Hogarth
November 2026
On Sale: October 27, 2026
608 pages ISBN: 0593978382 EAN: 9780593978382 Kindle: B0G4MWNCRV Hardcover / e-Book / audiobook Add to Wish List
One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Year: The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review Podcast, The Boston Globe, Time, The Millions, Autostraddle, St. Louis Post Dispatch, Lit Hub, Vulture, AV Club, The Chicago Review of Books, The Bookseller, Reactor, Electric Lit, Book Riot, Crime Reads, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, Gizmodo, Debutiful, and Write Through the Night
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.
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