Zach Dodson | Narrative Design

Kuu’s moonbase is disabled by a mysterious blast. The five women with her have 30 days of life support. Kuu must manage the dwindling food and the complex web of relationships in a base under stress. Who will starve and who will snap? Your only choices are bad ones in this Interactive Tragedy. 

interactivetragedy.com

KUU, An Interactive Tragedy
*Work in progress*

Zach Dodson
With Tiia Reijonen and Jason Heebl.

Additional input from Cedre Pradier, Benjamin Pilbrow, Brad Hoyt, Miikka Junnila, Niko Huttunen, Ling Chen, Gautam Vishwanath, Bokyung Kim, Clifton Phachanla, Safa Hovinen, Jac Jemc, Sara Honkanen, Eyad Khader, Xinran Wang, and BB.

With support from Aalto University, Victoria University of Wellington, and CODE NZ.

Book represented by Markus Hoffmann at Regal Hoffman Literary.

Game represented by Caspar Gray at the Arsenal Agency.

A small, sad video game studio in Wellington, New Zealand. All the drama is in our games.

interactivetragedy.com

Zach Dodson
With Tiia Reijonen and Jason Heebl.

Additional input from Michael Fallik, Benjamin Pilbrow and Erin Thomas-Riley.

Represented by Caspar Gray at the Arsenal Agency.

Conversation is a dangerous game. This atmospheric narrative video game submerses the player in a world of tension-filled sci-fi where manipulating a fractured band of deep-sea divers is the key to survival. Uncover alliances and expose betrayals — before something horrific from the depths silences you all. In this interactive tragedy, don’t let the conversation get too deep.

interactivetragedy.com

Sub-Verge, An Interactive Tragedy
Published by Pantaloon

Zach Dodson
With Tiia Reijonen and Jason Heebl.

Additional input from Chris Garnier, Thomas Voyce, Erin Thomas-Riley, and Benjamin Pilbrow.

With support from NZ Film Commission and from CODE NZ.

Represented by Caspar Gray at the Arsenal Agency.

Official Selection - LudoNarraCon 2025

Nominated for The Pavs - New Zealand Game Awards for Excellence in Representation

Written and designed by Zach, Bats of the Republic is an illuminated novel, in which alternating sci-fi and historical fiction narratives duel over a mysteriously sealed letter, drawing three centuries of Texana, two great love stories, and one giant cavern of bats into spiralling conflict. The traditional novel form is enhanced by natural history illustrations, subversive pamphlets, fictional star charts, and a 19th century novel-within-a-novel. 

The casebound book is printed in three specialty inks, with a reversible dust jacket, fold-out map, and actual sealed letter. 

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Print Best of Southwest Regional Design Award

Design Observer 50 Books of 2015

1st Place New York Book Show 

“Bats of the Republic cumulatively becomes a book about the way books are made and the way stories work. Dodson has quite brilliantly exposed the gears and cogs whirring in the novelist’s imagination. It is a mad and beautiful thing." - The Washington Post

Add it to your Goodreads list.

Bats of the Republic
Zachary Thomas
Doubleday, 2015

Fictional horror archive design and illustration. Shelley Jackson’s Riddance was a finalist for the Believer Book Award; Best Book of Fall Vulture and New York Magazine. Reviews appeared in The New Yorker, Publishers Weekly (starred review), The Washington Post, Newsday, Seattle Post- Intelligencer, The Village Voice, The Baltimore Sun, LA Weekly, and LA Times.

“Her story alone would make an excellent tale, but Jackson (Half Life) and designer Zachary Thomas Dodson have expanded it with facsimiles for each document that dial up the supernatural feel . . . A ghost story, a mystery, a manifesto, a work of art—Riddance is all of these at once.” —Bethanne Patrick, Literary Hub

Riddance
Or: The Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing-Mouth Children
Shelley Jackson
Catapult, 2018

In a city sustained by an eternal waterfall, an idle fisherman from the upper class takes an opportunistic shot at the High Commissioner. Accused of attempted assassination, he is cast into a subterranean labyrinth, where he uncovers the scaffolding of lies that has kept the city sundered from the sea. He survives with the help of the krake, an unnatural crustacean that keeps its prey in suspended animation. With this unlikely pet, he flees from the city and an officer determined in her murderous pursuit. His actions foment an accidental rebellion among those who aid and abet him. Cornered, his hidden motives confront him in the dark. Will he be caught first by his hunters or his long-buried past?

Subtle Mind is a prequel to the game Sub-Verge. It tells the story of The Mind, the enigmatic leader of a fractured band of renegade divers hiding out beneath the waves, and the depths he must go to in order to find himself once again.

interactivetragedy.com

Subtle Mind, A Sub-Verge prequel

Zach Dodson
With Tiia Reijonen

Embodying the 'Designer as Author' idea, this hybrid typo/graphic novel was written and designed by Zach.
A mysterious gray book drives Ollister and Adelaide’s twisted relationship. When it goes missing, he plots revenge against art patriarch The Platypus while she obsesses over their anti-love affair. Meanwhile, other art school scenesters experiment with bad drugs, bad sex, and bad ideas. When a punk named Punk shows up with a potent sex drug, the whole wild crowd gets caught up in the gravitational pull of The Platypus’ sinister White Ball, where a confused art terrorism cell threatens a ludicrous and hilarious implosion. Print magazine said "The effect is that of artist's journal meets ransom note: the text held hostage by the design."  The novel was a Gold Design Winner in Creativity 38 and received recognition from AIGA:Voice, HOW, and Dazed and Confused.The ‘signatures’ of paper the book was printed on function as both the perfect-bound book and a series of nine double-sided posters, containing the entire text of the novel. The posters were featured at a solo show at design gallery Country Club. The audio book, featuring a full cast and original music, was released by Flameshovel Records.

boring boring boring boring boring boring boring
Zach Plague
featherproof, 2008

For twenty years, The Minus Times was the most elusive literary magazine in America—and definitely the only one to be composed on a Royal standard typewriter. Contributors include Sam Lipsyte, David Berman, Patrick DeWitt, and Wells Tower, with illustrations by David Eggers and Brad Neely as well as interviews with Dan Clowes, Barry Hannah, and a yet-to-be-famous Stephen Colbert. All thirty of the-nearly-impossible-to-find issues of this improvised literary almanac are assembled here, with sly illustrations, gonzo layout and typos intact. Zach wrapped it all in a hand-letterpressed cover. Published in conjuncture with Drag City Records. 

The Minus Times
Hunter Kennedy, Ed.
Drag City books and featherproof, 2012

This is a collection of playful sci-fi influenced short stories by Patrick Somerville (The Cradle, This Bright River). The title story is about a father who builds miniature models of fathers and sons building miniature models of the universe. To reflect the ’meta’ aspect of the writing, the book itself is designed as a miniature model of the universe, with one planet for each story in the book, and instructions on how to cut out and construct the mobile. Some stories are illustration hybrids, like “The Abacus”, which was written mainly using faces. "The Machine of Understanding Other People" is a novella at the end which ties all the stories together, just like the string and popsicle sticks used to contract the miniature mobile universe. The book design was featured in Fully Booked: Ink on Paper, Design and Concepts for New Publications (Gestalten).

The Universe in Miniature in Miniature
Patrick Somerville
featherproof, 2010

With Illustrations by Rob Funderburk. 

This collection of post-apocalyptic stories by Blake Butler (There is No Year, 300,000,000) is designed as a primer on destruction. Each page is a hand-made artifact from a desolate future, some with teeth marks or smears of blood, the edges stained a sooty black, all echoing and enhancing the ruined world mapped out by the book. Pre-orders were hand-destroyed and then sent to adventurous book collectors. The design was noted by Time Out New York, and the book was shortlisted for the Believer Book Award. The book design was featured in Fully Booked: Ink on Paper, Design and Concepts for New Publications (Gestalten).

Scorch Atlas
Blake Butler
featherproof, 2009

In this collection of southern-gothic flash-fiction Lindsay Hunter (Don’t Kiss me, Ugly Girls) offers an exploration not of the human heart but of the spine; mixing sex, violence and love into a harrowing, head-spinning portraits of bad people in worse places. The book is designed horizontally, as a tackle box with a cover that fully encloses the text. It is illustrated with tackle box trays full of strange and nasty bait. Book design featured in Art in Book Form (Gingko Press).

Daddy’s
Lindsay Hunter
featherproof, 2010

Popular musician Tim Kinsella delivers a heady, harrowing debut novel with interlocking cast of off-balance characters. The Karaoke Singer’s Guide to Self-Defense is a masterful composition with notes of sadness, ambivalence, and the most humane kind of cruelty: honesty. The book is designed to look like a dusty used-book-store find, with illustrations by the author’s tattoo artist, and a hand-written price on the inside front page.

Let Go and Go On And On was designed to look like a book in the same series. It is the story of obscure actress Laurie Bird, told in a second-person narrative, blurring what little is known of her actual biography with her roles as a drifter in Two Lane Blacktop, a champion's wife in Cockfighter, and an aging rock star's Hollywood girlfriend in Annie Hall. She unravels in a Manhattan bathtub, committing suicide at the age of 26. Guided by constraints, Tim Kinsella creates a collage and a flimic tribute to the unknowable. The book was designed a similar appropriation technique. 

The Karaoke Singer’s Guide to Self-Defense
Tim Kinsella
featherproof, 2011

Cover illustration by Robert Ryan

Let Go and Go On and On
Tim Kinsella
Curbside Splendor, 2014

Cover collage by Beth Hoeckel

This book contains brilliantly strange set pieces that explode the boundaries of short fiction. Designed to reflect Christian TeBordo’s (We Go Liquid) twisted visions, the collection illustrates the awful possibilities we could never have imagined. This compact volume is interspersed with handwritten postcards, dripping with graphic menace. The cover sees an idyllic picture-perfect world covered with a spot-gloss "death-goo" of awe. The book design was featured in Fully Booked: Ink on Paper, Design and Concepts for New Publications (Gestalten).

The Awful Possibilities
Christian TeBordo
featherproof, 2010

When story and image collide the result is an EPIC SOMETHING! This exhibition and companion publication explored personal mythologies, narrative architectures, hidden religions, and the spaces between systems of storytelling. Twelve artists ventured to the nexus of text and image, across a multitude of media: drawing, animation, installation, and writing. Witness the rising action of literal correspondences, translations from narrative to image, or from image back to text. Muddle through the plot twists, story lines hidden beneath the surface, and images that speak volumes. Marvel as each work climaxes in an EPIC SOMETHING that articulates the magical space between storytelling and image-making.

EPIC SOMETHING was displayed at The Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, Illinois, from November 18, 2012 – February 24, 2013. It was the final exhibition of the Quarterly Site Series, part of the Twelve Galleries Project, a roving Chicago gallery run by Jamilee Polson Lacy. The exhibition co-curators included Zach Dodson, Dan Gleason, and Caroline Picard. Together they wrote a hybrid image/text essay introducing the work. 

Epic Something
Twelve Galleries, 2013

With works from Jesse Ball, Irina Botea, EC Brown, Lilli Carré, Ezra Claytan Daniels, Edie Fake, Heather Mekkelson, B. Ingrid Olson, Frank Pollard, Aay Preston-Myint, Deb Sokolow, Bill Talsma, and Viktor Van Bramer, who also drew the cover. 

This anthology includes work from authors such as Shane Jones (Light Boxes), Rachel Glaser (Pee on Water), Mike Young (Look! Look! Feathers), and twenty-seven other young innovators breaking ground, many with smaller publishers. Zach contributed the hand-written story, ‘I Write to You of This,' as well as the cover design for the collection.

30 Under 30: An Anthology of Innovative Fiction by Younger Writers
Blake Butler and Lily Hoang, Eds. 
Starcherone Books, 2011

Stories in origami form = Storigami. These downloadable, foldable mini-books tell stories that arrange themselves any number of ways - depending on how you unfold them. Featured in Flavorwire and Nylon magazine, they were part of featherproof’s popular mini-book series.

The Swan was published by The Antelope Magazine in 2018.  

Download ‘The Fox’
Zach Dodson
featherproof, 2011

Download ‘The Swan’
Zach Dodson
The Antelope, 2018

Zach has designed books for many independent presses including FC2, Fugue State press, Relegation Books, and featherproof, which he founded in 2005. 

30 Under 30: An Anthology of Innovative Fiction by Younger Writers Blake Butler and Lily Hoang, Eds. Starcherone Books, 2011

Hiding Out by Jonathan Messinger, Photo by Nathan Keay

AM/PM and Museum of the Weird by Amelia Gray (Threats, Gutshot)

This Will Go Down on Your Permanent Record by Susannah Felts, Illustration by Diana Sudyka

Way Out West, The Sea Whispered Me by Cupola Bobber, Illustration by Ezra Claytan Daniels

Sons of the Rapture by Todd Dills

Wake Up, We’re Here by Dallas Hudgens

The Failure Six by Shane Jones (Light Boxes)