“The times may change, the wars may differ, but the story, the raw, bleeding pulse of it—that’s eternal.” – E.H.
Step into the Abyss
If you loved the twisted genius of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, brace yourself for The Sun Also Rises on Cthulhu. This cosmic reimagining merges Hemingway’s timeless prose with Lovecraft’s eldritch horrors brought to life by Jorah Kai’s macabre, poetic mastery and creeping, crawling creativity, delivering a tale both haunting and profound.
About the Book
Authors: Ernest Hemingway & Jorah Kai
Genre: Cosmic Horror meets Lost Generation
Premise: Follow Jack Schitt, Ro’brt Ctholh’en, Brett Ashley, and Creepy Bill as they journey through post-war Europe in search of meaning. But their search leads to something far darker—an ancient horror awakening in the depths of their minds, threatening to unravel the fabric of reality itself.
Themes: Love, identity, existential dread, and the terror of the unknown.
“A century after its original publication, Hemingway’s masterpiece is reborn, dripping with new blood and ancient truths.”
Limited Opportunity: Get an Advance ARC of The Sun Also Rises on Cthulhu!
Although the book releases April 1, 2025, a limited number of advance copies are available for Christmas! To claim yours, post an honest review of Amos the Amazing or The Invisible War Trilogy on Amazon, and tag @JorahKai on Bluesky (link) or Facebook (link) before December 24, 2024.
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The journey to create The Sun Also Rises on Cthulhu has been marked by doubt, challenges, and relentless determination.
As an artist, I wrestled with the fear of overstepping—“What was I doing, trying to channel Hemingway?”—and faced skepticism, even with meticulous research and preparation. Legal hurdles loomed large, testing my resolve against a faceless corporate giant seemingly resistant to bold creativity.
The artist’s journey is fraught with the fear of standing out, of daring to push boundaries. But in the silence, I found clarity: The Sun Also Rises on Cthulhu is a story worth telling. Madness and bravery are often intertwined, and for an artist and mad hatter like me, that gamble is priceless.
What Readers Are Saying
“Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory meets Lovecraftian terror—a masterful fusion!”
“A fresh, horrifying take on a classic. Couldn’t put it down.”
The Origin Story
Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises entered the public domain in 2022.
Inspired by Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Jorah Kai infused the classic with cosmic horror.
A decade of dedication, a shared vision, and a touch of madness brought this collaboration to life.
“Collaborating with Kai? Like wrestling the sun itself. The dance may change, but the story remains.” – E.H.
To celebrate this hard-fought triumph before Cthulhu’s rise, I’m sharing two poems that encapsulate this journey:
Nyarlathotep By H. P. Lovecraft
Nyarlathotep . . . thcrawling chaos . . . I am the last . . . I will tell the audient void. . . . I do not recall distinctly when it began, but it was months ago. The general tension was horrible. To a season of political and social upheaval was added a strange and brooding apprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger widespread and all-embracing, such a danger as may be imagined only in the most terrible phantasms of the night. I recall that the people went about with pale and worried faces, and whispered warnings and prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat or acknowledge to himself that he had heard. A sense of monstrous guilt was upon the land, and out of the abysses between the stars swept chill currents that made men shiver in dark and lonely places. There was a daemoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons—the autumn heat lingered fearsomely, and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which were unknown. And it was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt. Who he was, none could tell, but he was of the old native blood and looked like a Pharaoh. The fellahin knelt when they saw him, yet could not say why. He said he had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-seven centuries, and that he had heard messages from places not on this planet. Into the lands of civilisation came Nyarlathotep, swarthy, slender, and sinister, always buying strange instruments of glass and metal and combining them into instruments yet stranger. He spoke much of the sciences—of electricity and psychology—and gave exhibitions of power which sent his spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his fame to exceeding magnitude. Men advised one another to see Nyarlathotep, and shuddered. And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished; for the small hours were rent with the screams of nightmare. Never before had the screams of nightmare been such a public problem; now the wise men almost wished they could forbid sleep in the small hours, that the shrieks of cities might less horribly disturb the pale, pitying moon as it glimmered on green waters gliding under bridges, and old steeples crumbling against a sickly sky. I remember when Nyarlathotep came to my city—the great, the old, the terrible city of unnumbered crimes. My friend had told me of him, and of the impelling fascination and allurement of his revelations, and I burned with eagerness to explore his uttermost mysteries. My friend said they were horrible and impressive beyond my most fevered imaginings; that what was thrown on a screen in the darkened room prophesied things none but Nyarlathotep dared prophesy, and that in the sputter of his sparks there was taken from men that which had never been taken before yet which shewed only in the eyes. And I heard it hinted abroad that those who knew Nyarlathotep looked on sights which others saw not. It was in the hot autumn that I went through the night with the restless crowds to see Nyarlathotep; through the stifling night and up the endless stairs into the choking room. And shadowed on a screen, I saw hooded forms amidst ruins, and yellow evil faces peering from behind fallen monuments. And I saw the world battling against blackness; against the waves of destruction from ultimate space; whirling, churning; struggling around the dimming, cooling sun. Then the sparks played amazingly around the heads of the spectators, and hair stood up on end whilst shadows more grotesque than I can tell came out and squatted on the heads. And when I, who was colder and more scientific than the rest, mumbled a trembling protest about “imposture” and “static electricity”, Nyarlathotep drave us all out, down the dizzy stairs into the damp, hot, deserted midnight streets. I screamed aloud that I was not afraid; that I never could be afraid; and others screamed with me for solace. We sware to one another that the city was exactly the same, and still alive; and when the electric lights began to fade we cursed the company over and over again, and laughed at the queer faces we made. I believe we felt something coming down from the greenish moon, for when we began to depend on its light we drifted into curious involuntary formations and seemed to know our destinations though we dared not think of them. Once we looked at the pavement and found the blocks loose and displaced by grass, with scarce a line of rusted metal to shew where the tramways had run. And again we saw a tram-car, lone, windowless, dilapidated, and almost on its side. When we gazed around the horizon, we could not find the third tower by the river, and noticed that the silhouette of the second tower was ragged at the top. Then we split up into narrow columns, each of which seemed drawn in a different direction. One disappeared in a narrow alley to the left, leaving only the echo of a shocking moan. Another filed down a weed-choked subway entrance, howling with a laughter that was mad. My own column was sucked toward the open country, and presently felt a chill which was not of the hot autumn; for as we stalked out on the dark moor, we beheld around us the hellish moon-glitter of evil snows. Trackless, inexplicable snows, swept asunder in one direction only, where lay a gulf all the blacker for its glittering walls. The column seemed very thin indeed as it plodded dreamily into the gulf. I lingered behind, for the black rift in the green-litten snow was frightful, and I thought I had heard the reverberations of a disquieting wail as my companions vanished; but my power to linger was slight. As if beckoned by those who had gone before, I half floated between the titanic snowdrifts, quivering and afraid, into the sightless vortex of the unimaginable. Screamingly sentient, dumbly delirious, only the gods that were can tell. A sickened, sensitive shadow writhing in hands that are not hands, and whirled blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities, charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low. Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things; half-seen columns of unsanctified temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space and reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and darkness. And through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods—the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep.
I wrote one too – and slipped it into the book:
The Dark Beyond Jorah Kai
There’s a species of silence that clings to the edge of things, thicker than ink, darker than death—a silence beyond sound, as if the cosmos itself has turned away, and left us to stare, trembling, into the dark beyond. They promised stars, a silver sea, galaxies spinning in endless dance, but out there, there’s no warmth, no gleam, just a void, cold as a widow’s hands, black as a godless night. A darkness that feeds on light, eats stars whole, leaving only echoes of screams that never reach our ears. I looked back once—just once—toward Earth, that fragile, blue breath afloat in the cradle of light. Gaia, with her clouds and her seas, the last gasp of life in an endless night. But out here, she’s nothing, a speck in the maw of eternity, a candle struggling against the winds of the void. It was supposed to be glory, this flight, a soaring communion with the stars, a plunge into the mysteries where gods keep their secrets. But the secrets are empty; the gods are dead or never were. And I am left spinning, caught in the jaws of the dark beyond, swallowed by an ancient silence that knows only hunger. So here I am, an orphan of stardust, adrift in the cold veins of the universe, where light is swallowed and stars are bones. There’s no song, no solace, only the yawning maw, the dark beyond, waiting, watching, a promise that all we know, all we are, will vanish into its endless, pitiless mouth.
So there you have it—The Sun Also Rises on Cthulhu is finally live! After battling the cosmic forces of Amazon KDP, our audacious plan not only survived but thrived. It’s a testament to the power of persistence, the necessity of being bold, and the beauty of never letting the giants of the literary world stomp out your light. Preorder your copy now and join us in celebrating this victory against the odds. And remember, in the grand story of life, sometimes you have to wrestle with the cosmos to leave your mark. Preorder The Sun Also Rises on Cthulhu Here! Cheers to the madness, the mischief, and the magic of storytelling. Here’s to leaving the atmosphere and soaring into the stars, one word at a time.
“Underneath the cosmic horror, this is still a story of people grappling with meaning in a fractured world. The absurdity of life stares us down, and we stare right back.” – J.K.
