I keep coming back to an old engraving. A man kneels at the edge of the world, one hand pressed to the ground, the other reaching through the sky. Not up into it. Through it. Past the firmament, past the illusion, into whatever machinery lies behind. It’s beautiful. It’s unsettling. It’s the kind of image that doesn’t just sit in your mind. It starts asking questions.
What kind of world might let you do that, push past the surface of reality and see what’s really there?
More importantly, what kind of person wouldn’t look away?
When I was invited to contribute to Earth(ish): Tales from the Splinterverse, that image snapped into place. The anthology lives in a fractured multiverse of pocket Earths, each one missing its stars. Not dimmed. Not hidden. Missing. Something has gone wrong with the sky.
That was my way in.
I knew I wanted a world with a sham sky, something artificial stretched overhead to hide the truth. But a world like that demands a certain kind of character. Not a poet. Not a dreamer. Dreams are for suckers and street bums. This world needed someone who deals in facts, who digs when things don’t add up.
So I wrote Frank Malone, Private Investigator.
Malone’s the kind of guy who trusts what he can touch. A bad cup of coffee, a late rent notice, the weight of a .38 in his hand. His world is cracked pavement and hard edges. You don’t go looking for cosmic truth in a place like that. You keep your head down and take the next case.
Until the case stops making sense.
A dead man. A missing device. A mysterious workshop. A trail that leads, piece by piece, to something bigger than a crooked politician or a staged suicide. Something that doesn’t fit in any police report. The kind of thing that makes you wonder if the whole world’s been feeding you a line.
My background with hardboiled noir is selective. A little hint of Chandler, a few old movies, some novels that bent the genre sideways. I wasn’t interested in recreating noir in amber. What interested me was friction. Dropping that gritty, tough-as-nails voice into a reality that doesn’t play by those rules.
Because a guy like Malone doesn’t ask “what does it mean?”
He asks, “what’s the angle?”
And when the angle turns out to be the sky itself, that’s where things get interesting.
“Malone’s World” follows that question as far as it can go. Past police reports, past corruption, right up to the edge of something much harder to file away. It’s a detective story at heart. There’s a mystery. There are answers. But not all answers sit easy.
Some of them ask for a decision.
Earth(ish): Tales from the Splinterverse releases May 15, 2026 from Splinter Press. Preorder earth(ish) here as ePub, paperback, hardcover, or a signed deluxe edition from all contributors. It’s a collection full of strange worlds and quiet fractures. Places where reality slips and something else shows through.
“Malone’s World” is mine.