About this item
Our narrator is the most talented salesperson at Dare to Know, an enigmatic company that has developed the technology to predict anyone's death down to the second. Divorced, estranged from his sons, and broke, he's driven to violate the cardinal rule of the business by forecasting his own death day. The problem: his prediction says he died twenty-three minutes ago. The only person who can confirm its accuracy is Julia, the woman he loved and lost during his rise up the ranks of Dare to Know. As he travels across the country to see her, he's forced to confront his past, the choices he's made, and the terrifying truth about the company he works for. Wildly ambitious and highly immersive, this mind-bending thriller explores the destructive power of knowledge and collapses the boundaries between reality, myth, and conspiracy as it races toward its shocking conclusion.
About the Author
I remember writing my first story when I was seven. It was called "The Strange Ship," and it was about two ghosts who visit a spaceship full of aliens and blow it up. After I illustrated it, drew a cover, and stapled the pages together, I was astonished. Producing a book was so easy! I felt as though I'd gotten away with something.
Encouraged, I tried something bigger: an epic that started with the creation of the world, progressed to a story about a talking Christmas tree and a dinosaur detective who fight against a grinning pile of hair and his army of squabbling freaks, and ended with the apocalypse. I kept rambling off into digressions and subplots, so I never finished, but that's why I enjoyed writing it so much. I discovered early on the pleasures of getting distracted.
The ability to get distracted is an easily misunderstood talent. Irresponsibility might be a secret virtue. Throughout grade school I left many stories unfinished; in high school I half-programmed a lot of computer games; in college I co-wrote a musical, but even though we got a cast together and rehearsed it, it was never properly performed. Yet I learned a lot by being undisciplined. Someone once wrote, "If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly." Yes - and I'd add that if something is worth doing, it is also worth doing halfway and then quitting. It's also worth brooding over, and making lots of plans, and then going off and doing something else. Having many little interests, amateur enthusiasms, and failed ambitions creates a rich stew out of which you can boil fresh ideas.
I'd always wanted to be a writer, but for a while I abandoned writing. In college I decided I'd rather be a physicist. After getting my degree in physics, though, I realized I didn't want to be a scientist after all. I had friends who were in bands, so I learned how to play the guitar, but as soon as I was halfway proficient I stopped. I taught science at a junior high school, but then I stopped that too. I moved to Japan and came back after a year; then I moved back to Japan; then two years later I came back again. I took classes in improvisational comedy, but when it came time for real shows, I often dropped out.
We hear advice about how perseverance pays off. That's true, but I think the opposite is more interesting and equally true. My favorite experiences and ideas have come when I've wandered away from what I should've been doing. Maybe it's better to make a principle of fickleness, to deploy a strategic laziness, to be staunchly flighty.
By letting myself get distracted by interests other than writing, I gave myself something to write about. The specialties of the knights in "The Order of Odd-Fish" are almost all subjects I've been curious about at some point or another. The Odd-Fish lodge itself has its roots in the grubby convent I lived in when I
