It’s 2009 and after witnessing the end of analogue television with her friend, David Sawyer, Erin Morrison witnesses a surreal broadcast from a network that doesn’t seem to exist, called Public Access Afterworld.
Seventeen years later, David Sawyer is in hiding, blamed for Erin’s disappearance, and a young woman named Bethany Peters finds herself falling into the Public Access Afterworld rabbit hole. Through multiple timelines, dimensions, perspectives and layers of mystery and conspiracy, will Bethany be the one to break the cycle, or will she become just another girl swallowed up by Public Access Afterworld?
There is, quite frankly, a lot going on in this book. Delightfully weird and mind-bending, Public Access Afterworld doesn’t pull punches, immersing the reader in a saga that unfolds over the course of decades. I love a complicated, multi-pov/multi-timeline story and I think generally Schoenbrun does a good job smoothly transitioning between them because I always felt like I knew where I was and whose perspective I was reading. That’s not to say that I really think I understood everything that happened. There’s kind of a frame narrative that the book doesn’t come back to (as far as I can tell–maybe it just went over my head), but for this kind of book I think you just kind of need to be along for the ride. I liked Bethany a lot as a character and Jules too was messy and self-destructive in a way that felt very relatable. David and Erin I maybe had more trouble getting personally invested in, but that’s alright since we don’t get nearly as much of their POV. I think my overall opinion of this book (unsatisfying as it might be to read in a review) is that I don’t really know what the hell was going on but I really enjoyed it. There were some magical moments, and there’s enough emotional intensity for the story to be engaging throughout, but if you gave me a quiz on this book I fear I would be pretty useless: What was the deal with Chimotera? Not a clue. What was the end goal of the Chicago project? Beats me. Who was the receiver? I maybe know the answer to this one, but it’s with very little confidence. I don’t really care if I understood it, because it was a cool book! I’m easy like that.
I’m not familiar with Schoenbrun’s work on movies, but I’ll keep an eye out for any more books they write in the future. I’m a little in love with their world of multigenerational conspiracy, interdimensional television, and messy queer people!
Thank you to Jane Schoenbrun and Hogarth for this ARC in exchange for my full, honest review!
Happy reading!
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