The army brings the movies to the desert for the Fourth of July. Folding chairs go up in rows, a white screen ripples in the wind, and the families of the scientists working on the hill settle in for a newsreel and a monster picture about a researcher who turns himself into something half animal. When the lights come up, the whole town applauds. Only one woman, a physicist’s wife who has never quite fitted in, sits there appalled, unable to understand what everyone else enjoyed. Weeks later she finds a slim glowing slab in her husband’s briefcase, a thing that should not exist in 1945. Public Access Afterworld by Jane Schoenbrun is about that woman’s question, and it keeps asking it for eight decades.
The Screen Was Never Neutral
The novel announces itself as a transcription. A former patient of a grim religious youth facility writes down the stories another patient told after lights-out, a whole invented TV show they insisted was stuck in their head. It is a good frame and a slightly underused one; the teller’s voice flickers through the episodes but rarely takes the stage again.
What it frames is a mythology about where television comes from. In 2009, on the night analog broadcasting is switched off, a shy suburban girl named Erin sees a channel underneath the static. Her best friend David believes her mostly because he is afraid of losing her. Seventeen years later he is a notorious cult leader whose followers trade challenges on hidden message boards, and the people who believe in him most are the loneliest kids online. Erin is the book’s first casualty of attention. She is a straight-A student whose father decided when she was six that she would be the youngest astronaut in history, and she has been performing that future for him ever since. The channel under the static is the first thing that has ever looked at her and wanted something other than a grade. Schoenbrun lets that hunger stay ambiguous, and it is one of the novel’s subtler achievements that Erin’s surrender reads as both a disappearance and a kind of escape.
Public Access Afterworld by Jane Schoenbrun treats all of this with deadly seriousness and constant jokes, which is exactly how the internet treats it too.
The Girl Who Watches for a Living
The best of the book belongs to Bethany Peters, and the novel knows it. She works the night shift for a video platform in Austin, alone at a shared desk after the employees with stock options have gone home, sorting an endless queue into three colours. Green means the clip can stay. Yellow means a manager has to look. Red sends it away to wherever deleted videos go. The algorithm feeds her porn, cruelty and long hours of nothing, and the company soothes her with a rooftop herb garden she is not allowed to visit and kombucha on tap.
Schoenbrun writes this work with the authority of someone who has thought hard about content moderation and the people who absorb it. When one desperate user keeps reappearing in Bethany’s feed, she breaks the rules to find them, and the decision tears up her life in ways that are funny, frightening and sad at once.
Bethany’s trans life is drawn without a single after-school lesson. Her boyfriend is kind to the point of suffocation, and his generosity is the softest trap in the book. Her parents keep loving her in the past tense. A phone call to her mother, made from a bus depot at dawn, is the quietest scene in Public Access Afterworld by Jane Schoenbrun and possibly the most devastating.
Public Access Afterworld and the Cost of Watching
Against Bethany stands David, and the contrast is the novel’s sharpest idea. Early on, in a stranger’s basement, he is dressed in a homemade protective suit and stands frozen on the stairs while his best friend is told to undress. He does nothing. He just watches, as if it were an episode. Erin never quite forgives him, and the book does not either. David wants more than anything to be one of the special ones, the people the static chooses, and his envy curdles into something monstrous.
That is the line Public Access Afterworld by Jane Schoenbrun draws again and again: between watching and acting, spectator and participant, the person behind the camera and the person inside the frame. Men of science observe their experiments from behind protective glass. Executives read their users as numbers on a dashboard. Bethany watches too, but she cannot stop herself from reaching through the screen.
Where Public Access Afterworld Breaks Up
The reservations are real and they grow with the page count. This is a very long novel, and too much of its cosmology is delivered by characters who sit down and explain it, most heavily in a long monologue from a very old woman living off-grid, which stops the momentum of the second half cold. The prose changes register often and on purpose, but a switch from past to present tense in the middle of a chapter feels less like design than drift. The violence escalates into mass killing, and the book’s comic reflexes do not always know when to stand down. And the ending, which works hard to resemble a season finale, leaves so many threads loose that it reads more like a pause than a conclusion.
None of that cancels the ambition, which is enormous. Public Access Afterworld by Jane Schoenbrun is often brilliant about media, gender and the business of attention, and its anger is earned. Readers should know that its darkness includes self-harm, suicide, sexual abuse, drugs and relentless transphobia, handled with care but never softened.
A Filmmaker’s First Book
Jane Schoenbrun grew up in Ardsley, a short drive from the Westchester suburb where the story begins, and spent their teenage years on message boards devoted to Buffy and The X-Files, writing fan fiction and planting fake spoilers. That history is visible everywhere here: the forum etiquette, the lurkers, the thrill of a thread that suddenly takes off.
Schoenbrun has described the book as the end of a loose trilogy that began with their films We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow, and it arrived with starred reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. Readers who saw those films will find in Public Access Afterworld by Jane Schoenbrun the same conviction that screens can be both a hiding place and a cage.
Where It Leaves You
Public Access Afterworld by Jane Schoenbrun is out now from Hogarth, published on 27 October 2026, and it is one of the strangest and most generous horror novels of the year, even when it overreaches. Readers drawn to its trans heroine should try Stag Dance by Torrey Peters, which also bends genre to talk about bodies and wanting. Those who want more horror about teenagers remade by forces beyond their control can follow it with You Weren’t Meant to Be Human by Andrew Joseph White. The review is based on an advance copy, so the published text may differ.
The set is off, the room is dark, and something underneath the picture is still waiting to be seen.