ETERNITY
The Long and Short of It

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Eternity is not concerned with why we are here; the eternal question remains, what are we doing with our brief existence?

Moving between the mean streets of Los Angeles and the lazy green byways of rural Georgia… between madness and epiphany… between reality and something, not quite real… between ancient cosmic terror and the mundane horrors of the American experience… Eternity The Long and Short of It is a collection of (mostly) short warnings. Warnings of things to come, and warnings of things that we can no longer escape.

Read a review by Frank Eckert on DasFilter.com!

What Brandon has done here, in such Brandon fashion, is weave together the daily terror of American Existence into an oppressive, but elevated tapestry. We have the terror of work, and the way offices are torture chambers-slash-competitive leagues-slash-eugenics laboratories. We have the combined legacy of old culture and banality of individual tragedy. We have religion and its confidence games blending with technology and its own confidence games. The warnings are haunting and the way Brandon blends sci-fi, horror, technophilia/phobia and dystopian cyberpunk themes creates something beautiful.

— Nate Ragolia, author of One Person Can’t Make a Difference and There You Feel Free

William Brandon’s Eternity: The Long and Short of It is a wonderfully smart and merciless dystopian collection about the evils of our times. With Ballardian scalpel-precision in dialogues and situations, William Brandon dissects the rotten limbs of neoliberalism, bigotry and technology in order to present us with the monster we have created ourselves. Terrifically well written and constructed, Eternity is a must-read for all those who seek a rewarding challenge in a book. Totally recommended.

— Seb Doubinsky, author of Missing Signal, The Invisible and Paperclip

William M. Brandon III’s Eternity deftly depicts a world gone whorled, where isolatos and desperados, worker bees and wannabes career through odd careers like post-Rapture-messaging-service server farmer, call-center-for-monetized-conversations operator, desire-for-new-products test driver, etc., each wildly imaginative story both mirror to our terrible present and medium to terrifying futures—from here to eternity, in other words. Keenly attacking disaster capitalism, total-spectrum surveillance, apocalyptic cults, religious fundamentalism, and more, Eternity foregrounds the following ironies: the more connection, the less intimacy; the more light, the less illumination; the more information, the less understanding.

—John Madera, author of Nervosities and Among the Dynamos

An intriguing blend of sci-fi and horror, these stories smash together the future we were promised and the very different future we live with now. The world of Eternity is dystopian and paranoid, but not without a thread of soul that pulls you through.

—Scott Gilbertson, luxagraf.net

Brandon’s ability to merge a great story with near-future SF and technology is impressive enough, but when combined with real-world-politicking Eternity becomes far more than just a collection of great, interconnected stories; it’s a clear warning about the endless ways corporations seek to own us, and the ways in which a daily grind can make us numb to the bigger picture. Fans of Black Mirror should run—not walk—to buy this book.

—Lindz McLeod, author of Turducken and Beast

A young atheist navigating the rise of American Christofascism and a secret police of Christian hardliners. A refugee adrift in a cyberpunk landscape looking for salvation. An apocalypse cult underpinning the American political-industrial complex, awaiting its Lovecraftian god. Poverty, avarice, desperation. Brandon’s interconnected tales – character-driven but dripping with commentary – are missives from post-Trump America, a bullhorn raised at our nihilism and apathy, warning that decline isn’t coming: “It’s been here for a long time.”

—Brandon Getz, author of Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before

Eternity is a collection of warnings from William M. Brandon III. This punk philosopher has been transmitting warnings through his novels for the better part of the last decade, and those who have heard have heeded. With this collection of stories (or are they essays, or does it matter? Why do you even ask? Are you a cop?), he breaks his vision down even further with easier chunks for chewing, while still dense in righteous nutrition. Genre is just another authority for Brandon to defy with relish, and that deliciousness is shared with the reader. In Eternity, William Brandon cuts through the corruption and hypocrisy inherent in the American Experience with a skeptic’s scalpel. This is not a reading experience; this is a rallying cry!

—Jordan A. Rothacker, author of The Pit, and No Other Stories, and the forthcoming novel, The Shrieking of Nothing.

William Brandon shapes Athens, Georgia as Kafka shaped Prague. The fabric of reality is, indeed, thin and the ever-present threat of detection by an underground THEM is as close to the characters of these stories as though THEY were standing just behind them, breathing thinly and waiting for the right moment to strike. Eternity features hellish call centers and data uploading facilities, the individuals who pick up jobs at these places to avoid a hideous fate, and the toxic blend of faith and misinformation. In William Brandon’s Georgia, beware. You are being watched.

—Pam Jones, author of A Carnival of Birds, The Arizona Room, and Andermatt County: Two Parables

William Brandon’s newest collection Eternity: The Long and Short of It, is written with a blistering, brilliant urgency, whose primary function, outlined as a compelling series of “warnings,” offers readers a remarkably thoughtful insight into class disparity, privatization, the colossal totality of civilization as information control, land ownership, disaster capitalism, history, the absurd reflective technological investigations of a rapturous theology of the doomed, marginalization, as well as the monopolization/control/management of the earth, including the reality in which it orbits, where we are all condemned as consumable objects, measured simply as an enterprise of assets to be managed by the elite.

Brandon’s fiction dares to help readers, grappling with the existential perils associated with navigating the contemporary tribulations perpetually imbedded within “capital R, Reality,” to not only help us understand the places that we have been, but more importantly, examine the possible positions of the paths that our civilization may take us, if we fail to collectively course correct, as we strive to more positively model the sharper coming curves of our ongoing evolution.

It is rare that a work of fiction can not only serve as deeply insightful, compassionate, caring, and forward thinking, but it also serves as a clarion call of solidarity that invites readers to unify around the idea that we use our arts as a means to create real measurable paradigmatic social change, it is for this reason that Brandon is not just an author, but also a creative pioneer, working for the themes of resistance and revolution, for as the book comes to a close we quickly realize that it is everything that we love that is on the line that we must collectively, not only fight for, but live to forever protect and preserve.

—Phillip Freedenberg, author of America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic

SILENCE & Selene

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This is not the book that was published in 2000. This is not the book that was published in 2014. It stands on its own as a subtle remix and the closing of a decades-long journey.

Dean O’Leary is a man who lives on the edge: of life, love, and happiness. After a bank robbery gone horribly wrong, Dean leaves his life of crime in Los Angeles and exiles himself to the cold grey sands of Las Vegas. A cruel and unusual twist of fate shows Dean a life filled with the love and hope that he has always thought impossible, and then rips it away. With nothing left to lose, Dean goes all in on one final crime.

Read a review by Frank Eckert on DasFilter.com!

A twisty, topsy-turvy ride with bad people making bad decisions.

– Jim Ruland, author of Make It Stop

Hello again, Dean O’Leary, you old romantic in your pinstripe suits and dive bars, barreling through time, looking for respite from this cruel world. In this steel-edged noir novella, William M. Brandon III takes us on a thrilling ride as his anti-hero tries to get to the bottom of things: Can time redeem us? Can friendship? Can love? Silence redux is a pure and dark delight.

– Saskia Vogel, author of Permission

Brandon’s style of writing in this novella is timeless. He perfectly captures the humanity of O’Leary. Every puff of smoke, sip of gin, and philosophical rambling has you questioning your life—your wants, needs, and goals. Like O’Leary, we find ourselves wondering: if we reach that one last goal, will we be happy? But money is just a Band-Aid on a bleeding vein, and Brandon shows us that love, true, intoxicating love is what we really crave. Silence is so much more than a tale of romance and robbery. I recommend you give it a read; it may just open your eyes to the world around you, and give you some introspective thoughts on your life choices.

– Amanda Moses, Spring Creek Sun

What one may state confidently without taking anything away from the readers, and I do trust this novella will undoubtedly find readers, is that this is a perfectly captured tale of trapped characters, trapped by their cages whose bars are just beyond their view and out of reach of their chisels. They didn’t ask for this and have no choice but to play it out to the end. And what an end it is, and what middle, and the novella as a whole, a breathless experience.

– Nick Voro, author of Conversational Therapy: Stories and Plays

Many a yarn has been woven around the quest for love. But that familiar tale starts to fray at the edges when young Dean O’Leary, a bank robber whose pinstripe suit is a better fit than the age in which he lives, packs up his cigarettes and his battered heart to start fresh in Las Vegas. With a voice and style that drag you in, Brandon sets up a character whose neurotic, mile-a-minute mind echoes the desire, anxiety, depression, and insanity found at every intersection on the road to love. From Dean’s ultimate highs to his rock-bottom lows (making a quick pit-stop at the surreal), Brandon will take you on an emotional walk in a desperate man’s wing-tip shoes—and you’ll be hooked from the very first step.

– Elise Portale, Editor

The Exile The Matriarch & The Flood

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In the beginning…

Victor Loingsech is adrift after being laid off from his job. He sets off for Ireland to wallow in stout but returns deeply changed. A dark compulsion is overcoming him, and when a terrible accident forces his hand, Victor steps into the abyss.

The present lays the foundation for the future…

Erlyst Rae Atropos, a far from saintly southern belle, is swept up into the arms of a powerful billionaire and whisked away to New York City. When Erlyst’s husband dies suddenly, his vast nefarious empire falls under her control. With scepter in hand, she forces psychopaths and war criminals into a high-stakes game of revenge.

The future, bent by greed, submits to Nature’s wrath…

Il Diluvio is an impossible storm that sits high above Los Angeles and pummels it with unending rain. The once mighty jewel of the Pacific Coast is destroyed by crippling floods and explodes in civil war. A mad Mayor rises to power, conquering the city and setting his sights on the entire Union. The Federal Government is permanently hobbled, but a brilliant politician asks a question that changes the world: What if the US was its own show, broadcast to voyeurs from pole to pole?

Read a review by Frank Eckert on DasFilter.com!

“Brandon is a mythmaker and a world-builder. Here he reimagines a future from the most intimate of relationships up to the largest institutions in a last-ditch hope against tyranny. The Exile The Matriarch and The Flood is an analysis of our times paired with a manifesto of how to save ourselves.”

—Jordan A. Rothacker, author of The Death of the Cyborg Oracle

“While The Exile The Matriarch & the Flood is brimming with brilliant speculative elements I find it difficult to refer to Brandon’s new book as genre science fiction, so I won’t. What I’ll call it is speculative literary fiction—the sort of sprawling, intellectually adventurous tome that’s bound to draw comparisons to writers like Pynchon and David Foster Wallace. Reading The Exile, the Matriarch & the Flood will do nothing less than change the way you look at yourself, America, and the world. Buy it now.”

—Kurt Baumeister, author of Pax Americana

“Taking future shock and present schlock to their logical extremes, William M. Brandon III’s Exile the Matriarch and the Flood limns a harrowing, post-everything world, where, ironically, the only way out of the morass, is further expansion of the spectacle. Visionary, caustic, this diaristic novel is a terrifyingly dark prediction of where our alienated, commercialized, and totally surveilled, disciplined, and controlled society is headed. Gibson and Womack are here, yes, but so are the ghosts of Debord and Baudrillard.”

—John Madera, author of Nervosities and Among the Dynamos

“Brandon treats speculative fiction with the truth and tenderness of traumatic regional history. Capable of equal parts darkness and satire, The Exile The Matriarch & the Flood will draw literary comparisons to Philip K. Dick and Mark Z. Danielewski, winking all the while at Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop and the accurate absurdity of a cityscape.”

—Christopher David Rosales, author of
Word is Bone, Gods on the Lam, and Silence the Bird, Silence the Keeper

“The Exile the Matriarch & The Flood is a force to be reckoned with, much like the perfect but impossible storm of the title, Il Diluvio. Complete with maps, timelines and footnotes, the book combines fact and fiction, diary and dialogue. William M. Brandon III weaves an experimental and epic tale driven by distinctive characters. If you like your speculative fiction rooted in reality and spun with a fast pace befitting a storm, here’s a book for you!”

—Marie Howalt, author of the Moonless Trilogy

“The latest great thing from William Brandon the Third, I am reluctant to call it a novel due to its complexity, is a story of a speculative past, present and future, which seems only slightly more absurd, only minimally more cynical-violent than our current state of affairs. Brandon tells this in fragments and leaps in various text forms, diary entries, and footnotes; there are maps, lists, and apocrypha. Connections remain subliminal, relationships complex, and the stories nested in subplots of subplots are allusions and tangential movements. A bit like Mark Z. Danielewski’s broad L.A. future chronicle The Familiar, a bit like Infinite Jest as well. Brandon’s vision of Los Angeles and the U.S., however, is far more explicit about socioeconomic imbalance and political power.”

—Frank Eckert, Das Filter

“In The Exile The Matriarch & The Flood William Brandon III wears golf shoes while jitterbugging across the polished floor of Capitalism, scratching all the way.”

—Steven Allen May, author of Plastic Sunrise, spontaneous chili and
fra ctur ede ve lo pm e nt, President of Plan B Press

Sneak Previews

Welcome to Spring Street

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Downtown Los Angeles 2013 – Protesters are being hunted.

In the wake of nationwide protests, the federal government created the Revision of Origin Act. Under the act, interstate travel is prohibited and political dissidents who are captured over state lines, disappear without a trace.

By completing the Revision program, Seward Keagan becomes a citizen of Los Angeles, where encroaching tyranny has met desperate resistance. He cavorts with geniuses, madpersons, and the depraved, as they fight for their right to exist.

When Keagan discovers an insidious presence in his building he joins anarchists and soccer moms alike in their quest to get out of L.A.—before it’s too late…

Welcome to Spring Street asks for your empathy, and in return, offers a call to rebellion.

Read a review by Frank Eckert on DasFilter.com!

“If Bukowski wrote about anarchists, dissidents, and reactionaries, the result would be Welcome to Spring Street. A prescient and delightfully discombobulating take on the American police state.”

— Jim Ruland, author of DO WHAT YOU WANT: The Story of Bad Religion

“William M. Brandon III has a vision that cuts to the core of where we are now and shines a light on the forces of the underground. Moving from downtown Los Angeles’s dive bars to the memory of Occupy encampments and beyond, Welcome to Spring Street is a pulsing ride through corruption, insurgency, and ultimately, hope.”

—  Saskia Vogel, author of Permission

“Brandon takes us into an alternative version of our own world with the confidence and resolve of a well-worn psychic-voyager. Multi-layered, multi-stylized, and featuring a wild and diverse cast, Welcome to Spring Street is a spark of hopeful art against authority and those who abuse power. Read this wisely!”

– Jordan A. Rothacker, author of Gristle: weird tales and The Death of the Cyborg Oracle

“Welcome to Spring Street is a portrait of a Los Angeles that once seemed fictional, but becomes less so every time I read it. Brandon’s ensemble cast foretells a brutal future, one that increasingly feels like it is arriving eerily close to Spring Street’s schedule. Is there a way out? Is there a safe place? Spring Street has no easy answers, only the cold comfort of its Noir world that lingers even after you put the book down.”

— Scott Gilbertson, WIRED

Brandon does not accept overly simple answers (revolution / uprising), but leaves hope for a possible outside of the repressive system. Brandon’s novel reads like Bukowski with Gibson as a speculative LA noir…Brandon – as indicated in the blurb – actually wrote the book back in 2011 in the hopeful first years of the Obama administration…he can [claim] a good deal of political clairvoyance, because both the protests and the reaction to it are already very 2020.

– Frank Eckert, Das Filter

The Atheist &
The Rapture Button

A cautionary tale in four parts

Declan Holyoake is unemployed and desperate for work. He accepts a mysterious job overseeing servers filled with digital messages from beyond the grave. As the true purpose behind the massive collection of data becomes clear, Declan is forced to reckon with the dark changes overwhelming America.

“The Atheist and the Rapture Button” first appeared online as a four-part short story dropping every Friday in March of 2019. Later that year, the story was published in the 2019 anthology BONED Every Which Way 2019. The online story begins at the corporate website for The Greenest Pasture.

“The Atheist and the Rapture Button” also appears in the short story collection Eternity: The Long and Short of It (2023).

Or you can go directly to the stories at the BONED website:

If they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.

– James Baldwin

I’m a dad and a partner who sees coercive relationships as the root of oppression. My first short story collection, Eternity: The Long and Short of It (’23), and my novels, SILENCE & Selene (‘23), The Exile The Matriarch & The Flood (‘21), and Welcome to Spring Street (‘20), were published by the esteemed Spaceboy Books. Further synaptic meanderings have appeared on F(r)iction, StatORec, The Rumpus, and in an anthology supporting Mines Advisory Group (‘The Atlantic’ – ‘13). From ‘13 – ‘21 I served as the Managing Editor for Black Hill Press and 1888.