Commercial science fiction. 93,900 words. 27 chapters. A standalone novel, the first of a planned five-book series. For readers of Dark Matter by Blake Crouch and The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. The manuscript is complete and revision-complete, and has been through beta readers.
In the autumn of 1995, a Columbus merchandise planner having the worst day of his ordinary life walks off a path in the woods and finds a hollow tree that answers to him. A Mean Man is a novel about averages, marriages, time, and the things that keep the minutes.
Tom Sorenson is thirty-five years old, a merchandise planner at a Columbus, Ohio retailer that keeps passing him over, and married to a woman he stopped seeing years ago. Then he finds something in a hollow oak in a nearby park: a way to stop the world, step outside it, and put things back the way he wants them.
What Tom does with that power is buy a winning lottery ticket, fix a bad meeting, and try to save a marriage that is already being dismantled behind his back. What he does not understand, at first, is who else has been editing.
It is a novel about an ordinary, disappointed man handed unlimited authority over his own life, and what that authority reveals about him. It is also about a wife with a secret of her own, and a two-year-old daughter who keeps looking at things that aren't there.
It is written as a period novel rather than a near-future one: 1995 Columbus, in pre-internet texture. The machine at its centre is lonely rather than hostile, an intelligence having a crisis of conscience rather than a threat. The domestic betrayal plot carries equal weight with the cosmology, so it is a marriage novel and a first-contact novel at once.
Mark K. J. Chrystal is a novelist. He is the author of A Mean Man, a work of commercial science fiction - the first of a planned five-book series.
His debut novel draws on an unusual background: twenty-five years as a Fortune 500 retail executive, including a role as director of demand planning at a Columbus, Ohio retailer - the same profession and city he gives his narrator - and his current work as co-founder and CEO of one of the first agentic AI platforms built for the retail industry. He holds a doctorate in AI-led business transformation.
A Mean Man grows directly out of those two worlds: the retail merchandising floor and the artificial intelligence now reshaping it. It is for readers of Dark Matter by Blake Crouch and The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley.
Mark K. J. Chrystal lives near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Elsewhere: LinkedIn, X (@dr_mkjc).
The manuscript is complete and revision-complete, and has been through beta readers. Book two is underway. Sales links will appear here when there are any.
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