I will not give up that which I have tasted

This piece will be sent out in the next edition of the Hell World newsletter. Subscribe to help pay our great writers. It is in fact the ethical thing to do.

Zack Budryk returns today with another deeply felt and defiant piece about the assault on people with autism by the pig and fraud Robert Kennedy Jr.

He recently wrote for Hell World about what it means to be a man.

We also hung out recently for the first time in D.C. on my book tour stop and had some pizza outside of a very cool dive bar which I wrote about in here.

You have to believe that things can get better

After only a few days on the road I am fucking beat dude. This shit is a young man’s game. Not just touring but everything. I had an absolutely lovely time in D.C. and Philly meeting so many of you though. Graded on the curve for how much enjoyment

Welcome to Hell WorldLuke O’Neil

Thanks to Reactor Mag for the shout out to We Had It Coming on their list of Can’t Miss Indie Press Speculative Fiction for November and December.

Can’t Miss Indie Press Speculative Fiction for November and December 2025 - Reactor

Astronauts in crisis, visions of the future, and the creepiest piece of furniture you’re likely to encounter in 2025.

ReactorTobias Carroll

In a recent interview with Typebar Magazine, Luke O’Neil explained one of the influences on his new collection We Had It Coming. “There’s also a lot of Barthelme in there,” he said.” I feel like a lot of my characters are sort of wandering around through the absurd with a concussion.” These stories provide a bleak, surreal spin on the challenges of modern life. (OR Books; November)

You know it's always Fuck the Atlantic. All my homies hate The Fucking Atlantic.

I will not give up that which I have tasted

by Zack Budryk

I got my autism diagnosis when I was 14 years old. Back then we still believed a lot of things about the condition that no longer apply. To start, I was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, which was folded into a generalized autism spectrum disorder diagnosis years later. It was also several years before a fabricated study by grotesque, vampiric fraud Andrew Wakefield linking childhood MMR vaccines to autism was formally retracted by The Lancet. 

In the current era of crank negative polarization, where the highest-profile proponents of the tired old canard are Donald Trump and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., it can be hard to picture a world where more traditionally mainstream figures gave the vaccine myth credence. And yet two years after my diagnosis, Rolling Stone and Salon platformed the idea, as did presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on the 2008 campaign trail. By the time Wakefield’s fraudulent research was retracted in 2010, it had reeled in a number of devotees who never left, from Trump to Bill Maher to a current panelist on what was once the most popular show on US TV. 

Most of this washed over me at the time. I was, after all, a hormonal teenage boy, so to the extent that I perceived myself as different I attributed it alternately to me being smarter than everyone else or dumber than everyone else. Nothing sounds more absurd to a high school-aged boy than the notion that someday he will better understand his place in the world, that he will be less irritated and confused all the time. But it did happen, largely because I fell in love a year or two into adulthood. My spouse and I have been married 13 years, but the relationship could easily have failed to clear the launchpad. We were set up by mutual friends, and she later admitted that early in our relationship she wasn’t sure what to make of my affect, or my sense of humor and tendency to ramble. Despite it all, she gave me a chance, one I was not entitled to but for which I remain indescribably grateful. In the next few years we would move in together, get married and build careers and lives in ways my mother once privately confided she had feared I would never be able to do.