Five connected pieces, following a character named Victor as he tracks down and kills the man he holds responsible for his brother's death — told out of order.
Publication timeline
- Part I — "Victor" — published September 15, 2007
- Part II — "Victor(2)" — published September 28, 2007
- Part III — "Victor(3)" — published November 23, 2007
- Part IV — "Victor(4)" — published July 16, 2026
- Part V — "Victor(5)" — published July 21, 2026
A note on the order
These first three pieces were written and published in 2007, in the order above — but the story they tell runs the other way. Part III is where Victor buys the gun. Part II is the night before, waiting in a bar with the gun already in the car, working up to what he has to do "the next day." Part I is that day: Victor breaks into a cabin and kills a man.
Part IV, added nineteen years later, goes further back still: how Victor learned where to find the man he'd spent a decade unable to stop thinking about. Part V picks up from there — the night he stops imagining it and decides, finally, to act.
Read in publication order, the serial opens with the act itself and works backward to how Victor got there. Read in story order (IV → V → III → II → I), it runs forward, motive to act. Both are valid; the publication order is preserved here rather than resequenced, since the reversal reads like a deliberate choice by the author at the time, not an accident of scheduling.
The pieces
A retrospective note
Parts I–III are early work — plainer prose than what's being published now, and a darker premise than most of the archive. They're kept here (lightly copyedited for spacing only, wording untouched) because they hold together as a complete, deliberate piece of storytelling for their length, not because every early post earns that treatment. Parts IV and V are new pieces, written in 2026 to close out the story those three left unexplained.
A content note, plainly: this involves a planned killing carried out in revenge, and its immediate aftermath, described directly rather than at length. It isn't softened for this collection, but it isn't dwelt on either — that was true of the original three posts too.