“Public Access Afterworld” is a novel for the terminally online

commentary "Camp Miasma" filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun's horror-fiction debut probes the internet's deeper, darker corners Published October 29, 2026 12:00PM (EDT) (oxygen) There was a time when the internet was cool. One could be forgiven if memories of the cool-internet era have grown fuzzier over the years, now that the web has become a self-regulating machine in an indomitable surveillance system and all. But I know it was true, because I was there. “Information superhighway” was a fitting nickname for a system that could blast the average user through a vast network of art and intelligence. (“Blast” being a relative description of how fast dial-up and early WiFi felt at the time.) Most of my adult music taste can be traced back to those early days, watching hyper-pixelated videos of the “Numa Numa” guy dancing to Romanian boy-band hits, or animated aliens piloting their spaceship to the thumping Europop of Eiffel 65’s “Blue (Da Ba Dee).” Archaic video hosting sites were a cultural gateway. Laggy Adobe Flash games commandeered afternoons. It was heaven, until it wasn’t. But paradise can’t be lost if it was never really paradise to begin with. The internet’s dark underbelly was always there, lurking slightly out of frame behind the firewall. If something that once seemed magical could be turned into something so corrupt in a comparably short time, its malevolent potential was a feature from the beginning, not a bug. “Public Access Afterworld” is less of an artistic pivot than a confirmation that Schoenbrun’s worldbuilding skill is well beyond their peers, cinematic or literary. Few people navigate the internet’s light-to-dark spectrum as well as writer-director Jane Schoenbrun, whose films play like dispatches beamed out from the depths of online black holes. Their work remixes the thrill of early internet exploration into colorful abstraction, cracking open an esoteric feeling to analyze its contents and origin — to varying effect. Schoenbrun’s three feature films, 2021’s “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair,” 2024’s “I Saw the TV Glow” and last summer’s “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” are as unwieldy as their verbose titles suggest. It’s impossible to watch one, let alone all three, without realizing that Schoenbrun has a lot on their mind, sometimes too much for a single film to bear. Schoenbrun’s talent for image-making, however, ends up shouldering much of that weight, letting intricate ideas about identity and personal relationships to digital media sit gracefully atop beautifully rendered cinematography. But what happens when someone so known for their visual flair abandons alluring imagery altogether and lets their writing do all the work? In Schoenbrun’s debut novel, “Public Access Afterworld,” the filmmaker takes a sizable risk, stripping away the meticulously crafted onscreen worlds to assert the dexterity of their prose. At 592 pages, this book could easily feel like a smug kiss-off to all those — present company included — who have criticized Schoenbrun’s reluctance to pare down their concepts into less dense works. But while the novel is imposing from sheer size alone, the shift in medium lends their elaborate, occasionally exhausting storytelling a curious new potency. Schoenbrun confidently guides readers down winding, interconnected roads, bouncing between online cults and peculiar digital ephemera to weave a gripping search for truth in a time when the internet has made everything fiction. “Public Access Afterworld” is less of an artistic pivot than a confirmation that Schoenbrun’s worldbuilding skill is well beyond their peers, cinematic or literary. Like the rest of their work, Schoenbrun’s novel is deeply concerned with the internet and its seedy electronic underbelly, using traditional media as a portal to the web’s sleaziest, scariest parts. “Public Access Afterworld” is divided into episodes, not chapters — although each episode has eight individual components, like a TV show divided by ad blocks. This unique structure serves the story, following the zealots of the titular analog realm that lurks beyond the television static through the action. We begin in 2009, just after television signals convert to digital transmission, when high school best friends David Sawyer and Erin Morrison see something strange in the fuzzy image filling their old cathode-ray television screen: a broadcast from an unknown entity called Public Access Afterworld. Their lives soon become consumed by the quest to find the source, turning to proto-internet message boards and video hosting sites in their search. Before long, dead ends give way to a digital abyss, pulling them both into something that will alter their perception of reality and the lives of hundreds of others called to follow them. This audacious mystery makes an ideal premise for a novel, where Schoenbrun can toy with reader expectations without the added task of ensuring that the final image reflects their objective. As it turns out, Schoenbrun’s writing is stronger when it’s devoid of visual images. Description and style can take hold without restraint. And while their prose is sometimes redundant, even the excess flows without struggle. A screenplay may be a different monster from a novel, but both depend on a writer’s foresight. An image has to exist in the mind before it makes it onto the page. But whether that image translates to the viewer in its final context is another matter. “Public Access Afterworld” is a page-turner in the tradition of supermarket paperbacks from Stephen King and Clive Barker, both of whom know cinema well. But Schoenbrun’s innate familiarity with the internet — its legendary Creepypasta stories and disconcerting YouTube videos that seem to spring from the void — sets their story apart from the classics. This is a contemporary novel through and through, and Schoenbrun writes with practiced conviction, subtly differentiating the different characters’ perspectives without dropping the pace. Having three movies under their belt helps there, too. A screenplay may be a different monster from a novel, but both depend on a writer’s foresight. An image has to exist in the mind before it makes it onto the page. But whether that image translates to the viewer in its final context is another matter. In their filmmaking, Schoenbrun sometimes struggles to apply broader themes within a minute-to-minute narrative, creating pacing issues that reveal a dissonance between intention and execution. For example, there’s a sizable gap between the one-shot montage sequences in “TV Glow” and “Camp Miasma.” The former brilliantly evokes wistful teenage dreaming as a character walks through their high school, adorned by a yearning Caroline Polachek song and light-pink diary scribblings. It’s a clever riff on teenage social politics and the hormone-ridden adolescence that so often define both our identities and our future. The “Camp Miasma” montage, on the other hand, toils under three layers of metafiction, as an ’80s slasher-film murderer stalks and kills at summer camp set to a Counting Crows tune, haphazardly interrogating the viewer’s relationship to nostalgia. With Schoenbrun, I often find it’s hit or miss. But in the current media landscape, consistency is overrated. I’m always more drawn to big ideas that have the potential for colossal failure. There are certain things you can draw from a Schoenbrun film that you could never get from, say, a Martin Scorsese movie, no matter how hard you try — and I’m not just talking about the trans subtext in all of Schoenbrun’s work. For an artist as formidable as Scorsese, a flop means nothing. But for someone like Schoenbrun, defeat defines their future. Every decision is a risk. And art without risk is just a product. While I’m hesitant to claim that Schoenbrun’s primary strength is as a novelist rather than a filmmaker, “Public Access Afterworld” goes some distance toward making that case. It’s not that Schoenbrun is bad at making movies, but their mind seems to operate like a story map, with hundreds of red strings pinned between plot points. Too many overlapping yarns in a movie make for a convoluted final product, a big clump of colorful material that’s too dense to pry apart to see the substance lurking below. But at least in this novel, the yarns overlap without tangling. A clear view suits Schoenbrun’s cerebral nature. We can admire the blue sky before the clouds cover the sun. Related Topics ------------------------------------------ Related Articles