Johnny Payne

“What a crazy and confounding contraption from the toy-box of a Macedonio Fernandez or a Julio Cortazar have we in our hands when we open this graveyard of first chapters.  But an American, rough-n-tumble Macedonio or Gregory Samsonite awakening from one dream into multifarious landscapes of dead-end jobs, alien abductions, Medieval moors, six packs, tow trucks, conquistador battles, and arctic explorers, scurvy-ridden, and surviving on pemmican hash.  It's a wild whirlwind, pure fun and a turbine of energy and shrapnel.  You won't be able to put this novel down.”

— Anthony Seidman, author of That Beast in the Mirror

"Johnny Payne’s new novel is intelligent, skillful, inventive, and moving. It begins in a North American junkyard and ends at a Peruvian hacienda, tracking the struggles of a confused young writer to find the woman who raised him, who may or may not be his biological mother. Surprisingly enough, despite the turbulence of the journey, the book has a happy ending, and even more surprising, the happy ending is earned, and richly satisfying. Payne is such a master of fictive techniques that he can do almost anything he wants on the page and make it work. The text is often insanely funny, yet confronts the unavoidable disturbance at the core of human experience. This is a book that everyone should read.”

— Stephen-Paul Martin, author of TwentyTwenty and The Ace of Lightning

"In the tradition of the late, great Gilbert Sorrentino, Johnny Payne’s latest “novel”, A Graveyard of First Chapters, is a tour de force of narrative invention, an exposition of writing’s potential when it is freed from the laborious conventions of the contemporary novel. Payne has a ball as he flips in and out of various story lines across time, space, the “real” world and myth tracking Jasper and Vanessa through semi-related stories interspersed with quasi-historical/fantasy narratives from pre-colonial Peru to Hindu myth. Equally whimsical, insightful, and hilarious, Payne thankfully shares his writer character Jasper’s lack of a sense of closure, the ultimate bugaboo of the unimaginative hordes. Be prepared—he careens through multiple realities with the unrestrained joy of an 8-year old kid on his first time in bumper cars. A Graveyard of First Chapters is a true delight."

—Michael Boughn, author of Cosmographia—A Post-Lucretian Faux Micro-Epic

“Johnny Payne’s A Graveyard of First Chapters is an exuberant, genre-bending novel that delights in the very act of storytelling. … Payne’s mastery lies in showing that meaning doesn’t always reside in resolution; it can live in the accumulation of starts, each shimmering with possibility. For readers who crave both wit and depth, who don’t mind being whisked from a love story to a historical romp to a philosophical aside, this book offers a literary playground.”

—Swapna Peri, Book Reviews Cafe, posted to Goodreads

A GRAVEYARD OF FIRST CHAPTERS

A dazzling literary fiction novel about second chances, buried stories, and the strange power of starting over.

Once a bestselling author with ten novels under his belt, Jasper Delgado has watched his life crumble piece by piece. He's lost his girlfriend, his house, his life savings to a disastrous day-trading venture, and worst of all—his confidence as a writer. All he has left is a beat-up laptop filled with what he calls his "graveyard of first chapters": brilliant beginnings to novels he could never finish. This experimental novel explores the tortured world of writers and writing, where creativity meets crisis and inspiration battles despair.

Then a mysterious letter arrives from Peru—typed on a broken Corona typewriter.

A half-sister he never knew existed claims he's inherited a crumbling hacienda near the ancient city of Cusco. The letter is eccentric, misspelled, and possibly a scam. But with nothing left to lose and nowhere else to turn, Jasper embarks on an improbable Peru adventure that will force him to confront his past—and the stories he abandoned.

What begins as a desperate escape becomes a journey of magical transformation.

As Jasper travels from American car washes to Peruvian highlands, from ayahuasca ceremonies to encounters with mysterious pottery thieves, fiction begins to bleed into reality. His abandoned stories start making uncanny sense. Memory blurs with myth. The line between imagination and truth dissolves entirely. This metafiction explores what happens when life imitates art, when the stories we tell ourselves become the stories that save us.

Accompanied by his rekindled love Vanessa, his unlikely friend Butch, and the enigmatic Inés—who may or may not be his sister—Jasper discovers that his graveyard of creative failures might not be a death sentence after all. What if these fragments—of stories, of life, of love, of identity—can be pieced together into something magnificent and whole?

By turns comic, philosophical, and heartbreakingly self-aware, this magical realism masterpiece walks the blurred lines between fiction and existence. It's an experimental novel about unfinished stories, written on the page and in the heart—and the absurd, glorious, completed puzzle that can be made of all those fragments. A story about second chances that reminds us it's never too late to rewrite your life.

Published: July 28, 2025
Paperback ISBN: 979-8-9990422-0-0
Ebook ISBN: 979-8-9990422-1-7