Good relationships take a certain kind of magic to succeed, and what Alex Petroya seems to have is the wrong magic.
After his wife Stephanie leaves, Alex has one place left to go: the pink house his parents left to him in Cambria, California. After moving in, he discovers a box filled with unfinished stories Stephanie had written during their marriage.
Could finishing them win her back? Alex decides to try but finds writing is harder than it looks. With help from his brother-in-law, Conner, he learns a simple incantation to increase focus. As Alex writes the stories, they come true, creating strange, unnatural events. Then he gets another idea: he will manipulate the stories further to make Stephanie return to him.
With the incantation and the stories, Alex seems to have tapped into a magical combination. But in the end, he finds there is no magic stronger than that of the human heart.
He’s come to destroy the world.
We beat him to it.
Welcome to a world where you have to suck the KKK for breakfast and people fight for the right to be warehoused. Welcome to a world where television is free just as long as you never turn it off, where opioids are delicious and safe, mostly, where the streets are filled with the bodies of the dead, worms are blessed, and children are tortured for the sake of art.
And into this world awakens Little Mike.
Little Mike is a doll.
Little Mike doesn’t know why he’s woken up. He doesn’t know that he means the end of humankind. He’s too busy being traded for sexual favors, watching Reality TV, and searching for the last shreds of human hope in the same landfill where they’d deposited their decency and their intelligence.
Dystopia is a word that gets thrown around a lot but what do you call a world where the future has been stripped of its meaning? Where the petty greeds of humanity eclipse survival? Where corporations have data-mined the human heart… and no one can see beyond the latest distraction… and human history culminates in silent surrender?
You’d call that the world of Little Mike. It only sounds like the world where you live.