WAKE ISLAND

Jarett Kobek is a Turkish-American writer living in California. His novel I HATE THE INTERNET was an international bestseller, translated into nine languages, and published in twelve countries. His other books include: ATTA, Do Every Thing Wrong!: XXXTentacion Against the World, Only Americans Burn in Hell and The Future Won't Be Long.

Motor Spirit: The Long Hunt for the Zodiac

It’s 1969. Evil lurks in California.

From a Napa County hippie child murder to Haight Street gang bangs to methamphetamine psychosis to the killing of Sharon Tate.

Here and now, in this place and this time, it’s all gone wrong.

And there’s something else, too.

How to Find Zodiac

Dear Reader,

This is not the Zodiac speaking. The one thing that I ask of you is this, please read this book. It is called How to Find Zodiac. Being that this book is about the Zodiac, it offers a new suspect. The theory is probably correct. At the moment the theory is unproven. But the idea is a bomb waiting to go massive. Can you see the flaws in the hunting method or will you just agree and say case closed. Either way one thing is true. Zodiac can never look and seem the same after you read this book. 

"A scruffy masterpiece of criminology. It seems to me that either Kobek's painstaking deductions are correct, or we must urgently revise the laws of probability." -Alan Moore, author of From Hell

SOCIAL:

Will American fantasies of purifying violence dissolve upon contact with reality or will the illusion break into civil war? 

We speak to Dr Dylan Mulvin, Assistant Professor in LSE Department of Media and Communications, about his book Proxies: The Cultural Work of Standing In, which examines the ways in which proxies shape our lives, the histories of their production and how we delegate power to represent our world. 

JUSTIN KEENAN is a writer and narrative designer on Disco Elysium which is a groundbreaking open world role playing game. In it, you’re a detective with a unique skill system at your disposal and a whole city block to carve your path across. Interrogate unforgettable characters, crack murders or take bribes. Become a hero or an absolute disaster of a human being.   

In this episode we excavate the inner world at the heart of Disco Elysium and get into: Dark City (1998), RPGs, paranoia vs dread, world detectors, the future of video games, the state of noir detectives, and more... 

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James Grauerholz is a writer and editor. He is most famous as the bibliographer and literary executor of the estate of William S. Burroughs. He worked as Burroughs’ assistant, and became his friend, business manager and editor until the author's death in 1997. Grauerholz wrote biographical sketches to a Burroughs reader Word Virus, and edited a posthumous release of Burroughs diaries Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs.

Susan Sontag meets Hanif Abdurraqib in this fascinating exploration of the unexpected connections between how we consume images and the insidious nature of Fascism.

Images come at us quickly, often without context. A photograph of Syrian children suffering in the wake of a chemical attack segues into a stranger’s pristine Instagram selfie. Before we can react to either, a new meme induces a laugh and a share. While such constant give and take might seem innocent, even entertaining, this barrage of content numbs our ability to examine critically how the world, broken down into images, affects us. Images without context isolate us, turning everything we experience into mere transactions. It is exactly this alienation that leaves us vulnerable to fascism—a reactionary politics that is destroying not only our lives and our nations, but also the planet’s very ability to sustain human civilization.

Who gets to control the media we consume? Can we intervene, or at least mitigate the influence of constant content? Mixing personal anecdotes with historical and political criticism, Image Control explores art, social media, photography, and other visual mediums to understand how our culture and our actions are manipulated, all the while building toward the idea that if fascism emerges as aesthetics, then so too can anti-fascism. Learning how to ethically engage with the world around us is the first line of defense we have against the forces threatening to tear that world apart.

Blake Butler is the author of seven book-length works, including Alice Knott (Riverhead),  300,000,000 (Harper Perennial), Sky Saw (Tyrant Books), There is No Year (Harper Perennial), Scorch Atlas (Featherproof Books), and Ever (Calamari Press), as well as the nonfictional Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia (Harper Perennial). He is a founding editor of HTMLGIANT

We talk about: The Consumer by Michael Gira, insomnia, Penny’s notebook from Inspector Gadget, horror, internet gods and demons, forbidden books, courting insane energy, transcendence, the enduring low cost appeal of text, childhood portals, points of no return, The Bachelor and Blake’s relentless drive to write. 

Catherine Liu is the author of Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class. 

We get into the: dynamics of noir, the pseudo superiority and inchoate narcissism of neoliberalism, social dominance, corporate embodiment, the monetization of victimhood, our collective need for catharsis and the Met Gala. 

Professional Managerial Class (PMC) elite workers labor in a world of performative identity and virtue signaling, publicizing an ability to do ordinary things in fundamentally superior ways. Author Catherine Liu shows how the PMC stands in the way of social justice and economic redistribution by promoting meritocracy, philanthropy, and other self-serving operations to abet an individualist path to a better world. Virtue Hoarders is an unapologetically polemical call to reject making a virtue out of taste and consumption habits.

"Virtue Hoarders amplifies a discussion that still needs to be had."—Spiked

"Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class, argues that the professional-managerial class-working class alliance was doomed from the start for the simple reason that the two classes’ interests are fundamentally opposed. "—The Washington Examiner

Catherine Liu is professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is also the author of The American Idyll: Academic Anti-Elitism as Cultural Critique was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2011. She works on Critical Theory of the old fashioned kind and is engaged in a long term critique of Professional Managerial Class driven liberal politics. She has written an unpublished memoir called Panda Gifts. Catherine Liu is professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine.

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Patrick McGrath is the author of three collections of short fiction, including Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now, and ten novels, including Asylum, Dr. Haggards Disease, Port Mungo, and most recently Last Days in Cleaver Square. His work has been widely published in translation, and in Italy Asylum, titled Follia, has sold over half a million copies. His screenplay of his novel Spider was filmed by David Cronenberg and premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Patrick was born in London and grew up near Broadmoor Hospital where his father was Medical Superintendent.

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Matthew Specktor is the author of the novels American Dream Machine and That Summertime Sound; a nonfiction book, The Sting; and the forthcoming memoir The Golden Hour (Ecco/HarperCollins). He is a founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. In the intro David and I discuss Michelangelo Antonioni's haunting film The Passenger starring Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider. In the interview with Matthew we get into the essence of noir, the dream beyond impact, and the vampiric Lost Highway-esque energy of Los Angeles. We also delve into the psychic undercurrents of LA, the nature of portals, Michael Mann’s Heat, Chinatown, and the complex, conflicting drives that compel us to create art. 

"A novelist and critic with a sharp eye for Hollywood blends memoir and cultural critique in this study of classic American failure narratives." ― The New York Times Book Review “The sweeping American Dream Machine by Matthew Specktor is . . . one of the best novels about Los Angeles I have ever read." — Bret Easton Ellis 

"A haunting memoir-in-criticism exploring a very certain kind of failure―the Hollywood story. Specktor intricately knits his own losses and nostalgias into a larger cultural narrative of writers and filmmakers whose failures left behind a ghostly glamour. I can’t get it out of my mind." ― Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander

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Kate Durbin is a visual artist, filmmaker, and writer from Los Angeles, California (USA), whose artworks are nervous, unnerving, and playful explorations of the human condition in a time of constant screens, globalism, and late capitalism. Her work draws on a wide-range of popular culture references: Disneyland, reality TV shows, fast food, horror movie characters, and Hello Kitty are just some of the recurring figures and references that populate her work. In Hoarders, her third book of poetry, Durbin deftly traces the associations between hoarding and collective US traumas rooted in consumerism and the environment. Each poem in the book is a prismatic portrait of a person and the beloved objects they hoard, from Barbies to snowglobes to vintage Las Vegas memorabilia to rotting fruit to plants. Using reality television as a medium, Durbin conjures an uncanny space of attachments that reflects a cultural moment back to the reader in ways that are surreal and tender and surprising.  Like Beckett or Kafka, in the absurdist tradition, Hoarders ultimately embraces with sympathy the difficulty and complexity of the human condition. Order Hoarders directly from Wave Books and enjoy 30% off by using the promo code WAKE_ISLAND

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Dr. Finley is a Religious Studies Professor at Louisiana State University and has been studying African American religious thought, and spirituality. His research expands upon these themes with an emphasis on esotericism, non-material consciousness, African American embodiment and the role of the UFO narrative in the Nation of Islam.

In this conversation we get into rethinking and restructuring how we conceive of America and its relation to African American spirituality and notions of transcendence. We also explore traumatic mysticism, African American UFO traditions and their relationship to the Nation of Islam, the origins of black embodiment, the irony of institutionalized diversity, blackness as a portal to the universal, Louis Farrakhan’s encounter with the Mother Wheel, mystical experiences that transcend white supremacy and anti-blackness, black narratives being at the center of consciousness, the expansion of consciousness during an abduction experience, familiarity with the transcendent other, and transcendent blackness as a key locus of American religion and spirituality.

Mikita Brottman is an author and psychoanalyst with particular interests in true crime, forensics, psychoanalysis, animals, abjection, and the unexplained.

Her work blends memoir, history, psychoanalysis, and creative speculation. Currently, she is especially interested in reconsidering and interrogating the true crime genre. This interest is at the heart of her two most recent books, An Unexplained Death (Henry Holt, 2018), and Couple Found Slain (Henry Holt, 2021).

COUPLE FOUND SLAIN: “In 1992, a young man named Brian Bechtold was judged “not criminally responsible” for the murder of his parents, a crime he had never tried to conceal. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, he was sent to a maximum security psychiatric hospital. Though the book does explore Brian’s life before the killings, when he was abused, Brottman’s real goal here is to shine a light on Brian’s decades-long captivity.”

Critically acclaimed author and psychoanalyst Mikita Brottman offers literary true crime writing at its best, taking us into the life of a murderer after his conviction―when most stories end but the defendant’s life goes on.

"Brottman has established herself as a leading voice in modern true crime. She finds empathy in the criminal and shows compassion for those whom society wishes to simply forget. This is not just a well-written book, it's an important book. A must-read." --James Renner, author of True Crime Addict

Dennis Cooper is on Wake Island! We talk about: Hoarders, escorts & slaves, dark rides, haunted houses, his forthcoming book I Wished, creating a literary monument to George Myles through the medium of devotion, the home as a universe, emotional history, Russian twink porn, Bjork’s meltdown, John Wayne Gacy, disliking objectification, the dying breed of emo escorts, the enduring sadness of Epcot center…

Dennis Cooper is best known for The George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels that includes Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period. His post-George Miles Cycle novels include My Loose Thread, The Sluts and God, Jr.

Other works include the short-story collections Wrong and Ugly Man, poetry collections The Dream Police and The Weaklings, as well as the recent Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback, and Obituaries.

He’s also written for the stage with theater director Gisèle Vienne and directed two films with Zac Farley called: Like Cattle Towards Glow and Permanent Green Light. 

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Literary horror icon Brian Evenson is on the show! We talk about: the uncanny psychogeography of Utah, religious text & parables, writing as a replacement for spirituality, Brian’s philosophical approach, the machinations of Dark Properties, Michael Gira’s The Consumer, the trancelike intensity of the Soundtrack for the Blind by the Swans, Sunn O))), and Pierre Guyotat's writing, Deleuze and Guattari, the Evensonesque aesthetic and trajectory, our loss of agency to technology, distortion/blur, the appeal of invoking destabilization, Immobility, the relationship between the mode of horror and mood, being a mentor, comfort listening....

“There is not a more intense, prolific, or apocalyptic writer of fiction in America than Brian Evenson.” —George Saunders

“Missing persons, paranoia and psychosis . . . the kind of writer who leads you into the labyrinth, then abandons you there. It’s hard to believe a guy can be so frightening, so consistently.” —New York Times

Brian Evenson is the author of over a dozen works of fiction. He has received three O. Henry Prizes for his fiction. His most recent book, Song for the Unraveling of the World, won a Shirley Jackson Award and was a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculative Fiction and the Balcones Fiction Prize. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at CalArts. 

David Leo RIce co-hosts this special episode of Wake Island in which we interview historian Peter Vronsky. We discuss serial murderer consciousness and the golden age of serial killers -- we range widely from werewolves to WWII, Bundy to Dahmer, and the latent urges that turned the America of our childhood into a carnival of serial murder. 

With books like Serial Killers, Female Serial Killers and Sons of Cain, Peter Vronsky has established himself as the foremost expert on the history of serial killers.  In this first definitive history of the "Golden Age" of American serial murder, when the number and body count of serial killers exploded, Vronsky tells the stories of the most unusual and prominent serial killings from the 1950s to the early twenty-first century. From Ted Bundy to the Golden State Killer, our fascination with these classic serial killers seems to grow by the day. American Serial Killers gives true crime junkies what they crave, with both perennial favorites (Ed Kemper, Jeffrey Dahmer) and lesser-known cases (Melvin Rees, Harvey Glatman). 

Peter Vronsky, PhD, is an investigative historian and a former film and television documentary producer. He is the author of Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters; Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters; and Sons of Cain: A History of Serial Killers from the Stone Age to the Present. He is an authority on Canada’s first modern battle, which he has written about in his definitive book, Ridgeway: The American Fenian Invasion and the 1866 Battle That Made Canada. 

 Peter Vronsky holds a PhD from the University of Toronto in the fields of criminal justice history and the history of espionage in international relations. He teaches history at Ryerson University in Toronto. He divides his time between Toronto, Canada, and Venice, Italy. 

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In Burroughs and Scotland, Chris Kelso explores the relationship between William S. Burroughs (author of Naked Lunch, Junkie, and The Soft Machine) and a country very much attuned to the Beat author’s provocative, transgressive sci-fi style of literature. Kelso investigates why Burroughs was drawn to Scotland, why Scotland was drawn to Burroughs, and what exactly the author got up to during his various visits to Edinburgh.

Chris Kelso is a British Fantasy Award-nominated genre writer, illustrator, editor, screenwriter, and journalist. His work has been translated into French, Spanish and Swedish. He is the 2 times winner of the Ginger Nuts of Horror Novel of the Year ( in 2016 for Unger House Radicals’ and  2017 for ‘Shrapnel Apartments).

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On this episode Chris and I discuss two movies we adore: Baise-moi and Sauvage. Through these films we have an honest and open conversation about: sex work, nihilism, transgression/transformation, subverted expectations, feminism, and porn.   

Baise-moi (Virginie Despentes, Coralie Trinh Thi, 2000) — Two young women, marginalized by society, go on a destructive tour of sex and violence. Breaking norms and killing men - and shattering the complacency of polite cinema audiences.  

Sauvage (Camille Vidal-Naquet, 2018) — A young street hustler leads a debauched life of turning tricks and taking drugs while longing for love.  

Christopher Zeischegg is a writer, musician, and filmmaker who spent eight years working in the adult industry as performer, Danny Wylde. He is the author of four books, Come to my Brother, The Wolves that Live in Skin and Space, Body to Job, and The Magician, and has contributed to The Feminist Porn Book, Best Sex Writing, Coming Out Like a Porn Star, Split Lips, and a variety of digital publications, such as Somesuch and The Nervous Breakdown. 

David and I drill down into the emendation point of Americana’s psychic crisis and investigate its rotten core. We also talk about seediness, the uncanny and drift.  

David Leo Rice is the author of ‘A Room in Dodge City’ (Alternating Current, 2017) and ‘A Room in Dodge City 2’ (Alternating Current, 2021), ‘Angel House’ (Kernpunkt, 2019) a Dennis Cooper ‘Book of the Year’ and ‘The PornME Trilogy’ (The Opiate Books, 2020). His short fiction has been been published in Hobart, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, DIAGRAM and The Rupture, among many other venues.  David currently teaches creative writing at The New School.   

Audrey Szasz (aka Zutka) is a London-based writer with roots in Central Europe. Her experimental narratives combine vivid prose with exotic imagery and transgressive satire. Tears of a Komsomol Girl (Infinity Land Press, 2020) is her first full-length novel. She has been described alternately as ‘the postmodern heir to the disarranged novels of Anna Kavan and more closely, Ann Quin,’ and ‘a deviant genius of surreal and perverse image-play.’ Audrey’s debut in print, Plan for the Abduction of J.G. Ballard (a collaboration with Jeremy Reed) was published in 2019 via Infinity Land Press. In February 2020, Amphetamine Sulphate issued her first solo novella, Invisibility: A Manifesto.

A young woman is found dead on the floor of a Tijuana hotel room. An ID in a nearby purse reads “Atlantis Black.” The police report states that the body does not seem to match the identification, yet the body is quickly cremated and the case is considered closed. 

So begins Betsy Bonner’s search for her sister, Atlantis, and the unraveling of the mysterious final months before Atlantis’s disappearance, alleged overdose, and death. With access to her sister’s email and social media accounts, Bonner attempts to decipher and construct a narrative: frantic and unintelligible Facebook posts, alarming images of a woman with a handgun, Craigslist companionship ads, DEA agent testimony, video surveillance, police reports, and various phone calls and moments in the flesh conjured from memory. Through a history only she and Atlantis shared—a childhood fraught with abuse and mental illness, Atlantis’s precocious yet short rise in the music world, and through it all an unshakable bond of sisterhood—Bonner finds questions that lead only to more questions and possible clues that seem to point in no particular direction. In this haunting memoir and piercing true crime account, Bonner must decide how far she will go to understand a sister who, like the mythical island she renamed herself for, might prove impossible to find. 

“A haunting, mind-bending memoir. . . . riveting.” —New York Times  

“A mixture of biography and true crime, this narrative . . . offers more plot twists, shocking revelations and shady characters than most contemporary thrillers.” —NPR  

Betsy Bonner is the author of the poetry collection Round Lake. She is a former Director of the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center, where she now teaches creative writing. She is a fellow of the MacDowell Colony and the T. S. Eliot House. 

 "Core" Written & performed by Atlantis Black Home demo (2002) 

 "Core" (cover) Written by Atlantis Black Tara Sullivan on vox, guitars, and bass Stephen Edwards on drums Home demo (2020) 

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Steve Finbow and I chat about his latest book The Mindshaft which is based on the infamous members-only BDSM gay leather bar and sex club called the Mineshaft. 

We get into: William Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, Francis Bacon, transgressive acts/art, noise music, Cruising, Ginsberg, literary pilgrimages, Bruce Chatwin and how illness influences creativity. 

“You have visited the bar on a number of occasions, it fascinates you, you find it disgusting, it excites you, you find it dangerous. You are lonely in this city of millions, yet, how do we connect with other people, particularly if we don’t find speaking easy? Is sex a cure for loneliness, and if it is, what happens to if our body or sexuality is considered deviant or damaged, if we are ill or blessed with beauty?”

A Has Grindr killed psychic gay powers? 

Find out on this episode of Wake Island with Thomas Moore, author of Certain Kind of Light, In Their Arms (Rebel Satori), The Night Is An Empire, Skeleton Costumes, When People Die (Kiddiepunk), Alone (Amphetamine Sulphate)

“Thomas Moore is one of the best writers the world has in stock, and I always expect a ton from what he writes. But, even so, ALONE is beyond the pale - immaculate, febrile, deadly. A complete stunner.” - Dennis Cooper⁣