TRUE BELIEVERS: Chapter 2 — Way Less Powerful Than A Locomotive

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!

Every ride on Metro North from Randolph to Penn makes Chad Mailer miss the city even more. Granted, his status hasn’t changed much in almost four decades, but there were those few brief years when he was able to say he lived “in the city,” instead of telling everybody that he lived “right outside New York.” Outsiders and tourists still tended to be impressed, but for anyone who lived within the Five Boroughs, they knew immediately and exactly what he meant: New Jersey.

New. Fucking. Jersey.

Somehow, this minor semantic distinction means a world of difference to people in the industry. “Oh yeah, you’re in New York too, yeah? What part? Jersey. Cool. Well. Yeah. I gotta…there’s a thing…” As if living in New Jersey has any impact on the…