I Shop At Laney’s, a novella by Jeff Johnson

“I haven’t had this much fun reading anything since I read True Grit years back. I Shop At Laney’s is 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.” –World Fantasy Award Winner James P. Blaylock

Laney Bozeman works at a lonely roadside junk shop in a remote corner of New Mexico. He reads old paperbacks and daydreams on his two-week shifts, and by night he stargazes and dabbles in the kitchen of the tiny attendant’s bungalow. He sleeps in his truck during his time off and explores, though lately he’s been carrying on with the beautiful clerk Maria from Big Donut in Roswell, so a different life might be on the horizon. The old carnie Ralston Orley is supposed to be gone when he arrives for their bimonthly sunset shift change, but this time he’s still there, half naked and blackout drunk, and he’s dragged a gigantic belt buckle into the bungalow’s living room.

“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, Hugo Award-winning author of The Oppenheimer Alternative

How did this novella come about? Years ago, my pal Chico (what up homie) and I rented a car and drove from Portland, Oregon to Roswell, New Mexico. We wanted to see the UFO museum and maybe take a poke around the crash site. There was whiskey involved in this decision. We went the next day, and while we didn’t actually do any investigating, which seemed like a crazy idea when we sobered up, we did see the museum, eat some great food, and explore New Mexico, a state I’d barely escaped once years before as a fugitive runaway teen. It was January, so we had a few storms to outrun because we forgot to rent chains, and while we were inadvisably speeding along under the leading edge of a biblical bummer of black cloud, way out there west of Ruidoso… Shit. That’s where I got the idea for I Shop At Laney’s. I was thinking right then about the essence of the differences between the very small and the very large, how it might be refined, from the wondrous to the bitterly entropic, into a single ghostly thread that ran through everything, always. The outline migrated from computer to computer. I lost it and found it again a few times. A short story version I never dialed in came and went, and short stories don’t pay for shit so who really cares… And then one night about a year ago, right as I was falling asleep, the ghost thread solution came to me. And now here we are. I Shop At Laney’s, A Novella by Jeff Johnson, available 12-5-2023, Radio Lake Press. And I kept the film rights! This is really good, because I wrote the screenplay, too, and my agent Stu is wicked gnarly.

The upshot? If that trip seems like a bad idea, go ahead a take it.

“…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.” –Norman Spinrad, Prix Apollo winner and multiple Hugo and Nebula Award nominee

Coming 12-5-2024