Read an extract. Make sure

The following is an excerpt from Make sure you die screaming from Zee Carlstrom. They grew up in Illinois and are now working as a creative director in Brooklyn. You can subscribe to your substanceWhat exactly two monthly subscribers need to pay the NBA League pass subscription from Carlstrom.

Make sure that you die when you scream, a non -binary narrator who steals a car after a burnout and a personal trauma and leaves Chicago to look for your missing conspiracy theorist in Arkansas. With a chaotic companion you navigate in a surreal, emotional road trip through the ideological and economic differences. While you confront your past and scars that capitalism, gender expectations and family dysfunction have left, the trip becomes both literally and deeply psychological. It is now available for buying Flatiron Books.

We run from Chicago around four in the morning and raced south towards Arkansas because my mother needs help to kidnap my father. It’s actually a lie. One real reason: I was looking for an excuse to leave the city, to plan my escape, ask my time, and Arkansas seems to be a pretty good place to hide. The kidnapping thing is a new development, a situation that I don’t quite understand. I usually ignore mom’s calls, but I was pretty shitty last night, and my phone buzzed again and again, and it was after midnight, so I thought … Well, I don’t really remember what I thought. Remembering has been sucked since I hit this funny new dent in my skull.

Anyway, we drink. We drive. We’re doing a good time. As soon as we clarify the suburbs, the Stevenson Expressway turns into the I-55 and the grass landscapes roll into an endless brown blurring. I heard Indiana named America’s hallway, but Illinois is Chicago’s float – an undesirable streak dirt that is only good to wipe off the shit on the way to the great mile from the shoes. This is the state of Lincoln, the prairiest state, and although they have already burned these prairies every few years, I wished that they would do a better job. Enjoy the earth and let yourself be finished. Salt the fields, stale the rivers, roll up Illinois like a sleeping bag and send the white people back to where we should be.

This is the place I come from, but I am like the Asian carp from Lake Michigan. Invasive and destructive. I am a virus with large teeth, converted nostrils, overpriced shoes, an ironic fashion sea corn and mild oral herpes. I think you could call me the first honest white man in the world, but I no longer identify myself as a man, so you would probably call me other things first: pale, mesomorphic, alcoholic, workaholic, successful, violent, queer, pessimistic, autophobic, unheroic, semi-effemininininate, sexually deviant, relatively confused, normally, unexpectedly. Forcibly, and photographed and photographically, photographically and photographically, and photographically and photographically and photographically and photographically, and photographically and photographically, and photographs, and photographically, and photographically, photographic and photographic, and photographically, and photographically and photographic and photographic. This is obviously an incomplete list and probably a bit overdrimatic, but I’m in the mood for drama. I hover near the cold center of a vague erotic black hole, sucks space and time and try to find something that I can stick to that I will not destroy.

In other words, I experience both a breakdown and a separation at the same time. They could think these two things would cancel each other, but they don’t. If the shitty sounds, it is so. If it sounds sad, it’s not. If at all, it’s strange. I learn to laugh and smile and to scream in view of the devastation. The drama also gives me an apology for self -medication. This is part of why we stole this car to my ex-boyfriend.

We drive the highway with a cop car in the back. Maybe an unsuspecting highway Patrolman, but I can’t shake him. I can’t even try to shake him. It has covered most of fifty miles behind us, and I cannot risk making something suspicious or openly difficult to grasp. I slow down and he slows down too. I change lanes to avoid trucks, and he too. A watchful nightmare, but also amusing. I keep saying that this state troops would put us on if he knew about my crimes, and he didn’t do it, so he doesn’t. That is the logical conclusion, but my father taught me to never trust things such as logic or perception or the cold solidity of the facts.

My father is a fool, but he is also very convincing. He has a kind of madness, like Alex Jones with less emphysema. I don’t know how or why he hiked away from my mother again, but I know the word hiked Let it sound as if he has Alzheimer’s or another diagnosticable apology. And he doesn’t. Not really. Something is wrong with him, there must be, but he has been tested many times for many things: bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, OCD, PTBS, whatever the doctors can think of. I am not sure how he manages to beat these tests, but he always comes out flawlessly. And here we are.

When mom called me from Arkansas, I fisted on the damp red Futon, who was thirty -three dollars in Airbnbing. The futon was in the basement of a blue -haired older woman with sparkling tartar, seven large Dalmatians and the questionable business model to run a motel with a low rent for downhill mobile. My living space was cordoned off from the rest of the cellar with floor -length white curtains such as an army hospital. I crashed there for two weeks – because I had left my ex – because I enjoy doing it as if I was still as poor as I grew up. Wait, sorry, that’s not quite true. The real deal is that I recently burned my whole life onto the ground when I put my vow of radical honesty, and now I need cheap places to hide if I can never find work again.

In any case, I haven’t hated the Airbnb. It suited my limited needs, and I met a self -proclaimed dump that fell on the other side of my curtain. Her name is Yivi. She screams in her sleep. I brought her McChickens and hot chetos when I stumbled back to my futon in the middle of the night, and we talked about Freddy Krueger and techno-feudalism. Yivis twenty -two, depending on pills and on the escape from a very bad guy she calls Big sauce. She is also great in drinking and my new best friend, which is why she murmurs in the passenger seat of this stolen car.

Mom calls me again, but I’m too sober for a conversation. Buzz-Buzz-Buzz. Answer-asshale. I can’t safely drink with this police officer on our cock, and thirst makes everything worse: my mood, my irritated ass, this headache that I cannot shake. I wish I was back in this cozy Airbnb Love island Tiebied.

Instead, I am out here and defy the real world while my iPhone slips on my ex-friend Clinton BMW M2’s dashboard. This fancy boy car was a gift from Clinton’s CEO father on his thirtieth birthday. Blue painting, silver racetracks, sticky leather seats, blurred red steering wheel cover. It is a delightful shit, terrible for long drives and long legs, but Yivi is even greater than me, and it seems that it doesn’t care about it.

Clinton, on the other hand, was my malignant short king. Five foot 5 with thighs like Thors Donner. A Saurer German-Irish type of Chicago’s North Side. We met in college. He liked the Blackhawks and I liked his Mastercard, his gold coast and enthusiastic alcoholism. We got on because Clinton’s family doesn’t know that he is strange, and I don’t. Clinton is also a big liar as before. The difference is that he grew up too well to ever feel bad. He always told me that I should lie more, lie to get everything I wanted and he was right. Lying brought me, brought me the respect of my customers, landed me and Jenny in a corner office. But it also mutated into a real evil habit.

I will not go so far to say that I have lived a lie in the past ten years – I read, I seem a human cliché – but I will say I have lived a few thousand of you. Big, small, fat, big. An infinite semi -seizure litani of tactical falsehoods. But that’s all over now and I could even be happy. Approach happily. Another human cliché is the truth that it will free it, but the one I have recently learned is Horesshit. What the truth becomes Strictly speaking If you do your career, remove your remaining interpersonal relationships, beat your skull with a baseball bat and beat Then Put them free.

Extract from Make sure you die screaming by Zee Carlstrom. Copyright © 2025 by ZS Carlstrom. Reprint with permission from Flatronon books. All rights reserved.