A NEW novella by Jeff Johnson! I Shop At Laney’s is available now!
I Shop At Laney’s, a novella, is available now!
Ralston Orley and Laney Bozeman didn’t like each other but it never really mattered. They made sure their two-week shifts at the lonely curio shop never overlapped, always leaving minutes before the other arrived. When Orley discovers an ancient, giant belt buckle buried in the desert, they’re forced to work together for the first time. In a desolate patch of New Mexico, an alcoholic ex-carnie and a breezy ditch digger discover the past and the future are both far bigger than they ever imagined, and even the present is out of proportion.
“I haven’t had this much fun reading anything since I read True Grit years back. I Shop At Laney’s an utterly original book with a wild strange plot made plausible by voice and setting details and exceptional writing. Overnight I find that I’m a Jeff Johnson fan.”
—James P. Blaylock, World Fantasy Award-winning author of The Rainy Season and The Last Coin
“Jeff Johnson is a master of characterization and suspense. I Shop At Laney’s will keep you riveted and enchanted from the first page to the last.”
—Robert J. Sawyer, Nebula and Hugo Award winner, author of The Oppenheimer Alternative
"What goes around comes around. I've recently published a column I called Outside The Tent about how writers who are not "science fiction writers" are now using "speculative fiction" bits in stories that are not science fiction, why not, all fiction is fiction, and Jeff Johnson has gone far further with I SHOP AT LANEY'S. Hard-nosed lowdown drunken partners on the realistic poverty road, what seems like fantasy for most of the story, becomes advanced science fiction at the end, and makes it into unified fiction that works wonderfully. And more, while his partners have ultimate funny dirty mouths and are nasty demi-bums in the beginning, whose talking made me laugh physically all the way through, they are somehow simpatico from the beginning and become something almost morally noble at the end.”
—Norman Spinrad, Prix Apollo winner, author of BUG JACK BARON!!!
The I Shop At Laney’s audiobook is being recorded now! A note from Big J- This has been a huge amount of fun and I can’t wait to do it again! Going into this I got so much advice, some good, some bad, and some crazy. Almost all of my novels have been optioned for film and television, some of them many times over, and over the course of all that I’ve met and made friends with many actors. Actors do audiobooks all the time! Lovely people all, some are just plain eccentric. The Chasteens, my erstwhile punk mutation band, rubs up against all kinds of recording technology, and our bass player not only owns a recording studio in San Fransisco, where award-winning audiobooks are born. All told, way more fun than anyone saw coming.
THE KINJIKU
Global finance has Wall Street. The Black Market has The Kinjiku.
This is Jeff Johnson’s first short film, based on his short story The Cantina Kinjiku. Produced by Sternman Productions, The Harris Company, and Javier Lavato and with a great cast, starring Thomas Hildreth, Tony Dennison, Ron Canada, Mark Bramhall, and Miki Hamano, with Elizabeth Lambert, Skye Coyne, Isaac Gonzales Rossi, Lynette Coll, and Colette O’Donnell. The film was shot in the same Los Angeles dive bar as Bar Fly, starring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway, which is incredibly cool. Edited by Dan Harris of 8Ball Pictures. Check out the trailer, made by Big J’s good pal Diablo Dean at Keef Army Films.
Thanks to everyone who was part of this!
Next up in short films-
Rocketgirl Rambobalboa
Tomato Mechanical
The Survival Parade
