Public Access Afterworld is the first novel by Jane Schoenbrun. You may recognize their name as the writer and director of the films We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, I Saw the TV Glow, and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (due out next month). As a sidenote, that first movie came out just four years ago! Jane Schoenbrun doesn’t fuck around, apparently.
Initial impressions
The first thing I thought when I started reading this book was, “Oh yeah, this is definitely a novel by the person who made I Saw the TV Glow.” That’s not a bad thing, I liked that movie although if I’m being honest I liked World’s Fair more. But I’ve been a sucker for found footage since The Blair Witch Project first came out.
Although I’m not familiar with their early work, Public Access Afterworld has many of the themes that are present in their first two films:
Secret or magical television shows
Schoenbrun talks a lot about how they are obsessed with TV and it comes through in all of their work. It’s a main story element for their first two movies, and I think Camp Miasma as well, but I haven’t gotten a chance to see it yet. This absolutely holds true for their first book as well.
In I Saw the TV Glow, the show is The Pink Opaque and the place where Maddy disappears is The Midnight Realm. In this book, both the show and the place are called Public Access Afterworld.
The entire premise of the book is that there is a secret place, an alternate dimension if you will, where people disappear into and TV shows come out. Not that TV shows aren’t made where we all think they are, but that the ideas for them come from this place, Public Access Afterworld, and are kind of broadcast into the brains of people who think they came up with the idea. i.e. Gene Roddenberry didn’t come up with Star Trek, he just thinks he did.
High school
The main characters of Schoenbrun’s first two movies are high school characters obsessed with TV (In World’s Fair, Casey is obsessed with online videos, but it’s the same spirit). While this novel opens the same way with David and Erin, two besties who love watching TV in the ‘00s, it quickly jumps to the present day focusing on Bethany Peters whose job is watching videos that have been flagged on social media as being inappropriate and may or may not be going slowly insane because of it.
Most of the characters in this book are slightly older individuals in their 20s or 30s. It is worth noting that most of them are emotionally stunted and behave like high schoolers (at times returning to high school just to hang out, which is both as believable and awkward as you expect).
Eggs
In this context, the term egg refers to a trans person who hasn’t realized they are trans yet. I feel like Schoenbrun loves these people, perhaps because they presumably were one at some point.
Schoenbrun has been very clear that this is exactly what TV Glow is about. Maddy representing an out trans woman who wants to help Owen “hatch”.
In Public Access Afterworld, we have Bethany, a trans woman who, for various reasons, feels the need to save Jules. Jules is a younger drug addict who secretly lives at a mini-golf course and is obsessed with finding the way into Public Access Afterworld. Jules uses they/them pronouns and insists they aren’t trans but just like wearing women’s clothing and wearing goth makeup. Bethany believes they are and feels that this is one more way she can save them.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, by the end Jules’ gender identity is one of the least important things about them.
What’s different?
Unlike Shoenburg’s movies, this story has a clear villain who we learn about fairly early. Although Public Access Afterworld, the place, is neither good nor bad, it just is. It is neither heaven nor hell. Some people want to be there, some do not. Forcing or tricking people to go there, however, is bad.
You might think that the first novel written by a film-maker would be cinematic. I certainly expected to read something that I could see working as a movie. It retrospect, it should have come as no surprise that this book is written more episodically. It seems like Schoenbrun has no intention of ever making this into a movie, but every intention of making a show based on the novel.
If you like horror novels and Schoenbrun’s movies, you’ll like this book. If you like TV and early ’00s nostalgia, you’ll like this book. If you hate social media but use it every day, you’ll like this book. Although, fair warning, it is a tome weighing in at just under 600 pages. But one of those pages is a Marge Simpson sex dream, so there’s that. Five stars!
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