Gods Fare No Better

PRE-ORDER: Available 04/17/25

Cyclone City is unraveling. A megacity built on ambition, now rotting from the inside—infested with warring cartels, techno-mystics, and assassins stitched together from spare parts.

Kentaro woke up without a past. No memories, no identity—just the faint hum of something monstrous buried inside him. The monks of the Dying World Clerics gave him shelter, a simple life of sweeping floors and weather control. But hunger and ambition claw their way back into his soul, dragging him out of exile—straight into a city that wants him dead.

Now, he’s hacking through cybernetic samurai, battling demonic creatures, and carving his way through assassins built from living myths. His katana whispers forgotten memories, his body pulses with a parasite made of stories, and the city’s fungal heart beats beneath the streets, watching, waiting.

As assassins and apostles clash, Kentaro finds himself tangled in a conspiracy that calls him deeper into the labyrinth of Cyclone City. And at its core, something monstrous stirs.

A mind-melting fusion of cyberpunk, animism, and body horror, Gods Fare No Better is a brutal, electrifying descent into a world where gods, demons, and mycelia fight for the future of a dying world.

Welcome to Neon Hell.

"Osborne's vision of a cyberpunk world is one tangled in mysticism. You have a deer-headed robocop, a talking sword, and a digital afterlife that comes with a price tag. Balancing the esoteric existentialism are gripping fight scenes and off-color humor. This is the closest a reading experience has ever been to watching anime." - Kelby Losack, author of Mercy and Letting Out the Devils

"Gods Fare No Better is an anime extravaganza. It combines ferocious action, philosophical speculation, and low brow humor to great effect. It's the kind of novel that engulfs you like an epic but entertains you like the best pulp fiction. Osborne's most ambitious and challenging book yet." -- Scott Adlerberg, author of The Screaming Child

“Gods Fare No Better is a rich book with a spiritual cyberpunk heart at the center, full of humor, cinematic prowess, memorable action scenes, and masculine prose. J. David Osborne takes diverse range of influences including Takashi Miike, spirituality, cult films, anime, and manga, and filters it through his brilliant imagination and witty sensibilities. This is sharp, wild cyberpunk narrative that feels like a movie you can’t get enough of.”—Grant Wamack, author of Bullet Tooth & The Frolicking

“Without J. David Osborne, I would have never started writing.” - David Simmons, author of Ghosts of East Baltimore and Eradicator

"A hell of a ride! J David Osborne’s Grand Guignol cyberpunk epic is propulsive, sweeping, and hilarious. Gods Fare No Better will have you gasping at the audacious set pieces, loveable characters, and its compelling, blood-spattered neon world. As the guts, shattered bones and burnt out cyber-implants pile up in the phantasmagorical Cyclone City, you’ll think it can’t get any more outrageous. And then it does." - Matt Sini, Getting Lit Podcast

“Somewhere between BLAME! and Blade Runner is Gods Fare No Better. Hyperviolent cyberpunk animism at full throttle—myth, metal, and memory stitched together by Yarn. The novel drags you through kill contracts, clown massacres, and a boss fight with a giant baby—all while something ancient pulses beneath the streets. It’s mythpunk, it’s body horror, it’s cyberpunk cracked wide open and rewired with fungal dreams.” - Jay Springett, worldrunner, author, strategist