Books

A book cover featuring a pickle, a stack of cash, and a black bolero hat, with green plants spreading from wispy white text that reads: "All the Idle Weeds That Grow"Disabled best friends Zed and Gretchen are barely staying afloat through an adolescent riptide of relationships, ableism, and pickles when their new neighbor and instant crush is mysteriously replaced by an inexact duplicate.

Along with a tough as nails non-binary friend from school, they soon find themselves drawn into a thrilling conspiracy of sex, politics, and the Americans with Disabilities Act. Outwitting villains, parents, and curfews, Zed and Gretchen remind the world that disability does not mean inability as they learn about life and love–and how to use others' prejudices against them. Now they just need to avoid getting killed.

By turns hilarious, poignant, and blisteringly honest, All the Idle Weeds That Grow is a coming-of-age novel that embraces the shared humanity of our wide diversities, our conflicts, our beauty, and our mess. The human race may be a vibrant palette that bends toward justice, but it could never achieve such things without the strength of its outliers.

Without those pioneering weeds, there could be no garden.

A ship labeled Escape Pod half-embedded in rocky brown dirt below a sunset sky. A third of the ship is hinged open, revealing turquoise capsules scattered across the ground filled with things like a person in a wheelchair with VR goggles. The title of the book is "Handicapsules: Short Stories of Speculative Crip Lit.""Mining the deepest ores of non-belonging with vibrant, often hilarious prose, disabled author Brian Koukol's thirteen harrowing works of speculative fiction, collected here for the first time, subvert disability tropes to delightful and unnerving effect.

Will you flinch at the choices of a man cynically peddling virtual reality inspiration porn extracted from his own miserable life? Can your dignity survive its plunge into a jar, in desperate need of a fluid-change, which hosts a disembodied head looking for his disappeared wife? Will you dare empathize with a myriapod refugee, otherworldly and bristle-legged, as it wrestles with its innate longing to fatally absorb the soul of each human it touches? What of the deformity-leasing friends actively circumventing facial-recognition-based toilet paper rationing? And how might you manage PTSD symptoms emerging off-planet along with a fast-killing vegetation borne from the corpses of your freshly vanquished foes?

Wry, irreverent, and uncommonly wise, meet a new disability fiction. Here Tiny Tim and his ilk are replaced by protagonists far from innocent, passive, or sweet...but defiantly human, instead.

Short Works

"Autumn in the Dying Light" – Speculative North

"Cardiophobia" – The Society of Misfit Stories Presents…

"Circling the Brain" – Phantaxis Magazine

"Compost Traumatic Stress" – Giganotosaurus (free)

"Ephemera" – Trembling with Fear (free)

"Executive Pressure" – The Worlds of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror

"Fashion Emergency" – The Chronos Chronicles: A Time Travel Anthology

"Homunculus" – Eckleburg Review (free)

"Much Abides" – Wordgathering (free)

"Museum Piece" – The Missing Slate

"The Nosegay" – Into the Ruins

"Oneiros"; "Sifted"; "Vital Lung Capacity" – Worlds: A Science Fiction Microfiction Anthology

"Pie in the Sky" – Bête Noire

"Propinquity" – The Society of Misfit Stories Presents…

"The Quality of One's Prison" – Delmarva Review (free)

"Regeneration Gap" – The Colored Lens

"A Rock and a Hard Place" – Breath & Shadow (free)

"Serotiny" – Baltimore Review (free)

"Song of a Flightless Bird" – LitMag (free)

"Swimming Pool Blues" – Hippocampus Magazine

"Tarnished Silver" – Fabula Argentea (free)

"The Unworthy" – Wordgathering (free)

"Vegetable Pulp" – Wild Musette Journal