All different ethnicities, and hybrid ethnicities, different walks of life, and tattoos just out the wazoo.” This new environment taught Hudson to be “more compassionate and loving of different kinds of people” – even while the Marines were instructing him “how to sneak up on somebody with a knife.”Īfter serving as a rifleman in the Marine Reserves, Hudson entered the MFA program at Brown University, a famously experimental program headed by Robert Coover. “Really? It’s the worst!” But Hudson persisted, and he was thrown into a very different world: “Next thing I knew, everybody was different.

“I want to be a grunt, like I read about,” Hudson told them, to which they replied. He had good grades, so said they could get him working on computers. When he went to the recruiting office, they seemed taken aback. And I was like, you need to get out of this soft, white whatever you’re in and have an adventure while you’re young.” “I’d been reading a lot of Cormac McCarthy Blood Meridian was my favorite book for a long time. “I think I was probably depressed actually and just didn’t know it,” Hudson says. Then, after graduating from UT-Austin, he decided to join the Marines. Hudson grew up in North Carolina and Texas. Then, from the perspective of the literary world at least, he disappeared.

Hudson was included in the New Yorker’s 2001 debut fiction issue – with Jonathan Safran Foer and Nell Freudenberger – and then in Granta’s Best Young American Novelists list in 2007, alongside Foer and Freudenberger again, as well as Karen Russell, Yiyun Li and Anthony Doerr, among others. President made about as big of a splash as a story collection can make. Gork is less Game of Thrones and more The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with fire-breathing characters and a John Hughes-esque plot.įifteen years ago, Hudson’s Gulf War satire Dear Mr.

Then again, some dragons, like Gork, are sensitive souls with puny horns and Will to Power ratings of a mere “Snackalicious” who are more at home reciting poetry than incinerating new species. In Gabe Hudson’s hilarious debut novel Gork, the Teenage Dragon, dragons are not mythic earth creatures but a terrifying extraterrestrial species hell-bent on conquering the universe with help of their cyborg slaves and talking spaceships. For example, Beowulf is “nothing but a pack of slanderous lie about my kind, written by a bum poet who didn’t have the gumption to sign his own name to the book.” “Not only are your reports about us dragons wildly inaccurate, they are downright insensitive and repugnant,” Gork tells the reader. Gork is a dragon, but not the kind you might be familiar with from HBO’s blockbuster TV show.

Gork, the Teenage Dragon by Gabe Hudson