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Under My Roof, based on Archanians by Aristophanes, is the story of telepathic tween Herbert Weinberg, whose father Daniel decides to strike a blow for freedom by building a nuclear device, planting it in the lawn jockey in his front yard, and declaring independence from the United States.

The Long Island household is predictably turned upside down. Mother is out, a local weatherman is in, and he becomes both a hostage and Minister of Information. Though troops surround the belligerent ranch house-state, the appeal of independence becomes too much for many. A daring raid to kidnap Herb and bring him back to his mother snatches the boy prince from his ancestral home. Meanwhile, the house is filling up with former American refuseniks. Can the refrigerator hold out?

However, the seed has already been planted. All over America, people are declaring their independence, and simply by traveling from lawn to lawn across "the country", Herbert is able to reunite with his father and defeat American imperialism with a final burst of his telepathic powers.


comes with a complimentary copy of Move Underground, also by Nick Mamatas. In Move Underground, the year is nineteen-sixty-something, and after endless millennia of watery sleep, the stars are finally right. Old R'lyeh rises out of the Pacific, ready to cast its damned shadow over the primitive human world. The first to see its peaks: an alcoholic, paranoid, and frightened Jack Kerouac, who had been drinking off a nervous breakdown up in Big Sur. Now Jack must get back on the road to find Neal Cassady, the holy fool whose rambling letters hint of a world brought to its knees in worship of the Elder God Cthulhu. Together with pistol-packin' junkie William S. Burroughs, Jack and Neal make their way across the continent to face down the murderous Lovecraftian cult that has spread its darkness to the heart of the American Dream. But is Neal along for the ride to help save the world, or does he want to destroy it just so that he'll have an ending for his book?

Nick Mamatas is the author of the Civil War ghost story for Marxists, Northern Gothic, and the Lovecraftian Beat road novel for shut-ins, Move Under Ground, which was nominated for both the Bram Stoker and International Horror Guild awards for first novel. His short fiction has appeared in the Mississippi Review, Razor, the German music magazine Spex and a dozen other publications. His reportage and essays have appeared in the Village Voice, The Writer, In These Times and various Disinformation and BenBella Books anthologies. A native New Yorker, Nick now lives near, but not in, Boston.

Chapter 1
My name is Herbert Weinberg. I know what you're thinking. That sounds like an old man's name. It does. But I'm twelve years old. And I know what you're thinking.
In fact, I'm sending you a telepathic message right now.
Yes, it's about the war. And yes, it is about Weinbergia, the country my father Daniel founded in our front yard. And yes, I have been missing for a while, but I'm nearly ready to go back home.
But I'll need your help. Let me tell you the story.
It was Patriot Day, last year, when Dad really went nuts. Thoughts were heavy like fog. Not only was everyone in little Port Jameson remembering 9/11, they were remembering where they were on September 11th, 2002, September 11th, 2003, 2004, 2005, on and on. The attacks were long enough ago that the networks had received a ton of letters and email demanding that they finally re-air the footage of the planes slicing through the second tower, because nobody wanted to forget. I was excited to finally see the explosions myself. Nobody else could really picture them properly anymore.
My mother Geri had forgotten pretty much everything except how beige her coffee was that day. She had been pouring cream into her blue paper cup when she looked up out of the window of the diner and saw the black smoke downtown, and had just kept pouring till it spilled over the brim. She found my father later that day and told him that they were going to move to Long Island immediately.
And they did. Every year since she forgot a little bit about that day. What was the name of the diner? Did she order a bagel with lox or just the coffee? Did she think it was Arabs or did the liberal centers of her cerebellum kick in to say "No no no it could have been anybody"? Did she want to kill someone? Drop an A-bomb on the entire Middle East? She didn't know anymore. All she remembered, and all I plucked out of her head, was her off-white coffee.
My father Daniel, on the other hand, didn't remember anything but the nuclear weapons. Dirty bombs, WMDs, suitcases filled with high-tech stuff; that was all he could think about. He took a job mopping floors at SUNY Riverhead so he could take classes for free. Physics. Mechanical engineering. His head was like an MTV video: all equations, blueprints, mushroom clouds, people running through the streets, and naked ladies, in and out, flipping from image to image. With every war Daniel got more frantic. The President would say some stuff about not ruling out nuclear weapons, and I could tell he wasn't kidding. My father would stay up all night, just walking around the dark kitchen and smacking his fist against the table. On the news, they kept showing more and more countries on a big map, painted red for evil. All of South America was red now, and even the normal people in California were dying when someone would run the border with a bomb or shoot down a plane over a neighborhood.
Dad read the newspapers, spent whole days in the library and all night on the computer. He was getting fat and losing his hair. He was a real nerd though, so nobody really noticed that he was slowly going mad. Actually, the problem was that he was going mad more slowly and in the opposite direction from everybody else. At night he dreamed of being stuck on an ice floe or on the wrong side of a shattered suspension bridge. Mom and I would be drifting off to sea on another ice floe or sliced in half by snapping steel cables. Then Dad would see the ghosts of firefighters and cops, white faces with no eyes, and they would point and laugh.
So Daniel studied. Researched. Thought of a way out.
Dad waited until I was out of school for the summer to make his big move, because he knew I would make a good assistant. He was laid off by SUNY because of budget cuts � Mom blamed his erratic behavior, but Daniel wasn't really any more eccentric than his other co-workers. He sold our nice car and bought a ratty old station wagon, and spent all day tooling around in it, while Geri clipped coupons and made us tuna fish with lots of mayonnaise for dinner. They didn't send me to genius camp that summer (I'm not really a genius, I just know what smart people are thinking) so that's how I ended up in being Prince Herbert I of Weinbergia.
Dad woke me early one hot day, just as the sun was rising. He looked rumpled, but was really excited, almost twitching. I half expected to see a little neon sign blinking Krazy! Krazy! Krazy! on his big forehead like I did back when Lunch Lady Maribeth went nuts and started throwing pudding at school, but he was really normal.
"C'mon Lovebug, I need your help," he said, shaking my ankle. He hadn't called me Lovebug since fourth grade, and his mind was going three thousand miles an hour, so I didn't know what he wanted.
"What is it?"
"We're going to the dump to look for cool stuff. C'mon, we'll get waffles at the diner on the way back."
I always wanted to go to the dump and look for cool stuff. I was really hoping to find something good like a big stuffed moose head or a highway traffic sign, but then in the car Dad told me that we were going to look for the ingredient that made America great.
"In fact, they call it Americium 241. It was isolated by the Manhattan Project, Herbert." Daniel loved to talk about the Manhattan Project.
"I don't think we're going to find that stuff at the dump, Dad."
"Smoke detectors, son. Most smoke detectors contain about half a gram of Americium-241," he said with the sort of Dad-ly smile you usually just see on TV commercials.
"How many grams do you want?"
"Well, 750 grams is necessary to achieve critical mass, but we'll want more than that to get a bigger boom," he said. He was thinking about turning on his blinker and how much smoother the ride in the old car was, not about blowing anything up. "I guess we'll need about 5000 smoke detectors."
"Uh�"
"Don't worry, I don't plan on finding all of them today."
He pulled the car into the dump and gave me a pair of gloves and a garbage bag. It was still early morning so the dump hadn't started getting hot and stinky yet. Dad let me go off on my own too, so we could cover more ground. I bet Mom or a social worker would have complained that Dad wasn't worried enough about my safety, but really, he was. As far as he was concerned, the safest place in the world was in a garbage dump, digging around for radioactive smoke detectors.
There wasn't all that much cool stuff at the dump, mostly just big bags of rotting food and milk containers, and broken Barbie Dream Houses � lots of those for some reason. There were old computers too. I liked checking out the motherboards and the stickers the college kids plastered on the side of their old monitors, but I couldn't find any moose heads or old hockey sticks or valuable comic books that some angry mother threw out or any smoke detectors.
I was playing around in this neat car I found that had a steering wheel that still moved around when Dad came running up with his own garbage bag. He'd found like twenty. "How many ya get, Lovebug?" he asked, then he frowned and mentally counted to ten when he saw the empty bag next to me. "Herbie, we really need to find these materials. Did you even look?!"
I shrugged. "It's hard. What do you want me to do? I can't look everywhere all at once."
He waved me out of the car, "C'mon. You just have to go about it systematically." He walked to the closest pile of garbage and then started going through it, one bag at a time. We poured through all the bags in one pile, tossing aside the smaller white plastic bags full of disgusting toilet paper; cardboard boxes with pictures of lasagna and fried chicken on them; newspapers from last week with headlines about the White Menace (Canada); gloppy leftover food mess sprinkled with white maggots, and all sorts of other junk. And then I found a smoke detector, at the top of the tenth bag we opened. Daniel gave me a big hug for that. "Now you can do the rest of this pile yourself. I'll be in that quadrant over there." Saying "quadrant" made him feel military.
Long Islanders are pigs. I found another smoke detector in the middle of a greasy pound of red spaghetti, but that was it. Everything else was just gross, from the moldy bathroom rugs to little baby clothes smeared in grease. Dad found me a bit later, his bag a little fuller. "Scored twelve all together. Let's get home, quickly now."
And that's what we did every morning. There was new garbage every day, plus there was always a chance we had missed something. Daniel printed out a list of things that might have some Americium 241 in it. Smoke detectors, and some medical testing equipment, and moisture density gauges all use the stuff.
"You know what a moisture density gauge looks like, Lovebug?" Dad asked me one morning.
I read his mind, then told him.
"You're such a smart boy."
We didn't find any moisture density gauges at the dump, but we did find some cool-looking stuff from the public hospital. They'd lost beds due to budget cuts. As the days wore on, we had more competition in the dump. Daniel was the only one after smoke detectors, but some poor people were spending their days at the dump, looking for old shoes or funny lamps or computer monitors to sell on eBay. I saw one guy cart away a giant bag full of stiff old bagels. Even he didn't know what he was planning on doing with them, but I could just picture his family in a dumpy living room: the kids all had dirty faces and crooked teeth, their little fists wrapped around mismatched forks and knives, and they wore white napkins around their necks like bibs. Then their dad would walk in and pour all the bagels onto the middle of the door he had put up on sawhorses to use as a table, and they'd all dive in at once, screaming, "FOOD!" It was so funny.
One of the poor people got really upset because he was poor and took it out on me, yelling and screaming that I was stealing garbage from his spot. Daniel came running, ready to tackle the guy but stopped, frozen with fear, when the poor guy picked up a rusty muffler and swung it over his head. "I'm a workin' man!" he shouted, "I'm working here in the dump, trying to get some food for my family." Inside his mind I could see him turning over, going from normal to crazy. The dump guys finally came out of the trailer where they watch TV all day with some crowbars to chase him off.
Most of the poor people were normal though. They were used to being poor, but just started coming to the dump because they had gotten poorer after the taxes went up or after they lost their job at a gas station. The worst poor people were the ones who used to have money. They really went crazy. I hoped that after Daniel became afraid we'd stop going to the dump, but he really wanted that Americium 241. We just went earlier in the day, while the poor people were still asleep on their couches, dreaming along with an infomercial or the national anthem on TV. It was fine after that, except for one time a black lady yelled at me for stepping on a pie plate she thought was a collector's item.
It took all month to get 500 smoke detectors, plus a few things from the hospital. Daniel spread them out over the basement and put me to work plucking the little silver bit of Americium 241 out of each of the detectors. I wore a nose mask that Daniel wasn't sure would work, rubber gloves, a smock. I used tweezers and a big magnifying glass connected to the table. Daniel worked on the other end of the basement � we kept the material in different piles so it wouldn't achieve critical mass and kill us.
The day Geri was laid off she nearly found out what were up to. Her sadness and anger preceded her into the driveway by nearly a minute, so I told Dad that I heard the car and we rushed upstairs, just in time to slam the door to the basement behind us and nonchalantly stand in front of it, while still wearing our masks and smocks.
"Hi boys," Mom said. She carried a cardboard box fill of little doodads from her cubicle with her. A frame with a picture of me from the two weeks I was in Little League stuck out of the top. Her misery evaporated as she took us in. "What are you two doing?"
"Ships in bottles!" Dad said.
"Model trains!" I said, because that is what Dad was thinking right before he changed his mind.
"Ships in bottles�" he started.
"They make up the body of the model trains, you see," I explained to Mom. "I'm learning how to reduce the resonant vibrations by altering the track gauge so the bottles don't chip or crack."
"Indeed," said Dad.
Genius stuff, thought Mom, then she said "I lost my job today. No severance package." She tried another smile. "I hope these shipping trains in bottles aren't too expensive."
"They're not, dear."
"I got a grant from the Department of Defense!" I said. They laughed at that, Dad a little too hard.
I slipped down to the basement to let my parents have their fight about money in peace.