Page 66 of Muscle Cub

“True crime shows. Here’s another one. This young guy—we’ll call him Toby—is staying at a cabin he found on Airbnb, this big blizzard hits, and he gets snowed in with no power. He burns all the logs in the fireplace and all the ones stacked on the hearth, and he’s outside trying to split more wood. He’s really struggling, it’s getting dark, and he’s starting to panic.”

“Wait. Hold up. Why can’t he chop wood?”

“He’s a little college twink. Like a book nerd with no upper body strength.”

“Excuse me, sir. Why can’t Toby be a literary type who happens to be strong from doing lots of carpentry and renovations on his house?”

“Mm.” Austin pulled a regretful face and shook his head. “No. He doesn’t have a house. He still lives in the dorms. He’s a student, remember? He hasn’t reached his daddy phase yet. Suddenly, this sexy, older lumberjack dude shows up. Frank. He lives in the woods nearby, and he’s been spying on Toby. Frank goes over to check and see if Toby needs anything, and Toby asks him if he can help him split firewood. Frank takes off his shirt, and he’s enormous, beefy, hairy, and he looks really hot chopping wood—like, it’s shot in slow motion and shit”—I didn’t bother to interrupt him with the crushing news that there is no slo-mo in books—“and of course they end up having sex in front of the fire.”

“Of course.”

“But then—twist—we find out Frank’s been hiding out in this remote area for years because he’s wanted for murder. One he committed with an ax.”

“And how do we find that out?”

“Toby sees a story about it on the internet.”

“I thought the power was out.”

“He sees it on his phone. And he’s like”—Austin shifted his voice to an impersonation that sounded even more bro than usual with a touch of Kardashian vocal fry—“‘Oh, no. I’ve already fallen for this sexy lumberjack daddy, and now I have to kill him in self-defense.’ But he has no choice. It’s the only way he’ll get home alive.”

“Back to the dorm in time for winter term to start,” I added.

“Right.” Austin was immune to my sarcasm. “And his friends all start to worry about him. He’s not the same. He’s tormented—no, haunted—by everything that went down over break. He keeps thinking he sees Frank everywhere. It turns out, the lumberjack may not really be dead after all but stalking him forever more.”

“So it’s dark erotica/instalove romance/psychological thriller/horror?”

“Yes! Suspenseful. Like Gone Girl but gay. And with a ton of sex.”

I grimaced.

Austin rattled off another implausible premise that began with a ton of gay sex and ended in a murder-suicide. When I asked if all his ideas started out like porn from the pre-internet era, he said, “Sex sells.”

“Okay, but why all the surprise murder?”

“People love love stories. And they love murder. I’m thinking, combine the two… Boom. Brilliant.”

“You don’t consider all this gore to be a little on the gloomy side?”

“No, because they’re crimes of passion. People get off on that way more than the emo shit you discuss with your therapist.”

“I think you might need to discuss your shit with a therapist,” I muttered.

“They’re killer ideas.”

“Literally.”

“All right off the top of my head.”

“You plucked them right out of thin air. I was here.”

“Imagine what I could come up with if I stared out the window for several hours every day.”

“Oh, fuck you.” I launched a pillow at his face. “That was a low blow. For the record, you typically don’t kill off main characters. Especially not in a love story. Audiences don’t like that.”

“Ah-ha, but see, that’s why it’s so cool. It’s totally unpredictable. People will sit in the theater stunned for like ten minutes as the credits roll.”

“I am a novelist, not a filmmaker.”