“ A 1980s

latchkey

kid. ”

Genre/Style: Known for works that explore the darker, grittier aspects of the human condition and the seedy underbelly of American life.

Author: Justin Arnold is ready to die to get to heaven by the age of seven, and the bible’s magic power is going to get him there. Born into the arms of a teenager, he’d never seen his mom and dad in the same room. His step-dad tried to break him by God or by the stripes of a belt. A 1980s latchkey kid, Justin watches the fallacy of “the American dream” beat against his family like rabid cartoons in an after-school episode of Tom and Jerry. Justin escapes the combat of his youth to join the Marines at 17. College cost him four years of active duty and an illegitimate war. The GI bill may have paid for Justin to be the first in his family in two generations to get an education but the daily exposure to a blowhard white male father figure floundering under the hypocritical delusions of his American strongman syndromes, may very well be some of the greatest lessons in theatrics a writer of modern-day southern gothic noir fairy tales could have ever been exposed to. Justin writes for the everyman, woman, and child resisting exploitative oppression amidst the havoc of sick ideological fulcrums. Namely, “the American dream”.