First, I want to wish everyone a blessed, grateful, and contemplative ANZAC Day. In Australia (and I suppose NZ too, though I don’t live there) it is a day of remembrance, gratitude, and intentionally stopping normal life to take stock of our freedom. To think of those who died so that we might live. And those who died needlessly. And those who died for lies and the monetary profit of the powerful.
Lest we forget.
I chose this day for the following announcement because of the themes of the day which parallel a project I’ve been quietly working on a while now.
NEU: For the men who saw things and were told they didn’t.
I have written a new novel, a total side-project, that I want to present to you as the readers of The Ghosts of Men Trilogy. It’s published in a separate space under a pseudonym, Santiago Morrow, because the setting and verisimilitude of the publication format is an important part of the experience.
I am extremely proud of this novel, whose form is both complex, and contained. It felt easy to construct and weave tidily compared to the massive Mardukverse. There’s no time-travel or informational realm involved in his book. Just documents, curious minds, questions that need answering, and a conspiracy so vast it will blow your mind. It was a research and organisation project first, then the narrative took shape from the very specific premise and set of connecting real-history events. The dual-journal format was part of the original concept, and it formed a needed set of restrictions to work within. Imagination and steady effort (so much more time spent on editing and trimming than writing) filled in the rest, and I think it’s a really great thriller.
“In October, a shipping analyst sends Iago Morrow a spreadsheet. Nineteen GPS blackouts. Same coordinates. Four minutes and seventeen seconds, every time. No official explanation.
In November 1946, Iago’s father Jack boarded the USS Mount Olympus as part of Operation Highjump — the largest military expedition ever sent to Antarctica. The expedition was scheduled for six to eight months. It returned in eight weeks. No official explanation was ever entered into the public record.
Seventy-eight years later, father and son are following the same silence south.
Santiago Morrow does not give interviews.”
As a pre-roll to the novel, which launches at iagomorrow.substack.com soon, there is already a wealth of articles posted. These are Santiago Morrow’s previous work as an investigative journalist. They set the background of the man who compiled the novel, and whose personal journals will form half of the story in the novel. The other half, his father described above.
SOME EARLY READER COMPARISONS:
“The father-son chapters are Gilead territory — patient, withheld, devastating. That a conspiracy thriller gets you there at all is the miracle.”
“Jack Morrow is the quietest character I’ve read since the father in The Road. Every sentence he writes costs him something, and you feel it.”
“Sits on the shelf between Libra and Foucault’s Pendulum. DeLillo’s paranoid architecture, Eco’s appetite for the buried archive. A proper grown-up novel.”
“A found-document novel that earns its form. House of Leaves without the gimmickry — the apparatus is the story.”
NEU will be launching in May with two chapters a week for subscribers at iagomorrow.substack.com - the first six chapters are free, as well as the 20+ prequel articles already published (a few more still coming before the book begins). Some time before the end of the year it will be available as an ebook and paperback, but for now it will be exclusively on Substack.
I hope you’ll enjoy the writings of SANTIAGO MORROW, and drop a comment there when you do!
Meanwhile, the Mardukverse adventures will continue here, with the next chapters of The Ghost of Delacroix to follow. Thank you for reading.