Public Access Afterworld - Couverture rigide

Schoenbrun, Jane

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0593978382 ISBN 13 : 9780593978382

Editeur : Hogarth Pr, 2026

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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, 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.

Les informations fournies dans la section � Synopsis � peuvent faire r�f�rence � une autre �dition de ce titre.

� propos de l'auteur

Jane Schoenbrun is an award-winning filmmaker and writer. Their films include I Saw the TV Glow, We're All Going to the World's Fair, and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma starring Gillian Anderson and Hannah Einbinder. Public Access Afterworld is their first novel.

Extrait. � Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits r�serv�s.

1

My TV show starts nine feet under the American suburbs, in Erin Morrison's basement.

That basement was a refuge. A nook to hide from the town above. Waste your youth watching horror movies and weird early internet videos. A cocoon without windows, incubated by central air.

My TV show starts on Friday, June 12, 2009, the night of the analog-to-digital switch-off. Maybe that date doesn't mean anything to you, but if your high school experience was anything like mine, you probably remember the legally mandated deadline when every television network in America, be it local or national, was required to flip the switch and put analog broadcasting out of its misery forever. David Sawyer and Erin Morrison had been quietly anticipating the deadline all school year long. They were, of course, losers.

It had all been a long time coming. Analog broadcasting had spent at least a decade in the TV equivalent of hospice, and during that time, houses all over town had been leveling up to flat-screens and TiVos, banishing their old bulky sets to collect dust in attics and basements. Digital television was the future. It meant more channels, crisper picture quality. Analog television meant fuzzy images and . . . I don't know, Dick Van Dyke reruns? Maybe back in the 1950s, all that had been a necessary stepping stone, but now analog was a relic, one whose government-mandated extinction date was way past due.

For David and Erin, the switch-off was an excuse for celebration. The best friends stayed up late that night, throwing themselves a two-person kegger in the basement with a bottle of Tito's they "borrowed" from Erin's mom's liquor cabinet. As the hour approached, they traded swigs, passing the bottle back and forth from beanbag to couch, waiting for analog broadcasting to end and the digital era to begin. That's what they would say on the news later that night (for the very first time broadcast exclusively over cable boxes and digital receivers): "The digital era has begun."

Around eleven-thirty, David stumbled to his feet and got to work setting up his Canon VIXIA. He fiddled with the tripod, trying to get the framing just right so he could capture the exact moment in history when some Cronkite-style newsman, nearly extinct himself, in some television studio somewhere, flipped the switch and transitioned eighty years of television back to that which came before it: static.

Never-ending static. Fuzzy and numbing.

Keep your eye on the static: It's an important part of my TV show's mythology.

David loved Erin's basement. You could call it his second home, but that would be giving too much credit to his first. To David, Erin's basement was a sanctuary. Its lava lamps and glow-in-the-dark alien smoking weed posters from Spencer Gifts. That "I Love NYC" snow globe on the mantel that Erin brought back from a school trip to the city at the end of the third grade, just months before 9/11 rendered its miniature skyline as outdated as the analog signal David and Erin were tuning into for the very last time.

A short list of things David loved: Erin's basement, which we've already covered. Television, obviously. Blockbuster, before it closed. Ms. Walsh's AV dungeon and the Auxiliaries who spent their time down there. Reading the plots of horror movies on Wikipedia without ever watching them. Double Stuf Oreos (David liked to combine the frosted halves of two to make a custom sandwich he dubbed the Quadruple Stuf Oreo).

And Erin. There was no one and nothing in this world David loved more than Erin Morrison, not even television. Erin, that anxious, mousy girl who'd first talked to him in the cafeteria back in fourth grade because they were reading the same Animorphs book. Erin, whom David had started having weekly playdates with before elementary school was over, even though both their moms were clearly uncomfortable with them being coed best friends.

And okay, look: Yes. If you need to know, David was utterly, totally, one hundred percent madly in love with Erin. Obviously. Always had been. Always would be.

David loved Erin. David loved watching TV with Erin down in her basement. And David knew without a doubt in his mind that before too long, Erin was going to leave him.

"Okay, it's . . ." David checks his watch. He grins at his camcorder, standing in front of Erin's old Toshiba.

"It's 11:58 p.m., June twelfth, 2009. And this is the biggest moment in television history since the Man on the Moon. The Fall of the Berlin Wall. Or when JFK got shot by someone who was definitely not Lee Harvey Oswald."

"It's the end of analog broadcasting," Erin says from behind the camera.

"It's over, baby! RIP!" David shouts.

Erin smiles, watching her best friend from the beanbag and beaming like a proud parent at a school play. David checks his watch.

"In just one minute and eleven seconds, Uncle Sam is gonna flip the switch, and eighty years of television history is going to go up in static. And the last thing ever broadcast on analog television was . . ." David looks behind him. "Sex and the f***ing City. The lamest show ever!" On the screen, the Sex and the City credits begin to scroll faster than anyone could possibly read.

Now midnight approaches. David checks his watch again and hams a countdown for the camera like it's New Year's Eve and he's a young, lactose intolerant Dick Clark.

"All right. In EIGHT. SEVEN. SIX . . ."

From her spot on the beanbag, Erin joins in on the count.

"FIVE. FOUR. THREE.

"TWO.

"ONE."

They don't hit the mark exactly. Maybe David's watch is a little off. Or maybe that decrepit Cronkite in his radio tower flips the switch a second or two past midnight. But who cares? Because even though it happens a moment later than it's supposed to, it still happens.

TSSSSSSSSSSSS-

Static. Without warning. A signal washed of its image. A transmission cut with the abruptness of lightning.

TSSSSSSSSSS. The static hisses from its boxed enclosure. Vibrates against the glass of Erin's newly useless Toshiba.

Do you know what static is, literally? Radio waves. Invisible to our sense perceptions, but surrounding us at all times, like water we don't even know we're swimming in. For centuries, millennia, since before the Big Bang, we didn't know these waves existed. But that doesn't mean they weren't there, waiting to be discovered.

And then about a century ago, we tuned in. We learned how to recognize those waves, to conjure them onto a screen in a digestible form. We tapped the signal, and soon we learned to work with it, to control it, to bend the static to our will.

We made shadows and shapes. Transmissions in color and black and white. The Honeymooners. The Andy Griffith Show. Sex and the f***ing City. Soon, as the decades passed, we discovered newer, more cost-effective ways to control electricity. To recognize and manipulate that invisible water that surrounds us all. To remake it in our image. So we allowed the analog signal to revert back to its original form: wild, endless static.

It's still there, of course. Even if our world moves on. Even if we hide our analog sets in storage closets and garbage dumps. The static remains underneath everything.

Eight percent uploaded.

Erin balances her mom's bottle of Tito's on her belly, sprawled out on her beanbag still watching the static on her Toshiba. David's in a leather chair at the computer desk, hunched over Erin's family desktop, uploading his video to GlobalVill.com, that new streaming platform people say is two times faster than YouTube, better quality than Dailymotion, more community-oriented than Vimeo.

This, too, another sign of the changing times. The streaming revolution is at hand. It seems like just yesterday it took David forty-five minutes to play a Flash game on his parents' 56K dial-up, three hours to download a WAV file from LimeWire. But recently, suddenly, streaming video was instantaneous. Anything was ready to watch or upload anytime. Anyone could start a TV channel of their very own.

David's not the only person racing tonight to upload his documentation of the analog switch-off, not the only loser who's dedicated his Friday night to playing amateur television historian. But he's probably the youngest. Some videos are already up on GlobalVill.com. "The Exact Moment that Analog Broadcasting Ended!" uploaded by JakeMonster. "Analog TV is Over You Guys!" uploaded by triggerhappyninja. David's been scooped, beaten to the punch thanks to Erin's mediocre DSL connection.

Nine percent. The upload stutters along.

"I switched your settings off Energy Saver," David tells Erin. He stumbles across the room, scoops up his cellphone, then grabs his house keys from next to that Twin Tower snow globe up on the mantel.

"I'm okay to bike. I think I'm okay to bike."

"It's one a.m.," Erin says. "Crash on the couch. Mom can make us waffles in the morning."

David looks towards the staircase and thinks about emerging out of air-conditioning into the swamp outside. A minor bout of vertigo wobbles him.

Erin rolls her eyes. "You're drunk," she says. Static hums from the screen across the room.