Voice
Gary the Lemon Cheesecake
The authorial mask for the Lemonverse: rude, self-aware, theatrical and suspiciously comfortable with cosmic questions.
Who permitted this?
Various Bearious
An independent home for ridiculous games, surreal fiction, psychological mysteries and one interdimensional cheesecake with a concerning amount of authority.
The person behind the incident
Leslie Boyce
Leslie Boyce created Lemons Tell No Lies and writes its fiction under the name Gary the Lemon Cheesecake. Leslie also writes psychological mysteries and thrillers as Bear Ursa.
Various Bearious is the umbrella for those projects: work that can be funny, unsettling, theatrical, psychologically sharp or—in Gary’s preferred arrangement—all of them at once.
The Lemonverse began as a novella and now expands through Full Duel, Chess and Survivor.
Creative doctrine
Ridiculous games. Serious nonsense.
The goal is not random weirdness. It is committed weirdness: absurd characters, coherent rules, strong atmosphere and enough emotional truth beneath the lemons to make the comedy land harder.
Heart
Marty Fletcher
A competent investigator whose grief and psychosis make the world frightening, tragic and absurd without reducing him to a punchline.
Infrastructure
Frank the Fridge
Cold, dependable and silent. A useful reminder that sometimes the appliance is the most stable person in the room.
The manifesto
Safe is on holiday.
The work should be readable and usable, but never anonymous. Purple should glow. Gold should behave like a religious event. Lemons should spill over the border. The joke should have rules. The sadness should remain real. Gary should always look like he knows something you do not.