My new book! 'We Had It Coming'

Well it's an exciting week for fans of very handsome socialists because my next collection of short stories and poetry titled We Had It Coming is available for pre-order now. Fifteen bucks? Not bad!

You can also get it through Bookstore.org or wherever.

I'm very fortunate that so many of you support my work in this newsletter but I think this might be the best thing I ever wrote so purchasing it or asking your local book store or library to stock it or sharing the word would be so amazing. If any of you would like a review copy for a publication or podcast or what have you let me know and we can sort that out.

Here's the description from my publisher OR Books. (Is it a coincidence that Zohran Mamdani shouted out OR Books yesterday just hours before his big win?

Well we don't know.

About the book

“I’ve been asking myself just how it is that a person can go about their day to day life at a time like this and I keep coming back to another question which is how did we ever convince ourselves we had the right to do so before?”​​

That question runs through We Had It Coming, a collection of stories that pulse with both the familiar and the uncanny. O’Neil’s characters struggle to survive in a reality rife with violence, addiction, fascism, and the crushing weight of modern life. From the threat of mass shootings to the absurdity of predatory healthcare, his sharp observations of societal decay leave a lasting impact.

Yet even amid the chaos, O’Neil’s trademark wit cuts through, offering moments of unexpected levity. Jumping from CVS to the emergency room to a seaside Massachusetts town ravaged by the opioid crisis, and blending short stories, poetry, and micro-fiction, O’Neil’s stream-of-consciousness style and inventive syntax pull the reader into a mesmerizing rhythm.

Fans of his previous work will find a continuation of his unique voice, and new readers will be captivated by his unflinching portrayal of survival in a world gone awry.

And here are some very nice things an insanely talented group of writers were nice enough to say about it.

Luke O'Neil is one of the writers I admire the most—for the clarity with which he notices big things and small ones, for the righteousness and humor he brings to describing them, and for the stubborn humanity that runs through all of it. It's a strange thing, to be this good at writing about the stuff that's bad in every abstracted and over-mediated moment of modern life, but it's an important one as well. His stories make me feel less insane.
—David Roth, editor and co-owner, Defector Media

Reading Luke O'Neil's writing is like getting your ribs kicked in by a boot that you can't help but notice is beautiful—its stitching, the leatherwork, shining eyelets and lace hooks—all its craftsmanship catching your attention, even as it crunches your bones. We Had It Coming is O'Neil writing at the top of his game, raw emotion intertwined with poetic expression, offering a profound exploration of modern life’s complexities and woes in a style that refuses to let you look away. I gulped this book down. Never have I been so hungry for writing about life's—and the world's—numerous and ongoing catastrophes.  
—Isaac Fitzgerald, New York Times bestselling author of Dirtbag, Massachusetts

What Luke O'Neil knows the answer to is a question both the straight world and the recovery community confronts every day—is anybody actually different from anybody else? And if so, what is addiction? The addict knows that being alive is the disease, a truth that science struggles to accept. We Had It Coming is not about suicide or addiction but the vivid, unmissable struggle of waking up, the only pain we are given, the first and last real gift.
—Sasha Frere-Jones is a writer and musician from New York

Like all of his work, Luke O’Neil’s stories and poems in We Had It Coming make me want to shout amen, call my mom, and punch a goddamn wall. Sometimes in the same sentence. Like nobody else working today, Luke articulates the agony of trying to live right now with a functioning heart, the anger of knowing right from wrong when one by one the people who taught you the difference turn out to have been joking. If you’ve been looking for the great art that bad times are supposed to bring about, look no further. Drywall is not that hard to patch.
—Dave Holmes, editor-at-large at Esquire 

Luke O’Neil has always been one of my favorite writers, because when he writes you know exactly what he meant to say. Some writers describe, some convince, some guide. Luke just shows you what he saw, which is always somehow exactly right, no matter how wrong it is, and leaves you feeling as though you have just glimpsed something true. It is easy enough for a bad writer to use a thesaurus; it takes quite a good one to write whole symphonies in plain English. Luke is among the most talented writers around, if for no other reason that the man has a keener eye than he sometimes admits and he has a strong hatred of bullshit. And that’s why no matter who you are as a reader, you’ll find something you like in his writing.
—Linda Tirdao, author of Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America

In his distinctive prose, O’Neil uses his generational talent for speaking to our current state of alienation – here, through vignettes that are darkly funny, intensely personal, and profound. Enthralling, like finding scraps of poetry in the dust after an apocalypse.
—Mattie Lubchansky, author of Boy’s Weekend and Simplicity 

Luke O’Neil has a degree in Massachusetts Studies and the human spirit. His stories imagine “a bill that will soon come due,” in grief, in the wars we’ve waged on other countries and nature itself. His characters can’t quit smoking or the hope that the bill might still be settled. O’Neil’s stories will make you want to show emotion, even if your family didn’t really do that shit. 
—Daisy Alioto, co-founder Dirt Media

Reading these stories is like grabbing a beer with your friend who's smarter than you, and funnier than you, and knows way more than you do about how screwed up people are—and yet somehow, on the other side, he's made you feel better about the state of humanity, not worse. 
—Rax King, author of Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer and Sloppy, Or: Doing It All Wrong

Luke O’Neil is the poet of our shared doom. We Had It Coming offers stories brimming with pitch-black gallows humor, indie rock criticism, rhapsodic epiphanies and stark terror, hopes false and true, and tender insights laced with dread. It’s good to know that at least we’re all in this Hell World together.
—Maria Bustillos, Flaming Hydra

It's a mix of longer more traditional short stories and shorter prose poems or whatever it is that I write in a similar style to the last book A Creature Wanting Form. Some I've published in here or Flaming Hydra but most of them will be new to all.

Here are a couple examples!

Out of our misery 

You saw a photo of panicked wild horses being chased by a helicopter. It loomed over them like a bird of prey in stark contrast against the backdrop of a scarlet setting sun.

The image crawled with you into bed and restless you fumbled for the plugged-in phone and poked around for more information and found an article that said that a dozen of the horses had died in the operation that day.

The rangers had been trying to round them up on federal land so they had made a break for it. One stallion fractured a leg and kept running on its other three for thirty six minutes it said which seemed so sad in its specificity. 

No one wants the last few minutes of their life reported in the newspaper. Not even a horse. 

Eventually they had to fly down closer to the ground when it had at long last collapsed and shoot it in the head. You presumed. It didn’t say how they killed it. Probably like that. 

Putting it out of its misery is what we call it when we kill an injured animal. 

The story said some of the locals had named that particular horse Mr. Sunshine. It sounded made up but that’s what the story said. 

Four of the other horses ended up with broken necks. How does that even work? They must have been running so desperately to try to escape that their skeletons snapped under the weight of their stubborn wildness. A freedom we believed we had lent them. That wasn’t ever ours to give. 

Believing you will receive 

I was out on the porch in the dark with a friend who had stopped by to tell me he was getting a divorce. No no no he didn’t want to come inside and disturb the kids he said. Out here is fine he said. I brought out a couple of ice cold cold ones and listened to a story about the collapse of an entire world. I confess I teared up more than he did. 

Then again it was sudden news to me. You would figure it had settled in for him by now. Hopefully being one of the first people to know about the slow dissolution of his own marriage. 

A person can become accustomed to almost any kind of pain. Novelty is pain’s cruelest device. 

We hugged differently than we had ever hugged. 

A decent enough man will hug his friends routinely albeit quickly and percussively but there is still a kind of hug we keep in reserve for when it is called for. 

A special occasion when the rare bottle is brought up from the cellar and decanted. 

We bullshitted for a while as the night bugs screamed in car alarm. Like someone was breaking into every tree and bush and nest on the block one by one. How panic is infectious like that. How it pollutes. How animals flee. Birds explode into the sky in unison at a rifle’s crack.

No there was nothing to be done about it he said after some interviewing. Wasn’t sure if he wanted there to be anymore. 

I was trying to solve it for him like a 1,000 piece puzzle I wasn’t even at the table doing. Shouting out instructions blindly from the other room. 

Everything was going to be alright he said. 

Trying to reassure me more than himself it seemed like.  

He was walking around downtown earlier trying to clear his head and he saw the funniest thing he said. He passed by a wedding in the park where the groom was reciting the lyrics to Nothing Else Matters as part of his vows. But doing it in the thickest Massachusetts accent he’d ever heard. 

That’s honestly so beautiful to me I said.  

I didn’t know whether to cry or laugh he said. 

He sounded like you he said. 

No matter how far I sang and we each laughed a half of a laugh.

Love is the only thing that is real he said in a suddenly different voice and I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. 

I said damn right. 

A subdued damn right. A mournful damn right.

Looks like the pope is about to die he said and I said that I had heard that. 

They put out a statement asking for everyone’s prayers he said. But if he can’t even get his calls picked up then what were any of us supposed to do about it? 

Then we talked about how much the Red Sox fucking sucked for a while. 

After he had retreated to his suddenly unfamiliar home I went back into my too familiar home and debriefed my wife and told her I was gonna go back and sit out on the porch for a while to decompress. I got myself another can and turned my playlist on shuffle. 

It don't make you do a thing it just lets you.

The next morning my doctor's office emailed to remind me that my upcoming free annual preventative health exam may not technically be free as per recent federal guidelines. The appointment is this week and I'm worried she's going to tell me all my numbers look fine. That there is nothing wrong with me that I have the power to fix. 

Just over the hill deer were busy shedding their velvet. Agitating their antlers against the bark and brush and stripping off the protective layer messily and bloodily. 

Have you seen this? The draped flesh hanging like red rags off of their sharpened points. Doing it over and over again every year. 

Had he not already existed you would have had to invent the Devil Himself if you ever came across such a sight in the woods. 

Maybe that’s where they originally got the idea I don’t know.

Sometimes they eat it too. So that nothing is wasted. And later in the year when the antlers fall off completely other smaller animals congregate and each in turn eat of them for their calcium and protein and to shave down their own constantly growing teeth.  

And it's a chilly dry morning at the end of the mildest summer I can remember and I can't fully appreciate its comfort because it all feels like a bill that will soon come due.

The known world

Overnight her car’s spider had erected yet another elaborate web on the side view mirror. Must have spent hours on the thing it looked like. She thought of brushing the entire mess off once again with the ice scraper from the back seat but then felt a pang of conscience. It couldn’t have been eating well lately what with her wiping its labors to hell every day. Going around cutting the lines of a village’s lobster traps. She turned the engine over and glanced at it perched there motionless and tense. Two spiders accounting for the reflection actually. Waiting in their own ornate webs in reverse. Famished in a trap they had both set for themselves. 

Thank you as always for being here. I'm very lucky to have you.