Domesticated Creatures

George-Rupert’s life isn’t going as planned. The writing jobs are few, he’s failing as a donkey parent, and navigating the absurdities of suburban life alongside his unsympathetic wife are more than he bargained for. It leaves little margin to dream his improbable moonshot—concoct an indoor swimming pool at the International Space Station in anticipation of tourism’s intergalactic promises. But keeping a dream alive and his life together will require everything he’s got, assuming he survives an unconventional friendship with a black-cloaked reaper who moves into The Hills and only befriends him. Subdivision life is about to get surreal.

DOMESTICATED CREATURES is a surreal-absurd collection that unspools across more than 60 interconnected short-form pieces, navigating the mundane rhythms of suburban life while also remaining otherworldly. It’s a tiny testament to rolling with life’s unforeseen punches and absurdities in hopes of seeing the good staring back at you, human and otherwise.

Coming Soon

Praise for Domesticated Creatures

“Domesticated Creatures will make you levitate. Flash postcards from a psychedelic space-station suburbia, where feral poems sucker-punch people, a donkey watches Law & Order, and the Grim Reaper lives next door. I don’t know the exact name for what Thad DeVassie achieves here, and I like it that way. As his narrator says: Nameless can be good.”

—Pete Beatty, author of Cuyahoga

“Imaginative, playful, laugh out loud funny. A twisted portrayal of domestic life told from its mundane heart, all while struggling to finish a cycle of poems that’s more stubborn and inexplicable than the pet donkey. Domesticated Creatures is one of the best incarnations of the short form I’ve seen in years.”

—Theodore Wheeler, author of The War Begins in Paris

“I didn’t read it and probably won’t. I don’t read fiction. But I hear that I’m in it, so I have royalties coming, right?”

—Philip Delbert, woodworker and 80-year-old, real-life neighbor of the author

About the Author

Thad DeVassie is a writer and artist/painter from Central Ohio. He is the author of three poetry chapbooks. His writing has been awarded the James Tate Poetry Prize (SurVision Books), the Ohio Arts Council’s Individual Excellence Award in Fiction, and anthologized in Best Small Fictions 2025. His artwork appears regularly in juried exhibitions throughout the United States and in literary magazines. Find more of his work at www.thaddevassie.com.