Magical Elk: A Novella

Academy Award winning actor Jim Lasher is secluded in his mountain cabin far from his Los Angeles home obsessed with writing a screenplay about bloody, ritualistic war with nonhuman beings, a screenplay he thinks will revive his flagging career. He desperately needs another iconic role to save him from financial and relationship disaster and to avoid another relapse into drug addiction.

On a night of summer smoke and a bewitching moon, Jim is deeply absorbed in chronicling the nonhuman invasion, his pen smoldering across the paper, when a knock sounds on his cabin door. It’s a California Highway Patrol Officer come to visit. Or is it?

This visitor is a creative piece of Jim’s soul and dislikes the direction of Jim’s screenplay. He lunges at Jim with a knife, and Jim reacts viscerally: blood, guts, emotion, the bedrock of story, the stuff that won Jim the Academy Award for Best Actor. This visitor takes on a real, visceral presence in Jim’s life as Jim’s screenplay takes on a deadly new direction, culminating in a terrifying car trip with an ominous last stop.

Includes an excerpt from The Ribs of Man, an upcoming novel from Jason Durant.