This story was born out of a desire to play with a timeless archetype: the trickster.

Experienced through first-person narrative, The Culling of Casimir seeks to break the boundaries of fantasy by introducing abstract concepts that arrive when we are met with the bildungsroman of a murderer, the budding of an artist whom finds poetry in death and salvation in the paradoxical. He dares you to say you don’t sympathize with him.

Although political and social threats play a role in Casimir’s realm, the story takes after Poe’s style of deriving purpose and narrative development through the changes in the characters’ psyches. Only ... without all of the 1800’s verbosity. Rather than taking a bucket-of-details-approach, I let the characters manifest their realm, deriving imaginative environments with a greater emphasis on emotions and moment-by-moment decisions to craft a tale more human and digestible.

Drawn entirely from his perspective, Casimir demonstrates how to find romance in the horrific, nightmares in the ordinary, and passion through observation, all while being hounded by the multitude of consequences which follow the assassination of his king.

He’s considerate, he’s crass, he’s altruistic yet ruthless, and all the while, he’s certain that there’s a laugh to be had somewhere in it all. Born with tangled pasts and an unfavorable hand dealt by fate, Casimir is the jester who never loses his mind, but never needs to, because he is determined to savor every moment of life’s chaos.