This is The Book of Joseph.
Only a couple thousand were made and given away to those who bought the Mondo edition of Far Cry 5.
I thought this would be a much easier way for his word to be spread so everyone can read it. It very much goes in depth...
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If a person had been walking down the poorly maintained road out front of the Seed's house on that afternoon in lune and felt the strange urge to glance over, they would have witnessed a bizarre sight.
The would have seen a man dressed in black pants and white undershirt, frothing with anger, brandishing a comic book in one hand and a bible in the other at his son, a child of about ten. But no one had been down this road in the poor suburb of Rome, Georgia, in a long time. Not ice cream trucks, not social services cars, not even police patrols.
In any case. In these parts, people kept their noses out of other people's business, even when that business took place on a porch out in the open.
The father thrashed his arms furiously while the boy, young Joseph Seed stood with his head bowed, contrite and seemingly fixated on the floorboards. If he had looked up, he would have seen the kaleidoscopic colors of an old issue of Spiderman flashing by, alternating with the smooth black leather of his father's Bible and the ruddy face of the father himself. He would have seen the grey teeth-few and far between- of Old Man Seed, as the locals called him, or Old Man Seed behind his back, as Josephs big brother Jacob had snickered to him. Dental care was not a priority in the seed household. The money was needed for other things. So, his father's teeth always reminded Joseph of the rocky crags that pirate ships washed up on in picture books at the library.
The priority in the Seed household, as everyone in the neighborhood knew, was cheap whiskey, which the father drank from dawn 'til dusk. The more whiskey that went in, the more Bible verses that came out – and the more often his children felt the switch.
The cause of the paternal fury was simple: comics were forbidden in the home – comics and books, records, magazines, radio, and television. Only the Bible was allowed.
Once, when the entire elementary school went to see Gone with the Wind at an old theatre in town, Joseph's father had leapt up in rage like a drunken jack-in-the-box, and before stunned teachers and students, launched into a rambling sermon condemning the sins of Hollywood, insisting this Babylon had long perverted the most fragile of minds and was responsible for the downfall of all of America, with Joseph under one arm and Jacob under the other, he stormed out of the room still hurling curses.
This time, when they arrived home, he beat Jacob only, because he was the eldest and thus responsible for his younger brother. At least the brothers had had time to see Atlanta burn. Thus, when Old Man Seed stood on the porch and began sliding off his belt, the child simply removed his T-shirt, folded it carefully, and bent over to offer his pale, delicate back to the worn-out strap of leather.
Joseph's head was turned toward the well maintained- at least by local standards – house of a quiet, gentle widow. He considered it a blessing, if a small one. Facing the other way, he would have had to look at the other neighbor's house, which even by local standards was so run-down as to be hideous to the eye. When they were younger, the widow used to bake them cakes, probably out of pity for them. The children's mother wasn't exactly an impressive chef. She wasn't exactly a loving mother either. But the widow didn't bake much of anything anymore now that she was dying of cancer. Instead, she spent her days in her porch rocking chair, rain or shine, tottering gently. Jacob and Joseph argued over whether the groaning came from the wooden rocking chair or the old women.
Sometimes the widow's daughter would stop by, just long enough to steal her mother's medication and barter it for heroin. She never stayed long; prospects in the town were so few that not even junkies wanted to live there.
On this particular day, the young Joseph, age seven, received 25 lashes. It was the price to pay from having read about the adventures of a man in tights bitten by a radioactive spider. He bore his punishment and hardly even cried.
You may be wondering who I am to know so much about the banal misery of this family living in a poor white neighborhood like so many others. I am Joseph Seed. And if you want to know why I remember that scorching day in June so clearly, it's because that was the first day that the Voice spoke to me.
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