Member-only story
True Believers is a full-length novel by Thom Dunn, based on his play of the same name. It’s a satirical tale of star-crossed lovers, aspiring comic book creators, crazed fanboys, cybernetically enhanced humans, women in refrigerators, real-life superheroes, and girls who dress like Slave Leia as their lives intertwine over a whirlwind weekend at a comic book convention in the early 2010s.
The book will be serialized on Medium throughout the month of April 2020. Here is the first chapter. Check back every day for more chapters!
Chloe Long looks up the at the clock between baggage terminals 3 and 4 at JFK International Airport for the forty-second time in nineteen minutes. To be fair, some of those counts are double-takes, as she has to keep reminding herself how to read the analog numbers and remember which hand is which hand without getting distracted by the constant fluctuations of the second-hand.
By now the effects of the room’s poorly-contrived comfort colors have worn off, and all that Chloe sees is the cold, hard linoleum and cold, hard conveyor belts that carry no luggage. She is mesmerized by their metal curves in between her clockward glances, but it’s not enough to free her mind from the cold, hard truth:
