Your Summer, Your Series: Author Spotlight - Bill Hemmig

Hi, I'm Bill Hemmig, author of One 'n Done #3 Breathren Hollow. It's a novella which is too long to be a short story, and too short to be a novel.

People like to ask me what genre I write in, and for the longest time I didn't know how to respond, but Samantha and Adam - my publishers at Read Furiously call my work absurdist. At first, that didn't make any sense to me. My stories were about people you'd meet at the supermarket living their lives. But then I took a more detached look. Take Brethren Hollow for example. It's really just a critique of American X-Urbanism, but what gets the whole story started is when a group of neighbors in a new development discover something in the woods behind their houses that's well... absurd.

And it sets all this stuff into motion that brings in elements of true crime, social satire, it gets kind of crazy. And then there are the people in my short story collection Americana. There's a man who developers an illness that has him hallucinating characters from children's books and hearing theme songs from 80s sitcoms. There's a real estate agent who converses with imaginary friends based on heroines from literature, there's a woman who can't stop planting her garden in strict geometric shapes. There's a guy who's mistaken for a deity, and another who thinks he is a deity.

And I guess the truth of the matter is, I have an extremely absurd way of looking at the world, and I didn't realize cause thats how I've always looked at the world. I'm absurdist to others, I guess, and a realist to myself.

Anyway, that's me. If you're interested, start with Brethren Hollow it won't take long to read and it's a gateway drug to the rest of the stuff.