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)

“A dazzling story . . . a great American novel.”—Publishers Weekly(starred review)

“One of the best novels of the year.”—Booklist (starred review)

One of _Publishers Weekly’_s 10 Most Anticipated Books • One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Year: The New York Times Book Review Podcast, The Boston Globe, Lit Hub, The Chicago Review of Books, The Bookseller, Reactor, Book Riot, Crime Reads, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, 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 content moderator, she spends her evenings reviewing an endless stream of horrific videos. But then a young streamer begins to crop up in her feed calling out to Public Access Afterworld.

But what _is_Public Access Afterworld?

Spanning decades and realities, with an unforgettable ensemble of outcasts and nerds—especially the messy but wholly relatable Bethany, who must overcome paranoia and self-doubt to transform into a hero of our times—_Public Access Afterworld_will have you reading through the night and rooting for its characters to survive. A mesmerizing mash-up of speculative fiction, horror, and conspiracy, it marks the arrival of a major new force in contemporary fiction by a groundbreaking filmmaker who’s been compared to David Lynch and Paul Thomas Anderson.