Camshaft 10

by Chad McComber ; illustrated by Annie Ruygt ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2025

Stories about nutty scientists, sleazy politicians, and the occult goings-on in a creepy California county are among the offerings in this 10-part collection of stories, poetry, and more.

McComber’s tales cover a profusion of styles and subjects, from gonzo SF to psychological horror and literary evocations of the ennui of American life. “The Shitstorm” imagines a 23rd-century physicist who invents a gadget that teleports solid and liquid waste from the human gut to a receptacle in outer space; he’s celebrated until the exiled material returns as a devastating asteroid. The 19th-century Pennsylvania senator in “Colonel Gerbenpepper’s Fancy Speech” celebrates his corruption and contempt for the public. “The Ripshaw Record Company” follows a Jazz Age San Francisco milkman with no experience, talent, or common sense who starts a record label and lucks into a few minor hits. McComber’s Ripshaw cycle, set in a gloomy, fictional Northern California county by that name, continues in a darker vein in several stories: “The Well – Part 10,” for instance, unfolds in a haunted Ripshaw where dreams of children dying seem to regularly come true. Another novella follows Chelsea Friendly, whose clan has suffered for generations from a mysterious curse that’s saddled them with dead-end jobs, loveless relationships, occasional miscarriages, and major depression, while in “Lanai,” a father on vacation in Hawaii during a tropical storm keeps calmly drinking when his teenage son disappears. A handful of poems and literary japes round out the issue, the latter including a letter to the editor from a fake government agency that praises CAMshaft for stimulating the economy by wasting money on a publication that no one reads. (Ruygt’s occasional, simple pen-and-ink illustrations feature characters and scenes from each section.)

The CAMshaft series is basically a showcase for McComber’s writing, and he has talent to burn. He has a Twainian flair for satirizing Americana that combines biting wit with a pitch-perfect ear for period hokum, as in Col. Gerbenpepper’s sendup of populist cant: “Journalists tell lies! If your eyes are blue, they’ll say they’re brown. If your shoes are white, they’ll say they’re black. If you pleaded no contest to a trumped-up orphanage arson charge, they’ll say you admitted to burning an orphanage down! They’re sick!” McComber’s Ripshaw yarns are redolent with dank, mossy atmospherics and sinister vibes, which are rendered in an eerie, Impressionist style: “A touch of fear prickled against her back, like something was behind her. She would not be stupid and give in to her ridiculous delusions of being stalked. But, like most everyone else, Rachel couldn’t help it. She turned around. And there was nothing there. But there was still the laughing.” McComber’s vision of American life mixes numbed anomie with lyrical evocations of vulgar beauty, as in “Unpossessed,” whose aimless young narrator finds solace in the art of his dead father, a maker of neon beer signs: “They popped on with tinkling noises and in the chair I felt absorbed by their glow….The light comes from the noble gasses, put there by my father….I want to be like them. Unaffected, beautiful in an inextricable way, unpossessable.”

A captivating, boldly conceived miscellany, rendered in haunting prose.

Pub Date: April 1, 2025

ISBN: 9798218731113

Page Count: 144

Publisher: Camshaft Productions

Review Posted Online: June 25, 2025

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

SHORT STORIES | PARANORMAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION