They brushed the snow from their eyelashes, and they looked out across the divide. It was hard to picture a steam engine here, grinding and huffing behind them, but the Major's notebooks were filling with inky measurements. He could see it. And what a view.
-These Imaginary Acts
Nicholas Maistros is an award-winning fiction writer whose work can be found in Best Small Fictions, Boston Review, The Baltimore Review, Witness, The Los Angeles Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, Nimrod, Sycamore Review, and Washington Square Review, among other publications. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Colorado State University, where he taught courses in literature, composition, and drama. He is querying his debut novel.
Nicholas has worked in Broadway merchandising and nonprofit finance. When he isn't binging campy horror movies or scouting a new brewery, he's usually reorganizing his comic book collection, or maybe dragging his kayak to a lake in Michigan. He lives with his partner in Dayton, Ohio.
With the observational acuity of Andrew Holleran and the menacing psychology of Ottessa Moshfegh, Desperate Living Creatures is a work of literary fiction that explores the pervasive classism, racism, and privileged passivity in a troubled American metropolis.
Julian surrounds himself with performers—comedians, cartoonists, and opera singers in their early thirties who gather in Harlem apartments to convince themselves of their potential. Distracted by their dramas and day jobs, they don’t notice the police watchtowers monitoring them from every street corner. They wear masks, if they remember, to protect themselves from the smog that enshrouds the city. Without looking, they pass taxicab strikes and the camps of climate refugees on their daily commutes.
They don’t inquire too deeply about Julian’s degenerative illness, which slowly claims his body. They don’t ask where he’s from or why he’s hiding, and they don’t seem to notice Julian’s brother, who may or may not be dead, and whose ghost won’t stop reminiscing about the glorious crimes they committed together.
It isn’t until Addy Pruitt, the darling of Dustwick, Missouri, takes the room across the alley that Julian finds someone who might hear his confession. She is hiding too, Julian is sure of it, and when her past follows her to this choking city, it is Julian’s consequential action, or inaction, that will determine her fate.
Email contact@nicholasmaistros.com to request the complete manuscript (100,000 words).