Public Access Afterworld

A mysterious realm on the other side of our screens. A dark force that draws victims into its static. The unlikely hero called to save them and herself from this electric hell. Public Access Afterworld is the profound, binge-all-night, headrush of a novel by the celebrated filmmaker of I Saw the TV Glow and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma “Beautiful, funny, and scathing . . . I stayed up all night binge-reading.”—SenLinYu “Gave me a vertiginous thrill I haven’t encountered since David Mitchell.”—Torrey Peters “Psychedelic horror of the first order.”—Grady Hendrix “Heart-wrenching, hilarious, visionary, and so damned smart, this novel is a major work by a major writer.”—Paul Tremblay “Utterly hypnotic.”—Lev Grossman “Dazzling and politically acute, Schoenbrun’s debut announces a major literary voice.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) One of Publishers Weekly’s 10 Most Anticipated Books • One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Year: Lit Hub, The Chicago Review of Books, The Bookseller, Reactor, Library Journal, and Debutiful Find the receiver. Make it real. At 5:35 p.m. on September 3, 1988, Dallas weatherman Ray “Can You Say Sunshine” Davino makes passing reference to Public Access Afterworld during a rambling monologue, right before he puts a gun to his head on live television and pulls the trigger. On June 12, 2009, David Sawyer and Erin Morrison, two lonely, TV-obsessed suburban teens who might be falling in love, gather in Erin's basement to watch TV's analog-to-digital transition. But in the static that follows, Erin witnesses surreal broadcasts from a pirate TV network called Public Access Afterworld, and their lives are changed forever. Seventeen years later, Bethany Peters toils through the night shift at megacorp GlobalVill’s bleak Austin campus. A trans…