What James A. Foster is writing these days
No novels yet (but see below for published poems and short stories). Hey, agents and editors, wouldn’t you love to see your name here? Contact me!
To Ashley and Lilly Duprey, identical twins, graduate today from Grinnel High with the rest of the Class of 1977. Tomorrow, if all goes well, their dreams will tear them apart. Ashley longs to escape their dying hometown, Grinnel, though it will hurt to leave Lilly. Lilly plans to stay and raise a family with her boyfriend, Daimon. Both their dreams die with Lilly when Daimon, stoned and drunk, crashes head-on into a family of four. To keep from ruining his future, Daimon tells the police Lilly was driving. Ashley doesn’t want Lilly to be remembered only as a killer, so she vows not to leave Grinnel until Lilly’s reputation is secure.
Meanwhile, Daimon’s guilt drives him to methamphetamines and debt. Suspicion grows that he caused the accident and cravenly blamed his dead fiancé. Ashley thinks these rumors insult Lilly, whom she believes incapable of loving such a monster. To defend her sister’s judgment, and rescue the man Lilly loved, she marries Daimon. They move into a mobile home and she takes a job.
As Daimon deteriorates, Ashley realizes she has stumbled into Lilly’s dream—life in Grinnel with Daimon—and it’s a nightmare. The final straw comes when Daimon’s dealer demands Ashley cover Daimon’s debts…or else. Unable to pay, fed up with Daimon, and wanting her old life back, she schemes with her friend, the bouncer from the local bar, to fake her own kidnapping. She’ll pay the dealer with the ransom, frame Daimon, and start a new life elsewhere. When a double murder and an unseasonable ice storm intervene, she vanishes. Her disappearance remains a mystery until years later, when a stranger appears with two competing explanations: a comforting one, and THE SECOND ONE.
Inspired by ALCESTIS, Euripides’ tragedy, THE SECOND ONE explores our struggle to create personal identity in the face of irreversible mistakes and unforeseeable accidents. It probes the dark and painful places where family, fate, and addiction intersect, as in Tana French’s THE SEEKER or Ely Crainor’s OZARK DOGS. Like Jess Walter’s THE COLD MILLIONS, the narrative unfolds from the individual perspectives of a diverse ensemble of characters, shaped by a peculiar—but not unfamiliar—time and place.
(93,000 word literary suspense)
A man calls 911 hundreds of times a week, each time reporting some atrocity he is watching through the windows of the apartment building across the street. It happens so often, the EMT dispatchers haze noobies by dispatching them to answer the call (as they are required by law to do). When the ambulance arrives, there is only an empty lot. Apparently, the building where the bad things are happening doesn’t exist. .
Or does it? One old-time EMT has learned that if he looks just right, he can see the building, and the doorman beckoning him in. Eventually, no one will ride with him, so he quits the job.
When the calls stop coming in, the protagonist trys to find out what happened to the caller, and to the phantom building. What he discovers is the heart of the story.
This is based on a true story
(Literary Horror, target 75,000 words, in structural editing)
A one-armed shaman named The Mountain Who Waits and his friends take revenge, when a physically and emotionally twisted stranger named Ghost, commits an act of violence. Ghost survives, and forms The Brotherhood, a band of fanatical teenage boys. After he destroys his own village, he sets out to destroy Mountain and his people.
Until Mountain understands that his connection to the land is more than symbolic, he cannot beat Ghost. In particular, he needs the help of the volcano who shares his name. Ghost cannot keep The Brotherhood together unless he learns that the true basis for leadership is friendship. If he fails in that, he cannot survive.
The Mountain Who Waits is set around 10,000 years ago in what is today the Pacific Northwest. It is a meditation on place, family, and loyalty.
(Literary Thriller, target 95,000 words, ready for structural editing)
A group of strangers meet in an abandoned space station, which was built as a mining operation on an asteroid. The station is haunted by the ghost of an AI, who doesn’t want them there.
(Horror/Scifi, 75,000 word target, inspired by Shirley Jackson’s “Hill House”. In prep)
A surreal short short story about a conversation about life and death with a trout that floats in the air at an outdoor cafe in Amsterdam (I get you guessed that from the title).
(720 word meditatiopn on mortality)
Published in Jersey Devil Press, issue 128, April 2025
A homeless young man is convinced that he can make himself invisible, because that’s how he thinks the world sees him. He tries to figure out why some people see him just fine, especially social workers, police, and thugs.
One final confrontation convinces him to disappear once and for all.
(2,000 word meditation on homelessness and mental illness)
Published in Synkroniciti Magazine, Volume 7, Number 1, 5 March 2025 (Katherine McDaniel, Editor), a special issue on “Identiy”.
A young man in a dead end job discovers that he can skip mentally into the future by setting the countdown timer on his watch to a negative number. Only then does he learn what happened to his body in the meantime, and what he stands to lose. (2,800 words)
Three co-workers are stuck in Hell, the bar where they work, trapped by a blizzard. They discuss what makes life worth living, despite loss and impermanence. (3,900 words)
A pair of biologists trapping kangaroo rats and rattlesnakes in the desert are plagued by a wild stallion. But it’s something very small that nearly kills them. This is a meditation on science, humility, and our place in the natural world. (5,400 words)
An ex-cougar hunter and his horse carry a special spool of fiber optic cable over a rugged pass in New Hampshire, to complete the national high-speed internet infrastructure. Along the way, they confront their worst fears and learn to trust each other and to respect that which is wild.
(7,400 words, based on a true story)
A drunken frat boy brings joy the local drug dealer in a depressed, dying small town. (2,200 words)
A tale of friendship, loss, and recovery that centers around fly fishing on the Saint Joe River. (3,700 words)
Too many to mention. Contact me if you’re interested.
About celebrating the things and places where I am not.
Published in Bowery Gothic
Why the squirrel never says “no”.
This is why you never expect another nighttime.
What it’s like to grow up as “trailer trash”.
Instructions on how to fly, and why we do it.
The gifts we give our children aren’t always what we think.
When the gifts we bring grow stale, all that remains is the box they came in.
Pain and love, like the sharp end of a sleeping cat’s claw.
Sometimes all you have to do is breathe.
What it’s like to experience every sensation as sound.
On the ephemerality, joy, and sorrow of having a child.
How to deal with your cancer.
On meeting a stranger in a hotel lobby at a writers conference.
Holding on to a love that never was.
Our life, like the ocean, has monsters in the deep parts.
Yes, I’m writing one. It will be a tale of how some people can never sit still until they’ve at least tried to understand absolutely about everything.
I still publish scientific papers. I’m not listing them here, because there are many (over 140, I lose count) in multiple fields (Computer Science, Classics, Mathematics, Philosophy, Microbial Ecology, and more). Contact me if you would like a copy of my (always in-progress) CV.