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Chapters (79)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. Epigraph
  4. One
  5. Two
  6. Three
  7. Four
  8. Five
  9. Six
  10. Seven
  11. Eight
  12. Nine
  13. Ten
  14. Eleven
  15. Twelve
  16. Thirteen
  17. Fourteen
  18. Fifteen
  19. Sixteen
  20. Seventeen
  21. Eighteen
  22. Nineteen
  23. Twenty
  24. Twenty-One
  25. Twenty-Two
  26. Twenty-Three
  27. Twenty-Four
  28. Twenty-Five
  29. Twenty-Six
  30. Twenty-Seven
  31. Twenty-Eight
  32. Twenty-Nine
  33. Thirty
  34. Thirty-One
  35. Thirty-Two
  36. Thirty-Three
  37. Thirty-Four
  38. Thirty-Five
  39. Thirty-Six
  40. Thirty-Seven
  41. Thirty-Eight
  42. Thirty-Nine
  43. Forty
  44. Forty-One
  45. Forty-Two
  46. Forty-Three
  47. Forty-Four
  48. Forty-Five
  49. Forty-Six
  50. Forty-Seven
  51. Forty-Eight
  52. Forty-Nine
  53. Fifty
  54. Fifty-One
  55. Fifty-Two
  56. Fifty-Three
  57. Fifty-Four
  58. Fifty-Five
  59. Fifty-Six
  60. Fifty-Seven
  61. Fifty-Eight
  62. Fifty-Nine
  63. Sixty
  64. Sixty-One
  65. Sixty-Two
  66. Sixty-Three
  67. Sixty-Four
  68. Sixty-Five
  69. Sixty-Six
  70. Sixty-Seven
  71. Sixty-Eight
  72. Sixty-Nine
  73. Seventy
  74. Acknowledgments
  75. About the Author
  76. Praise for Destroy All Monsters
  77. Books by Sam J. Miller
  78. Back Ad
  79. About the Publisher

I looked out the window and across the street, to the abandoned factories with brontosauruses spray-painted onto their brick walls. Past that were the cow fields. The air smelled like dung.

“Seems shady to me,” I said. “Like I’m trying to trick people.”

“You’re a photographer, not a friend. Being an artist sometimes means breaking the rules of civilized human behavior. Do you have the courage to do that?”

I nodded, but I wasn’t sure if I did. And Cass’s words had reminded me that I hadn’t been a very good friend.

Solomon. He had been hiding from the world. From what was wrong with him. I’d been letting him, because I was too frightened to go where he needed me to go. It wasn’t enough to bring him a vanilla Coke once in a while, and let him talk to me for an hour about whatever cartoon he was obsessed with that week. If I was going to help him, I had to follow him into whatever weird world he was living in lately.

And then another thought occurred. Maybe I could get the honesty that Cass wanted. Maybe I could get to the soul of my subject—if that subject was Solomon.

But first, I’d have to find him.

Six

Solomon

The whole block of the Clarion’s offices smelled like brontosaurus dung. I could hear them groaning in the massive factories where they were shackled and marched in a circle, turning giant wheels to generate power to work the machines. Cass had kept the paper in the factory district, in the same building as the printing presses, long after all the other newspapers moved their editorial operations to the ritzier part of town.

And of course Cass was hard at work when I got there, alone in the immense old building, except for the ink-splattered men working the print machines down on the ground floor. But they were the night shift, and their day was ending, whereas Cass’s workdays had no shifts; no endings and no beginnings. She slept at her desk, most nights. She was an addict, hooked on the never-ending stream of news that washed across her desk. The murders and the intrigue, the politics and the scandals. The backroom deals that would lead to a thousand people getting evicted. The movie star divorces no one could shut the hell up about, even though they made not a damn bit of difference in the lives of anyone.

She stood there, tall and bone-thin and ancient, peering through thin glasses at stacks of clippings. Chain-smoking, like she always did. I wondered if printer’s ink was flammable, and decided it must not be, or she would have burned up decades ago.

“Solomon!” she called, snapping her fingers like she’d summoned me. “Excellent. What have you brought today?”