I write horror and dystopian fiction about hesitant, scruffy, self‑absorbed protagonists who stumble through life making terrible decisions — getting high, seeking validation, chasing pleasure, and crashing headfirst into bureaucracy. I’ve never had patience for well‑adjusted Hardy Boys–style heroes; I prefer stupid assholes trapped in impossible, terrifying jams.
My characters come from the same frustrated hopes and messy realities I’ve lived, whether they’re disabled wards dodging Watchers, musicians getting tossed by nightclub bouncers, or teenagers swallowed by cliques and institutions. If you’re looking for polished heroes, you won’t find them here. If you want flawed people navigating dreadful worlds that look alarmingly like our own, you’re in the right place.
Dystopia has always been the clearest way to expose what a society fears most. Margaret Atwood imagined the nightmare of nationalist Christian extremism seizing the United States and reshaping it into Gilead. Stephen King explored a militarized America hardened by discipline and patriotic sacrifice. (And I’ve always believed The Long Walk would have been the perfect alternate world if JFK had survived in 11/22/63. He was a charismatic WWII veteran whose leadership might have inspired youth endurance, national fervor, and a culture that glorified suffering instead of collapsing under Nixon’s cynicism and bureaucratic detachment.) George Orwell showed the terror of a government so powerful it can define reality itself and enforce its laws through brutal means. And my books, gather the weeds and Hellelujah, imagine a world that regresses before the Olmstead Act, the Rehabilitation Act, and the ADA, a world that institutionalizes disabled people as wards.
Each of these nightmares is different, but they share one truth: dystopia happens when a society’s deepest values hurl themselves down to their raw and bitter end.
I believed the nightmare had ended after Trump lost the 2020 election, after the January 6 attack, and after the country staggered through the COVID‑19 pandemic, a crisis many people blamed on his chaotic and uninformed handling. It felt like the worst was behind us. But the shock of 2024 hit like a second wave, and the 47th president’s first address struck me as a sickening display of lies, incompetence, and bizarre theatrics.
I was unprepared for the sensation that the country had regressed once more when the gallows’ trapdoor dropped beneath us. It enrages me when people tell me to soften my disgust, as if the anger isn’t justified. They suggest I should politely ignore that we elected someone found liable for sexual assault in civil court, convicted on 34 felony counts, and widely criticized for catastrophic decisions. I’m not interested in toning it down; I’m interested in telling the truth. Under my anger is a deeper fear: that a narcissistic leader nearing the end of his life might use all his presidential power to take the world down with him.
Meanwhile, the Olmstead decision may still be on the books, but its protections are being weakened in practice. Organizations like the American Association of People with Disabilities, ADAPT, the National Council on Disability, the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, and Disability Rights chapters across the country have all sounded the alarm. States are failing to enforce community integration rights, the direct care workforce is collapsing, and disabled people are being pushed back toward institutionalization.
Insult piles on injury as institutions expand even though they are more expensive, more isolating, and more harmful than home and community-based services. The erosion of Olmstead isn’t theoretical. It’s happening through neglect, underfunding, and political indifference. Disabled Americans are watching their hard‑won civil rights slip backward, like a tide pulling them toward the same institutions they fought decades to escape.
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In 2026, the Department of Justice issued memoranda permitting federally assisted programs to use the 2010 ADA Standards for Accessible Design instead of the older, stricter accessibility standards long associated with Section 504. At first, I wondered if I was overreacting. (As if a Hardy Boys character, encountering a secret room of contraband, or a John Grisham protagonist, scrutinizing spreadsheets to expose a chief executive’s criminal enterprises, might react.)
But then my mind drifted to Watership Down, especially when Hazel’s band of rabbits encounters Cowslip Warren. That warren appeared safe, even thriving, but the farmer had set a few snares to take the occasional rabbit for venison. The rabbits of Cowslip Warren stayed quiet about it, accepting the loss of a fellow rabbit or two for stability and comfort.
The 2010 standard, while newer, is more flexible. And flexibility is not always a blessing. The older Section 504 standards of the 1970s and 1980s were born from a fiercer era of disability activism, when disabled people fought for their lives with uncompromising clarity. Federally supported programs’ choice to implement the newer standard eerily brings to mind Cowslip’s bargain, a subtle understanding that some individuals must be sacrificed to preserve the illusion of safety for others. It is possible that permitting the use of the 2010 standard is building a countrywide version of Cowslip.
It feels as if some evil troll grabbed the remote control and flipped the entire country through every dystopian film at once. Its malice overwhelmed us because we focused only on what was happening right in front of us, not on what was happening far away. That was the warning in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.
The citizens of Omelas prospered: wealth, health, happiness. In a basement cell, someone had locked away a child of unknown sex. As long as the child remained imprisoned, the city thrived. By the time the reader encounters the child’s body, held together by festering sores, it has withered. Its language has collapsed into a single animalistic cry: eh ha, eh ha. The child’s suffering is the pin holding the entire society together.
And that is the pin holding all dystopias together: people willing to go along with the sacrifice as long as it doesn’t happen to them.
What terrifies me now is how close any of us could become locked in our respective cells, not through fantasy but through policy, neglect, and political cruelty. As long as we continue to ignore the scraping sounds of its worn‑down nails, the wobbling plea from its atrophied throat, and the smell of excrement that rots the soul, we can pretend our paradise is still intact.
But a shiny world hinged on a single child’s suffering is not paradise. It’s decay. And the scraping is getting closer.
Originally published on Substack.
If you’d like to read more of my work, visit my author website: Patrick T. Kilgallon — Patrick T. Kilgallon’s Stories
