Fiction

LOOKING AT YOU, LUCIEN by Isabelle Yang

December 5, 2025

It's not fair that I get to be sick while my boyfriend gets to be healthy. Gets to live life horizontally—flat, always lying, perpetually still—bent in an angle like that of a slant. Like the longest side of a pudgy triangle, the hypotenuse, sinking slowly. Centimeters of neck crouching inwards—up and down—as he swipes his fickle dickle sucky whucky thumb—up and down—as he fries his brain—up and down. Tweet and twit and twat. Stick and root and rat. The kinds of sounds he watches, the kinds of sounds he makes from the other room. Our only room in our only bed that only stores his body. A body that is writhing without putting up fights. My boyfriend will die soon. I know it.“Lucien,” I say. “Lucien.” Always in that tone that swings between concern and entire holes of it.Sometimes, when I stare into his eyes, the nothingness is so nothing it becomes something. Something like ignition or excitement or shock from an unwarranted stab. It’s usually just a reflection of me in those black nothing pupils, and suddenly I remember how thin and sick and close to dying I am—dying in a different way than his eventual death. My death will be quick and pleasant because I would have lived a life full of suffering while he would have lived one of instant pleasure.My boyfriend’s name is Lucien. Or Luth-ien, because he has a lisp. My boyfriend says dating me is like having a full-time job. If he had a full-time job, he would know how inaccurate that is. His days involve watching acres and acres of green turf across screens. He watches games all day. Games that require consistency and power and stamina. Also ambition because how can my boyfriend forget ambition. Wowee wow wow. Wishy wish woosh. Sounds his willy whoopy body makes while mimicking a golfer’s swing, panting, getting tired, lying down again. I have a full-time job, so I can’t lie down. I can’t stretch time or take multiple showers or learn how to whistle. My days are dictated for me, albeit short days, days closed multiple times because no gallery is open all week. “Why are the walls so white?” he asks when he visits, scratching his face. It’s not fair that Lucien’s skin mimics porcelain while mine mimics concrete. Cracking in the middle of day, in broad daylight, for everyone to see. When I rush to the bathroom, I don’t wonder if any art will get touched or stolen or lit on fire at the cost of my absence. Every day is a secret wish to get fired, to kick-start my life in a new way. When I’m at the gallery, I can’t wait to go home to Lucien. And when I get home, I can’t wait to die.At home, I look at his face—his porcelain face—and find new ways to improve it. Lucien’s nose bends like a Bastard sword recently retired from battle, swooshing away at anything nearby. Sometimes, I panic in the middle of the night, because I think he’s stopped breathing, stopped swooshing. When I look at his face in the darkness, I don’t think it can improve any more, because his is the kind that will leather beautifully as he grows older. The kind that will get glances from twenty-five-year-olds ten years from now, and ten years after that, and ten years after that. Now, if he could only grow up. When my boyfriend hears these complaints, he says I should write about things I love instead. But I love to complain—it might be the only thing I love—so I, technically, am doing what he says. I make him so happy.“How can I make you happy,” he asks me again and again. Something my last boyfriend would say. So would the one before. I don’t know how I keep finding the same person again and again. They are all chunks of flesh from one body, regurgitated at different points in my life. Each one hoping to endure a little longer than the last. It’s a race to nowhere, especially if none of them qualify.Qualifying only for dates to dinners where everyone stares. Probably because Lucien is over six feet tall, and I hide perfectly in his shadows. In the cusps of his shoulders where no one can touch me. I grab his deltoids as if they’re soft grenades and wait until he asks to be seated. I feel the closest to God, like God, against his cashmere back.Cherry cheesecake, napoleon shake, small sirloin steak. A floating coke, a perfect sundae, a sticky toffee pudding. Cutie patootie, loopy canoopy, woffee toffee coffee, cherry berry cheesecake. My boyfriend and I don’t have these kinds of nicknames. He has a name. I say it the way you’re supposed to. “Stop.”“Stop what?” “Stop fidgeting. You’re making the table shake,” I say and point to his leg. “I have ADHD, iths not my fault that—”“It’s.”“What?” “It’s pronounced it’s. Is being dyslexic also a symptom of ADHD?” Sometimes I wonder if I create these fights so we can drone on in silence. Cruise through whole dinners, whole days, whole lives together like this. I used to think eternity was short until I met Lucien who makes everything feel long and useless and almost even redundant. Whenever I get overwhelmed with the feeling of spending forever with him, I imagine what would happen if he got in a car crash. Immediate relief gets immediately replaced with fear and regret and eventually remorse. The amount of remorse depends on when the crash happens. Tomorrow, I will still be young and gorgeous and can start over. Twenty years from now, I can’t say the same. Maybe Lucien is my lesson, my meditation in life. His mouth is often half-open, equally ready and not ready to stutter something life-changing, something that will completely slice my heart in half. “I just…I…” “Your words, Lucien,” I say. “Use your words.” A waiter watches us complete each other’s sentences. Lucien likes to collect commas, showing them off whenever he talks. “I, I find you, like, impossible,” he manages. True! I think, but I am trying to focus on things that won’t shatter my heart. A futile attempt when I can still feel the waiter’s presence hovering nearby, secretly taking Lucien’s side of the matter. “You don’t even know him,” I want to spit out to her. You don’t even know how I color-coordinate his life, how I spend hours rearranging shades of taupe and gray to match his complexion. How he’s everything because of me and nothing without. Outside, autumn is crinkling into layers of ice. I think of how it will take Lucien every inch of his brain to not want to slip. There is never a moment I don’t think about him. Phee hooo weee. Whooo whooo. Phee hooo weee. Whooo whooo. Practice makes perfect, and my boyfriend loves practicing his whistle. All of Tribeca and all of Manhattan and all of New York can hear him. The children on Crosby poke their heads out, trying to smell out the tune. My boyfriend waves at them like Elvis or Kennedy, and the children cheer back. Their toothed smiles will be engrained inside our memories forever, remembered as the time we saved lives. We pretend to be united, hand in hand, and continue to walk in leisure until my boyfriend grabs at the chance to sit down. If there is something he’s good at, it’s whistling for a cab.One or two or three hours later, my boyfriend is ready to go into bed. He can synchronize with nature like this in ways he can’t with himself. But reaching unconsciousness can sometimes be an entirely separate effort, so yes, sometimes even he needs help falling asleep. Won’t do so unless I sing him a lullaby. One abundant with rhymes and sounds that can be diced into cubes. And because this is my boyfriend, because I love him, I wedge between him and his pillows and begin singing, watching him drift, as he digs deeper and deeper into a dreamscape, as he finally rests in peace.

Lucien, Lucien, a love I invent,

Lucien, Lucien, wrapped in linen and light, tucked deep in cement,

Lucien who loves little white cries and custard-filled pies and whom I despise,

Last quickly like lust,

Persevere alone if you must,

Lucien, Lucien, a boy I deny,

Lucien, my Lucien,

I lie lie lie.

EARTHBOUND by Uma Payne

December 4, 2025

No one ever found him. Worms turned his whole body into the nutrient shit that plants need to grow. The plastic that had shared space with his flesh stayed. It sat still or traveled elsewhere. Where he had long since become indiscernible, it remained itself. It was outside of natural time, being that nature had exiled. Plastic was what had been severed from life, transmuted into another phase of existence beyond the metabolic processes that meant living. The accreting mass of plastic was nature’s obliterative tendency beginning to outweigh its reproductive one. Nature was poisoned by its own urges. Asphyxiated under the weight of desire. Life fumbled the bag hugely when it incidentally or maybe inevitably made those configurations of organs wants and needs that it was totally unprepared for.

LET’S TALK ABOUT DESIRE by Dana Jean Rider

December 1, 2025

The woman in the window doesn’t know I’m watching her. Or, if she does, she’s fine with it, having assessed me as nonthreatening. I’m just the skinny white girl raking leaves outside her first-floor apartment patio. Hired-by-the-landlord equals vetted-as-safe. And she’s right, I don’t mean any harm—but it’s probably still weird how many times I’ve raked these particular leaves, which are now effectively mulch. She’s doing yoga in the middle of her living room. Not especially good at it, but she’s giving it her all, and when I rake really softly, I can hear her faint, vocal sighs of satisfaction as she sinks into each pose. The skin on her thighs ripples like waves. I imagine running my tongue over it. She rises into warrior. Her stomach is a smooth, lovely hill flowing into the elastic of her tight pink shorts—the same pair she wore when I first saw her weeks ago. She tucks long, dark braids behind her ears and extends her arms upward. A car alarm sounds, and I duck outside her potential line of sight. I do other chores. Scoop abandoned dog shit. Tag vehicles parked in the lot without permits. Wipe down the sweaty equipment in the shared gym. This is how I’ve been making ends meet since P left: My regular job at the stationery store doesn’t pay much, but caretaking—for another apartment complex my landlord owns—knocks a couple hundred off rent in exchange for about an hour of grounds cleaning twice a week. The complex is called SCENE, always in all caps, no “the.” SCENE is outside the city, in a first-ring suburb, surrounded by grassy boulevards and well-maintained public parks. After I first saw the yoga woman, I looked up prices at SCENE and immediately set aside any dreams of lifestyle equivalence. My apartment is about fifty minutes away by bus, just outside downtown, above a laundromat. This new life of mine smells pleasantly of detergent and dryer sheets. I practice slow-motion falling into my sheets like I’m in a TV commercial about soft fabric and soothing scents. When I don’t get it quite right, I try another take.

***

The stationery store is an image of satisfied vacancy. Blank pages of specialty paper pads, notebooks, envelopes, and planners stare down from the shelves. Down the middle of the room, a long table of pens organized into little glass cups. Full ink chambers and empty pages are a promise—someday, they will carry meaning. Behind the counter, font displays for monogramming and a locked glass case of fountain pens, a couple of which cost more than my rent. I hunch over the cash register, waiting to be asked about prices or cardstock weight or ink flow or line width. The owner of the store is named Connie. She is a tiny woman with hair so long it brushes the backs of her knees. On my first day of work, she told me she had hired me because I looked scholarly. Like a poet, she said, but the kind who still wrote on paper instead of on a computer screen. Microsoft Word isn’t poetic, she said, and my glasses-plus-turtleneck-plus-haughtiness look would be good for business. I asked her if she really thought I looked haughty. She said it was a compliment. Connie is obsessed with love letters. She carefully copies loving lines of famous authors onto expensive floral paper. When she finishes, she frames the pages and pins them to the walls. Right now, she’s working on transcribing a collection of letters between two Victorian poets who have very complicated ways of saying they’d like to touch each other. Behind my head at the register: “What I do and what I dream include thee, as the wine must taste of its own grapes.”I fill orders of monogrammed stationery for all kinds of people. Businessmen prefer plain colors and typesets and pay with company cards. English lit majors prefer gilded edges and offer torn coupons from advertisements Connie places in the college newspaper. Connie looks at the empty store and says, Get ready, a group of customers just got off the train. Connie is also a psychic. Once, she suggested that she could offer me a reading in exchange for two hours’ pay and looked genuinely sad when I declined. I nod and straighten piles of journals. The rest of the shift is quiet.

***

After P left me, I found a therapist named Belle. She has uncomfortably large eyes. Uncomfortable for me, I mean, as the object of her gaze. In my first session, she asked me why I wanted to try therapy and I told her that my boyfriend of many years had broken up with me. She asked why we broke up. I told her that we didn’t have sex anymore. She asked, was that really the reason, and I said, yes, we hadn’t had sex for months before he left. Her: How many months? Me: At least twelve. So, a year. Yes. What changed? I don’t know. Except. When we had fucked, he would get all misty-eyed and wholly consumed, and I would be thinking hard about anything else. I wanted to be into it like he was, but mostly I was impatient, as if I were waiting for a bus. For him, it came easily—he came easily. But my orgasm still feels unsolved and private. Also. Sometimes I get stressed when I have to eat a large sandwich. That’s not a euphemism for anything, exactly. An enormous, unwieldy sandwich with no obvious entry point for biting. I’m relieved when it’s over, without once accomplishing enjoyment during the eating process. Chewing as a structured, mechanical action—just: I have to clean up this mess. The only satisfaction comes from the task being complete. So, that’s how sex was, and why I stopped having it. I thought we had reached the perfect equilibrium. P did not. Belle didn’t have much to say about the sandwich. She said instead, Let’s talk about desire. I said okay, so we did. My task, she said, was to recognize desire when I saw it in others.

***

A text arrives from my friend Amanda, who lives far away and is very into fitness. If I let her talk about herself, she will tell me about things like personal records and her favorite athleisure brands. Once every few months Amanda texts me to check in about my life and hers. We were friends in college, and every interaction since then has been perfunctory. I can see my last response in our text thread from a few months ago when P and I were still together. There, I’ve gushed about a new sofa we had recently purchased. I told her I had found a nice seafood restaurant that I went to alone because P was allergic to fish. In response, she said that she had recently run a charity 10K for drug addicts. I hadn’t replied. I draft a reply to her most recent text. I say as little as I can while still being honest: I work two jobs and live alone. My apartment is covered entirely in linoleum and it usually smells like dryer sheets. Recently, I have developed a fondness for canned fish. It is most of what I eat.

***

I’m picking up a particularly large dog shit at SCENE when I see the yoga woman walking toward me. She’s wearing a velvety beige tracksuit that looks a size too small and a golden necklace that says Bianca. I look at the place where the brown skin of her midriff sticks out, then at her eyes, which are crinkly with a smile. She says that she’s glad she doesn’t have a dog. I nod and say, Me too. She frowns for a moment then recovers and says, See ya. I wave to her with the hand holding the poop bag. Damn it.

***

Connie likes to interpret dreams. Specifically, my dreams. Specifically, as soon as I arrive at the store in the morning. Instead of “Good morning” or “Hello, employee,” she says, What did you dream about last night? Admittedly, I am the sort of person to consider all of those things fake. But with Connie, that certainty lets me revel, safely, in the idea that they might be real. I tell her that I dreamed about a hotel. Hotels, she exclaims, clasping her hands together as though she has been gifted something marvelous. Hotels are spaces of transition. You don’t arrive in them to stay forever—you stay briefly, then leave. Probably you never return. You stay in other hotels, but you never come back to this one, or that one. You’re in a room mimicking a home, but you are not home. There’s no food in the fridge except leftovers that you will inevitably throw out. There’s cable TV, which you don’t have at home. You’re a different person in this different place. Impermanent. But if I say anymore, I’ll have to charge you for a reading, ha ha. Just promise you’ll still be available on Saturdays after your grand change!

***

In the dream, I’m in a room with two crisp, white beds. P is in the bathtub. He asks me to get him a disposable razor from the front desk, even though in reality he’s a near-entirely hairless man—one of the reasons I was attracted to him. When I go into the hallway to look for the lobby, I can’t find anything. The carpet goes on endless, impossible. The doors I pass open at random and I see people inside. They’re watching TV with gaping mouths. They’re crying and pulling their hair. They’re fucking in weird positions I suspect P had wanted to try. I eventually reach the end of the hallway, where ornate, imposing doors open at my touch. Inside, Bianca is executing a perfect king pigeon pose. She is naked, breasts facing the ceiling. I try to go inside the room. Then I wake up feeling unoriginal.

***

I tell Belle about the desire I’ve seen in others. I see the glimmering eyes of customers who wish they were a different kind of person—maybe someone who writes letters by hand to send to estranged friends, or maybe just someone who spends hundreds of dollars on stationery. I see Connie’s desire to tell the future and maybe her desire to find her own love hidden in the letters of others. I see the stern desire of tenants at SCENE to not be like me, the girl working off rent money by collecting others’ various wastes. It’s interesting to me, Belle says, that most of the desires you observe are nonsexual in nature. Sometimes, I say, I see men’s desire for me or for other women. They make it very obvious. Does that ever frighten you? Only the normal amount, I think. Do you want to talk about fear? No, not really. I think I’m really getting somewhere with desire. And where do you see desire in yourself?

***

Bianca isn’t doing yoga when I arrive at the regular time. The drapes to her apartment are partially closed, but I can see her absence in the living room. No yoga video, no downward-facing dog, no pink shorts. For the first time, I examine the room itself, nose pressed to the glass: expensive-looking furniture, a large, wall-mounted television, a stack of books on the end table that all have to do with personal improvement: diet, exercise, self-esteem, finances. Beyond the living room, a well-stocked kitchen with open cabinets that reveal a series of identical, clear plastic containers with various granolas and crackers. Even the hand soap has been decanted into a clear plastic dispenser. The apartment is organized, intentional. I think of my own linoleum box. My fresh-linen air and cans of fish. No books to be seen, because P took them all, but slanting piles of celebrity magazines encircle my unmade bed. I sweep leaves from around the mailboxes. SCENE trusts enough in its own gates and safety that they are just boxes, no locks—so I look. Of course I look! Bianca Williams, apartment 124. She has a subscription to a magazine full of high-end business attire. The models look nothing like her—in that they are all white and draped in stringy muscle—but also nothing like me. They have bulges and caverns in all the right places. They shoot lusty looks at the camera that has plastered them onto glossy pages. I ask myself about my own desire.I waste time checking parking permits, and soon Bianca comes home—drives up in a small, blue BMW and emerges with a friend in tow. They have an aura about them like they’re drunk. They smell like brunch. I hover nearby with my clipboard of license plate numbers and she doesn’t see me or doesn’t care. When they are inside, I hear overlapping voices and rising laughter. I chance a look through the window and see them sipping wine at her kitchen table. I leave them like that, vague, giggling outlines in the background of the room where Bianca does her yoga.

***

Canned fish can range in price from ninety-nine-cent tuna—the kind from companies that have been accused of using dolphin meat—to pricey tins of swordfish or anchovy that can only be purchased at specialty stores. These expensive versions usually have an old-world, art nouveau design to them, muted colors and complex line art that evokes church architecture. It’s like I’m meant to think I’m royalty from a country that doesn’t exist anymore—an Eastern European countess feasting on caviar at teatime, instead of a thirty-something sitting on a rug she bought to hide some of the linoleum, eating canned fish she can’t quite afford with the tiny fork that she used to use to crush up pâté for her cat. The cat is dead now. “Tin fish” is a luxury good. I sink the fork into the pale fish flesh and try to connect to decadence.

***

I tell Belle that I think I have found my desire and she nods in encouragement. I tell her about Bianca and she asks how we met. I tell her, she talked to me about dog poop. And? No, that’s all, except I see her doing yoga through her window. Belle is quiet for a long time. Her face goes taut around the mouth. She explains to me why it is inappropriate to watch someone through their window. No, no, I know. I know that. So why did you do it? My turn for silence. If you are going to put desire into practice, it must be able to be reciprocated. You can’t just watch someone through a window.No, no, I know. Belle, frowning now: This is a good moment to practice empathy. How do you think she would feel if she knew you were watching her? I try to consider this, but as I’m forming an answer Belle continues speaking, so I guess the question is rhetorical. Is this the first time you’ve had feelings for a woman? Yes. Or, no. I had friendships when I was younger where I thought I felt differently than the friends. But it wasn’t a distinct, oh-please-let’s-touch thing. Just an ache in the back of my throat that only appeared on occasion. And anyway, how do you tell the difference between loving how someone exists and loving them? Are you trying to find the difference between love and envy? I would say, picture yourself with them, then picture yourself as them, and see which is better. We talk a little more about Bianca, but nothing very helpful. I stop seeing Belle after this session.

***

When I finally let Connie do a reading in exchange for half of my Friday wages, she has this to say: I’m getting the sense that you place a great deal of value on being liked. Which is good, as a sales associate! But maybe bad for a regular person. You will have people who like you in the longer term, but you’ve entered a dry spell of camaraderie right now. You are on your way to other things—interesting how this lines up with your hotel dreams! Think of this time as your space of transition—not this job of course, which you’ve told me you’ll be at for a long time. While you wait for a change, find a practice ground for feeling the connection you seek. Yes, we all need practice, not in feeling our feelings, but in making them known and meaningful for others. It is good that your biggest hurdle is figuring out what you want—what an interesting phrase, to “figure out.” I’ve done other readings where the biggest hurdle is avoiding a looming and painful death. So, you probably won’t die! But if you start to feel sick, tell me and we can try again. Listen, have you ever tried yoga? It may help with any number of your problems and paths and potentials. You will soon come into a small amount of wealth—not money, necessarily. You will have a slight headache for the next three Thursdays. Oh, and you’ll make a big sale this afternoon! Custom “from the desk of” stationery order.

***

For a while I stop showing up to my job at SCENE and no one notices. Eventually my landlord calls, I assume to fire me, but actually he just tells me there’s a dead raccoon near the SCENE dumpster that he’d like me to deal with. I mostly go because I’ve run out of things to do at home besides paging through the magazine I took from Bianca’s mailbox. I tried television and scrolling the internet and I even found a yoga video online. I made it about five minutes before the instructor said to lay down on the floor, then I watched the rest of the class from that position. I tried a yoga class once, years ago. I went with Amanda, my fitness friend, when she still lived in town. The class was more advanced than I was ready for. I tried for an hour to keep up with a room full of sweaty investment bankers and political advisors in colorful polyester. The instructor, in an apparent effort of pity, lurked near me to push in my spine or straighten my knees as necessary. When we left the class, Amanda said, Wasn’t that fun? My problem is that I’ve only ever known for certain what I don’t want. I don’t want to do yoga or have my fortune told. I don’t care about stationery or athletic clothing. I don’t need a therapist to tell me what I should be doing. I don’t want to have sex. But I do want.

***

The next time I see Bianca, she is naked with the curtain pulled nearly shut. She pulls her heel up against her thigh into tree pose and sighs. Her breasts and stomach hang heavy toward the floor. No line on her body runs straight, all flowing, like waves or poetic shifts in a love letter. Oh, how I love thee, let me count the ways—let me count your limbs, each mark and crevice, every hair on your head and body. She radiates light. She outshines the blinding midday sun. I’m aware of the rake in my hand and the mulched leaves at my feet. Looking at her, I see myself.When she has finished being a tree, she hangs loose in a forward fold. When she rises, our eyes meet and hers go wide.

YOU THANK THE MARQUIS DE SADE: AUDREY SZASZ’S ‘TELEPLASM’ by Jesse Hilson

November 13, 2025

My dictionary of British slang tells me that “Sloane” was the first name of an insufferable female archetype of the upper class in the 1980s. When I saw that the protagonist of Audrey Szasz’s novel Teleplasm (Amphetamine Sulphate, 2025) was named Sloane Epstein it suggested great wealth and privilege crossed with echoes of the human trafficking, pedophilia, and white collar underworld of Jeffrey Epstein. Indeed, the novel exists in a narrative Petri dish of high-class travel, Internet media celebrity, psychological deterioration and pervasive sexual violence. Sloan Epstein is a young woman attached to a roving paranormal researcher Dr. Novák, her “boyfriend,” for whom she serves as a fraudulent medium on his globe-trotting YouTube investigations into hauntings and apparitions. “Teleplasm,” on the book’s first page, is given as the title of a substance that hypothetically emanates from “the body of a medium that serves as the means for telekinesis.” Since nobody, especially Sloane, credibly believes in the fiction of the afterlife they are perpetrating, we as readers of the novel are left to witness her body’s other more tangible excretions in the form of aroused sexual response to Novák’s frequent physical and psychological abuse. Sadomasochistic sexual encounters come along with the punishing regularity of a city bus schedule, and are described with microscopic detail. More narration, though, is given to Sloane’s interior emotional landscape which is as weirdly terrifying as the darkest and most deranged true crime documentary offered on the planet’s most off-the-chain YouTube channel on the eve of its being taken down for obscenity. In fact, this monologued material—morbid, funny, shocking, unrepentantly antisocial—makes up the bulk of Szasz’s novel:

My wish for affection is part of a larger neurotic trend, put in motion by an artificial hand or a silent motor—eternity is an unwound thread from an invisible spool—…and what am I doing right now? I am imitating a masochistic patient who longs to be trussed up in my cell like a worm in ever-tightening restraints, disobeying verbal and written commands, slacking off, twisting and turning, prophylaxis as state oppression, I need to please a white man, a clearly ironic overtone of hypergenocidal mania, sexual relations with my oppressors, analysts, teachers, furtive incest wishes, involuntary recall of trauma injuries, furious self-flagellation that never seems to satisfy…

Imagine a jet-setting version of A Clockwork Orange, without the Russian slang and with no Ludovico Technique, no rehabilitation or reprogramming narratives or moral vision, no orientation to conformity, and you may come close to imagining Teleplasm. The narrator’s voice (this is a common feature of all Szasz’s fiction that I’ve read) is overpowering: sophisticated and urbane while at the same time uniquely dissolute and down for whatever, including felonious criminal behavior and flouting all forms of authority. This makes for a fascinating window onto her characters. The boundaries broken are both external and internal. Szasz’s narrators dare you to develop something as frail and weak as a moral objection, or a set of stupid moral reactions, to their litanies of outrage and danger.I had opened myself up to Teleplasm maximally, so the book stood for something significant, to me. I could play along with the morbid curiosity. When I read it, though, I felt like “There, I’ve read enough of the evil.” A good book in many ways, an evil book in a big way, in the biggest way. Teleplasm should not be banned as a matter of policy, but if you’re looking for books that from an enlightened and amused perspective “might as well be banned,” banned by a smirking individual, not a humorless, illiterate group, banned for one’s self, this is something like that book. It is a turn-off for all further books of its type about that kind of moral degeneracy. And there are a lot of books of the type out there, but none as well-written as Teleplasm, I’d wager. In it, I have found the book that has done the turning off for me. Szasz’s cool, black book has pride of place in my library.When I first read it, I gave it a five-star Goodreads review, deservedly, but on a personal evaluative basis, as a reader, it’s something I didn’t know if I ever wanted to read again. But I did read the book, again, later, months later, to taste and savor the moral viewpoints upon reflection. Part of this faculty of judgment was arrived at by reading several of Szasz’s novels and novellas, and feeling like I had seen enough of the progression of subject matter to get the picture and not needing to go further. I’m not 100% sure there’s much more depth to the cistern than what I saw from Counterillumination, Invisibility: A Manifesto, “A-Z of Robomasochism,” and finally Teleplasm. Szasz has written numerous other books that if one had extra cash and a desire to read further (itself a species of masochism, arguably), one could buy those books and explore it all. It feels like a case of clever craftsmanship and enfant terrible wit utilized on subject matter with diminishing returns.This repulsion is “satisfying” in a way, a sad satisfaction for a reader. Sad that it was necessary. But happy too, in that I can move on to investigating other moral territories in literature. It drove me, in a sense, out of Dennis Cooper’s best-of lists at year’s end and into the arms of …some more positive sensibility. I don’t know the Marquis de Sade enough to place him, but you thank Sade, you thank him for drawing the boundary. I no longer believe for me “there is no boundary.” Szasz, and in one sense, Sade as one of her influences as a writer of S&M erotica and venom spat into the collective face of the squares, illustrated that, not for themselves or for their thirsty, depraved readers, but for me. And I’m just one reader and nobody to heed. I might as well, however, find a philosophy or a utility in Teleplasm. It provides a service, an aesthetic object lesson: an example of morality and aesthetics meeting perfectly in a novel. If it’s a Sadean thing, I wouldn’t say it draws me closer to reading the French aristocrat. Notoriety is only so compelling — beyond a certain point it has no power over “good people,” people with some orientation, as Joris-Karl Huysmans found after writing his own horrid books, towards the Cross. I hate to sound like a Midwestern mom at a school board invoking Satanic Panic. I don’t think that’s me. I don’t know if I need to read more Audrey Szasz in a quest to gain the forbidden knowledge. And I don’t think this was ever her goal as a writer. The thing about quitting reading her for the kicks is that there is always the world’s horror reportage of its own evil you can turn to. Artists can give you so much of the picture and are in the end, interchangeable with each other. Szasz’s writing was a unique piece of the puzzle; her books, if they were living things, would have zero remorse, zero pangs of conscience about their capabilities. If there was a satirical vein in Teleplasm meant to invite a more complex moral reading, it was too Baroque for me to detect. Maybe I was too much of an obtuse normie to read, in the comedy of Sloane Epstein’s monologues, some cry for help, something about the need for love? It is a damaging, upsetting watershed of a book. I don’t think I’m interested in that kind of damage anymore. I could have gone on reading other transgressive and nihilistic authors forever, presumably. Again, I’m grateful to Teleplasm’s author for helping me to shut off the nozzle.The Marquis de Sade, it seems to me, served as a “necessary outlier” to position other philosophical, moral, and literary coordinates around, against which normalized values can and must be established. And yet the world seems by some lights (whether subjective or objective, whether localized perceptions or mediated global consciousness) to be well on the way to becoming more Sadean every day, not so much of an outlier anymore. Maybe here’s another value of Teleplasm. It’s a dishonest, ill-equipped critic who hasn’t read Sade yet invokes him, but I don’t really need to read him to get this: I have Audrey Szasz’s updated writing.

MAKING CONNECTIONS AND DRAWING LINES: AN INTERVIEW WITH EMMALEA RUSSO by Rebecca Gransden

November 11, 2025

Since its release in fall 2024 Emmalea Russo's Vivienne (Arcade Publishing) has had time to percolate with the culture it so sharply interrogates. A slanted satire, the book poetically autopsies online mores and offers a giddy sojourn to the realm of the artist, both the world they invent for themselves, and that imposed from outside. Three generations of a family are positioned as focus for the novel, and Russo bestows this trio with an enchanted ordinariness. What constitutes a violent act? By the end, flesh and blood puts words to shame. I spoke to Emmalea about the book. Rebecca Gransden: WHO IS VIVIENNE VOLKERCentral to Vivienne is the triumvirate of Vivienne herself, Velour, and Vesta. Do you recall how the characters came to you? How did you decide upon their names?Emmalea Russo: They are certainly a triumvirate, a holy or unholy trinity of Vs. Vivienne Volker sort of tumbled out of a poem I wrote which featured Hans Bellmer. I wondered what his family legacy would be like if he had another lover—one with whom he had a child. Velour Bellmer is Vivienne and Hans’s daughter and that name came to me in a sudden rush—like, duh—of course Vivienne would name her daughter after a fabric! I’d never heard the name Velour (Vel, for short) and I sort of love it. Vesta, Velour’s daughter, had to be another V—and I was thinking of the vestal virgins, the goddesses of home and hearth who kept the fire of Rome going.RG: I’m drawn to the attention you give to the idea of harm. In the media landscape described in the book, harm can be something seemingly arbitrarily ascribed, and amorphous in its definition. There are incidences for your characters that involve their harm, whether that be at the reputation level, or of the actual bodily harm variety. How did you set about incorporating the idea of harm into the book?ER: Harm was such a buzzword when I was writing the book. I grew up around a lot of lawyers, specifically criminal defense attorneys—so I became interested in this idea of harm, which is undeniable but also unprovable, as it relates to the presumption of innocence, reasonable doubt, due process. In Vivienne, detractors claim her work is “harmful” or has “harmed” them in some way. What does this really mean? Is it an artist’s job to make sure their work doesn’t harm anyone? Is that even possible, or a worthwhile goal? What are we to do with our harm? Are we supposed to avoid or boycott works that are risky, problematic, or triggering? In the book, harm and victimhood get weaponized. Accusations of harm become like babyish tyrannical refrains. There are piles of interesting things hiding underneath the word “harm.”RG: You utilize various mediums throughout the text, from comment threads to letters. I found this creates a sensation similar to that of social media scrolling, a pull into a vortex of information. Eyewitness reports on Volker turn up amid these comment threads, presenting tantalising glimpses of her. There is a hunger to construct the person from these fragments, an impulse that becomes a game. Where do you stand on the public and the private when it comes to an artist’s life, and to what extent does this influence your own approach to publicity in relation to your work?ER: Great question. Yes, there are these quick glimpses of Viv—glimpses which make her appear even more iconic and unreachable, in a sense. The Bellmer-Volker-Furio clan is quite private. On the one hand, it’s fair game to reach into a public figure’s life—to try and grab bits and pieces and make stories. On the other hand, there’s a kind of cruelty and madness about it. These days, we do the machinery’s work for it—exploiting ourselves and our images. I often wonder about the backlash—the children of influencers, for instance. I think these publicity technologies can give way to delusion and dehumanization. For instance: we begin to believe that a person is what a person posts. Or, that we know what a person cares about because we follow them online. There’s a level of unknowability, opacity, that has to be preserved. The danger comes when we forget the difference between info and truth. When it comes to my own work, I tend to be very private about my personal life. And yet—how to foreground the work and hope people read it while keeping oneself private? It's not a clean, clear line. Things get fuzzy and messy, inevitably. I don’t know!RG: Velour pictures Wilma’s broken body on the ground seven or eight stories down, Max’s needled, drug-torn form stacked atop it. And her father, too—thin and filled with cancers. Her own dead body, her mother’s, her daughter’s, the dog’s . . . their clothes blowing in the wind and smelling of piss, French perfume, and shit. A saint or an angel arrives—one of these entities her mother apparently believes in—and blesses them, makes the sign of the cross, then continues on. Their bodies, piled high, block traffic. Lou picks the whole mess up in his garbage truck, compacts them until all organs get crushed. A theme that haunts the book is that of accusation, and what it means to stand in judgement. So much of Volker’s story is surrounded with rumor and insinuation, questions of guilt and innocence. For me, a great strength of the book is its careful and nuanced exploration of human messiness. Do you view Vivienne as a moral work?ER: This is such a brilliant question. I’m glad you thought of it as carefully exploring human messiness—which is essentially what I aimed to do. I guess Vivienne is a deeply moral work, though not in an obvious way. I certainly hope it’s not moralizing or preachy. I think there’s a big difference. I get irritated when I can feel the author of a work of fiction winking at me or letting me know she’s on the right side of history. It’s belittling and shoots me out of the world. In Vivienne, the characters are not outright judges for their transgressions, but they do transgress a lot, and they are met with consequences. Vivienne wrestles with her own conscience and guilt, as we see in the church scene, and she seems to be guilty, but likely not for what the internet crowd believes she’s guilty of. The sins of Vivienne and Velour get visited on Vesta, but in ways the characters don’t totally see. There’s a lot of fate in the book. The three Fates, like the three Vs of Vivienne, are women. Maybe the book could be read as cautioning against forgiving oneself too quickly—the potential dangers in seeing oneself as a victim and not (also) a perpetrator. The ethics of guilt and wrestling with fate are at play.RG: Canines play an important part in the book, and a character’s recurring dream features the powerful image of a dog. What drew you to include this aspect? Have any real life animals inspired the dogs featured in Vivienne? ER: I’m happy you asked this! Dogs are everywhere in the book, including on the cover. I grew up with dogs, and I have two of them now. The dogs in Vivienne are amalgamations of many dogs I know or have known IRL. The family dog’s name is Franz Kline. Kline was an abstract artist from Pennsylvania, so I thought it fit. But also, a friend of mine told me that she met a dog in New York once named Franz Kline, and I thought it was perfect for the Vivienne dog. I was at a dog park a few months after the book came out, and I met a dog that matched the description I gave of Franz Kline perfectly. It was uncanny. There is such an innocence, honesty, and immanence about dogs, and it’s excruciating to see an animal hurt. Animals witness our sorrows, wrongdoings, all of it—and we project onto them. In the book, they become sacrifices, keepers of dreams, companions, protectors, gods, barometers. Maybe dogs serve as a kind of counterpoint to human messiness in the book because, as Freud said, dogs bite their enemies and love their friends, “quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate in their object relations.”RG: Vivienne presents the idea of growing a simple soul. What does this mean?ER: Lars Arden, the opportunistic and savvy gallerist who scoops up Vivienne’s work after it’s been ditched by the big museum, is also somewhat of a mystic, a seeker. And throughout, Lars is quoting and thinking of the French mystic Marguerite Porete’s 14th century text The Mirror of Simple Souls. It’s essentially a kind of guidebook for union with the divine, and also a profound and profoundly weird meditation on the nature of love and how to make one’s soul “simple” in preparation for meeting G*d. Porete was burned at the stake for her book, and for refusing to refute its contents. She was called a heretic and a pseudo-mulier (fake woman). These accusations are also levelled against Vivienne. I wanted Lars to be reading this obscure medieval spiritual text and really taking it to heart. There is a lot of dark humor and satire in Vivienne, and Lars is slippery and scheming, but he’s also wanting to better himself—to grow a simple soul. Simplifying one’s soul involves sloughing off earthly stuff. Some people think Lars is like the “villain” of the book, but I don’t see him that way. He’s caught between accruing and simplifying, between growing his reputation and growing his soul. Can you do both at the same time? RG: Lars Arden met Clorinda Salazar, a socialite moonlighting as a stylist and internet writer, at a coffee shop a few years ago when they struck up a conversation about an article she was writing entitled “Sexualities You Didn’t Know Existed.” Clorinda’s reputation preceded her, and Lars felt she lived up to the hype: a gorgeous, big chested redhead with an encyclopedic knowledge of who and what was in. The daughter of the late abstract expressionist known simply as Salazar, a painter who won notoriety amongst the downtown set and beyond when he allegedly pushed his wife, the artist Paulina Paz, from her studio window onto the sidewalk. After she woke from a brief coma following the six-story fall, she didn’t press charges and their careers flourished.I’d like to talk about falling. An incident of a person falling to their death hangs over the novel’s characters. It’s a concept that lingers, not only as a result of the tragedy inherent in the incident itself, but also on a deeper, symbolic level. It put me in mind of the depression era financier jumpers (although I believe that is now regarded to be mostly a myth), the supposed use of this method by government agencies to eliminate people deemed no longer of use, and, most obviously, the unbearable images of 9/11 jumpers. How did this aspect of the book come to you?ER: We see Vivienne’s rise in the book, which is simultaneously her fall. Windows (physical and digital) and highs and lows, obscurity and fame. Climbing/rising is always also falling. I was thinking of the falls and pushes in the book (and lingering questions about who was pushed, who jumped, who fell…) as ways of thinking about fault, guilt, escape, blame. It’s a sort of running joke in the book, but also deathly serious. There’s the tragedy of Icarus, of course—who flew too close to the sun and fell into the sea after his wings melted. Unica Zurn jumped from a window to her death. Deleuze did, too. And there is Ana Mendieta, who apparently fell from a window in the 1980s. RG: This is perhaps an example of the universe lining up in itself, but I increasingly find myself asking writers about their relationship with synchronicity and its importance with regard to their work. How do you view synchronicity, and are there any examples of it in your own creative life you’d like to share?ER: Synchronicity! It’s incredibly important to me. Synchronicity means “same time,” and this is the principle on which divination and astrology operate. Planetary positions aren’t “causing” certain events to happen in our lives. But, there may be a correlation between what’s going on in the sky and that same moment here on Earth. Synchronicity has to do with paying attention, reading the room, making connections and drawing lines. Vivienne unfolds over the course of one supercharged week, but we see overlaps and weird connections between characters. Synchronicities between online commenters and Vivienne’s rural life. Jung thought of synchronicity as a creative act. I think of my astrology practice as the weird study of synchronicities. RG: What does the future hold?ER: I just asked the tarot. I got The Fool.And also, there’s a sequel. It’s called The Moon Papers and it will be out in the summertime.

BECKETTIAN by Shane Kowalski

November 10, 2025

Murphy was visiting Malone. It had been a while since they had seen each other. Murphy being busy in the city, while Malone had lingered in the countryside. Murphy remembered those dark country roads, whizzing down them in the nights as a youth. No noise. But at the same time, all the noise in the world. The humming shadows. Malone was always the type to leave enough room between himself and other people. Murphy, on the other hand, had become a successful C-AWP II, a thing he so frequently had to explain to new acquaintances that it had lost all meaning. He no longer truly knew what the acronym stood for, nor the nature of the work. More recently he had taken to going into the office—a large high rise in the city with a long elevator ride—and sitting there confused as to what to do. The confusion was so wrought he thought he was having a stroke one day, even going so far as to say to a passing coworker, “I think I’m having a stroke.” But the coworker took this to be yet another slice of dark humor common to the world of the office. Murphy frequently went home with a headache. He had begun distancing himself from his girlfriend, Molly. It was a slow, painful process that would irrevocably damage their default modes in relationships going forward. Murphy felt bad about it. It was nothing Molly did or didn’t do. He felt it was connected to his confusion at work, but he couldn’t say in what way. On the other end, Molly was beginning to think Murphy needed help. It pained and angered her to feel pushed away, but she also felt like Murphy was spinning down a dark road, without light or guide, and would sure enough find himself crashed into a large tree. Part of this feeling was informed by a recent event she had witnessed on a ferry to the cliffs. It was very cold and the choppy ocean sprayed the deck from time to time. A young man, very well dressed considering the casual nature of the occasion, had gotten up and started stripping off his clothes. Soon he was naked and screaming that someone named Molly was down there, pointing to the ocean. This struck Molly for obvious reasons. The young, naked man had begun trying to climb the ferry’s rail to hurl himself over when a group of men pulled him back at last. They threw him to the deck, where he flopped like a fish. It all lingered for Molly, although she told nobody about it, least of all Murphy. And it was only a moment, nights later, when Murphy stayed over and was stripping off his clothes in preparation for a moment of intimacy, that she felt like she had witnessed an omen or premonition. That, somehow, Murphy was that young man, naked and flopping on the deck of the ferry. Murphy, of course, knew none of this. He had everything one could seem to want and yet felt fraught over all of it. It wasn’t until he got the letter from Malone that he thought maybe this was the answer. Going to see Malone! Malone was always a dissident, in every possible way. His life, in the country, the hardscrabble hew of it, just seeing it, would straighten Murphy out. He thought of that old children’s book about mice, one being from the city and the other the country. He couldn’t remember anything else about them. It seemed like the last book he had ever read. He had stopped after that one. The mice. The city one and the country one. Whatever their conflict was. When he finally made it to the tiny house in the country, after a six-hour train ride and then another hour and a half car ride there, Murphy was surprised to find a note at the door. It said: Friend, when you arrive, please just come in. I’m sorry. Murphy thought this was strange. He went in. There he found a neat and orderly house. Malone had done well for himself. Yes, he had stayed in the country, but he had made it nice. It seemed he had invested something into his solitary life. This warmed Murphy’s heart and made him feel guilty over the discontent he felt at his own life. Friendship, he thought, was a viaduct from one loneliness to another. When he went into the living room he found Malone. He was sitting in his rocking chair, very still, holding a large shotgun in such a manner that it pointed directly at his face. He seemed upset, perhaps had even been crying a little. He looked disappointed to see Murphy. “Oh,” Malone said. “I was supposed to have done it already. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. You weren’t supposed to see me living like this!”

THE BROKEN TOWER by Kaden Griggs

November 5, 2025

The hulk of the Orizaba lulled hugely in the calm spring water as if the waves were tongues tasting the air in broad gulps like old hounds lapping water from ground puddles. Not much moved. The poet was drinking and avoiding his beloved. His father had died and he was very sad tonight. He had never felt emptier within. Lust enters when the hollowness leaves nothing else behind. He makes the mistake of believing again that the drinking will bury the lust and set things aright but it only invigorates the lust. Lust for all things. Lust for the remembrance of those moments of past that once made life seem worthwhile, as if one’s existence were some abstract word on the tip of the tongue never recalled.He drank some more. He stared at the bartender and mumbled for another and he saw the uneasiness in the bartender’s gaze returning his dim, dead one. The poet’s face was straight and his eyes were stones in their sockets. The drunkenness was failing to save him like it had before. The poet got his drink and stood at the railing overlooking the water and the faraway lights beyond glittering like the wavering of dirty gems in torchlight. His thoughts grew tangled and dissolved like salt. They used to dissolve like sugar. He didn’t know what happened.He turned around with his back against the railing, against the water, and looked at the people mingling, the people coming and going, the people wandering about in confidence, the people smiling and the people whose eyes glowed as they forged a good memory. His expression never altered.A crewman came by. The poet’s eyes followed him as the crewman, dressed in a white shirt and brown pants, went to the bar and got a beer and took a swig and looked about. The crewman didn’t seem to recognize anyone in the crowd. He wandered over the poet’s way and leaned on the railing beside him. The poet stared at him. You would never think the poet drunk. If he were lying down you’d check his pulse. “Nice night here,” the crewman said.The poet did not comment. The crewman swigged his beer. “Where you headed to?” The crewman said.The poet did not comment. The crewman swigged his beer.“Not a talker, huh? That’s alright. Some are talkers and some are thinkers, I suppose.”The poet had been staring at the crewman’s pants. He could weep at every crevasse unironed, the silver of his zipper like a tear in the moonlight, the brown pigment of the fabric like his wife’s skin. Transfusing love from one thing to another. Perhaps that would solve things. The old desperation lurched within like a sick person’s soul escaping. He licked his lips and reached out in a jerk and grabbed the crewman’s crotch. He did not even look the man in the eye. He studied his own groping hand instead.“Hey! What are you doing?”“Love.”The crewman punched him twice. The poet fell. The crewman kept hitting, kicking, hitting. Someone finally pulled him off. The poet retained the same expression throughout, even as he picked himself up and stumbled back to his cabin as the onlookers gazed upon him with curiosity and mild disgust.When he got back to his cabin, his wife raped him. The same expression.The next morning he awoke with the same dread. By lunch he was drunk. When he leapt overboard, no one noticed until hours afterward. They couldn’t find his body. They looked and it was not there. It was a bright wide day. A tall, commodious, decorous sky unsealed.

HI by Erin Kelly Smith

November 3, 2025

She filled out her first dating profile in a frenzied whirl, half-drunk on the yet-undigested news that her ex had brought someone with him to Thanksgiving that year.For a photo, she uploaded the professional headshot that was on the “Meet Our Team!” page of her work’s website, then quickly removed it, fearing these unknown, savage internet men could reverse-image search their way to learning every private facet of her life. She snapped a brand-new—and thus unsearchable—photo of herself standing and staring into her hallway mirror. She intended a smile, but only captured once its bloom had faded, her expression already wilting into its usual wrinkle of woe.That first night, one man messaged her. She felt dangerous and desirable when she saw the alluring dot of the notification, red like a woman’s sex. The man’s name was Alan and all of the photos on his profile were selfies taken in his car.hi, he messaged.She stared at the little text bubble, and it was invigorating but then immediately she felt unsafe—who was this guy, this stranger? Why had she purposefully exposed herself to an unvetted man who would inevitably just bring her hurt? Then that initial, sharp instinct towards self-preservation withered and underneath it she just felt foolish.She closed the app, then reopened it and in one decisive press of her finger, deleted her profile. She closed the app again and uninstalled it from her phone. Who was she kidding? Who would want to date her? Before her marriage had ended, back in their courtship’s tender beginning, she had only become her husband’s pre-ex wife by dint of them both having been young and stupid. There was no way anyone else would ever want her, not now. There was no possibility that Alan could actually like her. He probably just messaged every profile he stumbled across. He probably was a bot.She went to work the next day and wore a high-collared, conservative blouse, like the one in her picture on the website, that hid any suggestion her body could be engaged in something as unprofessional as romance. She thought of emails and meetings and spreadsheets—but then, in the car on her commute home, suddenly she thought of Alan and his selfies. Where had he been driving to? His photos had been taken on different days, evidenced by his different outfits, but his expression was always the same. It was a stern, perceptive look; a look like he was really seeing her, even through the screen of her phone. His was a gaze that traversed time, traveling via the power vested upon it by the holy quintology of 5G mobile data, staring up and out of the phone screen and then deep within her. His was a look that trespassed upon the secret caverns of her mind, witnessing the heavy list of every bad thing she wished she could’ve undone. His seeing was her immaculate confession, and when his gaze at last averted from her hidden shames, she would finally be granted the freedom to forget them.That night she dreamt of Alan. They were in his car. He turned his face towards hers. They locked eyes. “Hi,” he said.She found herself thinking of Alan every time she drove her car. “Hi,” she started saying when she turned the ignition, when she buckled her seatbelt, when she stopped at a red light. “Hi.” It was like their secret code word, hers and Alan’s, the verbal key to unlock their world.Soon, her dreams of Alan became more complex. They’d drive around a dream city, for hours. She’d beg Alan to speak to her, but now he was always silent and distant. She’d plead with him to only just say their private word, to just say, “Hi.” He would instead stop the car, mutely turn towards her beside him, and stare. The stare was awful; it swallowed her in its thick blackness. And then, after a while, he would turn away and resume driving the city’s streets, and yet she would still feel trapped in his darkness.In the dreams, in the unspoken contextual fabric that swaddled them, it became fact that she and Alan lived in this car, and maybe always had. They were married, in the dreams. She would scream and curse at him to tell her where they were going, what unreachable place was their final destination, but of course he didn’t speak; in the dreams it had been years since she had heard his voice, since he had whispered what had become her pet name, her sobriquet: Hi, hi, hi. Hi had been prayer and dirty talk all in one syllable and now he had taken it away. He wouldn’t even look at her anymore, kept his unblinking eyes trained on the endless road ahead. She started weeping, in the dreams, a heavy, sticky kind of weeping that invaded her whole being like sickness.Even when awake, she now couldn’t speak their private word without sobbing, even just in greeting to her colleagues. Soon just the sight of her own car brought her to tears, and soon enough, everything else did, too: the couch in her living room where she and Alan would never lounge together on lazy weekends; the trashcan in her kitchen that he would never chivalrously empty before even being asked; the spot on her desk at work where his picture would never sit, declaring their love to the world.Her coworker caught her weeping in the bathroom, and she didn’t have words to express what she was going through.“Alan,” was all she could croak through the stall door, before being overcome by another sob.“Ah, breakup,” the coworker said knowingly, and silently exited the room.Then, abruptly, the Alan dreams stopped. She still dreamt at night, but she’d returned to her usual carousel of familiar stress dreams: the one where she was back in high school; the room full of spiders; being pulled by a wave out into the ocean with no way back to shore. In the mornings after these dreams, she somehow felt more tired than she had the night before. Throughout her days she now yawned as much as she had been sobbing. Her eyes were perpetually puffy and bloodshot but it was indiscernible whether it was from these restless nights or just the cold blanket of lingering despair.And then, early one morning, she woke herself up. The well-trodden high school dream had whirred into place: she was a student but she was her same adult age. Confused, she walked up and down the school’s labyrinthian halls. In this recurrent nightmare, she never knew her class schedule and she could never find the administrative office—the correct corridor was always locked, or she made the wrong turn and ended up back where she had begun—and she was overwhelmed by the pervasive suspicion that she wasn’t even supposed to be there. As always when she had the high school dream, a feeling of stress and frustration and powerlessness swelled within her. But then—in an unprecedented act of REM-cycle defiance, she simply thought, “No.” The dream ended. Her eyes opened. Somehow, her desperation had instinctively manifested the ability to dream lucidly.She started waking herself immediately if the wrong kind of dream began. She’d wake up five, six times a night. Just before rousing herself, she’d first whisper, “Hi,” as a last-ditch attempt to ferret out if Alan existed in that same dream universe.She woke herself from spiders and water and reenacted memories of her marriage failing, until finally, finally, she had a dream in which she was back in the city, their city, her and Alan’s city. Nervous, hopeful, and scared to feel something as perishable as hope, she whispered, “Hi,” out into the empty city streets. It rang true. She could feel the whole block vibrating—she had uttered the key and the lock was somewhere in this dream landscape. Alan was somewhere, here in this dream. She had to find him.She ceased waking herself from her other dreams. Instead, she discovered that with an invocation of her nascent powers of lucidity, she could simply leave her initial dream surroundings and go from there to the city. All she had to do was exit the high school, walk out of the arachnids’ nest, swim back from the shore. Once she arrived in their precious metropolis, she roamed its streets, calling, “Hi.” Her trembling voice’s echo reverberating back was her beacon, her compass, telling her where to turn next. “Hi, hi, hi, hi.” Soon she did not even have to say it, would just hold the unspoken word in her mind and it would guide her, through the dream streets, through offices and gardens and shopping malls. She started going to sleep as soon as she got home each evening, in order to grant herself the maximum time in which to explore the city. She started sleeping on her breaks at work, curled up under her desk or on the back seat of her car. And then she started sleeping in, and not even going to work at all.She wandered the dream city for dream years, saw dream seasons change, saw dream buildings crumble, saw dream snow and dream sleet and dream storm. She devoutly followed the beacon wherever it led her. It warmed her with its soft internal glow until at last it burned bright and clear and she knew he was close, she could feel him.And then she saw it: his car, driving towards her, out of the mouth of a tunnel several blocks away.The beacon burned brighter and brighter inside her, searing and hot. She ran towards the car, a run so fast it approached flight, only halting at the behest of a Do Not Walk sign’s demandingly authoritative red hand. She was so close. His car was stopped at the light on the other side of the intersection. Desperately she stared through the car’s windshield, but he didn’t notice her. She waved her hands and she flapped her arms and she jumped and she danced and then—and then he looked over. But—his face. The beacon inside her wavered and dimmed, and suddenly she was unsure if it had ever even been guiding her, if it had ever even warmed her with its light, if she was not just empty inside, suffused with her usual unrelenting darkness. His face—it was unfamiliar and uninviting, a cold, unexplored landscape. All at once she realized she could not remember if this is what he had looked like. If this man in this car in this dream city was even the Alan for whom she had been so desperately searching.The light changed. The car drove through the intersection and then past her. She tried to call out their secret word, their signal, but she could say nothing at all, and then he was gone.She woke without making herself. She rooted around her twisted bedsheets until she found her phone. She swiped past all of the email notifications and the texts and the missed calls. She reinstalled the dating app. She seamlessly clicked “forgot password,” opened her email and artfully ignored every message but the password reset link. She typed alanalanalan into the box, and then, after that was rejected for not being secure, alanALAN@1@n!She had to create a new profile and this time she used her professional work photo. She was unperturbed, had no reservations about him reverse image-searching the details of her life—for Alan would soon be in that life: sweetly serenading her at happy hour karaoke; softly kissing her beneath mistletoe at the office Christmas party; candidly beaming at her beside him in a framed picture that so captured their immaculate happiness co-workers would involuntarily stop beside her desk to smile back at this photograph. “That’s the look of love,” they’d say.For her bio, the only written section of the dating app profile which she could not leave blank, she just typed, “hi hi hi.” She clicked accept and then here she was, back in the portal connecting her to Alan’s gaze. She hungrily clicked on the button that said All Messages.The inbox was empty.She incredulously stared at the blank space on the screen that had once held hi, that had once held the world. After a while, the phone’s screen went black due to inactivity, and soon after that, her eyes closed, her vision went dark and she fell back into slumber. It was the ocean dream. From the shallows she could see the dream city blinking at her far in the distance—its skyscrapers and its overpasses, its churches and its penitentiaries—but she turned away from it, and she lay back on the surf with her arms outstretched, and she let herself drift out to sea.

NIGHTMARES COME AT NIGHT: ELEVEN BOOKS FOR HALLOWEEN by Matthew Kinlin

October 31, 2025

Nightmares come at night. The poster for Halloween III: Season of the Witch shows the silhouettes of three children walking in Halloween costumes against a red night. A ghoulish apparition evaporates above them into electric blue. The tagline at the bottom of the poster reads: “The night no one comes home.” Here are some recommended books that approach horror and other areas of eeriness in new and unexpected ways. Eleven lost souls drifting into darkness. The night goes on forever. Kier-La Janisse, House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (Fab Press, 2012) Kier-La Janisse’s seminal House of Psychotic Women rewrites the rules of the game with an autobiographical take on the neurotic women that populate horror and exploitation films. Opening with a shocking account from childhood of witnessing her mother being raped, she weaves this into a discussion of The Entity. In this 1982 film, Barbara Hershey plays a single mother who is raped by a poltergeist but no one, including her own therapist, believes her. With great skill, Janisse raises important questions about self-blame and guilt. She goes on to explore how films, often disregarded for their portrayal of women, actually deal with the complex experiences of women in a variety of ways: difficult sibling relationships and the doppelgängers of Robert Altman’s 3 Women, shifting attitudes to female alcoholism and trauma in Let’s Scare Jessica to Death. Janisse argues that rape revenge films could be seen as a pushback against male-driven architecture and the reclaiming of public space. A section of the book is dedicated to the “pallid and sickly looking” Mimsy Farmer, who perfectly encapsulates the typical neurotic and bears a striking physical resemblance to Janisse’s own mother. There are no easy answers to trauma, as the end of The Entity indicates. House of Psychotic Women is a powerful and extremely moving work that offers an important lens to an expansive understanding of horror and female experience. Kevin Killian, Argento Series (Pilot Press, 2023) Kevin Killian’s poetry collection Argento Series offers a haunting take on the work of the Italian maestro Dario Argento, with poems named after his many films, such as INFERNO and PHENOMENA, whilst others reference actors and central themes. Killian cleverly, and with wry humour, repositions the visual horror of Argento, with its lush scenes of crimson butchered bodies, to the AIDS crisis. He describes, “nasty patches on my epidermis like four flies / on gray velvet.” Bodies of friends and lovers break apart, “wasted and angry in death.” A killer somewhere in the apartment. The approach of unspeakable terror. In HOUSE OF WAX, Killian writes, “Give me back her floating eyes / I’ll put them in my shadow box / and build a new face around them / smiling and screaming / mouth open.” In Argento Series, the masked killer is AIDS. It runs rampant through its pages, “white, with veiny streaks of red.” Decadent bodies come apart like fabric; “a corsage of pink crinkles rather like the asshole of Tommy.” A beautiful boy led on a bed enacts a macabre ritual of desire. Killian concludes, “Death looks more like a person than he used to.” It’s in the blood now. As Derek McCormack summarises in his excellent introduction, “Kevin got what he wanted from Argento: an ambience of brutal bloodiness… he gave Argento’s oeuvre AIDS.” Naomi Falk, The Surrender of Man (Inside the Castle, 2025) Liberated from the sterile confines of academic discussion, Naomi Falk approaches 18 artworks with refreshing openness, vulnerability and questioning spirit. The stunning typeface and formatting, from the superlative Inside the Castle, matches the gothic tone of Falk’s prose. In her prologue, she muses on the limits of writing. Words are not enough. With shades of Clarice Lispector, she articulates the immediacy of her own experience as, “It leaves my body with scorching fury, white hot. I am screaming.” In her metaphysical treatise on language and self, she poignantly asks, “There are no oceans to cross, so where do I come ashore?” An uncertain captain, Falk finds 18 shorelines to head towards: the mute and quiet loneliness of an Alfred Kubin drawing, the uncanny valley of a Louise Bourgeious sculpture, Bruce Nauman as reminiscent of Saw II, her great love and admiration of abstract master Helen Frankenthaler whose painting Trojan Gates resembles, “an eruption bled into the world.” Falk smartly identifies her own role in the art she sails towards. An ocean beneath reveals her own fluctuating reflection. She writes, “I am experimenting with degrees of perceiving myself.” In stunning moments of poetic description (“Death was an unwashed sheet”), Falk heads into the unknown. She elaborates on her own alterity, “The words have unravelled me, everything I loved. I am that which I fear, destroyer of all I touch.” Each person creates and destroys all meaning. A reflection in the water: angel and demon. Ansgar Allen, Midden Hill (Schism2 Press, 2025) “Our assignment was this. To record what the islanders did and what they said.” Ansgar Allen’s Midden Hill offers the mind-bending dictation of a patient to his doctor about his time spent on an island with a midden, an incredible refuse hill, in the centre. Reminiscent of J.G. Ballard’s Concrete Island, Allen offers a confounding examination of civilisation and its discontents. The midden on the island is described as the dumping ground for the entire planet, made up of “everything every culture has expelled from itself.” An abject zone that “contains all defilements, all forbidden objects, all expulsions.” The book opens with a quote from Mary Douglas, an anthropologist who writes about purity and uncleanliness, and the rituals of purification central to modern cultures. There is a system to man’s filth. His safety is predicated on his daily attempts to expel waste and form himself in opposition to this. The island seems to place all of that in jeopardy. It carries perverse rituals of its own, mirrored in the vortical writing of Allen, as his visitors navigate this land of symbolic chaos: the burning and inhalation of a mysterious weed, the appalling significance of a peeled egg. In a way, the book captures something of Kafka’s The Castle; an outsider caught in an alien system, tunnels and tunnels of endless rot. David Kuhnlein, Ezra’s Head (Tragickal, 2025) David Kuhnlein is the master of surprise. Every sentence of his work is without compass, each paragraph leads to unexpected realms. In this collection, he offers nine short stories, one longer story, and then his novella, Ezra’s Head. Throughout the short stories, Kuhnlein draws arresting and haunting images, such as, “We called each other murderer, swirled one another’s faces like red paint.” He constantly provides head-spinning descriptions of experience; “Life felt like leaning out the window of a dream.” His imagery helps illuminate his character’s complex relationships with the physical body. This finds its apex in the novella that concludes the book. Ezra’s Head is the story of Redd, who “to kill himself, he gulped a cornucopia of barbiturates, chased by every ocean.” During this failed suicide attempt, deep within a coma, Redd enters an unknown zone overseen by severed heads, where “his lips were soldered shut by a chemical solution. He looked down at the ox bones dangling from his neck.” Death seems even more terrifying than the misery of living. Coming out of his coma, Redd attempts to exist for the following year; liminal and between worlds. “Are orbs souls?” a Hare Krishna follower asks, at one point. Metaphysically queasy, still adrift; “Redd’s skin felt screwed on.” The novella builds and builds to its violent conclusion. Nightmarish, Kuhnlein’s severed heads float forever in judgement. They look and ask, “Try to describe the nothingness that you imagined would exist for you beyond the veil. We’ll wait.” Can the dead ever die? Thomas Kendall, The Autodidacts (Whiskey Tit, 2022) As with How I Killed the Universal Man, Thomas Kendall has an incredible ability to take noir and other genre tropes into new and unexpected places. We begin The Autodidacts with the spooky disappearance of a man living in a lighthouse and the finding of his notebook. The obvious path would be a standard detective or mystery story but instead, Kendall provides a complex web of intergenerational stories of loss covered in “dust and detritus clashing everywhere.” Kendall’s prose weaves a Proustian dance. Slowly, it feels like a memory we can almost recall, “something that he—Lawrence—can’t recall the purpose of recalling.” The push-pull of grief, the swelling isolation, is all mirrored by the ocean. When, “Emily exhales. Really it is the tide of herself going out.” A deep sadness and sense of disconnect orbits around the lighthouse of every character, each flickering beneath pale fogs. As Mark Fisher writes in Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, where he makes links between depression and neoliberalism; “The past cannot be forgotten, the present cannot be remembered.” Characters, like life, look for answers and closure in a world that often denies this. In beautiful and tender prose, Kendall captures small moments of searching between his lost souls that realise, “other people are mirages.” We invent our own lives and ultimately, the deaths of each other. Paul Curran, Generation Bloodbath (Apocalypse Party, 2022) A massacred desert pit of viper blood and kerosene. Paul Curran offers more nightmare fuel in Generation Bloodbath; the horrific account of a recent regime change and revolutionary movement known only as Generation Bloodbath. Reminiscent of Pierre Guyotat’s Eden, Eden, Eden and Kathy Acker’s accelerated science-fiction Empire of the Senseless, Curran describes a territory where, “Chunks of uncooperative corpse-waste flooded the desert surrounding the interrogation camp.” Presenting as a numbered list, akin to a revolutionary manifesto, but one that ultimately negates itself: “The resistance manifesto’s last page calls for an end to manifestos.” An atrocity exhibition where, “amputating the hands of infants symbolised new-regime superiority.” The book feels relevant to the regimes of extermination we have seen currently. New administrations of rats and corpses. With exquisite prose and sickening imagery, Curran paints an apocalyptic tapestry of bodies evaporating into black ash. Missiles laser-guided through green night. Blood and blood and blood. Total non-existence. As Curran writes, “Generation Bloodbath is the end of time.” V.M. Harrigan, The Isolationist and Other Stories (Manifold House, 2025) Harrigan begins his impressive collection of short stories with the startling and shocking “Demon, 1966”, which opens with the incredible lines, “I just want to wake up. So I do.” This reality of wakefulness is brought into question throughout the unfolding story, an ambivalence which haunts and multiplies towards its devastating conclusion. Harrigan’s tales are often slyly humorous, such as “Indecipherable Black Metal Logo”, which follows an evil entity known simply as Nameless. The medieval entity possesses a number of hosts, only to feel seen and finally recognised centuries later, when a young boy scribbles down a black metal logo for his album. With its impressive hauntological artwork from Manifold House, The Isolationist and Other Stories evokes vintage BBC science-fiction from the 1970s. Its varied range of horror and speculative fiction feels like skipping television channels at 2am in the dark. There are moments of poetic beauty found here too, such as “I Will Have My Crown”, a story about telepathic nuns, where Harrigan writes, “The stars are dim but the shadows between them many.” One to devour. Tom Over, The Comfort Zone and Other Safe Spaces (Hybrid Sequence Media, 2025) Tom Over’s The Comfort Zone manages to meld revolting, eye-popping moments of splatter with poignant and challenging questions about human relationships. The ironically titled “The Vegetarians” takes J.G. Ballard’s High Rise even higher and asks how far a couple would go when the world descends into chaos and all they have left is the domestic space they once created, the bodies they loved each other with. As Bataille writes, “A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism.” Pulpy and fun, stories like “Phylum” feature bodies exploding in waves of orange slime, reminiscent of Stuart Gordon’s bubblegum pink From Hell and Carpenter’s alien mutants. Sexual insecurity, the limits of the human body, the uneasy relationship between fantasy and technology; Over offers perceptive insights into the cryptic riddles of the physical. His bodies are always at the point of rupture: birth, defecation, ejaculation. It’s so wet in here. Thirteen zones of seduction and repulsion. A modern classic. Ivy Grimes, Glass Stories (Grimscribe Press, 2024) In his 1976 film Heart of Glass, Werner Herzog presents an 18th century Bavarian town that has fallen under the spell of the ruby glass they produce. Famously, Herzog went so far as to have all of his actors hypnotised when they were learning their lines, so they might appear even more entranced. Ivy Grimes performs a similar trick in her collection Glass Stories where she examines the magical properties of glass in strange and compelling ways: a war of competing blessings between grandmothers during a friend’s labour, a ring buried with a deceased partner, trauma dissolved away in blinding jewels. Grimes has an impressive grasp of story, each one operating like a modern fairy tale akin to Angela Carter or Leonora Carrington, offering startling images and lines, such as “What was the point of having a face if it went away?” Her female characters navigate troubling, often horrific circumstances. Sometimes, the pull is too strong and they cannot look away from a dazzling, opalescent gem; “She was lost, so she had to let the glass world take her.” Eerie and compelling. Logan Berry, Doom is the House Without a Door (Inside the Castle, 2025) Marx famously wrote, “Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” Logan Berry follows the embers of his previous work Casket Flare further with this new work, titled after an incredible Emily Dickinson line. Doom is the House Without a Door reads like Artaud applying for a bank loan. It presents a series of diary entries from his protagonist who, following the advice of his Zoom therapist, begins to document the daily horror of his family life. Berry’s interest in the overlap between the corporate and occult finds a perfect balance here, sketching his narrator’s relationship with his children and wife who, “manages a fleet of programmers designing AI content moderators for a fintech start-up.” He muses on her, “beamed to her teams’ computer screens, her waifish face dispersed in spectral pixels.” Technology as magic(k). There are moments of amethyst-dark poetry, “The demon met me in the form of a smiling pastel purple diamond: the icon of my gambling app,” and acid black humour throughout, “My wife refuses to let me shoot her, which is strange because she’s basically a sentient selfie stick.” The debts begin to rack up as the narrator submits to vampiric capital. He is just a vessel that golden coins fall through; a carcass riddled with cryptocurrencies. As Berry posits, “Our future-corpses rehearse through us.”

IN ANOTHER LIFE, I AM A DIRECT DESCENDANT OF SHARKS by Bethany Cutkomp

October 30, 2025

And if I do not keep moving, I will pass away. They call this ram ventilation, a shark’s way of breathing. My invisible gills demand the same method of survival. Since hatching from your womb, I have been burdened to forward momentum, a squirming force to be reckoned with. Raised in a realm above sea-level, however, the current has always worked against my nature.Most mornings, you barely squeeze in the chance to slather sunscreen over my ampullae of Lorenzini—freckles, you insist I call them—before I'm out of the door and down the street, bike pedals whirling, thrusting through the stagnant humidity. I may not bear fins like my aquatic ancestors, but the sweat I shed tastes of the sea. Marine familiarity, a restless scene. Inherent muscle memory urges me to continue on, past the front of the school, past the park, and past the fast food joints. Past the gas stations, past the woods, and past the town border. On and on, beyond state lines, never stopping until my toe-shaped fins touch the fizzy surf.Logic is a habit you’ve instilled in me, however. I settle for circling the perimeter of the building until my muscles scream for mercy or until security guards scream after me.In the classroom, society expects me to conform to anthropocentric ideologies: sit still—a manner my species physically cannot obey. Doesn’t matter that I’ve just biked the scenic route to school. For a shark, it’s move or die. I’m a fish out of water, floundering at my graffitied desk after exhausting all bathroom privileges to wander the hallways.From what I’ve overheard you whispering to neighbors and folks at our church, my teachers exchange concerns about the pacing, the rocking, the bouncing, claiming my fidgety movements are a detriment to my development and too much of a distraction to my peers. They’ve got it all wrong. The girls sporting dolphin cackles in the corner are the ones to be wary of.“See that kid over there? Yeah, that one. The boy that can’t sit still,” I make out of their clique-exclusive echolocation. “Stay away from him. Guy’s got issues.”If it were socially acceptable to bite, I would.That is a common misconception about my kind, though. I may bear a sharp-toothed grimace, but I am not violent-natured unless provoked. Even then, sharks are more afraid of humans than humans are of sharks. Often you prompt me to suck it up, to conform to warm-blooded standards out of my comfort zone for the sake of making friends. You don’t get it. My ancestors have roamed this planet solo, hundreds of millions of years before any mammal, and they’ve managed well enough.Y’know, you yourself aren’t the best at showing affection. I get my skin takes on an abrasive texture, but a bit of compassion here and there won’t hurt. Just a few kind words to validate my existence.Deep in the night, I thrash under sweaty bed sheets. The only way you get me to fall asleep is by dangling me from the edge of the mattress, flipping me head-side-down and feet-side-up, evoking a trance of tonic immobility. Assuming I’ve surrendered to human dreams, you admit to my father that it may be time to seek professional help for my condition.What condition is that? Do you not see traces of shark in yourself? Through weary slits of nictitating membrane, I watch your shadow roam back and forth past my bedroom door.