Book excerpt: "The Slip" by Lucas Schaefer
Lucas Schaefer's debut comic novel, "The Slip," set in and around a boxing gym in Austin, Texas, pounces on issues of race, sex and gender identity in America today, as a long-dormant missing-person's case comes back to life.
Read an excerpt below.
"The Slip" by Lucas Schaefer
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The morning after Ed Hooley saw a coyote in the supply closet, Bob Alexander declared something smelled rotten inside Terry Tucker's Boxing Gym.
This was at six a.m. on a Tuesday, midway through abs and stretching. Inside the ring, the eleven members of the First Thing crew sprawled out on foam mats as Terry Tucker, fifty-four, led them through an arduous medley of scissor kicks and side-to-sides, knees-to-your-ears and upside-down bicycle. It was August in Austin, the average age inside the ring was forty-nine, and though it would be hours before a single speck of perspiration would appear on Terry's left temple, his charges were sopping.
Sopping except for Bob Alexander. Bob was lanky and spry, a semi-affable curmudgeon. At sixty-eight, he was the oldest of the First Thingers and among the fittest, too, though on this morning he was only going through the motions. Preoccupying Bob was the anonymous note that had been placed under the windshield wiper of his Audi sometime the night before.
It had been a decade since his nephew had disappeared, and things like this still happened on occasion. A lead to nowhere, a tip to nothing. A psychic in New Braunfels who'd experienced a vision. "Sounds promising," Bob had told the detective who'd called with that gem. A few days before, a short article on the tenth anniversary of the disappearance had run in the Statesman, so of course the kooks and grifters were coming out of the woodwork now.
No one had ever shown up at his house before, though, and it was this, combined with the note's puzzling content, which meant that as soon as Bob left the gym, he would take the folded paper, stowed in his glove compartment, to Austin Police headquarters, a time-suck in building form, where, if he had to guess, he'd rehash the story of his missing nephew, Nathaniel Rothstein, without coming any closer to finding him.
From "The Slip" by Lucas Schaefer. Copyright © 2025 by Lucas Schaefer. Excerpted with permission by Simon & Schuster, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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