I’m Gonna Act as Though What Seems Real Is

Raphael Helfand speaks with David Leo Rice about his new novel “The Squimbop Condition.”

By Raphael HelfandOctober 22, 2025

• SF

NO ONE CAN see the future, but David Leo Rice’s cascading dystopias feel more like reality with every passing day. Crack open one of his books and you’ll find lucid prose and striking insight. Dig a few chapters in and you’ll realize you’re reading the ravings of a madman. Follow his train of thought to its logical conclusion and you’ll find yourself completely lost. By this point, though, you’ll be trapped in his bizarre psychogeography, and you’ll soon discover you wouldn’t want to leave if you could. Furthermore, by the time you finish, you’ll look up to see that some of his wildest conceits have already become all too real—or are about to.

The town Rice built in A Room in Dodge City (2017), a novel about a drifter who finds himself in a mythical Kansas burg that quickly swallows him whole, took to the sea three years later in Angel House, in which a haunted ship captained by a complicated villain named Professor Squimbop sails across the interminable “Inland Sea,” bringing death to every new town it reaches. In 2021 came A Room in Dodge City 2: The Blut Branson Era, which Matthew Specktor, writing for Los Angeles Review of Books, called “infinitely approachable” while noting its inclusion of “suicide, child murder, miscellaneous perversions, and psychological disturbances.”

The Squimbop Condition, out now from 11:11 Press, may or may not be the final frontier of the Angel House/Dodge City universe—rumors abound of a forthcoming Dodge City 3—but it has all the components of an epic finale. The novel tells the tale of brothers Jim and Joe Squimbop, who, between infinite rebirths, tour the Midwest, teaching fake classes to empty lecture halls, manifesting plagues and wars across Europe, bringing class tensions to a boil in Los Angeles, and, when they finally separate, going on an epic killing spree in the hopeless hope of reuniting again. This all happens in the book’s first third, and things only spiral further from there.

Despite its absurdism, it’s not hard to imagine the Brothers Squimbop’s journey as a photo negative of our own accelerationist path. The Squimbop Condition is an essentially American novel—a book about the desire to move west, to simultaneously recreate an imagined heartland and an imagined gold rush, a new Kansas and a new Hollywood. It’s about memorials to things that never happened and stories that come true before the telling is through. 

I interviewed Rice in the spring of 2022, as he was putting the final touches on The Squimbop Condition and the United States was a year into Joe Biden’s presidency, settling into the comfortable fiction that the status quo of “liberal sanity” had been restored. “Biden doesn’t have to say anything other than ‘I’m not Donald Trump,’ and there’s some weird sense that that’s redemptive,” Rice told me then. “That logic may be necessary at the moment, but it’s a psychic dead end.” 

He had a point. The second Trump administration has, in less than eight months, laid bare the fragility of the United States’ supposed safeguards against fascism. We are a deeply divided people, and the specter of violent internal conflict looms large. The situation has deteriorated remarkably for some of the most vulnerable members of our society, but for many of us, not much has changed. 

“There’s this lingering cold civil war, this thing that’s happening but that also might not be happening,” Rice tells me now. “There’s something maddening about the fact that no one feels American culture is in a stable position, and yet it’s in some ways still shockingly stable based on that assumption.”

Meanwhile, the rise of artificial intelligence is rendering the proliferation of misinformation even more severe. “You’re training these things on dubious logic and bad facts, and it’s just going to keep ramifying,” he says. “AI spits something back into the waters that some people believe, which causes other people to not believe things that are actually real. It fragments, creating this soupy, glitchy, chaotic feeling about reality, or even the concept of reality.” He goes on to clarify: “This book isn’t about AI, but it is about this idea of feeding information into the storytelling matrix, and what happens when the storytelling matrix spits out stuff that’s already corrupted.”

The stories we tell others, and ourselves, are corroding at an exponential rate. The Squimbop Condition is certainly not the cure for our illness, but it’s the sort of fun-house mirror that helps us see the ugliest parts of who we really are.

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RAPHAEL HELFAND: You’ve written a book called The Squimbop Condition that also includes a chapter called “Squimbop Fever.” Is America currently suffering from these illnesses?

DAVID LEO RICE: I’d say we’re suffering from the fever, whereas the condition is the longer game. The fever is a more temporary, more extreme state. It’s an unsustainable state, whereas the condition is more ontological. It’s the fundamental condition of all Americans, the story of being on the make, of trying to use this backdrop of a new world to make yourself someone in the public eye, of feeling like you’re being compelled to do it by forces outside of you, and that these forces are keeping you from knowing yourself. It’s the desperate hope that by becoming famous enough, you can find out who you really are by having a stranger reflect it back to you.

In the story, Squimbop Fever refers to a very specific delusion that involves having a lost brother. Do you think our current American delusion is one of duality or one of individuality?

It’s definitely a tension between the two. On the one hand, there’s this feeling like there was something lost, the sense that if you found your real lost brother, they could tell you who you really are because they would know where you come from and who your parents were, so they could ground you in a way that, in America, you’re never really grounded—which is partly the selling point. But on the other hand, this feeling creates a psychosis that tends toward violence, and the commodification of violence into a kind of comedy.

One thing I like about your writing is that every idea is taken to its logical extreme somewhere in your literary universe. What would you say drives that compulsion?

I think that’s a very American impulse too, wanting to see the whole frontier. It’s a melancholic impulse, because on the one hand there’s this exuberance of “Let’s see how far we can go, how much we can plunder, how many times we can tell the same joke.” But there’s also a masochism, because you know it’s still somewhere, it’s not infinite. You’re excited to see how far you can go, but you know you’re going to undermine yourself by going there, and there’s this weird desire to have it both ways: to feel the potential of a frontier, either of the country or of the imagination or of the material, that’s infinite, and to have the reassurance of knowing it’s not. “If I can get all the way to the coast,” or “If I can climb all the way to the top,” or “If I can extend this concept to the point where I literally can’t extend it any further,” then “I can feel secure that I’ve mapped my territory.” So there’s a hopeful aspect to that, but there’s the inevitable melancholy of “Well, I guess that’s all there is.”

Do you think any concept can be taken to its logical extreme?

It can certainly be taken to the point where you feel like you’ve short-circuited yourself. Then there’s the philosophical and even the ethical question: when you reach that point, are you the kind of person who says “That’s all there is,” or the kind of person who says “Maybe there’s more?”

Is part of Squimbop Fever the desire to have someone else make that decision for you?

Right, and the hope that you could delegate. When the brothers are lost, the hope remains alive: “When I find my brother, we can get further than either of us could alone,” but it’s also self-handicapping. There could be something you know you can do on your own, but you tell yourself you can’t do it.

In the story, Squimbop Fever causes its victims to murder people and sacrifice them to wax figurines of their imagined lost brothers.

I’ve always been interested in the idea of blurring the timeline between action and reenactment. I really like scenes, when you’re in a museum, of something that hasn’t happened yet, or when there are wax figures of events that you’re nevertheless doing for the first time, but it’s partly because the wax figure gives you the idea to do the event. That type of boggling feels really generative to me, both funny and scary. There’s the sense that if I take this really traumatic event and immediately translate it into kitsch—and therefore into commercial ventures—I’ll never have to grieve and process it as real. It’s a coping mechanism of sorts. There’s something very American about the knowledge that, whenever there’s a bombing or a Columbine, there’s an ever-diminishing amount of time until it becomes a movie. 

One definition of postmodernism is that the past is so full of references that you can’t escape it, but life goes on. You can’t just ignore life, but you also can’t live it without drowning in these references. So postmodernism is a weird workaround where we can still feel real things, but we can only express them with references—often mocking references—to other things.

Reading your novel A Room in Dodge City, I often felt like I was drowning in references. Your writing style is almost schizophrenic. Your narrators would immediately go insane in the real world. How do you stay sane knowing that persona is part of who you are?

Probably only by creating these microworlds. It’s like taking an eyedropper and putting just enough in each container. The bad news is that the narrator would go insane in the real world. The good news is that there can be a constructive world that is just big enough for them to occupy.

I’m an only child, so I’m stuck with my imaginary lost brother, but I know you have an actual brother in real life. Can you describe the sensation of having a brother?

I guess this is the first thing I’ve written that deals with that. I haven’t written about families very much, but all the children—insofar as there are children in my books—are either only children or swarms, infinite families of innumerable children. There is something schizophrenic about the idea of brotherhood, because there’s someone who is you—or the closest someone could be to being you—and yet the fact that they’re not you almost renders them the ultimate stranger. They’re less knowable to you than a friend because, with a friend, you don’t have the supposition that you should know them better than you do. So there’s a unique tension between brothers. It can be generative, but it’s a volatile relationship. There’s always a power struggle between them. 

With doubles, there’s always an instability. With Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, one of them has to prevail. Almost every story about doubles is about one prevailing. Who will dominate the other? Who will be the real one and prove the other is just their shadow? Especially with these brothers, whose parents do technically exist as characters but never in a stable sense, only as folklore, a routine that they’re asked to accept. That’s another thing that interests me a lot: characters who are in a position of needing to accept as real something that they don’t fully believe is real, because it’s that or nothing. 

You can have this feeling—not just a passing fancy but a deep-rooted sense—that things aren’t as real as you’d like them to be. And you can point out the root conspiracy and try to unravel it, but that quickly dovetails into schizophrenia. Or you could go in the other direction and be in complete denial. To me, the sanest way to act is somewhere between the two: “I actually don’t know what’s real, but I’m going to act as though what seems real is.”

In Angel House, your first Squimbop novel, there are two nine-year-old brothers who do seem to have a real symbiosis, with no imbalance of power, and Professor Squimbop goes on a mission to destroy them, but he seems conflicted.

He hopes to destroy them in that his mandate from this distant master, whom he believes is his lost brother, is to destroy them. But secretly, in a repressed part of his psyche, he hopes to be destroyed by them. Part of him wants to let his own fallen form actually fall and let them, his purer form, go on. Maybe parents always feel that way: we only got so far, but our children could go farther. Ultimately, though, you can’t help but ramify whatever sickness you’re already carrying.

In The Squimbop Condition’s final story, “The Last Testament of Professor Squimbop,” Joe Squimbop decides to stay in the town he’s meant to destroy, and his lost brother arrives and assumes his identity almost immediately, turning him into a “mascot, a furry familiar.” Do you think that within our desire to find this other lost piece of ourselves is the knowledge that, if we find our doubles, they will only destroy us?

It’s like the koan “If you ever meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” The thing you wish for will ultimately be your undoing. That’s why you’re afraid of looking for it, but you can’t help yourself because you want to be put in your place. It’s why people democratically vote for dictators. There’s something about true freedom that’s absolutely terrifying, and people always seem to be in a hurry to give it away once they get it. That’s why dictators rarely seize power, at least in modern history, and why dictators can then claim they’re “only doing the will of the people” as a sort of intermediary. And it might sometimes be true, in a way: if they enact mass psychology, they’re no longer autonomous beings; they’re synced up to some mass will. If you ask Stalin why he’s doing what he’s doing, he might not say “Because I personally want to.” He might say “This is what I have to do,” and maybe he’s right. 

You’ve now published a network of books that operate in the same literary universe. What writers do you think have achieved this most successfully over their careers?

The two biggest, for me, are William Faulkner and Bruno Schulz, both of whom literally turned their own hometowns into these mythic universes across books and stories that could be read as the holy books of these places. Or Lovecraft. I was just in Providence, Rhode Island, and we went on the Lovecraft tour, which is run by the city, and it’s interesting how they conflate the sites where he lived and the sites where his stories were set: “Here’s his rooming house, and this is where the professor lives in ‘The Call of Cthulhu.’” It goes back to childhood. If you’re a certain kind of child, you automatically add this either sacred or demonic quality to the places that are familiar to you. So you hear about witches, and they can mean whatever they mean to you, but then you’re like, “Maybe that person on the street is that witch I heard about,” or “Maybe the dump on the edge of town is where werewolves live.” You’re learning about mythological concepts for the first time and grafting them onto the geography that you’re also encountering for the first time. 

Something about that is more exciting to me than either strict realism or pure fantasy. Philip Roth also has the same characters in otherwise unrelated books, or a character who remembers in one book something a different character did in another one. It’s a grand patchwork of ramifications. You have to hope to live a long time to have this growing fictional world as a counterlife (to use a Philip Roth term), a life that grows alongside you and that does actually map out. It’s the thing that’s most on my mind in The Squimbop Condition because I view it as an interstitial book. It has these mobile characters who are threads going between Dodge City and the Angel House town and Hollywood and Kansas. There’s something very exciting to me about filling in the map, even if it calls into question whether it’s the real map.

So we haven’t reached the end of the Squimbop universe?

I feel compelled to keep wondering what the edges of the universe are. There’s a Harold Bloom book that compares the exodus of the Jews to the Mormons going off into America on their vision quest. On the one hand, it’s something that’s very opposed to the America of the East Coast at that time, but on the other hand, nothing’s more American than heading west to create your own world. There’s a beauty in the inevitability that no matter what you do, you’ll be partaking in this great national legend, and there’s a horror in it, which is that whatever you do will have already been done. That’s why everything becomes shtick immediately. There’s the famous saying “comedy is tragedy plus time,” but now the video denying the shooting happens at the same time as the shooting; there’s barely a glitch between them. It’s sinister, but it’s also very interesting. There’s something about it that perversely gets my juices flowing.