Jane Schoenbrun's Debut Novel Finds Horror in the Space Between the Screen and the Self

Public Access Afterworld translates Schoenbrun's trans horror cinema into fiction — same permeable screens, same psychic dread, sharpened by an internetty prose voice that knows exactly what it's doing.

Jane Schoenbrun built their reputation on the idea that screens aren't windows — they're membranes, and something wrong lives on the other side. I Saw the TV Glow made that visual and visceral. Public Access Afterworld makes it structural: the novel itself is built like a television archive, cycling through formats and character perspectives the way a bored insomniac cycles through channels at 3am. The premise is a content moderation nightmare that tips into cosmology. Bethany Peters watches the internet's sewage for a living — the illegal, the disturbing, the violations nobody else wants to see — until one video snags her: a visibly malnourished non-binary kid named Jules, drawing a razor blade down their arm on camera, addressing a 'David Sawyer' who may or may not exist. Bethany recognizes something of her pre-hospitalization self. She goes looking. The book opens from there. What Schoenbrun does exceptionally well is layer the strands without explaining them to death. The novel runs five or six storylines simultaneously — Bethany's present-tense quest, a nameless psych-ward patient narrating a TV show about Bethany, David Sawyer as lonely teenager and later as cult leader, the Manhattan Project scientist's wife, and in the book's bravura set piece, Chimotera, a Lon Chaney-era monster who slowly understands he is a franchise property being rebooted across decades. That last section is the best writing in the book: Chimotera's dawning awareness of his own commodification is both a theory of internet culture and genuinely moving horror. The trans and non-binary experience isn't backdrop here, it's the engine. Bethany's survival instincts, her canny threat-detection, her readiness to find herself the object of obsession — none of this needs explaining once Schoenbrun situates her. Jules is the more haunting figure: abused, isolated, drug-dependent, enraged at their own invisibility, dressing like a ghost because that's the closest available identity. The archetype Schoenbrun names — the traumatized victim returned to exact vengeance — is as old as horror itself, but Jules makes it specific and contemporary in ways that linger. The tone is the thing that will split readers. Schoenbrun is an internet native who started in fan-fiction forums, and Public Access Afterworld reads like it: casual, self-aware, occasionally sloppy, prone to characters pausing to acknowledge how far-fetched everything has become. This meta-knowingness keeps the horror from ever fully closing its jaws. That's a choice, not a failure — Schoenbrun is working in a tradition of cool, winking horror that runs through Chuck Tingle and Widow's Bay — but readers who want their dread uncut will find the irony a persistent leak in the vessel. A sentence like 'The London Symphony Orchestra conducts, soundtracking our propulsive opening credit sequence whisking viewers over a CGI map of Second America' has pace and charisma, as the reviewer notes, but it's also a sentence that trusts its own velocity over its own precision. The ending earns the complexity Schoenbrun has accumulated. It is, genuinely, both uplifting and nihilistic at once — a trick that requires every strand to have been worth following, and they are. The world-building doesn't always hold up to scrutiny, but the novel knows this about itself and doesn't ask you to audit it. What it does ask — and this is where Schoenbrun is 'wonderfully brutal, passionate and astute' — is that you feel how the ugliest content on the internet and the laughtrack of an 80s sitcom inhabit the same nightmare subreality. That the locked psych ward and the primetime HBO slot can be the same place. The novel makes you feel that. That's worth something.