Last year, we asked you to send us your gritty, humorous, compelling, or otherwise Curbside-minded, novella-length manuscripts for the First Annual Wild Onion Novella Contest. This April 30 we're publishing the winner to coincide with Independent Bookstore Day. You can now pre-order Tacky Goblin from our store and have it shipped before it's released!
Chicago-writer T. Sean Steele's delightfully weird Tacky Goblin follows an aimless twenty-something who struggles to make sense of reality after he moves to Los Angeles to live with his older sister. His legs are rotting, his apartment is haunted, and he’s in charge of taking care of a human baby that might actually be a dog. On top of it all, he has trouble making friends. Tacky Goblin blunders through particularly strange but familiar misadventures to remind us that, ultimately, learning to take care of yourself is hard.
"Travis Steele's Tacky Goblin is the future. It's also one of the most original, hilarious, inventive books I've read. Echoing the work of Richard Brautigan, Haruki Murakami, and Sam Pink, this novella presents the unending strangeness of becoming yourself. Through dog-children, black pills, and lost teeth, Steele traces the liminal moments of being lost in your twenties in LA and Chicago, and perfectly captures the travails of two siblings—brother and sister—as they negotiate the absurdities of the beginning of the twenty-first century."
—Joe Meno, author of Marvel and a Wonder and Hairstyles of the Damned
"This book is weird as hell and I love it."
—Chelsea Martin, author of Even Though I Don't Miss You and Mickey
"For all the strangeness in Tacky Goblin, the strangest thing might be how true it all feels: the experience of waking up sometime in one’s early adulthood and realizing that the world will keep changing around us whether we like it or not."
—James Tadd Adcox, author of Does Not Love and The Map of the System of Human Knowledge
Cover art by Jenna Caravello