Two very different kinds of book come out under this name, three titles so far between them, and readers sometimes assume there are two writers. There are not. There is one preoccupation approached from opposite ends.
People ask which one is the real one. Both are, and the question assumes a distance that is not there. What interests me is the moment somebody does exactly what they were trained to do and something terrible follows from it. In Bone Saw that produces dread. In Dicky Weed and ComptonWorld it produces farce. The difference is largely a matter of how much money is in the room.
The historical horror
Bone Saw follows a Federal amputation saw from the New York workshop that made it, through field hospitals, Reconstruction, Chicago industrial medicine, Wyoming settlement and the probate courts, across more than twenty years and a great many hands.
Nothing supernatural happens in it. The saw is not cursed and it is not haunted. It is a well-made tool that continues to work exactly as intended, and every person who picks it up is doing their job. That is the horror, and it did not need any help.
The satire
Dicky Weed is about a man with seven hundred million dollars who decides he has become inauthentic, signs the money into a trust he cannot reach, and walks to Skid Row to recover himself. He discovers that poverty is not a retreat, that the people already living there are not scenery for his journey, and that an audience will arrive whether or not he wants one.
It is a comedy. It is not a kind one.
ComptonWorld takes the same instinct and hands it to someone with worse judgment and a bigger budget. An heir builds a theme park version of a struggling neighborhood, hires people to make the fantasy feel real, and discovers that everyone standing around his project, from the workers to the documentary crew to the lawyers, has their own idea of what to do with it once it starts making money. Dicky Weed’s comedy comes from one man failing to buy his way into meaning. ComptonWorld’s comedy comes from an entire system succeeding at it.
What they have in common
The books are about systems behaving precisely as designed, and about the people the design does not account for. A surgeon reaching for the capital saw is following correct procedure. A trust that forbids anyone from rescuing the man who wrote it is a valid legal instrument. A theme park built on a borrowed neighborhood is a legitimate business plan with permits filed, insurance bound, and payroll met. In each case the paperwork is in order and somebody still loses a limb.
None of these books has a villain, which is the point. Villains are a relief. They let the reader off.
How they are made
Research first, and then the research is held to. Before a line of Bone Saw was written there was a document specifying that the handle is ebony rather than walnut, because walnut is furniture and gunstock wood and never appeared on a capital amputation saw. The blade is ten inches from heel to point and two inches deep at the body. The handle is secured with brass screws through a cheek plate, not rivets. Every operation rendered on the page names its anaesthetic, and the anaesthetic is ether.
None of that is on the page as decoration. A reader who knows the period will catch a wrong detail instantly and stop believing anything that follows, and a reader who does not know the period can still feel when a writer is bluffing. The constraint is also useful in itself. Deciding early that the saw can never become magical forces the horror to come from somewhere harder and better.
For readers who prefer dread over spectacle
These are books that reveal themselves slowly, that trust atmosphere over incident, and that tend to leave the reader with a question rather than a resolution. If that is the kind of thing you look for, the reader list is where new work is announced first, along with the research notes behind it.