On his 1985 Sears typewriter, Nick Rombes taps out the adventures of a man trapped in a warren of subterranean tunnels, prints up pamphlets at the local print shop, then mails chapters to fans eager to find out what happens next in the serialized thriller Nightmare Trails at Knifepoint.
Why swim upstream in the digital age? The Michigan-based writer believes that nothing beats a personally addressed piece of mail to set the pulse racing.
"I'm finding that some readers crave the physical objects of stories themselves as well as the anticipation of receiving them on a regular basis not through e-mail or downloads but through the U.S. Postal Service," Rombes writes in a snail-mailed letter to Wired.com.
Rombes, who also wrote A Cultural Dictionary of Punk, 1974-1982 and currently teaches at University of Detroit Mercy, describes Nigthmares as "a sort of disordered noir for our fragmented age, involving a vast underground tunnel system, a detective, a hunchback and a doppelganger." Given the cliffhanger nature of his 12-part series, Rombes adds: "I'd better stop there."
Nightmare Trails, so far, sprinkles a few bread crumbs of pulp-fiction dread along the trail, but lead character Ephraim is hardly a straight-ahead action hero. Instead, Rombe spends most of his time exploring an absurdist David Lynch-meets-Waiting for Godot demi-world brimming with cryptic messages, phantom sightings and existential dead ends.
Early on, Rombes pieced together cryptic collage to illustrate the text. With three installments down and nine to go, Rombes proves he's not entirely anti-web by inviting artists to submit Nightmare graphics for upcoming episodes at the Nightmare Trails blog. (The site also lets readers buy a year-long subscription to the entire saga for $22.)
"This is not some Luddite retreat into an imagined past," Rombes insists. "In the age of Twitter novels, microstories and fragmented bits and pieces, is it possible to bring some elements of paper-based narrative without completely succumbing to nostalgia? I think so."
But what's up with that 25-year-old typewriter? "I love the clash of the analog with the digital and to me, a typewriter typifies the analog era," Rombes says. "The machine is durable and I can still buy new ribbons for it!"
Top image: Nightmare Trails at Knifepoint poster art courtesy Jili Allen.
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