Who Wants To Live Forever?

K. R. (Kevin) Wilson is a Toronto novelist. His current novel Stan On Guard (Guernica Editions 2026) is a sequel to his Leacock-nominated novel Call Me Stan (Guernica Editions 2021), which is weird, wry, episodic historical fiction narrated to a police interrogator by a 3200-year-old Hittite. Stan (originally Ishtanu) has seen a lot. At one point he was even crucified next to Jesus. There’s a short piece about how Stan came to be on Kevin’s own blog, if you’re curious: https://krwilson.ca/f/why-i-wrote-call-me-stan

By the end of the first book Stan has picked up a nemesis, a badass Trojan princess named Tróán who (spoiler) leaves him for dead in a Berlin safe house. But hey, at least that means she isn’t looking for him anymore, right? Well … not until the publication of Call Me Stan anyhow. Let’s let the two of them take it from there:

Stan

I have a bone to pick with K. R. Wilson.

I’ve always been careful about who I trust with my story. When a police stenographer transcribed it a few years ago, I wasn’t concerned. It was never going to be a public document.

Until it was.

Imagine my surprise.

Somehow this guy got his hands on it, cleaned out the ‘ums’ and ‘ers’ and phonetic spellings and awkward repetitions you find in transcripts, cut out everything the interviewing cop said, and published the result as fiction.

Which would’ve been fine on its own. I don’t need credit for my prose—I have to assume it’s better than this Wilson character’s—and I certainly don’t need the money.

The problem is Tróán.

I have to assume Tróán has read it.

And if she has, she knows I’m still alive.

Tróán

Imagine my surprise.

I thought I’d killed him. Ishtanu of the Hatti. I shot him in the heart. Watched the light leaving his eyes. Now I know I failed.

He was stupid to tell his story. You only tell someone you can trust. The police he told his story to could not be trusted.

I won’t fail when I find him again.

What follows is a present-day cat-and-mouse story with long historical sections where the two of them set out some of their experiences over the last 3200 years. Tróán in particular has a pretty subversive take on the Odysseus story.