Eight Books. One Argument. One River Valley.
A connected sequence of speculative fiction based on political reality — each novel a cascade of consequences traceable to the political climate of northwest Illinois in April 2026. The two books below are available now as free ePub downloads. The rest will follow on the same terms as they're released: $0.99 as an ePub download or on Kindle.
Masters of Extraction
If you read nothing else, read the Preface — or listen to it. It is the argument in miniature, and it will tell you within ten minutes whether the rest of the book is for you.
This is a quick read — about 100 pages in its current form — built in three parts:
Four chapters on what the extraction costs you right now: your district, your county, your ballot, and the most recent robbery you already remember — the COVID-era wealth transfer that moved $4.6 trillion through the financial system while the country argued about masks.
A single chapter showing the entire extraction lifecycle operating inside one American institution you can look up on your phone right now — with financial records the SEC has already examined. The proof of concept for the pattern.
Where the architecture came from. Pharaohs, satraps, Roman senators, feudal lords, colonial merchants, railroad barons, Klan recruiters, prosperity-gospel preachers, social-media algorithms — different products, different centuries, same architecture. The book closes where it began: in HD-89, with a question.
ePub is the standard open format for eBooks — it opens on almost anything. Two easy options:
- Google Play Books (free, Android & iPhone) — tap the + icon, Upload files, and select the ePub.
- ReadEra (free, Android & iPhone) — my preferred app for having the book read aloud. Open the file, tap the three-dot menu, choose Voice reading, and pair your phone to your car over Bluetooth if you want to listen while you drive.
On iPhone, you can also have any text read aloud with built-in accessibility: Settings → Accessibility → Spoken Content → Speak Screen, then swipe down with two fingers on the open book.
House District 89
If you read nothing else, read the Preface — or listen to it. Two short pieces, fifteen minutes end to end, and you will know what this novel is about and whether the rest of it is for you.
The Preface does one thing: it shows you your own future if the rigged system stays rigged. The novel is set in November 2028 and imagines that year as a cascade of consequences traceable to the political climate of May 2026 — the one we're living in right now. Though the place names are fictional — Bowen County, Bergamot Township, Pearlton, the City of Rock River — anyone who drives these seven counties will recognize the geography on the first page. The most sparsely-populated township in Boone County is here. Galena is here. Mount Carroll is here. Every small town and two-lane road between them is here, renamed but unmistakable.
The book is a quick read — a single arc across twenty-one chapters, January to November 2028, braided through three voices:
A former Michigan Avenue creative director who traded the Loop for a boarding barn on a haunted road in Bergamot Township. She signs a petition she wasn't expecting to sign, asks the volunteer three questions the volunteer can't answer, and ends up on a county board ballot she wasn't expecting to be on. She is the reader's first door into the architecture.
The author of The Rural Remainder — the nonfiction volume inside this fictional world, mapped onto the one you're reading now. He lost his first campaign and kept the data. He runs again, and this time he is not running alone. Seventeen sticky notes become forty-eight candidates become a movement that calls itself rye.
A data journalist with Ioway ancestry who maps the landscape by watersheds instead of county lines and teaches the campaign to hear the political work hiding inside ordinary words. She enters the story in March, carries the frame, and closes the book in November.
And along the same river corridor where the organizing spreads, seven new buildings appear — metal frame, metal siding, a cross bolted to the front façade. Because the people who oppose you are organizing too.
ePub is the standard open format for eBooks — it opens on almost anything. Two easy options:
- Google Play Books (free, Android & iPhone) — tap the + icon, Upload files, and select the ePub.
- ReadEra (free, Android & iPhone) — my preferred app for having the book read aloud. Open the file, tap the three-dot menu, choose Voice reading, and pair your phone to your car over Bluetooth if you want to listen while you drive.
On iPhone, you can also have any text read aloud with built-in accessibility: Settings → Accessibility → Spoken Content → Speak Screen, then swipe down with two fingers on the open book.
