Mustard Seed
A Thystopian Satire, Book 3
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Pub Date Aug 13 2026 | Archive Date Sep 29 2026
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Description
"Tom Strelich is a magician. In Mustard Seed, he channels Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, and Richard Brautigan to create something entirely his own... Strelich has taken that absurdist torch and carried it forward." -Haris Orkin, bestselling author of the James Flynn Escapades
End of the world? No. Maybe later.
Mr. Frostie is just a baby when his parents move, along with almost a thousand others, into the top-secret Mustard Seed time capsule. The move is occasioned by the mistaken belief that JFK's assassination puts WWIII in the thermonuclear starting blocks.
In Mustard Seed they discover a massive underground complex stretching through miles of ancient lava tubes, and Mister Frostie grows up in a familiar, almost mythical mid-century small town with parks and stores and movie theatres and schools, even a miniature golf course. It's a time capsule full of people meant to preserve a tiny seed of the human experiment-just in case the human experiment blows up in the lab.
But when a teenage Mister Frostie is banished to face certain death in the radioactive-zombie-mutant-cannibal hellscape above, he learns the surface world isn't a hellscape at all but has been wobbling on above their heads the whole time. He makes it his mission to bring the people of the duck-and-cover civilization up and into the glorious, mystifying, and often dismaying world above. What could possibly go wrong?
Advance Praise
"Mustard Seed hit it out of the park... deep emotional mining of Cold War America... brilliantly works in Walt Disney and JFK as storylines... and you don't for one second question how it all fits together." -Tom McCaffrey, bestselling author of The Claire Saga
"Tom Strelich is a magician. In Mustard Seed, he channels Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, and Richard Brautigan to create something entirely his own... Strelich has taken that absurdist torch and carried it forward." -Haris Orkin, bestselling author of the James Flynn Escapades
"Mustard Seed is a pleasure to read, full of laugh-out-loud moments and a story that flows through chapters like a river-rapid but leisurely." -David E. Sharp, author of the Lost on a Page Series
"It pulled me in, made me laugh out loud, and sent me off thinking about things I hadn't planned on thinking about." -Neal Rabin, award-winning author of FLAT: An edgy voyage of accidental discovery
"...ironic, simultaneously profane and spiritual tale pulls the reader in with not only a redefined idea of normality, but also a glimpse of the afterlife imagined as no other writer has dared." -Virginia Brackett, award-winning author of In the Company of Patriots
"Strelich does it again! Engaging characters, a totally unique plot and masterful writing" -Tom Lederle, author Digital Surrealism
"Mustard Seed was a truly excellent read, a great blend of story, character, technical machination, existential/supernatural speculation, tragedy, and absurd comedy...classic Strelich" -Alex Lee, stoner/web-developer