Bad Times with Julian Mercer. Bad Times with Julian Mercer, #1

THE DEBUT PUBLICATION FROM JULIAN MERCER . AN ABBYCAT LIMINALT ANTHOLOGYWith Contributions by Jack Chase (Made in America, The Bastard of Taylor's End) on "Moonlight Jazz" and "Camp Doom"A fractured debut of six interlinked stories set across desert test towns, roadside motels, and postwar Hollywood, this collection explores isolation, obsession, and the intersection of the surreal with the ostensible mundanity of American interior lives.
In a nuclear testing town, a sleepless engineer watches his silverware vanish piece by piece (FORKS). A fugitive checks into a motel room that already belongs to someone else (There's a Man at the Door). A woman calls her boyfriend ninety-seven times from a roadside motel after a fight. When he finally arrives, she's calmer and kinder than he's ever seen her-and knows things she shouldn't (The Crying Woman in Room 202). On the night of January 9, 1947, a cartoonist shares coffee with a stranger hours before she becomes the most infamous murder victim in Los Angeles history (Moonlight Jazz).
And in the mountains, a group of teenagers celebrating graduation meet a man on the trail who behaves like an old friend (Camp Doom). Spare, unsettling, and unmistakably its own, this debut marks the emergence of a singular voice operating between noir, psychological realism, and American myth.© 2026 Abbycat Group LLC