Introducing The Cult Of The Rainbow Rat
The Rainbow Rat Review
Hi, I’m Emil Ottoman, and I’ll be your editor
Well, I’ll be your editor any day but today.
Today We’re Talking About Cult Of The Rainbow Rat!
What is The Cult of the Rainbow Rat? Well, it’s a meme page, an artist’s collective, a long running insurgency against whatever we don’t like, an idea, mostly it’s whatever you want it to be if you participate. Choose your own adventure. and now my co-founder, Sarah Sottile (Evelyn Milquetoast) is dead. I guess it’s a legacy.
May 29th is the second anniversary of her suicide. I’m not looking forward to it. I’d been constipating on how I could bring my other long running project to Substack in a viable, novel, or interesting and experimental way since I decided to name my stack after a tool in minimalist writing instead of falling back on the cult branding.
In the end I think that was the right move.
But then this year happened, and the growing but nascent fiction tab community I was working to embed myself in saved my family’s ASS. It’s lore by now but snow brought the roof in on us, we weren’t ready for it, winter had been punishing to every working adult in the household already— all three of us— and we were staring down the Howitzer’s barrel of having to move with no money.
This was the start of a community of sorts. We’ve all restacked and boosted and helped each other.
, , , especially , , the list is too long to type out. Sum Flux hit and upped the quality expected. I wanted to help people write better in their own voices, get their stories out how they wanted, see them raise their game to the level of their aspirations, at least as far as storytelling and prose styling goes.And came FICTION IS CULTURE. Still a magnificent rallying cry.
New projects were sprouting everywhere. Not only did the folks around here, tagged and not, help to keep me sane and financially solvent during a crisis, they were genuinely compassionate. It made connection easy. ARC’s rap battles bring people together through showmanship and competition, and everyone wins. (But really he does, all the damn time. Undefeated.) Leaving essay length notes and comments on everything kept me sane.
’s fucking finger emoji. ( , , , , , and Alice from , thank you all forever. Along with BR and Charlene, whoh I’m tacitly not tagging since they’re creepin’ and lurkin) I’d go on but this isn’t an update about news, the tea, or my weird little life. It’s about The Cult Of The Rainbow Rat.THE LORE
The Cult Of The Rainbow Rat is a meme page on Facebook with a steady follower base of between 27 and 30,000 people at any given time. It’s also my weird merch shop. It’s also just a concept. The meme page is classified as performance art. It was created on June 1, 2016 under the name Nietzsche Never Died, and renamed Cult Of The Rainbow Rat on March 17, 2017. It’s been a Patreon, a “lifestyle brand?”, a Dada experiment, but mostly just a repository for overflow creativity.
Apparently when the Patreon was my main source of income during the Plague Year of 2020 (also the year of the rat in Chinese astrology) I not only turned it into a 70 hour a week job, but posted a five part history of Cult Of The Rainbow Rat.
Below I have cut out the first of those posts, as it gives all the backstory you need for what comes next given what you already know.
Emil Ottoman’s Oral History of Cult Of The Rainbow Rat
The Cult Of The Rainbow Rat hasn't always been what it is. This is just my oral history, as the person who took the page and ran with it. This project was born from trauma and the deep desire to escape. It wasn't a happy creation made in a happy time in anyone’s life.
In February of 2016 one of my best friends, Deathanie, was diagnosed with stage 4 diffuse large B-cell non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma because we live in Monsanto's hometown and roundup just wafts through the air in clouds. Later we found out her neighborhood is a lymphoma hot spot. As in, almost every house on the block has someone dead from it.
She got back from trimming pot in California and had a little persistent hacking cough. The Urgent care said it was mild pneumonia, gave her meds, sent her on her way. Shit wasn't pneumonia. Shit was cancer. In the meantime she took a trip around Europe. Spain, Rome, Greece, with these tumors growing inside of her, these alien cells multiplying endlessly. She'd call me at weird hours. She had night sweats so bad she couldn't sleep, could barely eat, raged anyway. Partied how she could. Hacked up blood on ancient Greek stones.
While this was going on a tumor the size of three of my fists side by side was growing in her chest. It's worth noting here that she's five foot four, and I don't have small hands.
It came to a head when she got back to the states and was diagnosed with pneumonia two more times at the same Urgent Care, lord knows how they missed the gigantic tumor pushing on her heart and compressing her left bronchus, but when it got so bad she couldn't stand it anymore, and trust me, she's tough, she went to the hospital and they put her in a wheelchair, put her in the ICU, put her on oxygen, and said she was dying.
They didn't say it, but it was apparent at a glance.
The real bitch was sleeping at the hospital almost 13 days straight, or driving up at 7 am for a sixteen hour shifts staying with her and her family. The real bitch was at 6am rounds with residents in the ICU and the door open to the inner guts of the ward when they came round and said she probably had lymphoma one morning before she was officially diagnosed. She looks at me and goes, "did they say lymphoma?"
To cut this short she almost (how long do you have to be dead for it to not be almost? Because looking back from 2025, I’m pretty sure I watched her die 3 times in the hospital - Emil) died three times in the hospital, they started chemo while she was on the stepdown ward with me watching, and because the stakes were lowest for me I lied and said yeah I was her fiance and got FMLA from Starbucks to be her primary caretaker while her parents both worked to keep the household afloat.
From there until the page popped into existence on June 1st of 2016 was probably the longest time I've ever lived. (We have some competitors now in 2025 - Emil)
Me and Evelyn had been talking about making a meme page on Facebook since I had ran a few Wook and yes, Grateful Dead groups. I'd been eating 120 round blue one mg Klonopin a month my friend Kupkakes gave me for free, calling them skittles, to get me through my side of being the primary caretaker, but June came and with it was the last chemo appointment, and then.
Then nothing happened. Then we needed an outlet. We'd been talking about this in the parking garage at the hospital while I chain smoked for a while, grand plans for a place of our own on the internet, on Facebook, whatever. Me and Evelyn did, when she would come down to visit from Springfield Illinois every weekend during grad school.
I honestly don't remember which of us made the page, but I remember I came up with the name. (She made the damn page)
Cult Of The Rainbow Rat was originally a page called Nietzsche Never Died.
This was the first post.
That's right, The Cult didn't start out as a cult, it didn't start out with a house style, it didn't start out with OC, and it didn't start out with regular posts either.
How's that for a fuckin' shocker?
So it was a post-cancer trauma hole to yell into. Our own personal void, with no one watching yet.
Oh, and Emil Ottoman as I write and breathe didn't exist.
Oh Patreon. You were so kind to me. (I was also selling a shit ton of weed and middle manning, for no profit mind you, which is shocking, a lotta Xanax. 2020, year of the rat, year of the green Hulks.
THE BOTTOM DROPPED OUT
Stephanie is a decade clear of the cancer next year. Her five year odds were dead split 50/50. So since everything is beautiful and terrible forever, Sarah hanged herself from her bedroom door from an over the door coat rack that I guarantee she bought at Target or IKEA on Memorial day 2023. Bitch, could you BE more ironic.
She left a tesseract hole in the universe and a demon’s puzzlebox of a life to try to figure out forever, compartmentalized, hyperreal, and liminal. She may as well have BEEN “the backrooms”. For 21 years she’d been my best friend and closest confidant. We’d gone through every peak life experience together including a bad marriage, messy divorce, ecstasy days, heroin nights, raves, festivals, trap houses, strip clubs, multiple substance abuses and addictions, one trip to federal prison, college, and grad school. Fuck. And we’d lived together so many times I can’t recall. Fuck.
When I say she was the other half of my brain, it’s no hyperbole. Everyone who knew us knew the long standing legend. Together we made one fully functional human being who was too smart for their own good.
So far the only thing I’ve done besides memorializing her and turning her into a Saint is when she died I ran a Go-Fund-Me for her malignant narcissist of a mother, who was a significant contributor to the downward spiral that with me kissing her slabbed corpse in a cardboard box with a hospital gown pulled up tight around her neck to hide the ligature marks they couldn’t make go away with makeup.
The GoFundMe included an art auction, a raffle, and constant pressing and passing the hat. I filled it, $25,000.00. Her mom got the money and dropped me and her other closest friends like burning white hot iron. We knew too much. I figured since Sarah had taken care of her mom, who’d raised her to be just independent and driven and magical enough to be a parentified child, taking care of her perpetually and chronically ill and disabled mother, you know, I should make sure she had some breathing room too.
If I could turn back time.
I learn everything the hardest way possible.
So having blown a survivor’s fund on her magically with two suicided children, now completely able to take care of herself narcissist of a mom instead of the people who really could have used it, her closest chosen family and friends. Instead of doing that, I paid out her mom.
I regret that one every day.
GET TO THE POINT
I had an idea last week. I’ll be launching a publication with several co-conspirators. Once a week it will post a curated list of stories or poems or whatever the fuck the contributors read and liked most that week on Substack. We have literary fiction, poetry, possible surprise guests, and me, The Editor.
No, you can’t submit. (But maybe you can poke or suggest, I don’t know.)
No, there’s no badge. (Anathema to the project.)
No, there’s no list. (Except an archive)
No, there’s no ranking system and no tangible reward. (new stories, new voices, innovation)
No, it’s not designed to be all inclusive. (Because I don’t care about pleasing everyone and Cult Of The Rainbow Rat does not regress to the mean or lowest common denominator)
Nor comprehensive. (My spine just crawled)
In fact, it’s an exercise in curation, tastemaking, and exclusion by design.
It’s about the writing. That’s it.
It’s about curation and the objectively subjective ineffable quality of good writing, a good story, inventive or interesting prose, whatever the contributors want it to be (even when the good writing is bad, or when the bad writing is good.)
Hopefully it will turn into a place to go find NEAT NEW SHIT TO READ.
And yeah, eventually it will probably expand in scope in some asymmetrical way.
Because that’s what we do.
People already like my recommendations, ask for them sometimes even. I know people who make great recommendations. If there’s one thing we’ve always had, it’s great taste. It takes a lot of class to be this fuckin’ trashy. And I’m always looking for the next thing before anyone else finds it. And I gather like minded people.
SO LET’S DO A THING!
THE FINAL PIECE
The Rainbow Rat Review will technically be a memorial publication. (don’t worry, if it flops I always have more ideas.) In the spirit of both that and in the spirit of community support, the publication will be monetized from day 1.
All proceeds from the Substack will be accounted for, available, open and transparently held. Put into a community support and emergency fund for, I don’t know, the next time someone in the community has a freakish emergency like me while flat fuck on their ass, so they don’t have to parade their trauma for everyone like a west Oakland sideshow on a hot Saturday night in June.
The proceeds from the paid Substack subscriptions to Rainbow Rat Review will be held in their own account. And if people start to pay for it, there will be a release of a monthly available financial transparency audit to make sure that everyone understands this isn’t a joke.
If fiction creates culture, I’m going to find a way to make fiction support the culture of those who make it.
The process of applying for funds is under contemplation and internal review, a nascent concept at this point that makes no sense until there’s a paid subscriber. But it will be needs based, impartial, and fair. It’s a shock, but having done this before, bad actors are the vast exception, not the rule.
So that’s it.
COMING SOON THE RAINBOW RAT REVIEW
Presented by
There’s a Lotta GOATs around these days but ain’t none you Bear. Alpha Bitch Forever
This is grief with gold teeth. A cult built from ash and memes. Che and Fidel in one body, cracked out and holy. You flipped pain into a movement not just a moment. I feel the fire.
hell yeah. great idea. i’ll support however i can