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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 feels like an idiot for not seeing it sooner. She had accepted that his thinning hair was just a premature quirk. She even went along with it when he said he was divorced, something that she’d always thought was reserved for older, unhappy people — why get married so young in the first place if you’re just going to break it off a few years later?
But now it all makes sense.
“You said you were 36.”
Ted swallows, almost as if he’s forcing down the fury that Chloe can plainly see simmering beneath the surface. “So I shaved off a few years. I was nervous, I wasn’t lying, I was — “
“A few years?” Chad laughs, a mocking, hearty guffaw. “Ted, she’s 20 years old. She can’t even get into this bar legally, I…