Table of Contents: Kraken...

Kraken in a Coffee Cup

You’re familiar with retellings of famous stories. You remember the trend of slapping zombies and sea monsters into classic novels. This—isn’t—either of those.

Kraken in a Coffee Cup takes chunks of Moby Dick, mixes them up, and blends them with new material to create a story about a ship that sails beneath the waves, capturing the souls of drowned sailors.

While retellings plays with the story but throw out the original text, Kraken plays with the original text but throws out the story. It’s fun. It’s experimental and deep—ocean-bottom deep—and it’s free to read.

In addition to the text taken from Moby Dick by Herman Melville, the opening image was inspired by Cornelius Matthews and his story, “Noadiah Bott; or, Adventures with A Governor and a Widow”; from his The Motley Book (1838).

I’ve also used passages from the book of Jonah beyond those quoted in Moby Dick and taken passages from the hymn, “There is a Fountain Filled with Blood” by William Cowper (1772).

The serialized novella, Kraken in a Coffee Cup, begins August 23rd, 2024.

Cornelius Mathews, The Motley Book: A Series of Tales and Sketches.(United States: J. & H.G. Langley, 1838)

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1851)

Kraken in a Coffee Cup

The date each chapter becomes available is included on the button text.

If you click on a chapter button before it’s date, it will take you to the correct page and show you a countdown to publication. In the app, it bumps you to my profile, but once the post is live, the link will work. Thanks to

Larry Hogue

for discovering this discrepancy.

Table of Contents:

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There will be 21 chapters in all.

—Thaddeus Thomas

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Public Domain Photo by Alexandre Duret-Lutz

Steampunk Cleopatra: From the title I was expecting swashbuckling adventures against a vaguely Egyptian backdrop, but instead I found a finely crafted and exhaustively researched work of historical fiction, full of mesmerizing detail. The book is studded with details that make the world seem richer and slightly more unfamiliar than you'd expect. These are embedded in a story of palace intrigue, scholarly curiosity and - most importantly - several very different kinds of love.

See you soon.