About the Book
The World Serpent is circling the globe. Any day now it could decide to swallow the world whole. Everyone in Cyclone City knows this. Most of them have decided to keep going anyway.
Jimmy Apanatchi has a solution for a dying world: a fake afterlife, an infinite number of years crammed into seconds, packaged and sold to every gang willing to pay for it. When he goes rogue and gets himself killed, he comes back as something worse — a monster built from every story the city ever told about itself, ready to burn it all to the ground.
Zuno didn't plan on being involved. He was just a loner with a synthetic deer skull where his head used to be, bolted onto the body of a police mech after a rampage gone wrong. His first assignment coincides with the end of the world.
Kentaro has no memory and a talking sword. He's doing his best.
Cielo is headed straight to hell.
Meanwhile, deep in the Rhizome — the city's living, mycelial internet — something is waking up and forming opinions. And factions.
Gods Fare No Better is cyberpunk anime at maximum volume: darkly funny, genuinely moving, and relentlessly strange. A kaleidoscopic kitchen sink novel of over-the-top gore and palliative philosophy. Readers have called it Hotline Miami meets The Guyver. Proceed accordingly.
"The start of something new." — Goodreads reviewer
"Loud, ugly, beautiful. This novel won't be for everyone. That's what makes it cool." — Goodreads reviewer
"Telepathic fungal rhizomes, techno-spirituality, hysterically funny action set pieces, and lots of dick jokes." — Goodreads reviewer
What Kind of Book Is This?
Gods Fare No Better is animist cyberpunk filtered through Oklahoma sensibility — neon-lit and mud-stained, cosmological and brutally physical. The DNA runs through Suda51's No More Heroes (outsider anti-heroes, gleeful ultraviolence, fourth-wall awareness), Grant Morrison's The Invisibles (faction warfare, consciousness as battleground, ideas as weapons), and Takashi Miike's Dead or Alive (the feeling of the first ten minutes stretched into a novel). It draws from noir, weird fiction, and speculative fiction without belonging entirely to any of them.
Readers who connect with Richard Kadrey, Jeff VanderMeer, and K.J. Parker find the territory familiar. Readers who come through Osborne's other work find this one opens the whole map.
Read It If...
- You want a full-length novel that builds a complete world without losing narrative momentum
- You're drawn to fiction where the spiritual stakes are as real as the physical ones
- You've wanted cyberpunk that doesn't feel like a Silicon Valley fever dream
- You want to understand the cosmology that runs beneath all of Osborne's work
- You want something that genuinely cannot be compared to anything else
Get the Book
Order direct from the author (signed copies available) or pick it up on Amazon.
More from J David Osborne
Berserker Club, Osborne's follow-up novella, functions as the origin story for key cosmological elements introduced here. Read Berserker Club →
Not sure if this book is for you? Read the honest breakdown — pros, cons, and who should actually buy it. Red Team / Blue Team →
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