Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only €10,99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti
    The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti
    The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti
    Ebook119 pages2 hours

    The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti

    By Stephen Graham Jones

    4.5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    “This strange, subtle story of father-son disaffection and disjointed love is told with [Jones’s] signature narrative inventiveness and dark humor.” —Kris Saknussemm, author of Private Midnight

    If drinking mercury from a thermometer didn’t kill him, maybe spray painting in an unventilated garage would. Or so Nolan’s father thought. One inspired yet failed suicide attempt after another, each with a note to his son—with only a hint of accusation.

    But as Nolan sits in an empty office building, the last customer service employee for a nearly obsolete video game, those many suicide notes come back to haunt him. As do the levels of the game that no one plays anymore. And now a homicide detective is on the phone.

    Maybe his father was right when he wrote that he was teaching Nolan not to give up, that the only way to understand what happened was to make it to the end of the game. But there’s no cheatcode that’s going to get Nolan through this . . .

    “Two unreliable narrators, a bunch of suicide letters, and a plot that collapses on itself just like the characters do—Stephen Graham Jones is our contemporary Jorge Luis Borges.” —Michael Kimball, author of Big Ray

    “Like Lethem and Murakami before him, Jones mines his genre fiction past to bring us a work of startling literary merit. Mystery, horror, sci-fi: the ingredients are all in there.” —David Goodwillie, author of Kings County

    “[A] stark exploration of guilt, grief, and fear. . . . And did I mention that it’s funny? Unplug your consoles, kids, and play this book.” —Zack Wentz, author of The Garbageman and the Prostitute
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateOct 1, 2024
    ISBN9781504096270
    The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti
    Author

    Stephen Graham Jones

    Stephen Graham Jones is the author of fifteen novels and six story collections. He has received numerous awards, including the NEA Literature Fellowship in fiction, the Texas Institute of Letters Jesse H. Jones Award for Best Work of Fiction, the Independent Publisher Book Award for Multicultural Fiction, and the This Is Horror Award, as well as making Bloody Disgusting’s Top Ten Horror Novels of the Year. Stephen was raised in West Texas. He now lives in Boulder, Colorado, with his wife and children.

    Read more from Stephen Graham Jones

    Related to The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti

    Related ebooks

    Science Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Terrify Yourself with These Ten Horror Novels

      Jun 19, 2019

      A list of books so scary you definitely won't keep them on your nightstand. The post Terrify Yourself with These Ten Horror Novels appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Quiet Boy

      Jan 28, 2019

      The Quiet Boy
      29 min read

    • Article

      Chuck Tingle Goes Mainstream…ish

      Jul 19, 2023

      "As a buckaroo on the autism spectrum, I’ve come to a place where I’m fine being a sort of outsider." The post Chuck Tingle Goes Mainstream…ish appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Paul Tremblay

      Dec 3, 2020

      For the first time in weeks, I was swept along into that trance, that magic inner space where stories live. The post A Year in Reading: Paul Tremblay appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      Tender Is The Flesh

      Jan 29, 2020

      RELEASED 6 FEBRUARY 224 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Augustina Bazterrica Publisher Pushkin Press This is a pretty unpleasant book. It’s clearly meant to be, but knowing that doesn’t make it any less unsettling to read. It’s set in a near future wh

      1 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Phillip B. Williams

      Dec 15, 2017

      The masters are yet dead. Wanting to be human,I tried to rewrite The Waste Land. The canon’s reachcasts ruinous light. The masters’ pens breachthis page where, above, my own hand spectates. Babylonrisen, exorcism in reverse, whose nature upended now?

      6 min read

    • Article

      Dark Tales

      Dec 2, 2021

      Dark Tales
      6 min read

    • Article

      Speaking Of Horror

      Sep 12, 2020

      Speaking Of Horror
      14 min read

    • Article

      The Word Game

      Apr 6, 2023

      The Word Game
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Ripple Effect

      Nov 5, 2020

      The Ripple Effect
      3 min read

    • Article

      You Talkin’ To Me?

      Nov 9, 2023

      You Talkin’ To Me?
      3 min read

    • Article

      You Talkin' To Me?

      Aug 17, 2023

      You Talkin' To Me?
      3 min read

    • Article

      Dialogue

      Apr 21, 2022

      Dialogue
      6 min read

    • Article

      Caught Out

      Oct 2, 2022

      Caught Out
      9 min read

    • Article

      Fall-down COMEDIAN

      Apr 11, 2021

      Fall-down COMEDIAN
      3 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Nov 1, 2021

      What is the uncanny valley? asks the student and I draw the graph on the board, and point to the lowest point, and then move up the slope; This is like a scarecrow, it’s kinda shaped like a human but you’re not sure; This is where you’d put a mannequ

      6 min read

    • Article

      What Just Happened?

      Apr 9, 2021

      What Just Happened?
      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti

    4.5/5

    5 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti - Stephen Graham Jones

      1.

      What I remember best about my father are the suicide notes. This is what I tell the homicide detective who calls me at three in the morning.

      After I say that, the line is kind of quiet.

      I’m guessing he’s tired like me. I’m guessing too that he’s leaned over his desk, a desk he hasn’t seen for months it’s so thick with paperwork, and he’s holding the receiver up to his right ear with one hand, his head propped on the splayed fingers of his other hand, his eyes closed against everything.

      My desk isn’t like that at all.

      When my shift ends in nine hours, so does my job. My instructions were stuck to my locker with a magnet: lock the door behind me. My check’ll be in the mail.

      I’m fairly certain that I’m the only person left in the building. All five stories and two wings of it. The only things left behind are broken staplers, miles of printer cable going nowhere, and cartoon panels about the workplace.

      Because I spent the first two hours of my last shift walking through all the abandoned cubicles and empty offices, reading these cartoons—they were the same on each floor, sometimes the same from door to door—my desk is different now. Gone is the mouse pad which I had made at the mall, from a picture of my girlfriend Jenn, when she was my girlfriend. And all my different coasters that were supposed to have been a joke, ‘mood coasters,’ I walked them down the hall, deposited them in recycling to hide them from the archeologists of the future, who I know are already interested in me, sifting through the remains of today, trying to attach whatever they can to me. And I never had any cartoons. Maybe because I never had any wall or door to pin a cartoon to.

      The reason I never got a wall or doors like everybody else is that the suite I’m in used to be a radio station, I think, and my desk is where the sound booth was. Except all the soundproof glass that probably used to be around me, it probably made whoever had the job before me feel like they were in a display case. I don’t doubt that those four large slabs of glass are stacked down in the basement right now, and that, months after I’m gone and this building’s started to really go to seed, some skater punk’s going to see them, and seriously start to wonder what they might look like in a thousand tiny pieces, instead of just four boring big ones.

      Even without the glass walls, my station, my desk, it still feels like I’m on display. Like I’m in a ticket booth, one selling admission to an event nobody even wants to consider.

      The story of my life, yeah.

      I do at least understand why the old sound booth was the best spot for me. Or for my job: what I am is customer service for the videogame Camopede. You’ll have to imagine the little trademark symbol. But Nitrox, who owns the rights to Camopede, really really insists you imagine it. And that, while you’re at it, you maybe try to find the Camopede in whatever environment the level you’re on has generated for you.

      More on all that later, though. And on the blind ninjas that inhabit those higher levels, and how their congenital blindness has, through the centuries, made them fiercely loyal.

      You heard right, too: centuries. The Nitrox designers, or whoever they contracted the back-story of Camopede to (‘

      ™

      ’), suggest that Camopede, being outside the normal flow of time, is perhaps responsible for just about every event—calamitous and serendipitous—in the history of the earth. No trademark there, just ‘earth.’ You don’t even have to capitalize it.

      But that’s no real explanation of my job—of why I’m the last Nitrox-certified employee clocked in. Maybe in the whole Western hemisphere.

      The reason I’m here at the bank of phones which, ‘serendipitously,’ the old sound booth was already wired for, is that if I’m not here for at least nine more hours, then Nitrox will become vulnerable to some kind of legal action, should any gamer out there choose to pursue it.

      Trick is, ten years ago, whatever designer was entering the boring warranty info at the back of the little handbook guide that came with the disc, they messed up the wording. Because he or she was a graphic designer, I have to guess; words were just pretty shapes, more or less, but didn’t really mean much in and of themselves.

      In this case they kind of did, though. To me anyway. And to the Nitrox legal department.

      Instead of just saying that customer support and game navigation would be available to players of Camopede, it guaranteed—the designer’s calamitous word—that customer support and game navigation would be available to the legions of Camopede novices.

      However, as the graphic designer did at least manage not to stipulate any time period, the Nitrox legal department’s been able to qualify that ‘guaranteed’ down to a period of no more than ten years: the average shelf life of all their videogames, as established by sales, obsolescence, later versions, all that.

      What this means is that my job duties require me to stay current on a videogame that no human has played now for, I’m guessing, nine years, and maybe even some months on top of that.

      Camopede wasn’t that popular. The reason the building’s empty is that Nitrox is retreating, going back to Japan, its digital tail tucked between its skinny businessman legs.

      For as long as I’ve worked here—four years, I think, though I only recall the first two with anything like clarity—none of my phones have ever rang with a Camopede question. Other stuff, sure: my girlfriend, doing the break-up thing; my friend Simon, using a fake voice to ask questions about videogames so archaic he finally couldn’t help laughing; my dad, drunk; my supervisor over and over, doing quality control, then breaking down into laughter too; my mom, telling me about Dad, and not laughing, really; and now this homicide detective.

      Suicide notes? he says, his fingers surely still splayed across his left eye and the bridge of his nose.

      Are you sure you have the right number? I ask him back.

      It’s a feeble attempt. At what, I’m not really all that sure. But the feebility is ridiculously high.

      Nolan Dugatti? he reads off some card or file, maybe the palm of his hand.

      I close my eyes.

      But he … it was two years ago, I say.

      Translation: when my mom called about my dad, it was two years ago.

      And yes, I laughed then. That kind that’s just through your nose, like what you mean with it is ‘finally.’

      When I hung the phone up, too, I held the receiver there for a long time, like I was afraid it was going to fall off the hook or something, and I was going to have to hear my mom just sitting there at the kitchen table, wondering what to do with her life now.

      None of which I particularly want to be thinking about on the last stretch of the last shift of my first job, the one I got specifically because of my dad—because he told me I never could.

      Yes, I see, the homicide detective says, with zero delicateness (he must have a file, to be able to find this out about my dad so fast already), Mr. Dugatti passed away … it’ll be two years in March.

      March is tomorrow. This tells me he’s one of those detail guys.

      Then why are you calling? I manage to ask.

      If I could, what I would be doing right now is punching a button to make one of the other lines ring, loud, so I could ask this homicide detective to hold, please.

      That wasn’t part of my training, though, and was never covered in any of the weekly quality control exercises.

      What he can say here, approximately, is either that he knows what I’ve done, or that his real name is Simon.

      Like any homicide detective in the history of homicide detectives has ever been that uncomplicated, though.

      Suicide notes, you say, he says again, not dropping it at all.

      I nod, and am pretty sure he hears it somehow.

      exhibit 1f :

      Dear Nolan—

      I know what I’m supposed to say here is that it wasn’t your fault. But holy hell, son. I mean, I apologize for taking the Lord’s name in vain, but goddamn—sorry, sorry—we could have won. We were winning, even. But no, don’t misconstrue this. If you or your mother find me in the morning, and it looks like I’ve broken open all the thermometers in the house and drank the mercury from them, it’s not because of anything you did. It’s because we lost. When we were winning. And that’s the worst kind of losing, far and away.

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1