Author Spotlight: Cody Goodfellow
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- December 29, 2014
We are very proud to present our next author in our Author Spotlight series, our own Nameless Digest contributor, Cody Goodfellow.
His story, “Dust Made of Words”, starts:
“’Hey, kid, you like to read books?’
The boss’s brother was waiting for Jim Newcomb when he brought the trash out to the dumpster behind the Aeneid Bookshop, near the bowls of kibble they put out for the feral
neighborhood cats.He was so dirty that tiny green sprigs of grass sprouted from his matted salt-and-pepper hair and behind his ears. The goatish angles of his sweaty, sunburned face had an
absurdly regal cast to them, as if his profile belonged on an ancient bronze coin, and his voice had the distracted bullroarer drone of an aphasic shaman. He clearly didn’t
realize he was in any way abnormal, or that he was wearing one muddy work boot and one New Balance running shoe. He wiped his hands on grimy white painter’s pants and a
torn sweatshirt with an old bumper sticker plastered across the chest. In English, Greek, and Egyptian hieroglyphics, it said NO MORE ALEXANDRIAS!Newcomb had expected him to ask for or offer drugs, but this sublimely obtuse question caught him off guard. “No, I’m only in it for the money . . .” The awkward silence set like
concrete until Newcomb added, “Sure, man, I like to read books.”“That’s cool, that’s cool.” Nodding contentedly, as if they were finally back on the script. “But you know, you’re doing it wrong.”
He says about the story:
I started writing what became “Dust Made of Words” shortly after I started working at Iliad Bookshop in North Hollywood in 2011. It was a difficult year and the story went into a drawer unfinished until shortly before I quit the store, three years later. It’s a love letter to used bookstores, to books and reading, and an example of the kind of fantasy I’m most attracted to, where magic accretes around the seeds of our faith and obsessions. A non-functional demonstration model of the book vaporizer exists, and is eagerly seeking investors.
Cody Goodfellow has written five novels and co-written three more with John Skipp. He received the Wonderland Book Award twice for his short fiction collections, Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars and All-Monster Action. He was a contributing editor at Substance, the world’s first CDROM zine, and co-founder of Perilous Press, a micropublisher of modern cosmic horror.
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