Tell Me How This Ends Well

This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof

Copyright © 2017 David Samuel Levinson

Thursday, April 14, 2022

Los Angeles welcomed them with a dark, moody sky that broke open halfway through breakfast. The drizzle fell gently at first, then more profoundly, in sheets that ricocheted off the sidewalk, spotting the windows of the overcrowded IHOP on Sepulveda. Even for that late-morning hour, closing in on eleven, every table, booth, and countertop was occupied. Someone, probably the reedy, pimple-ridden shift manager, had set his iMuse to play every awful electro-punk-funk artist in his arsenal, an eternal, cacophonic loop of sinister screeches, the latest craze perpetrated on the teen- age masses by a currently dying (again) music industry. The songs, which were forced upon them from four floating speakers hovering in the corners of the room, blasted through the bacon-grease-filled air. Each one collided with the other and sounded exactly like, if not worse than, the next, each vying for a top spot in Jacob's memory as the most craptacular and inappropriate accompaniment to breakfast, in this case pecan praline pancakes and Belgian waffles, which he and Dietrich were trying to consume while also struggling to carry on a conversation.

Around them, all was din and dystopia, and for a moment Jacob looked up from his plate of congealing syrup and butter, wondering if they hadn't wandered into some sort of bizarre casting call- girls in pale purple tutus performed pirouettes in the aisles; boys in Wranglers, cowboy boots, and spurs played horseback with imaginary whips and a few misplaced whinnies; a couple of the dads wore big red clown noses and frizzy orange Afro wigs; and many of the moms fed their saurian offspring lines from scripts, as they them- selves shoveled eggs Benedict into their mouths.

"I thought you told me in L.A. the sun is continuous," Dietrich said, his German accent far more pronounced when he was tired or irritated. Or both,

DAVID SAMUEL LEVINSON is the author of the novel, Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence, and the story collection, Most of Us Are Here Against Our Will. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has received fellowships from Yaddo, the Jentel Foundation, Ledig House, the Santa Fe Arts Institute, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellowship for Writers. He has also been published in The Atlantic, RE:AL, storySouth, The James White Review, The New Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories, The Brooklyn Review, Prairie Schooner, The Toronto Quarterly, West Branch, and Post Road, among others. He has formerly served as the Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College and as the Fellow in Fiction at Emory University.

"Unexpectedly affecting...A moving account of the rich complexities of maternal love and the bewildering ecstasies of sibling rivalry."
-San Francisco Chronicle

"This frightening glimpse into a near future that has succumbed to hatred rings uncomfortably true with present-day circumstances in America, making it essential reading for our times. In Julian Jacobson, Levinson has crafted an unforgettable villain, whose family fights through the psychic woods of years of abuse and out into a clearing of sorts. Levinson skillfully deploys an unexpected twist that reveals new layers of psychological complexity and gives his narrative a satisfying shape. This is a dark book that casts a powerful light and earns every ounce of the pathos of its denouement."
-Matthew Thomas, New York Times-bestselling author of We Are Not Ourselves

"Tell Me How This Ends Well is Cormac McCarthy's The Road doing 70mph in reverse on the 405. David Samuel Levinson's dystopian vision is deeply strange in the best way, perverse and precise and teeming with life, reminiscent of George Saunders, Flannery O'Connor, Nathanael West. A comic novel firing on all cylinders, with one eye on the highway and the other to our future."
-Daniel Torday, author of The Last Flight of Poxl West

"Like absolutely nothing I've read before, Levinson's brilliantly unsettling, fiercely funny novel takes on both dangerous intolerance in the near-future world, and in the confines of one wildly destructive family, where ties tighten like nooses and kith and kin can become like warring political systems. Affecting and hilarious, and filled with dark truths that gleam like jewels. I totally loved it."
-Caroline Leavitt, author of Cruel Beautiful World

"Tell Me How This Ends Well is a wickedly funny, intelligent examination of the dynamics of a uniquely strange family, and David Levinson guides these characters through a plot that intensifies in such unexpected ways. Against a backdrop that feels both