PREFACE ‣ Greetings from Fort Hook

Join the ebb and flow of seafaring cutthroats and wraiths and stupids.

Ahoy and welcome to CHOKEMAIL. This periodical will bring you the latest dirt from Fort Hook, a ridiculously perilous pirate city. It’s the setting for my as-yet-unpublished (and unpublishable??) novel called Chokeville, which you can learn more about at chokeville.com.

We’ll get into the salty tales of its citizens in future issues. But for now, please enjoy this introduction to the town itself, plagiarized from a brochure I found at the Fort Hook Welcome Center, conveniently located inside a mediocre brothel called The Lamprey.

Escape the ordinary (and the authorities) in beautiful Fort Hook!

Are you perhaps a contract privateer, or an unlicensed angler, or a grubby stowaway needing to lay low til the heat dies down? Are you looking to trade ill-gotten contraband? Or dredge up unsavory work? Or just raise sundry types of hell?

Then go ahead and dock your junk at Fort Hook, a town built from scratch to skulk just outside maritime law! You’ll find it cozily tucked betwixt the piney hinterland known as the Palaces and the briny blue known as the Salty Abyss.

Join the ebb and flow of seafaring cutthroats and wraiths and stupids! Wallow in the sights and stenches of our dark narrow alleyways stacked high with parlors and emporia of disrepute! Gaze in wonder at begrimed seamen spitting in their hands to seal deals, and some guy bellowing nonsense!

Then: Stagger along our tortuous sprawl of piers and harbors and slipways, flanked by breakwaters, dominated by a massive cannon’d seagate from back when the place was actually a fort, cleaved in two by an estuary, and further fragmented by a confounding web of canals.

It’s as if a drunken giant smashed its hairy fist down onto a pristine stretch of coastline and shattered it! (Which is not far from the truth.)

Next: Feast at our thick-menu’d gimmick restaurants, drink at our dimly lit menace taverns, shop for affordable cigarillos and rotgut in our duty-free convenience stores!

Fort Hook is all yours to explore. What terrible secrets will you unearth? What freaky truths will you learn about yourself? What will you have for brunch and why is it a crab-infused daiquiri? Let’s find out…together.

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This has been Chokemail. Dictated but not read by Fireland. Shipped from Chokeville.

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