The book you’re now reading has never been conventionally published.

Let me backtrack a little.

In 1999 I landed a literary agent with a technothriller novel called Origin, about the United States government keeping Satan in an underground research facility in New Mexico.

Origin was my seventh novel, and arguably the first I’d written that was any good. The other six never got published, though they did garner me more than 400 rejections. Apparently Origin wasn’t good enough either, because it was rejected by damn near every editor in New York.

Undaunted, I wrote another technothriller, blending in elements of science, mystery, and humor. The List, in my opinion, was better than Origin. Not only was it trendy, tying in closely to the work being done on the Human Genome Project, but it had more heart than its predecessor.

It didn’t sell either.

I decided my problem was mixing genres. Since there’s no Thriller-Humor-Horror-Sci-Fi section in bookstores, I needed to write something that fit easily within an established genre.

I chose a medical thriller, in the style of Robin Cook and Michael Palmer. No humor this time. Just a by-the-numbers, straightforward, homogenous thriller, with an everyman hero trapped in a terrible situation that quickly spirals out of control.

The book was called Disturb. My agent hated it, probably because it had no humor in it, and she never sent it out. So Disturb remains my only book that has never been rejected.

After Disturb, I wisely chose to put the humor back into my narratives, and wrote Whiskey Sour. I’ve been writing Jack Daniels thrillers ever since.

When I started having some success with the Jack books, I looked back on my earlier novels and decided to offer Disturb, Origin, and The List as free downloads on JAKonrath.com.

The reader response took me by surprise. The books have been downloaded thousands of times each. I’m humbled and flattered by the attention my failures have gotten, and have answered quite a bit of email about them. The question people most often ask is, “When will these be published?”

I still don’t have an answer to that.

Origin, The List, Disturb, and my short story collection 55 Proof aren’t available in bookstores, or libraries, or anywhere other than JAKonrath.com and Amazon Kindle. They don’t have ISBN numbers. They haven’t been catalogued by the Library of Congress. They haven’t been professionally typeset, or edited. But fans, collectors, and completests have asked for them, so here they are.

Disturb is my red-headed stepchild. While I love the main concept, and many of the scenes and ideas, there isn’t much of me in the book. If anyone wondered what a JA Konrath thriller would look like stripped of its humor, this is it. Many years later, I wrote another book without any humor in it. I used the pseudonym Jack Kilborn, and the book was a horror novel called Afraid.

I hope you enjoyed Disturb, and would love to hear what you thought. I wrote this back in 2002, and recently in the news there has been talk of pharmaceutical companies working on the same thing that I postulated five years ago. Let’s all hope they aren’t as unethical as the scientists in Disturb.

Also, as an added bonus, following this afterword is a horrid little story I wrote a while back, but didn’t include in 55 Proof, called Dear Diary.

Joe Konrath
April, 2009