One of 10 previously published short stories, featured in Ken Brosky's full collection, "The Unauthorized Biography of Michele Bachmann (and other stories)."

"Altered Beast," first published in Pif Magazine in 2010, tells the story of a young man who finds a surprise waiting for him in the basement of his apartment. Stuck illustrating genitalia for a struggling anime company, he finds himself lured into a fantasy world where the regular rules of Capitalism no longer apply... and may not be needed at all.

From "Altered Beast":

There's a guy living in my storage room. I noticed it about a month ago, when I went into the basement of my apartment building to drop off a box full of old Evil Dead posters I'd collected at college poster sales. Every storage room is about the size of a college dorm room, separated by rotting vertical wood panels hastily put together without any measuring tape so they only half resemble a 'wall' and half resemble what would constitute a 'fence.' The floors are concrete, like any good old-fashioned Milwaukee apartment building, and spider webs and dirt line the ceiling panels and wooden beams supporting the floor above.

I never kept anything important in my storage room because the door's hinges broke the first time I opened it, so whenever I needed to store something, I had to move the door like a boulder, then place it back in front of the opening when I was finished. So when I opened the door and saw an old, brown couch resting against the concrete foundation on the other end, I wondered if maybe it was a gift from one of the other tenants. I didn't care, really, because I wasn't going to use all the space anyway.

I came back down a week later to store a few boxes of books that I couldn't fit on my small bookshelf. Now the couch was complemented by an old tube TV sitting on two red milk crates and a middle-aged man lying on the couch. I set down the books next to the posters in the corner, which had been untouched, and the man glanced up.

"What's up, dude," he said.

What Kirkus Reviews says about "The Unauthorized Biography of Michele Bachmann (and other stories)":

Brosky's darkly witty stories describe the major and mundane problems facing ordinary Midwesterners.

The young and youngish, mostly male, characters in Brosky's stories find their personal, self-devised method for dealing with the world challenged by what life throws their way. The protagonist of "Deer Tales" impulsively stakes a major decision -- whether to move back to his hometown or stay in the city and pursue a career as an artist -- on his success at playing a deer-hunting video game in the lobby bar of a Holiday Inn, only to find that he's terrible at it. The phone hacker in "The Phreaks" wins a hacking challenge by whistling payphone tones to trick the computer system -- "Nines was in his own world, with his eyes closed, running his fingers along every naked space of Ma Bell's back, treating her the way a really good guy does to a woman he knows he doesn't deserve" -- only to see a lesser hacker make off with the girl he likes due to superior social skills. In the best stories, Brosky exploits this disconnect with a sharp eye for detail and a fine sense of absurdity that's both darkly funny and subtly tragic, as when one of the Four Horsemen pulls up to a Wisconsin coffee bar for a double shot of espresso in "Apocolypse Wow!" The preconceptions the story's characters have about the End Times, whether credulous or skeptical, fail to prepare them for the grimly underwhelming, almost bureaucratic nature of the disaster they face. The polite, apologetic Horseman doesn't have many answers to give the anxious baristas, just weary resignation, a presence that wilts vegetation and a golden scale he has no idea what to do with...
These stories about often-overlooked characters find sharp observations on the indignities of modern life.

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