I just got back from Washington, where I spent the first half of the week to do a few things and most notably attend The American Spectator’s 56th Annual Robert L. Bartley gala, which is a pilgrimage I’m in on each year. Tomorrow we’ll have a post here at The Hayride with an interview I did with Rand Paul for The Spectacle Podcast as part of that; Paul was the keynote speaker at the gala, and it also featured a conversation between American Spectator editor Paul Kengor and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. which was absolutely sensational.

I note this by way of explanation for why my contributions to The Hayride have been somewhat meager so far this week. But there’s another reason as well, and that’s the warp-speed progress of my new novel From Hellmarsh With Love.

This is a sequel to King of the Jungle, the highly-acclaimed novel currently making the rounds on Amazon. I’m halfway through what I could call the first draft, though I’m editing it almost in real time because we’re serializing From Hellmarsh With Love at The American Spectator every week at present.

So every couple of chapters there’s an edit, and then it publishes. I’ve managed to jump out ahead of the serialization so that I’m not writing a novel on a deadline (that’s something you very much do not want to do if you want it to be any good).

And it’s really, really good.

So if you read King of the Jungle, and if you haven’t then you should certainly click here and fix that, you know that it’s fundamentally a story about a red-pilled billionaire fed up with a corrupt presidential administration here in the U.S. (an administration which persecutes its political enemies, of course) who decides to build a Shangri-La in the jungles of Guyana and settle there just in time for the Venezuelans to invade the place, and rather than skedaddle he decides to fight a private war against them. But King of the Jungle is narrated by the billionaire’s college roommate and friend, a Tucker Carlson-y podcaster and independent journalist named Mike Holman, who’s there for both the kinetic conflict in the South American jungles and the non-kinetic disaster that is the political unraveling of the Joe Deadhorse administration.

In From Hellmarsh With Love, Holman is on his honeymoon in London just as the UK begins to unravel in its own right, and while his attitude is that this is a vacation and not a working honeymoon, that changes as things get crazier and crazier. Except getting involved as a journalist in a country where the freedom of speech is rapidly waning can be dangerous, and Holman finds that out in spades.

It’s a great ride, and it’s as brutally satirical as King of the Jungle. Almost nothing that happens in either book would be particularly surprising to see in real life, and reading both is something of a surreal experience in that many of the events parodied in the novels seem to happen for real. After all, a good three-quarters of what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania was “predicted” in King of the Jungle, and it was written in December and January!

Hayride readers have a great opportunity to pre-order a signed copy of From Hellmarsh With Love, which you can do here. The official publication date is November 5, but these will be shipped earlier!