Satire Dystopia: Weird Tales of Gods, Dinosaurs, and Chaos

A Dystopocon Anthology Collection of Seventeen Short Stories

Cody Poston

Still here.

Surprised? Me too. And somehow, louder this time.

This is the second book in the series. If you haven’t read the first one, well, you should. Not because this book depends on it, it doesn’t, but because I like money and profit, and frankly, you buying both feels like a win for everyone.

What you’re holding is the same chaos as before: part diary, part anthropology experiment, part comedy set in a Walmart parking lot. Yes, that’s three parts. Math was never my strength.

Who am I? Depends on the day. Not a scholar. Not a guru. Just a middle-aged human with too many note apps, a bad habit of eavesdropping, and a belief that people are funnier when they don’t mean to be. I write these stories because if I don’t, they rattle around in my head like loose screws. Writing is often less expensive than therapy, although it is rarely as beneficial.

This time around, the stories wandered farther than expected, into bars haunted by invisible cats, theme parks run by elder gods, nightclubs with dinosaur comedians, and offices where Helvetica is treated like a war crime. Each one is absurd, but if I did my job, you’ll find an uncomfortable truth hiding under the punchline.

Here’s a sampler platter:

In Heavy Petting, Frankie goes on a date while her six-foot Persian cat named Gloom, the embodiment of her anxiety, sits across from them, heckling every move.

Elder God Land takes us behind the curtain of Disney’s newest “innovation”: a theme park designed with Lovecraftian elder gods. Churros, animatronics, and sanity erosion all included.

Last Roar at Club Extinction follows Terry the Allosaurus, a washed-up comedian wrestling with faith, fame, and chicken wings that taste uncomfortably like family.

In Flat Design for a Blind God, Vince the designer goes to war with ADA compliance and Helvetica itself, screaming into the void while his agency crumbles under laminated accessibility signage.

The Monet Experience immerses us in Natalie’s impossible job of running an immersive art installation while battling chaos, self-doubt, and her own inner saboteur. Then Monica walks in, and everything shifts.

And in Dirk Donnar: Last Cop on Jurassic Island, a burned-out detective patrols a stitched-together Jurassic hellscape, shouting dinosaurs into submission while influencers livestream their own funerals.

And more, a lot more waiting in this book.

For those who skipped the first book’s prologue, picture me giving you the disappointed teacher stare over my glasses, let me back up for a second. I want to mention a few things about myself that may be helpful. The book is authored by me, well, technically, the name on the cover is “me,” but it isn’t my actual name. It’s a pseudonym. It’s part performance, part shield, part running joke. People who know me in real life already get it. For everyone else, just think of it as a mask I wear to tell these stories without the burden of being “me” the whole time.

I’ve always liked making things. As a kid, it wasn’t LEGO castles, but arranging Marx dinosaur figures on the bricks of our fireplace. In my mind, those bricks became a primordial canyon, my Micronaut figures swooping in to explore this strange new planet and study the plastic creatures that inhabited it. From there, it was comic books, science fiction, role-playing games, video games, and music, all the things that eventually merged into what we now call pop culture. That stew has been shaping me for decades, and it still leaks into everything I write.

Technology finally caught up to me. I can draft stories on the couch, in my car, wherever the idea hits. Editors are easier to find and more open-minded than ever. Self-publishing, once a whispered embarrassment, is now a thriving path.

We still don’t have flying cars or a moon base, but at least a few of the promised inventions from our childhood have actually materialized. And this book, me being able to create it and put it in your hands, is one of them.

A quick warning, especially for anyone who knows me outside these pages: these stories aren’t about you. Or them. Or us. Every piece started with something real, but they’ve been stretched, filtered, mashed together, and set on fire until the spark is almost unrecognizable. Honestly, most of these were written before I even met you. If you see yourself in them, that’s not proof. It’s projection.

So welcome, or welcome back. Laugh if you want, groan if you must, and maybe finish this book with a little less faith in perfection and a little more joy in the mess.