Double Black Diamond

stories by
Mads Gobbo
&
Miles Klee
002 222 pp 5" x 7.5" x 0.513" August 14, 2025 978-1-965726-01-3 $18
It’s our turn in the wilderness.
The future is fucked and it is already here. Feral children stage raids on villas in the foothills. Poison Ivy prowls the suburbs for boys to inject. An ether-huffing doctor is dispatched south to help contain a strange epidemic. With murder legalized, teens compete to lose their victim cards. A mysterious stench terrorizes the residents of North Hadely, Indiana. Things might seem hopeless, but as society breaks down, new forms emerge, glowing green with mutant ingenuity. Double Black Diamond incubates nineteen such freaks, creatures evolved to scavenge the wastelands. From prehistoric jungles to radioactive waters, from the haunted ruins of the old country to the glittering horrors of the new, these stories run wild, feasting on the spoils.

File Under

artificial scarcity, breaking and entering, bullies, bullshit jobs, casual violence, collaboration, domestic horror, evolution & sterility, feral children, found families, inside jokes, mating rituals, the seriocomic, suffering idiots, talking animals, throwing curveballs, unholy visions, ugly Americans, workplace drama

See Also

J.G. Ballard - War Fever
Donald Barthelme - Forty & Sixty Stories
The Duke of Burgundy (2014)
Kathryn Davis - Duplex
Rachel Ingalls - Mrs. Caliban
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Lathe of Heaven
Garielle Lutz - Divorcer
Steven Millhauser - Dangerous Laughter
Nowhere (1997)
George Saunders - CivilWarLand in Bad Decline
The Brothers Strugatsky - The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn
Kurt Vonnegut - Welcome to the Monkey House
A Zed & Two Noughts (1985)

Excerpts

“The Ambassadors” - Flaming Hydra
“Castle Doctrine” - Protean
“How Much of a Bastard You Must Become” - Wigleaf
“It Is Valiant to Be Simple” - Territory
“What It Actually Does” - Joyland

Discourse

2025-08-29 Lincoln Michel interviews Mads & Miles about ordering, the small press, and fantasy colliding with the mundane for Counter Craft
2025-08-28 Luke O’Neill interviews Mads & Miles about tag teams, world-building, and trap doors for Welcome to Hell World

Events

2025-09-18 Under the Influence with Colin Winnette, Lucy Corin, and others at Et al. Gallery, San Francisco (poster)
2025-08-03 Carnival of Depravity with Amelia Gray, Molly Lambert, and others at Stories Books & Cafe, LA (poster, photos)

Author

Mads Gobbo is a writer and illustrator from Los Angeles. Mads runs Hand Follows Eye Studios, a mobile arts education business with a queer and feminist focus.
Miles Klee is a writer from Los Angeles. He is the author of True/False (2015) and Ivyland (2012), both with OR Books. His culture writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, MEL Magazine, Slate, Vanity Fair, Lapham's Quarterly, and elsewhere.