If you love horror, the films of Jane Schoenbrun are probably on your radar: We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021), I Saw the TV Glow (2024) and this summer’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma offer brainy, off-kilter spins on genre tropes for a knowing indie film audience. In their first novel, Public Access Afterworld (Hogarth, Oct. 27), Schoenbrun really gets out there, imagining the dark alternate reality of the title, a pirate TV network that becomes the obsession of a handful of characters across the decades, including a trans woman who moderates content for a YouTube-like service. Our starred review calls it “dazzling and politically acute” and declares the author “a major literary voice.” Schoenbrun answered our questions by email.

Public access television plays a different role today than it did in the pre-internet world. What did it mean to the younger you? 

There was magic in that which was hard to find, that which beamed through in low fidelity on channels that almost didn’t exist, that which barely even cleared the scramble of static. I think about the radio station in American Graffiti where Wolfman Jack broadcasts from, a venue both local and mystical, a castle on the edge of town that’s almost Kafkaesque in its reachability, except on certain nights…

What inspired you during the writing of the book? What were you reading, listening to, watching?

I read every Carson McCullers novel. I read Kelly Link’s short stories. Probably the biggest influence was an anonymous creepypasta novel called _9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9, which was written entirely in reply to random posts from random subreddits, scattered across that platform like a glitch.

Where and when did you write the book?

I moved out of New York City on something of a whim to write the novel, and at first I took a weird sublet in an old schoolhouse in a cemetery where I read Stephen King’s On Writing. I wrote and rewrote the first 40 pages of my book over and over again for half a year. I walked every morning past the graves to a pond where I sat and thought about how to write. Nothing like pondering by a pond. 

You’re accustomed to creating your art on a film set, with a large cast and crew. What was most rewarding about the solo endeavor of writing a novel? Most challenging?

So much of filmmaking is logistical and managerial: The script becomes a blueprint that you then spend years negotiating into existence. Writing the book was the first time in my life I felt like I had the consistent creative practice I’d always dreamed of. To me it’s the happiest version of life: getting to wake up every day at home, make coffee, and then go hang out for a while in the realms in my brain. But I’d come back to reality by dinnertime. Work-life balance doesn’t really exist during film production, but it does during novel production.

Also: There’s so much out of your control when you’re trying to make a film, because films cost a lot of money and so the money people kind of control your destiny. It’s an emotionally draining thing to write something deeply personal and not even know if you’ll ever get to make it real. So the book gave me this sense of autonomy or creative liberation, of being in control of my own practice and output, of knowing I could always get the stories in my brain out into the world without any green light necessary. That’s an important space to be in for a novel that’s ultimately about what is and isn’t allowed to bubble up to the surface of culture.  

Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.