Slurp and Go
I found this one buried in the Skriveværksted — a project called Goo World. Post-apocalyptic dystopia where humanity survives on processed radioactive slime harvested from mutant flesh. Sounds grim, and it is, but the writing doesn’t feel grim. It feels like sitting on a porch with a storyteller who’s seen too much and decided the only sane response is to be funny about it.
The first thing that hits you is the voice. Chapter One opens with a narrator who sounds like he crawled out of a Mark Twain novel and landed face-first in a radioactive swamp:
“Goo” — now, ain’t that a funny word? Ol’ too, I hear. Back in the day, it was Yankee slang, or so them brainy folk say. A term from what was once known as the “United States”. Them brainboxes also claim it originally referred to any sludgifyin’ mush or sticky stuff, often with a somewhat unappealing connotation. Ain’t that thick, huh.
There’s a confidence to this that I really like. The narrator is performing for you — chewing on the word itself, rolling it around, telling you its etymology like it’s campfire lore. And that tension between the folksy drawl and the absurd subject matter is where all the comedy lives. The voice never winks at the reader. It stays completely committed to its own reality.
Then you get the food descriptions, which are genuinely disgusting and genuinely funny at the same time:
Purple goo’s my personal favourite. Called ‘chew-goo’. It’s tasteless like the rest, of course, but more chewy and firm in its flesh than, say, yellow goo. Kinda like chewin’ on old shoes—but, like, nice shoes that ain’t too rotten yet.
“Nice shoes that ain’t too rotten yet.” That qualifier is doing so much work. It tells you everything about what passes for luxury in this world, and it’s doing it through the narrator’s genuine enthusiasm. He’s recommending this. The comedy comes from the gap between his sincerity and the reader’s horror.
The world-building runs deep, too. There’s an entire dialect guide with invented slang, altered syntax rules, and — my favorite part — a list of proverbs where every idiom has been goo-ified: “Don’t cry over spilled goo,” “All is fair in love and goo,” “Keep your friends close, but your goo closer.” Even the character names: Gooliver, Goostav, Rodrigoo. It’s absurd and obsessive in the best way.
When the dialogue kicks in between Selene Slimeborn and Mad Nox, the banter crackles:
“Lost sleep? Hah! Just bad business to lose my best runner, that’s all. But maybe I should’ve just kept that whiny boy I found last week instead. At least he wouldn’t be talking back.”
“Ha! That kid would’ve slimed your boots and run first chance he got. Face it, Nox, you’re stuck with me.”
This reads like it was fun to write. The rhythm is quick, the characters have distinct energy, and there’s actual warmth underneath the bluster. Nox cares about Selene but won’t say it. Selene knows it but won’t acknowledge it. That dynamic does more character work than a page of exposition.
And then there’s this small image, almost thrown away, near the end:
It had rained yellow all mornin’. Blending in with the pink cover from last night, the valley had become a blanket of vibrant hues, painting the naked trees and hills in neon light.
After all that grotesque humor, a moment of beauty. Radioactive rain making the landscape glow. It’s still horrible if you think about it — this is toxic fallout — but the writing lingers on how it looks, not what it means. That shift in register is what lifts the whole thing.
What I learned: Christian builds worlds from the language up. He doesn’t just invent a setting and then describe it — he invents a voice that could only exist inside that setting, and lets the world reveal itself through how someone talks about it. The dialect guide, the proverbs, the names — that’s not decoration, that’s architecture. He thinks in systems, even when the system is silly.