About me
Sean Patrick Carlin (he/him) is an author and essayist, as well as an environmental activist with the Climate Reality Project. His debut novel, The Dogcatcher, was published in 2023 by DarkWinter Press. An occult horror/dark comedy in the spirit of Shaun of the Dead, it's the story of a municipal animal-control officer whose Upstate New York community is being terrorized by a werewolf.
In Saturday Morning Cartoons, Carlin's forthcoming collection of magical-realism novellas set in the late 1980s, three very different preadolescent boys each come into possession of an ordinary novelty item with extraordinary powers that opens up a world of wondrous possibilities and heartbreaking revelations. Like Stephen King's The Body, Robert R. McCammon's Boy's Life, and Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, Saturday Morning Cartoons explores the formative experiences of 12-year-old boys with heart and humor: the inevitable disillusionment with our parents that marks the end of childhood and the beginning of adolescence; the unacknowledged psychological toll parental addiction and divorce take on children; the emotional and social complexities of having one foot in childhood (still playing with action figures and watching cartoons) and another in adolescence (noticing the opposite sex and wishing they would notice you), and how unwarned and utterly unprepared we leave boys to navigate that hormonal minefield.
Carlin's next novel, The Lost Boys of the Bronx, is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story about three 17-year-old boys in the summer of 1994 who set out to shoot an amateur sequel to their favorite horror movie, Joel Schumacher's The Lost Boys, on the streets of New York City.
