What is a City Eater?

Back it Here!

Welcome back to the wasteland! It's time to ask some questions.

What eats a city? How does a metropolis just up and disappear one day like it was never there in the first place? And what happens to the people inside when it goes?

Today I'm proud to introduce my new project to you: City Eater! This a story of the end of the world, and what comes after. Horror, action, weirdness, and crazy turns, all await you in this book brought to you thanks to the lovely folks at Cirsova Publishing! It's been a very long time coming, so I wanted to talk about it today.

Here is the description:

A diabolical ritual performed by a coven of witches has ushered in the end of the world! Demonic supernatural forces tear apart the cities and befoul the countryside. Survivors struggle to make sense of this new reality where predatory beasts stalk the streets and cross into nightmares to swallow souls. A brave few have taken up the call to fight the encroaching apocalypse, pushing back against the dark. Can they break the curse before the City Eater devours all of reality?

City Eater is a tale of horror, violence, and survival, but most importantly, redemption. What awaits at the end of the world?

From the pages of Sidearm & Sorcery, Silence and Starsong, and Cirsova Magazine, JD Cowan's new novel is a supernatural thriller sure to raise the hairs on the back of your neck!

The seeds of this story were written long ago in ideas I had but couldn't quite understand how to put to paper. It was only as I grew older and saw modernity crash down around and on top of me that I conceptualize what I wanted to get across. It's only once I became a writer that I could even begin to put it out in a manner that would make sense to me.

When I was in college I frequently had the idea in the back of my head of a monster that ate cities. I could never quite get it locked down. I had visions and dreams of strange cityscapes and destruction everywhere: the end of the world. But what about it was ending? What was doing the destruction, and what was the end goal of it beyond death?

In the interim I wrote a few other stories, including Y Signal, of which one of the stories included in City Eater is a sequel to. That got me used to exploring weirder concepts in a way that felt more natural with what I wanted to get across.

It was only a few years back for Sidearm & Sorcery Volume Two that I received the inspiration to finally write the first story in the City Eater cycle, the titular one. What is the enemy of destruction? Normality. What is normal? A family. Who would be the #1 target of a being that fed on decay? It would obviously be a normal family. That's where the whole idea started from.

But City Eater also runs the gamut, following schizophrenics, loners, wannabe witches, nostalgics, and yearners, on their quest through the end of everything. I focused on what happens at the center of that storm when it hits, and where everything goes from there once it's here.

Suffice to say, this isn't exactly a lighthearted story cycle. Things get dark, very bad events happen, but there is always even a little light shining through that narrow space between eternity and death. The final story here will only make sense from that angle.

There is a reason a lot of these are my most well received stories since I first started writing. They ran in two volumes of Sidearm & Sorcery, Cirsova, and Silence and Starsong, for a reason. Several have been called the best I've ever written, so if you're new to what I do, this is probably the best place to start from! Just be warned that I have a tendency to stomp a foot on the gas and not let up until the end. It will get hectic.

The design inspiration for the cover was obviously steeped in old Paperbacks From Hell covers, but also the old movie chillers of the 1960s through the 1980s. That sparse feeling of dread from a John Carpenter or a Dario Argento before it explodes into madness was key to the vibe. That's why you see so much white text on black when I talk about it. The less visuals I give you, the more your imagination goes to work when you open the pages for yourself.

This also continues in the soundtrack EP created by the very talented Jacob Calta, who also did the soundtrack to Star Wanderers. He very effectively caught that specific vibe in the trailer and songs he constructed for the project. He got the exact atmosphere I wanted of creeping dread and horror reading to explode.

In case you missed said trailer, check it out here:

I'm also releasing a series of FREE podcast episodes talking about the stories if you'd like to know more. You can find them here. I'm going to be releasing one a week over the next month to discuss all the stories and their background and inspirations to what lead to their creation. At the same time, I'll be posting on X/Twitter about them as well.

Suffice to say there's a lot behind this project and you'll be seeing a lot about what made them over the next month. I've got a lot to say.

I've had the feeling we've been at the end of the world for a long time, but I've never quite been able to express why that is. One read of City Eater and you might get that exact feeling and where I'm coming from. 

A large chunk of my work deals with ends and new beginnings, where the ends are usually brought about and shaped by the sort of things that bring about "little" endings in a lot of us today: alienation, atomization, abandonment, individualism, cultism, and every other motto and creed we've been sold by Hollywood and the music industry since at least the 1960s.

I always go back to the time where I was listening to "My Brain Hurts" by Screeching Weasel for the first time after buying the CD from the music store. It's one of of those songs I would constantly think on and wonder why I related to it so much. By the time I had first heard it, the album in question was already over a decade old, and yet not only did it speak to me, it left me with a strange sadness that things are this way, and that they're still a lot like it now.

There are two lines in the song that especially still hit hard today, and probably influence a lot of how I write characters that feel like they have nowhere they belong.

"Like characters on my TV

These people look like maggots to me

And I wonder what the hell is wrong with me"

And

"The perfect generation sees

That I'm infected with disease

And everything just crumbles and there's nothing left"

These lines come in a moment of self-awareness at your darkest moments, and you realize you're trapped in a cycle of hatred at the world and you've fallen into a pit of self-annihilation you can never get out of on your own. On top of it, the world does nothing to dissuade you from thinking this way, which leads into the chorus and the fade out of the song. It's an ouroboros of constant little deaths until you become a shell.

As the final chorus says: you can't be alone, but you have to be alone; you can't trust anyone, but you have to trust someone; you can't be an island, but you have nowhere you belong. And that's why "My Brain Hurts" while thinking about this madness.

What is the way out? Who knows, but it requires a lot of self-reflection to escape it. Otherwise, well, you get nothing but bitterness, eternal misery and self-hatred. That is what the scene that song originally came from stews in today, after all.

Here are the full lyrics, just for reference:

How do we deal with these contradictions? We don't. They eat at us and destroy us until there's nothing left. This is why we fight to sit at the "cool kid" table, strive for our fifteen minute of fame, and constantly compare ourselves to how others are doing as if we have to get in front of them. "The perfect generation" will see we're "infected with disease" and then we will lose it all, as well as any sense of belonging.

The dehumanization of the screen leads us to think of people as caricatures of living things, walking stereotypes little more than "maggots" to be devalued and sneered at. It was a problem with television, but it's an even bigger problem in a world of nothing but electronic spaces, constant information assault, and short looping videos projecting constant nothing into our brains. We don't get to have that moment of self-awareness, because there is no quiet, no space, and no breaks. Eventually it will all crumble and there will be nothing left.

This poison atmosphere just pumps on forever, infecting everything, as we "breathe different air" from each other, even when we're sitting right next to each other. We say the same words, but don't speak the same languages; we wear the same clothes but don't share the same fashion; we look at each other but we see little more than "maggots" or nothing at all: just another object to avoid on the way from Point A to Point B so we can hide away until the next day continues the cycle. What is there to believe in when this is the only world we know?

This is the real end of the world that City Eater spawned from. This is the end of the world we're already living right now.

But, again, this isn't all there is. We all know there's more, and so too does City Eater show exactly that. You'll just have to back it for yourself to see what that means!

So check out the campaign and discover the world of City Eater for the first time! Action, weirdness, ending, and new beginnings . . . I can promise that you won't read anything quite like it. And you can only find it on Kickstarter! It's also jut been labeled as a "Project We Love" on the site, which is definitely new for me!

Look out over the water. Tell me what you see? Chances are it won't be there in the morning, but then what even is it? You'll just have to find out for yourself!

Back City Eater today! We're already at 50% funding!