iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

John Chrostek @johnchrostek.com · 01/10/2026

Tomorrow night at @eveninghouse.bsky.social, 7PM in Buffalo, NY, I’m really excited to be hosting @adamvoith.bsky.social of @littleengines.bsky.social AND @ljabouttown.bsky.social. All three of us will be reading as part of Adam’s book tour. gonna be a really fun night of literature. Come out!

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John Chrostek @johnchrostek.com · 11/09/2026

I'm at Endorphin Port level today

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John Chrostek @johnchrostek.com · 08/09/2026

This is my favorite detail of this terrible fucking situation

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John Chrostek @johnchrostek.com · 26/08/2026

Hey, it’s the one year anniversary of my first novel, FEAST OF THE PALE LEVIATHAN, so here’s a picture of me crouching in the bushes next to some construction equipment in my neighbor’s lawn Thanks for giving this book a nice life, friends, and being pals

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John Chrostek @johnchrostek.com · 21/08/2026

Evening at the Evening House (slow August Friday edition)

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John Chrostek @johnchrostek.com · 15/08/2026

If you’re in the Buffalo area get your ass to WNY Book Arts center before 4 and get you some zines feat: @philmcandrew.bsky.social and other local rock stars

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John Chrostek @johnchrostek.com · 14/08/2026

putting out books is ritually humiliating (you have to keep talking about them, it never feels enough, failure feels baked in) but every now and then you get a review that makes this whole "subjecting the art you make for your own needs & meaning to the judgement of the world" thing feel worth it

4 star review of FEAST OF THE PALE LEVIATHAN

Enormous is the word I would use for this quite engrossing and epic novel. Yes, it has a lot of science fiction and fantasy elements, which has never really been that attractive to me, however, I’ve always been attracted to uniquely creative writers of fiction. And this book fits the bill. The story never stopped expanding, resplendent in its magnitude, holding so many aspects that were unlike anything I had read before. So imaginative and uncommon, leading me into incredibly unfamiliar surroundings. An excellent sensation, by the way. I do have to say the ending was a bit of a stumble for me, leaving me with an unresolved and incomplete feeling. That said, it’s singular and exceptional enough for me to definitely recommend.

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John Chrostek @johnchrostek.com · 11/08/2026

Read two great lady cannibal novels in two days. Both short, both unsettling, both fantastic. Carnalis by @tiffmorris.bsky.social Hunger by Choi Jin-Young for @europaeditions.bsky.social Carnalis is a queer indigenous erotic thriller, Hunger a Korean tale of cannibalism as act of love & grief

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John Chrostek @johnchrostek.com · 08/08/2026

Someone cut up the string lights outside the store and messed with the wooden pillars last night. at home the rain is making the ceiling leak/water damage worse & no word from the landlord One thing after another after another

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John Chrostek @johnchrostek.com · 05/08/2026

"Different" is the right way to put it! Happy to reveal that at Amazon, we're innovating on recasting w/this one, because Bond is dead & cannot be recast until he is retrieved from hell. To make that a reality, we've got Chalamet's The Candler, a sleepy psychopomp, to find Bond & BRING HIM HOME.

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John Chrostek @johnchrostek.com · 30/07/2026

okay but the body, like the zone, is also a very complex maze of traps, so maybe they should kiss and zone up

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John Chrostek @johnchrostek.com · 30/07/2026

don't mind me,, I'm, getting into "Zones",

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John Chrostek @johnchrostek.com · 29/07/2026

I trust @coffeehousepress.bsky.social for excellence but pleased to report this novel by @monicaojeda.bsky.social has BARS. Psychedelic Ecuadorian music festival horror, suffuse with poetry, insight & phantasmagoria “To have a voice is to be alive & kicking, and to be alive is to rejoice & suffer”

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John Chrostek @johnchrostek.com · 28/07/2026

It’s been a while since I’ve done any digital drawing, but last night I put on the 50’s Italian version of the Odyssey on Tubi after Amanda fell asleep (I wasn’t thrilled with it) and loaded up Procreate on the tablet and did this sketch of Madeline, and it felt good to do

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John Chrostek @johnchrostek.com · 27/07/2026

This book has done a lot for me the last few days. @twolinespress.com and @jeremytiang.bsky.social did wonders bringing Zechen’s fantastic novel to English. The premise: a Chinese grad student snaps under pressure & lies to his parents that he killed a man so he can leave his small town for once

Xu Zechen
translated by
Jeremy Tiang

NIGHT
TRAIN

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John Chrostek @johnchrostek.com · 13/07/2026

Madeline passed away today. A big piece of my heart went with her

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John Chrostek @johnchrostek.com · 12/07/2026

should have just had a Jarmusch style Coffee and Cigarettes scene in the middle of the movie with these two

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John Chrostek @johnchrostek.com · 08/07/2026

We had a rough night last night. Cvetka wasn't keeping any food down over two days and we were getting panicked flashbacks to Zadie's deterioration, so we took her to emergency vet. They did an examination but wanted more money than we have available credit for XRAY and blood tests

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John Chrostek @johnchrostek.com · 08/07/2026

Abundance of caution trip to the pet ER. We’re nervous that Cvetka’s not keeping any food down for two days and still shook up from Zadie

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John Chrostek @johnchrostek.com · 02/07/2026

you're right. I'm well overdue

cool white dude with katana, black leather jacket and white sneakers on a well maintained lawn somewhere in the continental united states, perhaps in early spring when the leaves have yet to fully return to the trees, though there are evergreens among bare trees in the distance, alongside a few rocks. also the guy is wearing sunglasses, and his black t-shirt is sleeveless, which would be very uncomfortable during summer months under a leather jacket, but it's really cool here. also he is wearing gloves, black leather gloves, which does sort of look weird with the sleeveless shirt

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John Chrostek @johnchrostek.com · 28/06/2026

Did some volunteer work in the plaza near the shop earlier and now trying to land the back half of this longer horror story I’m working on

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John Chrostek @johnchrostek.com · 26/06/2026

this came out awful but I had to try

a horribly photoshopped jim carrey's grinch overlaid atop the famous painting Prometheus Bound by peter paul rubens

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John Chrostek @johnchrostek.com · 18/06/2026

Highly recommend checking out these awesome indie authors doing the thing. I was honored to work with them & look forward to designing more covers in time to help reveal aspects of the beauty and intrigue within these pages 🫡

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John Chrostek @johnchrostek.com · 18/06/2026

Another Malarkey author great to work with was @traaaant for his recent release The Walls Are Closing In On Us, a southern odyssey inspired by a distant relative. He came in with lots of visual notes. The symbols of the snake and the river quickly entwined together for this cover.

THE WALLS ARE CLOSING IN ON UŞ
BY JOSHUA TRENT BROWN
A SOUTHERN ODYSSEY BLEED-OUT
BY THE RIVERBANK SAGA THE WALLS ARE CLOSING IN ONUS
"...a book that examines not only the soul of a man but—perhaps—the soul of a nation."
- Austin Ross, author of Gloria Patri
JOSHUA
TRENT BROWN
OUT NOW!

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John Chrostek @johnchrostek.com · 18/06/2026

Next up is author, editor and librarian @menshevixen’s DEVIL’S CUP, a queer surfer satanic panic horror, using the bright yet shadowy beaches of Florida as a backdrop. Dee was looking for something “goth Lisa Frank,” an all-timer note. This book releases TOMORROW!! Go ask Dee for details 😌

DEVIL'S CUP BY DEE HOLLOWAY
A SAPPHIC SURFER SATANIC PANIC FLORIDAPUNK MERMAID HORROR
DEVIL'S ©CUP
DEE HOLLOWAY
OUT TOMORROW!!

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John Chrostek @johnchrostek.com · 18/06/2026

First up, @rogerjva.bsky.social is a fellow @malarkeybooks.bsky.social author & just had his cover revealed yesterday! He came to me with a specific image of the inaccessible island rail, pivotal to the book, the idea of recursive isolation, the bird within the bird within us all.

THE INACCESSIBLE RAIL
BY ROGER VAILLANCOURT
"A RICHLY OBSERVED MEDITATION ON THE MUNDANITIES AND ABSURDITIES
OF MODERN LIFE"
-LUKE O'NEIL, AUTHOR OF WE HAD IT COMING AND WELCOME TO HELL WORLD
INACCESS BLE
RAIL
ROGER
VAILLANCOURT
COMING THIS OCTOBER!

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John Chrostek @johnchrostek.com · 18/06/2026

Just wanted to take a minute to shout out some of the authors I’ve been working with recently in my freelance book cover illustration life! If you can’t tell, I really love books and want to participate in the art of books at every step of the process.

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John Chrostek @johnchrostek.com · 13/06/2026

all time favorite Krillin drawing

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John Chrostek @johnchrostek.com · 05/06/2026

Lifting my spirit this morning is this great review of Feast of the Pale Leviathan

4.5
I hadnt expected this book to be so modern day, so that was delightful.
Pages 71-107 hit me like a truck, and how much the book picks up in its final third, incredibly cathartic

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John Chrostek @johnchrostek.com · 03/06/2026

“Gets eaten by the Leviathan, meets other people, gets roped into gastrointestinal civil war, gets devoured, astral war, devoured, demon war, and it goes on and on and back and forth like this for 150 pages or so until the novel just sort of… ends”

Dennis Reynolds pitching a movie from always sunny

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John Chrostek @johnchrostek.com · 03/06/2026

This is a fun game. Here’s my favorite negative snippet for Feast of the Pale Leviathan

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John Chrostek @johnchrostek.com · 29/05/2026

Celebrating Thiel’s departure by reminding everyone he uses Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis as the framework for technocratic fascism. If you wanna read a story about that “utopia” burning, have I got a book for you

The pinnacle of this ideological edifice appears in Peter Thiel's latest theological essay, co-written with Sam Wolfe, where the challenge to democracy takes an explicitly apocalyptic form.
Translated in these pages, we have commented on it at length. Thiel reinterprets scientific modernity, inaugurated by Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, not as a process of emancipation, but as a sacrilegious project aimed at "abolishing God" and even chance itself. The "House of Solomon" imagined by Bacon-a secret institution dedicated to omniscient knowledge capable of "achieving all things possible"-becomes, in his writing, the archetype of Palantir. Although he acknowledges the dark side of this technological ambition, drawing a parallel between the figure of Bacon's sovereign and the biblical Antichrist falsely promising "peace and security," Thiel seems to consider this fate inevitable. His vision crystallizes in the dilemma posed by Alan Moore in Watchmen. © humanity would be faced with a terrible binary alternative - "Ozymandias or nuclear war".
In other words: either a global technocratic regime imposing salvation through lies, or total annihilation. In this apocalyptic exegesis, Thiel also draws, unexpectedly, on the imagery of the manga One Piece. The
"World Government" that appears there, promising absolute order at the price of freedom, becomes for him the perfect representation of a secularized katechon: a power that holds back chaos.

FEAST OF THE PALE LEVIATHAN
A man falls asleep on a river raft tube and drifts out to sea, where he is found and devoured by a titan of unbelievable size. But rather than death, what Owen finds inside is a community of fellow survivors carving out a life amidst the flotsam and flesh of the impossible Leviathan.
There seems to be no hope of escape until another devoured soul arrives, kickstarting a chain of events that reveals to the survivors that their damnable fates are tied to a mysterious cult that lives in deathless splendor in the ivory halls of New Atlantis.
For readers who enjoy cosmic horror, nautical adventure, and all who feel trapped in the belly of the beast, Feast of the Pale Leviathan may be your next beloved literary journey.
"Feast of the Pale Leviathan invokes Hobbes for this hellish modern age.
A ferocious and surreal novel, as beautiful as it is dread inducing, it speaks to that atavistic horror only found in the very depths of the ocean.
Full of strange magic, deception and sinister cults, this book sucks you out of the tempest and straight into its dark, labyrinthine guts." -R.L. Summerling
"Feast of the Pale Leviathan begins as Jonah and the Whale by way of the weird and avalades into comething even greater- cosmic, biblical in scale and nature.
Evening House Books
Feast of the Pale Leviathan (Signed Copies
as human as it does hallucinatory."
-Daniel Miller
DEEP
O VER STOCK
Chrostek, John Weird Fiction
816 00 May 1, 2026

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John Chrostek @johnchrostek.com · 27/05/2026

Agreed!! Semi-relatedly: this passage (especially in context) rocked my shit this afternoon

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John Chrostek @johnchrostek.com · 20/05/2026

35 years old today! First full year of the Evening House life, first anniversary of my story collection, Boxcutters, first serious go at putting my art out into the world (the book & I share a birthday thanks to Malarkey, so I get to plug it every year like clockwork and no one can judge me)

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John Chrostek @johnchrostek.com · 14/05/2026

At the vet getting a leg bump checked out Fingers crossed it’s all okay

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