ComptonWorld grew directly out of Dicky Weed. I’d just come off building that book’s material, and needed somewhere to put the ideas that hadn’t found a home there yet. I spent a weekend just banging around concepts, most of them useless, before one of them refused to let go.
Compton Land, the wacky version
The original idea was something closer to a punchline than a novel. I pictured an eccentric billionaire building a theme park called Compton Land, a kind of twisted Disneyland where rich kids could pay admission for a cartoon version of a gangland suburb, dropped into the middle of an ordinary neighborhood. It was absurd on purpose, the kind of premise that works as a single joke and falls apart the moment you try to hold it for more than a page.
Where it got heavier
It didn’t stay that way. The longer I sat with the premise, the less interested I was in the joke and the more interested I became in everyone standing around it: the people hired to make the fantasy feel real, the people watching it happen, the people deciding what to do about it once it started making money. That’s when Compton Land became ComptonWorld, and the satire picked up real weight.
ComptonWorld sits in a grittier register than Dicky Weed. Dicky Weed’s comedy comes from watching a rich man chase an idea nobody will sell him. ComptonWorld’s comedy comes from watching an entire system figure out how to profit from a moral emergency it created. It isn’t for everyone. The people who get it, though, will get it.
ComptonWorld releases 3 November 2026. Read Chapter One is here.