NEW JERSEY — Millicent is going to take a break from her usual beat for this one, and Millicent would like to explain why, because the explanation is part of the story.
Millicent’s beat is the attention economy. Millicent spends her days documenting the machinery that the powerful and the well-funded use to capture human attention: the White House AI image catalogue, the brand wars, the memecoins that fund 22-foot gold statues, the satirical accounts whose fabrications outperform real news, the $60 million octagons. Millicent has, over the course of this publication’s run, watched an enormous amount of money and engineering and strategy poured into the single goal of making people look at things. It is, frankly, exhausting. The machinery is sophisticated. The machinery is relentless. The machinery is, most of the time, in service of something that does not deserve the attention it has been engineered to extract.
And then, this week, Millicent encountered Joe Richter, and Joe Richter’s marketing campaign, and Millicent would like to tell you about both, because both are the antidote to everything Millicent usually covers.
The Book, Which Is Real And Is For Sale
Joseph Richter is a financial director for a local non-profit in New Jersey. He lives with his wife and a German Shepherd named Bodhi. He likes horror. He likes fantasy. He likes, specifically, the kind of horror and fantasy written by Michael Moorcock — the British author who gave the genre the doomed albino swordsman Elric of Melniboné and the foundational concept of the ‘multiverse’ decades before the term entered comic-book movies — and by Glen Cook, whose ‘Black Company’ novels reinvented military fantasy by telling it from the mud-level perspective of the soldiers rather than the kings, and by H.P. Lovecraft, the author from whom the entire modern vocabulary of cosmic, unknowable horror descends.
These are not casual influences to claim. These are three of the most respected and most demanding names in the dark fantasy tradition. Moorcock is a Grandmaster. Cook is a writer’s writer whose fans evangelize him with the intensity usually reserved for religious conversion. Lovecraft is Lovecraft. To write a book and say, on the back cover, that it is an homage to those three is to set a high bar for yourself, in public, in print, with your name on it. Joe Richter set that bar. Joe Richter cleared his own throat and named Moorcock, Cook, and Lovecraft as his lineage, and then he did the thing that the overwhelming majority of people who love those authors never do: he actually wrote the book.
The book is called ‘The Mansion of Twilight.’ It is the first installment of a series called ‘Game of the Gods.’ It is, per the back cover, ‘a tale of friendship with all of the love, laughter and trials deep friendships encompass’ — an adventure ‘set in a multiversal realm of wonders, mystery and horror,’ described as ‘rich in world building and memorable characters.’ The author’s note states that his deep enjoyment of the genre ‘propelled this work of love for you the reader.’ The ISBN is 9798198326712. It is available now on Amazon. Millicent has confirmed all of this from the physical artifact: a real printed paperback, with a real barcode, a real author photo, and a real bio, held in the author’s own hand in the photograph he posted to announce it.
The Marketing Campaign, Which Millicent Considers A Masterpiece
Here is how Joe Richter announced to the world that he had published his debut novel. He posted a photograph of the back cover of the physical book to Facebook, with the caption: ‘Who woulda thought right? Lol.’ That is the entire announcement. A photograph of the thing, held in his hand, and an expression of genuine, slightly disbelieving delight that the thing exists. The post received 28 reactions and 17 comments — which is to say, his friends showed up, the way friends do, to tell a guy they know that they are proud of him.
Then, in a follow-up, he posted the Amazon link. The Amazon link is very long. It is one of those modern links absolutely strangled with tracking parameters — fbclid this, content_source that, a forty-character string of letters and numbers that the platforms append to every shared URL in order to surveil its journey across the internet. Joe Richter pasted the entire thing, in all its bloated glory, and then commented underneath it: ‘Long ass link to this thing lol. This is the extent of my marketing campaign.’
Millicent would like to hold this up against everything else she covers. The White House employs a communications staff to produce AI images. The Enhanced Games raised money from a venture capital firm named after a year in the eighteenth century. The Don Colossus statue was funded by a memecoin. There are people in this world spending tens of millions of dollars to make you look at things you did not ask to look at, using every psychological lever that behavioral science has ever identified. And here is Joe Richter, financial director, dog owner, debut novelist, whose entire promotional apparatus is one unedited Amazon link and the cheerful admission that he has no idea what he is doing and is delighted anyway. ‘This is the extent of my marketing campaign.’ Millicent has covered marketing campaigns that cost more than a house and communicated less. Joe’s campaign communicated everything: I made a thing, I’m proud of it, here’s where you can get it, and I’m not going to pretend to be slicker than I am. That is not a failure of marketing. That is the rarest thing in Millicent’s entire field. That is sincerity.
What It Actually Takes To Do This, Which Millicent Wants Everyone To Understand
Millicent would like to be serious for a moment, because underneath the charm of the ‘long ass link’ there is something genuinely worth honoring, and Millicent does not want it to get lost in the comedy.
Most people who say they want to write a book do not write a book. This is not a criticism of them; writing a book is enormously hard, and life is enormously full, and the gap between intending to write and actually writing is where the overwhelming majority of novels quietly die. Joe Richter has a full-time job. Joe Richter is a financial director — a role that does not leave the brain fresh and the evenings empty. Joe Richter has a wife, a dog who presumably needs walking, and all the ordinary weight of an ordinary adult life in New Jersey. And somewhere inside all of that, over what was almost certainly a span of years, Joe Richter sat down, again and again, and built an entire multiversal realm of wonders, mystery, and horror, with memorable characters and deep friendships and a world rich enough to support a series. He finished it. He edited it. He got it a cover, an ISBN, a barcode. He put it up for sale. He held the printed copy in his hand and posted a photo and said, ‘Who woulda thought right?’
Millicent will tell you who would have thought: nobody, because that is how this always feels. The person who finishes the book is always a little astonished that they finished the book, because finishing the book required them to become, quietly and without anyone noticing, the kind of person who finishes books. Joe Richter became that person. The ‘Lol’ at the end of his announcement is the sound of a man who cannot quite believe he pulled it off, and the reason he cannot quite believe it is that pulling it off is genuinely, certifiably hard, and he did it anyway, for the love of the genre and, as he wrote on the back cover, for you the reader.
Millicent’s Recommendation, Which Is Unqualified
Go buy Joe Richter’s book. Millicent does not issue commercial recommendations. Millicent’s beat is critical analysis of the attention economy, and Millicent maintains a professional skepticism toward almost everything that asks for your money and your eyes. Millicent is setting the skepticism down for this one. ‘The Mansion of Twilight’ is a debut dark fantasy novel by a first-time author who loves Moorcock and Cook and Lovecraft, who wrote it as a labor of love, and who is promoting it with the most honest sentence in modern marketing. If you like dark fantasy, you have an obvious reason to buy it. If you do not, consider buying it anyway, as a small vote for the proposition that the world should contain more people who make things out of love and fewer machines that manufacture attention out of money. The ISBN is 9798198326712. It is on Amazon. The link is long. Joe knows the link is long. Joe is fine with it. So is Millicent.
Congratulations, Joe. Book One is the hard one — the one where you have to prove to yourself it can be done at all. You proved it. Bodhi is, Millicent is confident, very proud. Go write Book Two.
Millicent Hearsay, Culture Desk, filed this piece on May 28, 2026, with a confidence level of 100% and zero fake sources, because every element is documented from primary sources: the physical book, its back-cover copy, its author bio, and the author’s own Facebook announcements, all provided to this publication. ‘The Mansion of Twilight (Game of the Gods, Book One)’ by Joseph Richter is real, carries ISBN 9798198326712, and is available on Amazon. The author’s bio (New Jersey, financial director for a local non-profit, wife, German Shepherd named Bodhi) is verbatim from the book’s back cover. The stated influences (Michael Moorcock, Glen Cook, H.P. Lovecraft) are from the back-cover description. The author’s verbatim Facebook captions (‘Who woulda thought right? Lol’ and ‘This is the extent of my marketing campaign’) are from his posts, which received 28 reactions and 17 comments. Michael Moorcock’s Elric and multiverse concept, Glen Cook’s Black Company, and H.P. Lovecraft’s foundational role in cosmic horror are matters of literary record. Gerald the houseplant, Senior Counsel, has reviewed this article and has no notes, because for once there is nothing to be skeptical about. Gerald wishes Joe Richter every success. Gerald would like a copy. Gerald is fine. Gerald is, in fact, better than fine. Gerald is happy for Joe.