Acclaimed director Jane Schoenbrun has had an immaculate run with their first two feature films, We're All Going to the World's Fair and this year's I Saw the TV Glow. Now they're set to wrap up the trilogy with their debut novel, Public Access Afterworld.
Schoenbrun shared a snap of their editor's copy that came in the mail today to Instagram, with the book having already been picked up by Random House Publishing imprint Hogarth Books.
"All of my work so far has been leading up to this," Schoenbrun said in a statement [via IndieWire]. "Public Access Afterworld is the culmination of my so-called 'screen trilogy' that I began with World's Fair and TV Glow. But unlike those works, which focused mainly on pre-transition, this novel is an epic of trans becoming, and probably the biggest cinematic universe I'll ever create, my attempt to craft a contemporary queer opus on the scale of Sandman, Lord of the Rings, or even, groan, Harry Potter."
The novel is described as thus:
An epic blend of literary fantasy, coming-of-age, sci-fi, and horror, Public Access Afterworld traces the mysterious transmissions of a secret television network known as Public Access Afterworld that draws in a wide cast of characters, from two teenage best friends in a suburban New York basement to a housewife during the last days of World War II to a young trans content moderator at a YouTube-like corporation, who becomes an unlikely hero capable of rescuing a century of victims disappeared into the broadcast's signal. Public Access Afterworld is a thrilling and profound novel of identity, conspiracy, the secret occult history of American entertainment, and the narratives that guide our lives and shape our world.
While Exclaim!'s own review of Schoenbrun's latest framed it as a middling affair, members of the LGBTQ+ community have been hailing the film as Schoenbrun's masterpiece — with its trans allegory and Buffy the Vampire Slayer analogue providing a vessel for queer catharsis unseen in recent cinema. Meanwhile, reviewer Josiah Hughes presented a more positive review of 2021's World's Fair, calling the filmmaker's debut a "meditation on loneliness and connection writ large."