Ship Of Theseus: A Novel

Jeremiah Strickland

Dec 2020 · Shiny Red Nothing Press

About this ebook

In 2006, writer Wayne Bird loses his girlfriend Sally (AKA: VD) to a heroin overdose while housesitting for Dorothy, an art dealer. Isolated in Dorothy’s haunted apartment and surrounded by her vivid, surreal collection of paintings, Bird parties, hits on the vampire from downstairs, and obsesses over the Skyrat video game he can’t beat… Anything to avoid his grief. Deeply depressed, his grip on reality crumbles, the apartment’s ghosts close in, and his own demons threaten to consume him. Literally.

However, transported to the plague-ridden Earth of a parallel reality, Wayne finds his purpose and new love as a freedom fighting journalist. Nearly 150 years after we first meet him, semi-retired and working as a creative writing teacher at Green City High School, Mr. Bird comes face to face with the Skyrat, the superhero he made up when he was only seven years old. When Skyrat accepts a crucial mission from Bird, he gets mixed up with math worshipping cultists, a pair of questionably ethical cops, a hive-minded street gang, a skin-shedding monster, and a crime boss with a vendetta against a warlord in the Evil East.

Is Wayne Bird’s entanglement with Skyrat a coincidence? A cosmic inevitability? The senility of an old man?

Or could it be fate....

Prepare to question your own reality as you join Wayne and Skyrat to embark on the strangest adventure in this dimension! 

About the author

There was fire and water, followed by single celled organisms. Then fish. Amphibians gave way to reptiles . Mammals followed. Soon, primates were using tools. One of their cousins painted symbols on a sheet of processed tree pulp, and that excited another distant relative, many years later. His name was Jeremiah. He was strange.

In a former life, Jeremy led the indie rock band, The Minni-Thins, to some success. In his current incarnation (AKA at forty), he still makes music, as well as art and writings, all under the umbrella of Shiny Red Nothing. Jeremy lives in West Michigan with his wife and two stepchildren.

Edited Part 1 and provided world-building support to Part 2.

Edited Part 2.

Edited Episode 6.