Unset 1965

These are digital versions of the letters sent in the mail for Unset 1965, an epistolary horror story that was delivered between March-October 2022 to subscribers.

The California desert is lonely and so was I. Around me, the Joshua trees raised their arms to the sky in prayer, the sky turned a brilliant orange, and the sand swirled in small eddies around my feet like tiny magic clouds. The desert was beautiful and terrifying and for a brief moment, I felt beautiful and terrifying too. I want to walk out into the sunset and disappear, but I do not. Everything here survives on barely anything, but I cannot subsist on barely anything. Despite everything, I still want to live.

In a distance, I saw a neon sign and it said VACANCY.

Unset 1965 is a short epistolary horror story, delivered in the mail between May to October 2022. It is a story about the California desert, ghost towns on old Route 66, and falling in love with a old motel that needs you as much as you need it.

It was part of an ongoing shift in my work towards tangibility and slowness, and experiences that you hold in your hands. Subscribers received physical letters, over 6 months, a story intentionally moderated by the actual passage of time. It is an exploration of a larger project, the Unset Motel, which is about a motel that eats people, which is being poked at in several formats right now, including a game and a novel, but this is a self-contained story. It is self indulgent and moody, and I poured in all my love of the southwestern California desert, my obsession with ghost towns, and the feeling of wanting to drive off into the sunset and start everything over. 

This download is an archive of the letters sent, which are also available on Google Drive. You can use these files to recreate the story for a friend. You are free to modify any content, and share it for non-commercial usage, under the Creative Commons license stated below. 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.