because a heart beats. Asa can see it. He can catalog it. He cannot replicate it. He tries. The result is a window painted on a wall. Every measurement is precise. Light does not pass through.

Harlan appears three times across fifty years. Each appearance finds him doing invisible work: maintaining water systems, testing samples, keeping the infrastructure alive that the public consumes without awareness of the labor that produced it. The dedication reads: For the good men who dig the ditches. The water flows. No one applauds.

I have known Harlan Moecks. Every writer has. They are the people who do the work that makes the visible work possible, whose names appear in no coverage, whose labor sustains the systems that the public credits to the faces standing in front of cameras. I wrote Harlan because the book needed someone whose goodness was structural rather than performed, and because the horror of Asa’s condition is legible only when measured against a person for whom goodness is a condition of being alive rather than an overlay applied to a composite.

Cordelia’s Secret

Asa’s mother, Cordelia Greer, runs the household with efficiency and without affection. Touching her son only when logistics require it. Pushing his hair from his forehead with the heel of her hand. Washing a glass that is already clean, alone, in the dark, in the middle of the night, while the rest of the house sleeps.

The book’s final section, On the Lability, includes a clinical appendix: case notes of uncertain provenance describing Asa’s condition in medical language. Filed separately, an addendum describes a woman who presented at a clinic in 1987 asking whether the condition could be passed to a child. She said her father had possessed the ability to move his face and that it had eaten him from inside. She had spent her life holding still so it would not start.

That woman is Cordelia. The reader connects the dates and the details without being told. Every scene of emotional distance, every closed face, every hand that withdrew, is retroactively reframed. Cordelia was containing the same condition that consumed her son. The holding still was an act of will maintained across an entire lifetime. The coldness was a firewall.

I am proudest of this element of the book. The revelation arrives in a clinical register that has no capacity for grief, which is exactly why the grief hits as hard as it does. The driest language in the book carries the heaviest weight. If the mechanism works, the reader finishes the appendix and then sits for a moment and thinks about Cordelia washing the glass.

The Mirror on the Back Cover

One design detail I want to mention. On the paperback’s back cover, the title of the book appears reversed, as a mirror image. Letters flipped. Name reading backward. Below the reversed title, two amber eyes stare out, the same eyes that appear in the dissolving face on the front cover. Asa Greer is five years old in the first scene, standing in a bathroom, looking at a mirror. Turn the book over, and the mirror looks back.

The Borrowed Saint: A Horror in Five Skins is available now from David Boles Books Writing and Publishing at BolesBooks.com. Kindle eBook and paperback.

David Boles is a writer, dramatist, editor, and publisher. A member of the Dramatists Guild since 1984 and a graduate of the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies at Columbia University, he has published novels, nonfiction, and dramatic works through David Boles Books Writing and Publishing since 1975. He lives in New York City.

IDP Sleepers Might Be Hiding Among Jets Additions

The Jets won’t fool anyone into believing they’re a 2026 contender. But their offseason moves have installed some…
#NFL #NewYorkJets #NewYork #NY #Jets #additions #among #be #Football #Hiding #IDP #might #sleepers
https://www.rawchili.com/nfl/836442/

IDP Sleepers Might Be Hiding Among Jets Additions

The Jets won’t fool anyone into believing they’re a 2026 contender. But their offseason moves have installed some…
#NFL #NewYorkJets #NewYork #NY #Jets #additions #among #be #Football #Hiding #IDP #might #sleepers
https://www.rawchili.com/nfl/836442/

IDP Sleepers Might Be Hiding Among Jets Additions https://www.rawchili.com/nfl/836442/ #additions #among #be #Football #Hiding #IDP #Jets #might #NewYork #NewYorkJets #NewYork #NewYorkJets #NFL #sleepers

IDP Sleepers Might Be Hiding Among Jets Additions https://www.rawchili.com/nfl/836442/ #additions #among #be #Football #Hiding #IDP #Jets #might #NewYork #NewYorkJets #NewYork #NewYorkJets #NFL #sleepers

A quotation from James Howell

He that gropes in the dark, finds that which he would not.

James Howell (c. 1594–1666) Welsh historian and writer
Paroimiographia [Παροιμιογραφία]: Proverbs, or, Old Sayed Sawes & Adages, “English Proverbs” (1659)
[compiler]

More about this quote: wist.info/howell-james/82798/

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #jameshowell #proverb #darkness #discovery #finding #grab #grope #night #reach #search #surprise #unseen #hiding #lurking

A quotation from James Howell

He that gropes in the dark, finds that which he would not.

James Howell (c. 1594–1666) Welsh historian and writer
Paroimiographia [Παροιμιογραφία]: Proverbs, or, Old Sayed Sawes & Adages, “English Proverbs” (1659)
[compiler]

More about this quote: wist.info/howell-james/82798/

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #jameshowell #proverb #darkness #discovery #finding #grab #grope #night #reach #search #surprise #unseen #hiding #lurking

A quotation from James Howell

He that gropes in the dark, finds that which he would not.

James Howell (c. 1594–1666) Welsh historian and writer
Paroimiographia [Παροιμιογραφία]: Proverbs, or, Old Sayed Sawes & Adages, “English Proverbs” (1659)
[compiler]

More about this quote: wist.info/howell-james/82798/

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #jameshowell #proverb #darkness #discovery #finding #grab #grope #night #reach #search #surprise #unseen #hiding #lurking

A quotation from James Howell

He that gropes in the dark, finds that which he would not.

James Howell (c. 1594–1666) Welsh historian and writer
Paroimiographia [Παροιμιογραφία]: Proverbs, or, Old Sayed Sawes & Adages, “English Proverbs” (1659)
[compiler]

More about this quote: wist.info/howell-james/82798/

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #jameshowell #proverb #darkness #discovery #finding #grab #grope #night #reach #search #surprise #unseen #hiding #lurking

How American #Camouflage Conquered the World

The world-famous #MultiCam pattern was designed for the #military by two #Brooklyn hipsters. Now everyone—from babies to #ICE agents—is suited up for battle.
#privacy #security #hiding

https://www.wired.com/camouflage-multicam-military-navy-seals-ice/

https://www.europesays.com/africa/135547/ Ugandan opposition leader goes abroad after two months in hiding #Abroad #after #goes #hiding #in #leader #months #opposition #two #Uganda #Ugandan

Faster Asin() Was Hiding in Plain Sight

https://16bpp.net/blog/post/faster-asin-was-hiding-in-plain-sight/

#HackerNews #Faster #Asin #Hiding #Plain #Sight #Optimization #Math #Performance

RE: https://fairdinkum.one/@John/115805250091709866

And if #ZacharyLevi had his way most of the cast of #Chuck would be in #hiding, #deported or in a #TrumpConcentrationCamp #USPol #auspol

RE: https://fairdinkum.one/@John/115805250091709866

And if #ZacharyLevi had his way most of the cast of #Chuck would be in #hiding, #deported or in a #TrumpConcentrationCamp #USPol #auspol

#1boy #2koma #3girls #absurdres #ayanami_rei #back_bow #bishoujo_senshi_sailor_moon #blue_eyes #blue_sailor_collar #bow #bow_(weapon) #breasts #brown_hair #choker #comic #commentary_request #cosplay #double_bun #earrings #elbow_gloves #energy #english_text #fire #gloves #hair_bun #hiding #high_heels #highres #ikari_shinji #inner_senshi #interface_headset_(evangelion) #jewelry #katsuragi_misato #kneeling #magical_girl #mars_flame_sniper #medium_breasts #miniskirt #mitsuishi_kotono #multiple_girls #neon_genesis_evangelion #ojou-sama_pose #pleated_skirt #purple_bow #red_sailor_collar #red_skirt #sailor_collar #sailor_mars #sailor_mars_(cosplay) #sailor_mercury #sailor_mercury_(cosplay) #sailor_moon #sailor_moon_(cosplay) #sailor_senshi_uniform #skirt #souryuu_asuka_langley #speech_bubble #star_(symbol) #star_earrings #thought_bubble #tiara #tsunemoku #tuxedo_kamen #tuxedo_kamen_(cosplay) #voice_actor_connection #weapon https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/6893118

A quotation from Bill Watterson

CALVIN: Some days you get up and you already know that things aren’t going to go well. They’re the type of days when you should just give in, put your pajamas back on, make some hot chocolate, and read comic books in bed with the covers up until the world looks more encouraging.

Bill Watterson (b. 1958) American cartoonist
Calvin and Hobbes (1995-01-16)

More info about this quote: wist.info/watterson-bill/79673…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #billwatterson #calvinandhobbes #badday #bedtime #cocoon #expectations #foreboding #hiding #hunkerdown #snuggling #discouragement #reading

A quotation from Bill Watterson

CALVIN: Some days you get up and you already know that things aren’t going to go well. They’re the type of days when you should just give in, put your pajamas back on, make some hot chocolate, and read comic books in bed with the covers up until the world looks more encouraging.

Bill Watterson (b. 1958) American cartoonist
Calvin and Hobbes (1995-01-16)

More info about this quote: wist.info/watterson-bill/79673…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #billwatterson #calvinandhobbes #badday #bedtime #cocoon #expectations #foreboding #hiding #hunkerdown #snuggling #discouragement #reading

A quotation from Bill Watterson

CALVIN: Some days you get up and you already know that things aren’t going to go well. They’re the type of days when you should just give in, put your pajamas back on, make some hot chocolate, and read comic books in bed with the covers up until the world looks more encouraging.

Bill Watterson (b. 1958) American cartoonist
Calvin and Hobbes (1995-01-16)

More info about this quote: wist.info/watterson-bill/79673…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #billwatterson #calvinandhobbes #badday #bedtime #cocoon #expectations #foreboding #hiding #hunkerdown #snuggling #discouragement #reading

A quotation from Bill Watterson

CALVIN: Some days you get up and you already know that things aren’t going to go well. They’re the type of days when you should just give in, put your pajamas back on, make some hot chocolate, and read comic books in bed with the covers up until the world looks more encouraging.

Bill Watterson (b. 1958) American cartoonist
Calvin and Hobbes (1995-01-16)

More info about this quote: wist.info/watterson-bill/79673…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #billwatterson #calvinandhobbes #badday #bedtime #cocoon #expectations #foreboding #hiding #hunkerdown #snuggling #discouragement #reading

A quotation from Bill Watterson

CALVIN: Some days you get up and you already know that things aren’t going to go well. They’re the type of days when you should just give in, put your pajamas back on, make some hot chocolate, and read comic books in bed with the covers up until the world looks more encouraging.

Bill Watterson (b. 1958) American cartoonist
Calvin and Hobbes (1995-01-16)

More info about this quote: wist.info/watterson-bill/79673…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #billwatterson #calvinandhobbes #badday #bedtime #cocoon #expectations #foreboding #hiding #hunkerdown #snuggling #discouragement #reading

Saturday, September 6, 2025

https://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2025/09/saturday-september-6-2025/

Saturday, September 6, 2025

https://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2025/09/saturday-september-6-2025/

Saturday, September 6, 2025

https://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2025/09/saturday-september-6-2025/

Saturday, September 6, 2025

https://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2025/09/saturday-september-6-2025/

Saturday, September 6, 2025

https://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2025/09/saturday-september-6-2025/

Los Angeles County encourages prohibiting the law enforcement while hiding identities while working star-news.press/wp

,Los Angeles County encourages prohibiting the law enforcement while hiding identities while working star-news.press/wp, 2025-07-30 02:24:00 #Los #Angeles #County #encourages #prohibiting #law #enforcement #hiding #identities #working

https://star-news.press/los-angeles-county-pushes-prohibit-law-enforcement-from-hiding-identities-while-job/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=jetpack_social

"i may not be the one to really do this since im not Knowledged and cant provide sources but people need a #reminder that #blur #filters over faces is an #outdated means of #hiding #identities. basically, what's done #algorithmically (the #blurring) can be #reversed algorithmically. just use plain black ovals or squares. and not with some marker #tool or anything with #transparancy, which can be undone by messing with levels and shit. just plain, pure #black."

https://www.tumblr.com/nando161mando/789099981954072576

"i may not be the one to really do this since im not Knowledged and cant provide sources but people need a #reminder that #blur #filters over faces is an #outdated means of #hiding #identities. basically, what's done #algorithmically (the #blurring) can be #reversed algorithmically. just use plain black ovals or squares. and not with some marker #tool or anything with #transparancy, which can be undone by messing with levels and shit. just plain, pure #black."

https://www.tumblr.com/nando161mando/789099981954072576

"i may not be the one to really do this since im not Knowledged and cant provide sources but people need a #reminder that #blur #filters over faces is an #outdated means of #hiding #identities. basically, what's done #algorithmically (the #blurring) can be #reversed algorithmically. just use plain black ovals or squares. and not with some marker #tool or anything with #transparancy, which can be undone by messing with levels and shit. just plain, pure #black."

https://www.tumblr.com/nando161mando/789099981954072576

"i may not be the one to really do this since im not Knowledged and cant provide sources but people need a #reminder that #blur #filters over faces is an #outdated means of #hiding #identities. basically, what's done #algorithmically (the #blurring) can be #reversed algorithmically. just use plain black ovals or squares. and not with some marker #tool or anything with #transparancy, which can be undone by messing with levels and shit. just plain, pure #black."

https://www.tumblr.com/nando161mando/789099981954072576

"i may not be the one to really do this since im not Knowledged and cant provide sources but people need a #reminder that #blur #filters over faces is an #outdated means of #hiding #identities. basically, what's done #algorithmically (the #blurring) can be #reversed algorithmically. just use plain black ovals or squares. and not with some marker #tool or anything with #transparancy, which can be undone by messing with levels and shit. just plain, pure #black."

https://www.tumblr.com/nando161mando/789099981954072576

Unique Android Pre-Game Castes

In most cases, an android character has made its way in the post-apocalyptic world by performing some task, earning a wage, or being supplied with sufficient recharge access, lubricants, repairs and shelter in return for whatever enslavement, assignment, labor or freelance occupation it conducted. During its time in this occupation or caste it might well have suffered permanent damage due to abuse or injuries, but so too, gained new experiences, skills, and improvements to its cognitive and physical abilities.
Ink art from page 55 of The Mutant Epoch RPGs Expansion Rules Book. 

Learn about this tabletop roleplaying Game, and grab our free Quick Start Rules PDF here: https://www.outlandarts.com/qsr.htm


#covert #mutants #hooded #hiding #crowd #freak #wtf #android #selfaware #noaiart #ink #rpg #ttrpg #scifi #mutantepoch #expansionrules #tabletoprpg like #gammaworld or #fallout or #mcc or #mutantcrawlclassics #williammcausland