Carlstrom Make Sure You Die Screaming

A whip-smart debut about a genderqueer corporate burnout on a road trip across MAGA America
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-0-85730-943-3
Verlag: Verve Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

When their mother calls with news that their MAGA-pilled, conspiracy-theorist father has gone missing, the newly unemployed queer narrator of Make Sure You Die Screaming does what anyone would do: steals their ex-boyfriend's BMW and races from Chicago to deep-red Arkansas on a mission to kidnap their estranged father and bring him home.

Now, with a bottle of premixed margarita jiggling in the cupholder and the narrator's brand-new garbage goth bestie, Yivi, screaming through night terrors in the passenger seat, our hero hurtles toward a family reunion from hell. Along the way, they experiment with Yivi's mystery pills, elude a relentless stalker and outrun some cops who believe the narrator committed a tragic murder.

An unflinching interrogation of class rage, economic (im)mobility, gender expression, the rot at the heart of capitalism and the political bloodbath dividing so many American families, Make Sure You Die Screaming is the loud, funny, suspenseful road trip novel of our times.

'Roars to life from page one and never lets up. It's a Fear and Loathing for the generation devastated by the generation that brought us Fear and Loathing' Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby

'Carlstrom is a scary amazing writer. They took me on a joyride that had me holding on for dear life, utterly immersed in their exquisite prose and skewering humor. This iconic road trip novel is a balm for a bleak, uncertain world' Vanessa Walters, author of The Lagos Wife

'I loved every loud, messy page. Carlstrom is the first writer to make me feel better about my own life choices' Sam Irby, author of Wow, No Thank You

'Outrageous and funny and heartbreaking and redemptive, whether you're grieving a person or a country, Make Sure You Die Screaming is the novel for you' Holly Wilson, author of Kittentits

'Carlstrom has written a book that feels incredibly of the moment, twining together anger and glee, hope and despair, alienation and community' LA Times

'Carlstrom's unique voice is a breath of fresh air with just the right mix of humor and resigned cynicism with a dash of hope' Associated Press

'Carlstrom's anarchic literary thriller may have one of the best titles of any book published this year... Carlstrom writes their characters with nuance and empathy' Autostraddle

This novel contains depictions of drug and alcohol abuse, violence and domestic abuse.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Carlstrom, Zee

Leseproben

1

We rage out of Chicago around four in the morning, hurtling south toward Arkansas because my mom needs help kidnapping my father. Actually, that’s a lie. A truer reason: I’ve been looking for an excuse to leave the city, planning my escape, biding my time, and Arkansas seems like a reasonably good place to hide. The kidnapping-my-father thing is a new development, a situation I do not entirely understand. Normally, I ignore Mom’s calls, but I was pretty fucked up last night, and my phone kept buzzing, and it was after midnight, so I thought… well, I don’t actually remember what I thought. Remembering has sucked since I got this fun new dent bashed into my skull.

Anyway, we are drinking. We are driving. We are making good time. Once we clear the suburbs, the Stevenson Expressway turns into I-55, and the grasslands roll into an endless brown blur. I’ve heard Indiana called America’s Hallway, but Illinois is Chicago’s Doormat – an unwelcoming strip of dirt, good only for wiping the shit off your shoes on your way to the Magnificent Mile. This is the Land of Lincoln, the Prairie State, and while they already burn these prairies every few years, I wish they’d do a better job. Scorch the earth and be done with it. Salt the fields, stanch the rivers, roll Illinois up like a sleeping bag, and send the white folks back to wherever we’re supposed to be.

This is the place I am from, but I’m from it like the Asian carp is from Lake Michigan. Invasive and destructive. I am a virus with great teeth, upturned nostrils, overpriced shoes, an ironic fashion mullet, and mild oral herpes. I guess you could call me the World’s First Honest White Man, but I don’t identify as a man anymore, so you’d probably call me other things first: pale, mesomorphic, alcoholic, workaholic, successful, violent, queer, pessimistic, autophobic, unheroic, semi-effeminate, sexually deviant, socially confused, normally repressed, compulsive, repulsive, and photosensitive. That’s an incomplete list, obviously, and probably a bit overdramatic, but I am in the mood for drama. I am floating near the cold center of a vaguely erotic black hole, sucking space and time, trying to find something to hold on to that I won’t destroy.

In other words, I am simultaneously experiencing a breakdown as well as a breakup. You might think these two things would cancel each other out, but they do not. If that sounds shitty, it is. If it sounds sad, it’s not. If anything, it’s hilarious. I am learning to laugh and smile and scream in the face of devastation. Plus, the drama gives me an excuse to self-medicate. That’s part of why we stole this car from my ex-boyfriend.

We race down the highway with a cop car in the rearview. An unsuspecting highway patrolman, maybe, but I can’t seem to shake him. I can’t even try to shake him. He’s been barreling behind us for the better part of fifty miles, and I can’t risk doing anything suspicious or overtly elusive. I slow down, and he slows too. I change lanes to dodge dawdling trucks, and so does he. A waking fucking nightmare, but also kind of amusing. I keep telling myself this state trooper would pull us over if he knew about my crimes, and he hasn’t, so he doesn’t. That is the logical conclusion, but my father taught me never to trust things like logic or perception or the cold solidity of fact.

My father is a fool, but he is also very persuasive. He has a kind of lunatic charisma, like Alex Jones with less emphysema. I don’t know how or why he has wandered away from my mom again, but I do know the word wandered makes it sound like he’s got Alzheimer’s or some other diagnosable excuse. And he doesn’t. Not really. There is something wrong with him, there must be, but he’s been tested many times for many things: bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, OCD, PTSD, whatever the doctors can think of. I’m not sure how he manages to beat these tests, but he comes out spotless every time. And here we are.

When Mom called me from Arkansas, I was lounging on the damp red futon I’d been Airbnbing for thirty-three dollars a night. The futon was located in the basement of a blue-haired elderly woman with sparkly tooth gems, seven large dalmatians, and the questionable business model of running a low-rent motel for the downwardly mobile. My living space was cordoned off from the rest of the basement with floor-length white curtains, like an army hospital. I’d been crashing there for two weeks – since leaving my ex – because I enjoy pretending that I’m still as poor as I was growing up. Wait, sorry, that’s not totally true. The real deal is I recently burned my entire life to the ground when I took my vow of radical honesty, and now I need cheap places to hide in case I can never find work again.

Either way, I didn’t hate the Airbnb. It fit my limited needs, and I met a self-proclaimed garbage goth who was crashing on the other side of my curtain. Her name is Yivi. She screams in her sleep. I’d bring her McChickens and Hot Cheetos whenever I stumbled back to my futon in the middle of the night, and we’d stay up talking about Freddy Krueger and techno-feudalism. Yivi’s twenty-two, addicted to pills, and on the run from a very bad guy she calls Big Gravy. She’s also great at drinking and my new best friend, which is why she’s mumbling in her sleep right now in the passenger seat of this stolen car.

Mom is calling me again, but I’m way too sober for a con-versation. Buzz-buzz-buzz. Answer-quickly-asshole. I can’t safely drink with this cop on our tail, and thirst makes everything worse: my mood, my irritable ass, these headaches I can’t shake. I wish I were back in that cozy Airbnb basement, sipping Birthday Cakes in the damp dark, staring blankly at my curtains while Yivi hummed along to the Love Island theme song.

Instead, I’m out here, braving the real world while my iPhone rattles on the dashboard of my ex-boyfriend Clinton’s BMW M2. This fancy-boy car was a gift from Clinton’s CEO father on his thirtieth birthday. Blue paint job, silver racing stripes, sticky leather seats, fuzzy red steering wheel cover. It’s an adorable shitbox, terrible for long drives and long legs, but Yivi’s even taller than I am, and she doesn’t seem to mind.

Clinton, on the other hand, was my malevolent short king. Five-foot-five with thighs like Thor’s thunder. A sour German-Irish dude from Chicago’s North Side. We met in college. He liked the Blackhawks, and I liked his Mastercard, his Gold Coast apartment, and his enthusiastic alcoholism. We got along because Clinton’s family doesn’t know he’s queer, and neither does mine. Also, Clinton’s a big-time liar like I used to be. The difference is he grew up too wealthy to ever feel bad about the lying. He used to tell me I should lie more, lie to get everything I wanted, and he was right. Lying got me promoted, earned me my clients’ respect, landed me and Jenny a corner office. But it also mutated into a real nasty habit.

I won’t go so far as to say I’ve spent the past ten years living a lie – lest I seem a humongous cliché – but I will say I’ve been living a few thousand of them. Big ones, small ones, fat ones, tall ones. A never-ending semi-Seussian litany of tactical falsehoods. But that’s all over now, and I might even be glad. Approaching happy. Another humongous cliché is the truth will set you free, but that one, I’ve recently learned, is horseshit. What the truth will actually do is tank your career, eradicate your remaining interpersonal relationships, bash your skull in with a baseball bat, and then set you free.

When my phone rings for the tenth time in three minutes, I snatch it off the dashboard and throw it hard into the backseat. I am not an athlete, and my aim definitely sucks, so the phone hits the rear windshield and careens around before settling somewhere out of sight.

Yivi snorts awake. ‘The fuck was that sound?’ she asks, pulling her cheek off the window she’s been dozing against.

I casually adjust my grip on the steering wheel as if I am a perfectly chill person who never throws Apple products. ‘Good morning,’ I say.

‘Did something hit the car, babe?’

‘Yes,’ I say, which is technically an honest statement. ‘Did you have a nice nap?’

‘Not really,’ she says. ‘Mostly nightmares. Are we there yet?’

‘Any cowboy guys?’ I ask, because, well, I’m just remembering this, but Yivi’s last nightmare is the reason we left Chicago in such a hurry this morning. We spent most of the past few days rewatching old movies – Thelma & Louise, Lost in Translation, Pulp Fiction, Drugstore Cowboy, The Parent Trap, Stand by Me, Alien, Finding Nemo, Deliverance, and Apocalypse Now in that order – and drinking as much as we could without throwing up. Yivi eventually did throw up, and it was right around then that she got very serious, speaking with a haunted affect as she described her nightmare by the light of my glowing laptop screen. I’m used to Yivi talking about her dreams because she’s a weirdo like that, but this dream was different. It was about me and her, the two of us hiding in that basement, and a cowboy with a tan truck parked in front of the Airbnb. She said the cowboy with the tan truck was someone she recognized, someone who worked for Big Gravy, and when I looked out the grimy half-moon...