'Jane Schoenbrun has the literary voice I've been famished for. Public Access Afterworld gave me a vertiginous thrill I haven't encountered since David Mitchell'
Torrey Peters, author of Stag Dance and Detransition, Baby
David Sawyer and Erin Morrison, two lonely, TV-obsessed suburban teenagers, watch the 2009 analog to digital transition in Erin's family basement. Beneath the static that follows the analog switch-off, Erin catches a glimpse of a mysterious universe, the so-called Public Access Afterworld. Soon after that, she vanishes - breaking David's heart and changing his life forever.
Fourteen years later, Bethany Peters slaves away at megacorporation GlobalVill's bleak Austin campus. A trans woman and a content moderator working the night shift, she is confronted by an endless stream of the most hideous videos humanity has to offer. But gradually a pattern emerges from the ocean of digital violence in the form of a young streamer, JulesPAA, who slices into their arms in each video before calling out the same words: Public Access Afterworld.
When Bethany ignores the guidance of her corporate overseers and sets out to rescue Jules, she begins an epic journey that sweeps from rural Texas to the heart of American darkness at 1940s Los Alamos - all the way back to that basement where David and Erin had first encountered a world at the edges of reality itself.
Can Bethany travel beyond the gates of Public Access Afterworld? And will they ever be able to make it back?
