A Quiet Escape from Kansas City

Writer Mac Tonnies died this week at the age of 34, supposedly of “natural causes,” though dying at such a young age in this society is anything but natural. He was found dead in his bed in his apartment in Kansas City, Missouri. Mac was a soon-to-be author of an Anomalist Book, his long awaited work entitled The Cryptoterrestrials. I first contacted Mac after reading his clear-headed, remarkably balanced, but still full-of-wonder website on Martian anomalies, The Cydonian Imperative ...

. I found him to be an original thinker and a terrific writer. At the time, I was the editor of Paraview Pocket Books, published by Simon & Schuster, and offered Mac a contract to write a book on the subject which became After the Martian Apocalypse. I spoke to Mac several times after the book was published and he expressed a strong desire to leave Kansas City, which he loathed. He seemed to have trouble making ends meet and was exasperated by the job market there. He ended up working at Starbucks and most recently at a call-center, in both cases a terrible waste of a wonderful mind. I saw Mac as a writer with a brilliant future and did my best to encourage him. Unfortunately, there will be no more quirky blog posts, stark photographs, or trenchant observations from Mac Tonnies anymore. He had promised to deliver his manuscript to us at the beginning of November and I will do my best to get his final work published. Mac is now posthuman, no doubt wandering among the stars from which he came. And I, along with his many friends, have a terrible case of the blues.

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