Tom Schecter, Championed by Simpulacra

The Champion Series

Guest author:

Simpulacra

Presenting the fiction of:

Tom Schecter

Tom Schecter: For Love of Grit, Grime and Wholesomeness

By Slater Ross Garcia (Simpulacra)

When I first joined the ‘stack in October, I admittedly had no idea what I was doing, in fact I wrote it off as another twitter because all the notes in my feed were cranky writers being cranky. I posted a few things and uninvolved myself. Then one day, Thomas Schecter found me.

At first our conversations were about music, Alice in Chains in particular, but a friendship quickly emerged, the mortar of which was our shared love of indie fiction. His good taste in tunes led me to his writing and I have never been more grateful for a discovery.

Thomas Clark Schecter

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This article is part of Literary Salon issue #5.

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For Love of Grit, Grime and Wholesomeness

The Shieldbreaker Saga is Thomas Schecter’s primary bread and butter, and that first chapter is easily one of the best first chapters of any novel I have ever explored, ending in a hauntingly inevitable bloodbath that is Shakespearian in soul and spirit. I found myself sucked in to a genre that generally tends to leave me with a bad taste in my mouth: Fantasy. But the world of The Disputed Lands isn’t just fantasy, it’s elevated fiction.

The Last of the Etela, Chapter 1

Consequences are very real in Shieldbreaker, and the structure of his work is methodical, logical and so very fundamentally human. His work has a great many strengths. He is clearly a history nerd, he respects violence, he is obviously very technically skilled (his writing reads at once like real histories and Mastadon lyrics, punchy emotion, brutal logic), he loves his work, but more than anything, Schecter has a deep understanding of humanity. I would say that if he weren’t such a masterful artist, he should have been a therapist, because the actions of his characters are a tug-of-war between culture, history and innate traits. More than anything, I know Kareva, I know Alakuz, I know Sivridi. I have seen these people make these mistakes in real life (in gentler contexts, obviously). He understands fundamentally the recipe for a person.

Any good plot is motivated by character actions, but for Schecter, there is no sense of plot, no moment of contrivance. His fantasy feels real. I could call his work grimdark, however, the genre has been tainted by authors who use it as an outlet to create trauma porn. What Schecter has done is simply create a core logic to his world and to his characters, and brilliantly generated a web of consequences that splay out into an epic tapestry of storytelling. While this seems like Writing 101, it is a stranglehold on the basics that yields a masterpiece. And it is no hyperbole to say that if Schecter gets the eyes he deserves on his stories, he could single-handedly transform the grimdark genre into something that can be once again taken seriously.

It’s easy to find yourself immersed in the world of the Etela, the good news is that Schecter has more books planned, in fact he is currently working on Daughters of Vei, which is a prequel to the Shieldbreaker Saga, and it slaps my cheeks just as hard. He only has 3 chapters out as of writing, and each one escalates with the same white-knuckle severity as Shieldbreaker.

The Daughters of Vei, Chapter 1

Furthermore, what Schecter also masters is the cinematic quality in novel form. There is much criticism of cinematic presentation in literature, however, for epic fiction, this is a positive.

And it is not cinematic in that it removes the other senses. You can smell the stink of blood, feel the vibration of anticipation in the warrior’s chests, taste the grit and dirt lodged between your teeth. His story loses nothing for its visuality, for its staging and its widescreen frame. Read Chapter 6 of Shieldbreaker and tell me it wouldn’t make for an A+ television adaptation.

Now, Schecter is a busy man. He’s got a family, his own business, he has created some remarkable fiction, and on top of it all, he is a vital piece of the indie arts community. Schecter is the Mr-fucking-Rogers of Substack. What this man does to promote other writers with the aim of healing creative discourse is unmatched in other corners of the internet; he truly wishes to build writer communities, create a backbone for indie creators that expands far beyond the usual bitter shitslinging we like to pretend is critique. We are, after all, indie writers, no one will save us but ourselves, and he knows this better than most.

Schecter has launched mutual aid campaigns for

Emil Ottoman

and

Pablo Báez

, all the while waving the flag for Fiction is Culture, a small movement, that wishes to remind the reader that an act of creativity is something fundamentally communal; to remove the artist from the dingy none-bedroom apartment solitude and the inherent solipsism therein; he wishes to remind you to take a shower and take care of your fellow creative. In the indie lit scene, all boats rise with the tide. He walks the walk and talks the talk.

Introducing 'PABLO, MICHELIN POET'

Introducing 'EMIL IS MY EDITOR'

The man’s work is criminally underrated, but I could say the same for the man himself.

For that reason, I also have a full comprehensive review of Shieldbreaker and Vei on my secondary publication, My IBS (My Independent Book Selection [yes, that is the joke]).

ReviewStack: The Shieldbreaker Saga Book 1 by Thomas Clark Schecter

Read his work, witness how he heals creative communities, and show him the love he deserves. If you haven’t discovered Thomas Clark Schecter, it is time to do just that.

—Slater Ross Garcia (Simpulacra)