Owen, a man adrift in life, falls asleep on a river raft tube and floats out to sea. There, in the waters below, a great titan, like a man and a whale combined, swims below the surface, waiting for lost souls to devour. Inside, Owen finds a community of survivors who have built a makeshift society carved into the impossible anatomy. Each day in the belly of the beast is dark and painful, and yet they still dream of escape.
If there is any hope to do so, they’ll not only have to band together and find a way out, but also face the mysterious cult who use the Leviathan’s hunger to build the deathless city of New Atlantis.
Feast of the Pale Leviathan is a New Weird dark fantasy novel. It’s a horror of the body politic. It’s a Boschian nautical nightmare, occult mystery, and a belly of a kaiju story all in one, from first-time novelist John Chrostek.
John Chrostek is a writer, editor and designer currently based in Buffalo, NY with his partner Amanda and their pets Madeline and Cvetka. He is the EIC of the genre literary magazine Cold Signal.
He is originally from Bensalem, PA but has lived and worked all over. He attended Bucks County Community College and the Savannah College of Art and Design and previously worked at Powell’s City of Books.
In his work, John is driven towards themes of poverty, madness, memory loss and capitalism’s many ills inspired by his working class background and bizarre life experiences.
He has been featured in magazines like Deep Overstock, Little Engines, Coffin Bell, X-R-A-Y, HAD, Cease Cows, Hex Literary, Maudlin House, Scrawl Place, River Heron Review, Taco Bell Quarterly, and more.
You can find his personal portfolio at johnchrostek.com.
ISBN: 9781949127515
Release Date: 2025 – TBD
Price: $16.00