The Other Ones

From Dave Housley, one of the founding editors of Barrelhouse, comes a ghostly, comic new novel that asks just one seemingly innocent question: What would you do if your fellow office workers won the lottery?  "The Office meets Then We Came to the End meets that recurring nightmare where your most loathsome co-workers win the lottery that you mocked them for playing each week...a sly gem of a novel." — Leslie Pietrzyk,author of Admit This to No One  In The Other Ones, Housley tracks the actions and reactions of multiple characters in the wake of a cataclysmic event — a coworker winning the lottery.  For better or worse, what can you do? Some coworkers dig in, some quit, some go...more than a little crazy. One commits suicide by jumping off the roof of the office, then returns as a ghost to haunt the winners. Funny, tragic, and real, The Other Ones shines a light on our contemporary relationships to money, work, and each other."Using his trademark wry, observant humor, Dave Housley explores a fascinating premise —when an office lottery pool hits the jackpot, what happens to the workers who are now multi-millionaires versus those who didn't put in a dollar to play? Filled with insights and skewering commentary on office politics and relationships, marketing culture, ageism, and commercialism, THEOTHER ONES delivers a funny and suspenseful tale of a corporate crisis as you've never read before."— Angie Kim, author of Miracle Creek "Dave Housley's The Other Ones is a riotous and bighearted office comedy, about a surprising kind of Rapture where it's not a heavenly force that whisks away half of your co-workers but a winning lottery ticket you forget to throw in on. Fans of Chris Bachelder or Sam Lipsyte will thrill as Housley applies eight point eight million dollars worth of regret to his loveable left-behind heroes, eager to learn who will crack among the cubicles and who might find another way to win their own good life."— Matt Bell, author of Appleseed

Rion Amilcar Scott, author of The World Doesn’t Require You

“A pitch-perfect funhouse mirror view of our ridiculous times. We're all Howard and Charles standing in front of a closed factory waiting for the world we knew to make sense. Read this in front of a shuttered factory, while looking for dinosaurs and UFOs, or just any moment you want to feel pleasure in a mad, mad world."

or rather, for the people trying and failing to understand them. Like so much of Housley’s best work, absurdity simmers and spills over in this story, funny and unexpectedly sad in the best, scathing-est way.”

"Waiting for Godot for Trump voters

J. L. Delozier, author of Con Me Once

"A trippy, unique spin on the vampire mythology that'll satisfy Deadheads and noir purists alike."

About the Author

Dave Housley is a writer, editor, and web strategist living in State College, PA. He has published two previous novels and four books of short fiction. He is one of the founding editors of the literary organization Barrelhouse. He is the Director of Web Strategy at Penn State Outreach and Online Education. He lives in State College, Pennsylvania.

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