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!
Billy carefully places the crown of rusted bronze gears upon his head. The hard-edged material only hurts a little, and he wonders if this is how Christ himself felt when he wore the Crown of Thorns. Perhaps the similarities aren’t as disparate as he’d once thought.
With his costume in place, Billy attends to his laptop and tries to find the best angle for the webcam to capture his visage. He also wants to move it away from the bathroom so that the tiny onboard laptop mic doesn’t pick up the hiss of Calvin showering in the background. The backlight from the morning sun casts him in a shadow on the camera, and he briefly considers whether such an ominous appearance would be fitting for his broadcast. Then he realizes that the immaculate details of his Saturday cosplay would be lost to the viewer…
