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WAKE ISLAND

WAKE ISLAND

By Paul K

WAKE ISLAND IS A CONVERSATION SERIES ABOUT THE DARKENING UNDERCURRENTS OF CONTEMPORARY CULTURE WITH HOSTS PAUL K AND DAVID LEO RICE 🕳️ 🐇
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Peter Vronsky - American Serial Killers: The Epidemic Years 1950-2000 (featuring David Leo Rice)

WAKE ISLANDMay 05, 2021

00:00
02:08:23
CHRIS ZEISCHEGG: ON ART AND UNBECOMING

CHRIS ZEISCHEGG: ON ART AND UNBECOMING

Christopher Zeischegg is a writer and filmmaker who spent eight years working in the adult industry as performer, Danny Wylde. He is the author of The MagicianBody to JobThe Wolves that Live in Skin and Space, and Come to My Brother


His latest book CREATION spans a decade’s worth of writing on art, violence, sex work, and friendship. Acclaimed author, Christopher Zeischegg, confronts his past narratives, cruelty in auto-fiction, pornographic ambivalence, and transformative relationship to artist, Luka Fisher.


"Creation is a stunning new collection by one of the most exciting living writers. Reading a Christopher Zeischegg book is like stepping into a dream in which anything can happen—his particular combination of sex, death, beauty, and horror often feels downright transcendent." —Chelsea Hodson, author of Tonight I'm Someone Else

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius


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David's Twitter: @raviddice

Mar 20, 202401:02:57
The World Below with David Peak

The World Below with David Peak

Last year, David Peak released "The World Below," a midwestern gothic tale intertwining two rival families whose animosity sparks amidst a ritualistic occult murder mystery, amplified by heroic doses of LSD.


Published by Apocalypse Party, a rapidly acclaimed purveyor of top-tier horror, "The World Below" is a testament to their commitment to darkness.


This book seamlessly blends atmosphere and narrative, achieving the rare feat of being both immersive and a page-turner. David Peak's work aligns him with horror luminaries like Brian Evenson, Clive Barker, and Poppy Z Brite.


In this episode, we delve into reading as a psychedelic act, exploring how family feuds in small towns can evolve into an art form. We also dissect the drama and artistry of Jerry Springer, touch on the American mythology surrounding the West Memphis Three, and revel in the exhilaration of death metal and films like "Mandy."


"A brilliant and flayed slice of Midwest gothic. While one might find traces of Poppy Z. Brite or Michael McDowell here, The World Below is wholly its own beast. Peak laces the classic premise of feuding, cursed families with high-potency LSD, forming something fresh, potent, and filled with ache."

-B.R. Yeager, author of Negative Space


"Violent, noir-soaked horror infuses every page of David Peak's astonishing The World Below, coiling like a serpent around love: first and lost loves, love of family and the land, love of darkness and blood. Peak mixes the most primal of emotions like an alchemist, leaving every reader transformed."

-Livia Llewellyn, author of Furnace


SOCIAL: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod  Instagram: @wakeislandpod David's Twitter: @raviddice

Nov 15, 202301:09:35
Three Nights at the Skylark Motel with Logan Berry
Oct 25, 202301:14:33
Exaltations in the Dead of Night with Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh Part II

Exaltations in the Dead of Night with Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh Part II

“The omnicidal will to constitute an infinite decision implies one of two things: either to kill the unfinished, or to let the unfinished kill.”


In the second part of our conversation with Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh, we delve deep into the realm of unreality. We explore topics such as the labor associated with maintaining the criminal enterprise of the dream, the suffering and expenditure associated with visionary figures like Joyce Monsuer, the allure of totalitarian seduction during times marked by the predatory and sadistic behavior of those in authority, the phenomenon of NPC culture and the detachment /neutrality it brings, the banality of repressed nerds and the enduring shittiness of the metaverse. 


Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh is a philosopher, literary theorist, and professor of comparative literature at Babson College. His work tracks currents of experimental thought across the so-called East and the West, with particular attention to concepts of chaos, violence, illusion, silence, extremism, mania, disappearance, night, evil, secrecy, and apocalyptic writing. He has published nine books to date, including: ⁠⁠⁠Night: A Philosophy of the After-Dark⁠⁠⁠ & ⁠⁠⁠Night: A Philosophy of the Last World⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠Omnicide: Mania, Fatality, and the Future-in-Delirium⁠⁠⁠ & ⁠⁠⁠Omnicide II: Mania, Doom, and the Future-in-Deception⁠⁠⁠, The Chaotic Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Inflictions (Continuum, 2012); The Radical Unspoken (Routledge, 2013); Insurgent, Poet, Mystic, Sectarian (SUNY, 2015);

He is also the founding director of the Future Studies Program (www.futurestudiesprogram.com), Programmer of Transdisciplinary Studies for the New Centre for Research & Practice, and co-editor of the "Futures Theory" and "Suspensions" book series (Bloomsbury).


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Oct 11, 202301:19:43
Exaltations in the Dead of Night with Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh Part I

Exaltations in the Dead of Night with Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh Part I

"Every storyteller harbours a secret desire to be the one who tells the last story, just as every maniac wishes to inscribe the last fateful madness on earth."


In this episode with Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh we walk with vertigo to summon the authors who play at the borders of insanity and intoxication. We get into the territories of the night and mania, both of which are the premise of Jason's most recent books: Night: A Philosophy of the After-Dark & Night: A Philosophy of the Last World and Omnicide: Mania, Fatality, and the Future-in-Delirium & Omnicide II: Mania, Doom, and the Future-in-Deception.


Topics discussed include: exploring the dark poetics of the avant-garde, forbidden literature, and the final words of poets that lean into the dark and speak in apocalyptic tones, manic obsession, cosmic intoxication, opium dreams, mania redeeming nihilism, standing on the threshold of the abyss, embracing relentlessness as an aesthetic to achieve undeniability, and shunning sanity in favor of embracing madness.


Omnicide is “A captivating fractal of conceptual prisms in half-storytelling, half-theoretical prose, a rhythmic, poetic, insidious work that commands submission, Omnicide absorbs the reader into unfamiliar and estranging landscapes whose every subtle euphoric aspect threatens to become an irresistible invitation to the end of all things.”


Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh's Omnicide offers readers a view into a unique philosophy of delirium, mania, and vitalist annihilation: the startling revelation that everything that is, should not be. Omnicide is a singular kind of taxonomy, a teratology of thought-creatures that dovetails around his chosen writers, from the revelatory self-abnegation of Forugh Farrokhzad to Sadeq Hedayat, the poète maudite of modern Iran. These and other “poets of the lost cause” come together in a compelling book that is a strange hybrid of Aristotle's Categories, Borges's Book of Imaginary Beings, and the Necronomicon.

Eugene Thacker, author of Infinite Resignation and In the Dust of This Planet


Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh is a philosopher, literary theorist, and professor of comparative literature at Babson College. His work tracks currents of experimental thought across the so-called East and the West, with particular attention to concepts of chaos, violence, illusion, silence, extremism, mania, disappearance, night, evil, secrecy, and apocalyptic writing. He has published nine books to date, including: The Chaotic Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Inflictions (Continuum, 2012); The Radical Unspoken (Routledge, 2013); Insurgent, Poet, Mystic, Sectarian (SUNY, 2015); Omnicide: Mania, Fatality, and the Future-In-Delirium (MIT/ Urbanomic/ Sequence, 2019); and, Night: A Philosophy of the After-Dark (Zero Books, 2019); Omnicide II: Mania, Doom, and the Future-In-Deception (MIT/Urbanomic/Sequence, 2022); and Night II: A Philosophy of the Last World (Zero Books, 2022).

He is also the founding director of the Future Studies Program (www.futurestudiesprogram.com), Programmer of Transdisciplinary Studies for the New Centre for Research & Practice, and co-editor of the "Futures Theory" and "Suspensions" book series (Bloomsbury).


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Oct 04, 202357:59
Jack Riccobono - Amityville: An Origin Story

Jack Riccobono - Amityville: An Origin Story

Enter the Amity-verse with Wake Island.


In this episode we get into channeling dark energy from the media vortex surrounding America’s most infamous haunted house in Amityville, Long Island.


In addition we also talk about: Hauntings as a manifestation of trauma, the mythology-making behind the nearly 50-year Amityville horror house phenomenon, demonic media spectacles, the allure and menace of the suburbs, and the reality and fantasy of demonic possession.


Jack Riccobono’s new series, Amityville: An Origin Story, is now streaming on MGM+. Riccobono has written & directed a wide range of narrative, documentary and commercial work across the five boroughs of his native New York City and around the world, from Moscow to Shanghai to Freetown, often exploring hidden subcultures and the complexities of the human soul. His critically acclaimed feature documentary The Seventh Fire, from executive producers Terrence Malick, Natalie Portman and Chris Eyre, premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and received a New York Times Critic’s Pick. Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius SOCIAL:

Jack's site: All Rites Reserved

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Jun 22, 202302:22:47
How to Find Zodiac with Jarett Kobek
Jun 09, 202202:33:30
Illuminating the New American Right with James Pogue

Illuminating the New American Right with James Pogue

James Pogue is a journalist and essayist. His first book is called Chosen Country: A Rebellion in the West

James recently wrote an article for Vanity Fair called Inside the New Right and it’s not only a great piece of journalism but it struck a cultural nerve. Not only did it go viral but it even got a shout out on Twitter from the likes of Jeff Bezos and Glenn Greenwald. 

In this conversation we discuss everything from MMA’s connection to the right, to diagnosing what is happening at the margins of our flailing empire.

We also get into: the Dillon Danis controversy, bro science/Rogan’s appeal, being skeptical of liberalism, how the left loses dynamic & questioning men, constantly beating back the devils at the gate, alienation leading to chaos, the system spinning out of control, reading the tea leaves of history and seeing techno fascism, Curtis Yarvin as a historian analyst of the left, social revolution, the aesthetics of the new right, and cool kids adopting a religious pose.

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May 26, 202201:25:18
On the Cusp of Dissolution with Lindsay Lerman

On the Cusp of Dissolution with Lindsay Lerman

Lindsay Lerman is a writer and translator. Her new novel, WHAT ARE YOU (CLASH Books) is out now. Her first book I'm From Nowhere was published in 2019. Her essays, short stories, and poetry have been published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Entropy, Hobart, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. She is currently adapting her short story Real Love—which first appeared in NY Tyrant Magazine—for the screen. She is represented by Abby Walters at CAA.

In the intro David and I talk about Pascal Laugier's MARTYRS (2008). The interview with Lindsay starts at 27:42. 

In this conversation we get into: locating and living through the cusp of our time, the interconnection between nuance and chaos, dissolution, the unspoken rules of commodification, giving into the productivity of terror, giving yourself up to the universe, barfing into the void, celebrating the irrational, and the importance of play in the face of utility. We also talk about Bataille’s philosophy around expenditure and waste as a way to explore Lindsey’s outlook and work as an author.

WHAT ARE YOU:

Hypnotic, dreamlike, lyrical essays tell the story of a woman trapped in a destructive love affair with the universe. Her understanding of power, desire, and complicity must be transformed again and again. Addressed to an amorphous you, Lerman wrestles with the forces of birth and death, creation and destruction—going deep into the subterranean strata of consciousness and back. 

PRAISE

“An incantatory and hypnotic work of voice, What Are You exists at the apex of creation and destruction, desire and shame, innocence and experience, violence and tenderness, rapture and suffering, hunger and the denial of flesh. To read it is to feel the terror of falling from a great height—but wanting to; maybe even choosing to jump.” - SARAH GERARD, AUTHOR OF SUNSHINE STATE AND TRUE LOVE 

"Passionate, dispassionate, hypnotic, deadpan, ecstatic, Lindsay Lerman's What Are You, read it now. Now." - KATHE KOJA, AUTHOR OF THE CIPHER

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Apr 28, 202201:20:40
Counteragent Adam Lehrer on Addiction and Crypto-Transgression

Counteragent Adam Lehrer on Addiction and Crypto-Transgression

Adam Lehrer is a writer and an artist living in New York. He is the founder and co-host of the System of Systems podcast, and the founder and curator of the Safety Propaganda collaborative media platform. Communions is Adam's debut book - out now from Hyperidean Press.

Communions: Channeling hallucinated versions of dead artists and junkies, these fragments access the uncanny allure of shared experience. Elements of speculative fiction, criticism and encrypted auto-biography merge to form a disconcerting portrait of the artist as addict. Neither denunciation nor valorization, Communions is an attempt to probe the haunting singularity of opiate addiction and its ineradicable influence on art and culture.

As a writer, Lehrer covers topics such as contemporary art, horror fiction, noise and experimental music, cinema, and left politics.

David and I talk about the Truman Show in the intro. Interview starts at 19:25.

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Adam's Instagram: @adamlehreruptown

Apr 14, 202201:29:46
Stephen Marche on The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future

Stephen Marche on The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future

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

Find out on this eps w/ ⁦Stephen Marche‬⁩ author of The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future 

We also get into: American wildness, bloodlust, foment, genius, and the apocalyptic longing for an endless frontier. 

The United States is coming to an end. The only question is how. 

No matter your political leaning, most of us can sense that America is barreling toward catastrophe—of one kind or another. Relevant and revelatory, The Next Civil War plainly breaks down the looming threats to America and is a must-read for anyone concerned about the future of its people, its land, and its government. 

“Should be required reading for anyone invested in preserving our 246-year experiment in self-government . . . The book alternates between fictional dispatches from a coming social breakdown and digressions that support its predictions with evidence from the present. The effect is twofold: The narrative delivers Cormac McCarthy-worthy drama; while the nonfictional asides imbue that drama with the authority of documentary.” —Ian Bassin, The New York Times Book Review 

Stephen Marche is a novelist, essayist and cultural commentator. He is the author of half a dozen books, including The Unmade Bed: The Messy Truth About Men and Women in the Twenty-First Century (2016) and The Hunger of the Wolf (2015). 

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Mar 18, 202201:05:20
Dylan Mulvin on Proxies: The Cultural Work of Standing In
Mar 03, 202201:24:08
Journey to the Heart of Disco Elysium with Justin Keenan
Feb 17, 202201:19:16
Jonathan Greenaway on the Gothic State of Necrotic Capitalism

Jonathan Greenaway on the Gothic State of Necrotic Capitalism

In this episode with Jonathan Greenaway (Theology, Horror and Fiction: A Reading of the Gothic Nineteenth Century & The Horror Vanguard podcast) we arrive at the New Flesh while peeling back the layers of a nightmarish society in stasis.  

We get into: necro-neoliberalism, depressive hedonia, unspent energy mutating into gothic maw, our struggle to be and remain human, nostalgia neutralizing hope/fear instead of bringing us closer to history, the internet as a profoundly haunted and haunting device, Paul tells a dumb story about seeing Beyond the Black Rainbow on acid and the glorious weirdness of "Titane" 

Jon Greenaway is an academic, writer and teacher based in the North of England. He’s currently working on a PhD that focuses on philosophy, theology and the gothic literature of the nineteenth century. 

He’s also behind @TheLitCritGuy, a social media project that aims to bring critical and cultural theory away from its academic enclave and to the widest possible audience. He writes for a variety of publications online and blogs at thelitcritguy.com. 

He tweets @thelitcritguy. 

Find Jon on Youtube at Jon the Lit Crit Guy Theology, Horror and Fiction: A Reading of the Gothic Nineteenth Century Surpassing scholarly discourse surrounding the emergent secularism of the 19th century, Theology, Horror and Fiction argues that the Victorian Gothic is a genre fascinated with the immaterial. Through close readings of popular Gothic novels across the 19th century – Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Dracula and The Picture of Dorian Gray, among others – Jonathan Greenaway demonstrates that to understand and read Gothic novels is to be drawn into the discourses of theology. Despite the differences in time, place and context that informed the writers of these stories, the Gothic novel is irreducibly fascinated with religious and theological ideas, and this angle has been often overlooked in broader scholarly investigations into the intersections between literature and religion. Combining historical theological awareness with interventions into contemporary theology, particularly around imaginative apologetics and theology and the arts, Jonathan Greenaway offers the beginnings of a modern theology of the Gothic. 

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius 

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Feb 03, 202201:13:51
Enter the Sanctum of the Heroic Pervert with Erik Davis
Jan 20, 202201:32:19
James Grauerholz - Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs (REBROADCAST)
Jan 06, 202201:19:34
Small Town Pervert Derek McCormack!

Small Town Pervert Derek McCormack!

Derek McCormack is a small town pervert and the author of The Well-Dressed Wound and Castle F*ggot, both published by Semiotext(e). His most recent book is Judy Blame's Obituary. This collection brings together for the first time McCormack's fashion journalism. He writes about and interviews fashion figures that fascinate him, tracing the ways they inspire and inhabit his novels. The result is a sort of memoir in essays: as he writes, "My tribute to [Judy] Blame is about him and about me—there are lots of my own tales woven in with the topics I touch on. The writing here is a sort of autobiography, a life seen through a scrim, or a life as a scrim—my moire mémoire."
Judy Blame's Obituary contains twenty years' worth of reminiscences, reviews of fashion shows and books, interviews with writers about fashion, and interviews with fashion designers about writing. He talks to Nicolas Ghesquière about perfume, and to Edmund White about which perfume he wore as a young f*g in New York City. He inspects the clothes that Kathy Acker left behind when she died, and he summons the spirit of Margiela in a literary seance. He traces the history of sequins, then recounts the cursed story of Vera West, the costume designer who dressed the Bride of Frankenstein. These pieces were all previously published, some in Artforum, some in The Believer, and some in underground publications like Werewolf Express—what binds them together is a sense that though fashion victimizes us, this victimization is sometimes a sort of salvation.
In this Wake Island holiday special we talk about: my butthole, revealing the real Derek through writing about fashion, turning our ashes into jewelry, clothes as ectoplasm, Dodie Bellamy’s “Kathy Forest,” Vivienne Westwood’s imperial years, an outfit based on an advent calendar, sequins implantations, Margiela, being a small town pervert from Peterborough, our hometowns vs the hometowns of our minds, fistulas, Guy Maddin, the sadomasochistic beauty of being a writer, and we investigate - why does fashion abandon us?
Judy Blame's Obituary: Writings on Fashion and Death here.
Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius
Additional music by TRG Banks
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Dec 23, 202101:59:44
Blake Butler on Obsession and the Unholy Sacredness of Time
Dec 03, 202101:42:14
Rosecrans Baldwin on the City-State of Los Angeles

Rosecrans Baldwin on the City-State of Los Angeles

Rosecrans Baldwin is the bestselling author of Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.
Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles is a provocative, exhilaratingly new understanding of the United States’ most confounding metropolis—not just a great city, but a full-blown modern city-state.
America is obsessed with Los Angeles. And America has been thinking about Los Angeles all wrong, for decades, on repeat. Los Angeles is not just the place where the American dream hits the Pacific. (It has its own dreams.) Not just the vanishing point of America’s western drive. (It has its own compass.) Functionally, aesthetically, mythologically, even technologically, an independent territory, defined less by distinct borders than by an aura of autonomy and a sense of unfurling destiny—this is the city-state of Los Angeles.
Deeply reported and researched, provocatively argued, and eloquently written, Rosecrans Baldwin's Everything Now approaches the metropolis from unexpected angles, nimbly interleaving his own voice with a chorus of others, from canonical L.A. literature to everyday citizens. Here, Octavia E. Butler and Joan Didion are in conversation with activists and astronauts, vampires and veterans. Baldwin records the stories of countless Angelenos, discovering people both upended and reborn: by disasters natural and economic, following gospels of wealth or self-help or personal destiny. The result is a story of a kaleidoscopic, vibrant nation unto itself—vastly more than its many, many parts.
Baldwin’s concept of the city-state allows us, finally, to grasp a place—Los Angeles—whose idiosyncrasies both magnify those of America, and are so fully its own. Here, space and time don’t quite work the same as they do elsewhere, and contradictions are as stark as southern California’s natural environment. Perhaps no better place exists to watch the United States’s past, and its possible futures, play themselves out.
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Nov 19, 202101:31:39
Catherine Liu - Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class

Catherine Liu - Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class

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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Nov 05, 202101:34:38
A New Gothic Age with Patrick McGrath & David Leo Rice
Sep 08, 202101:41:29
Matthew Specktor - Always Crashing in the Same Car On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California w/ David Leo Rice

Matthew Specktor - Always Crashing in the Same Car On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California w/ David Leo Rice

Aug 05, 202102:03:01
Kate Durbin - Hoarders
Jul 29, 202101:07:20
Mikita Brottman - Couple Found Slain

Mikita Brottman - Couple Found Slain

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

Outro song is "Slum Creeper" by Calla off the Scavengers album -- follow Calla on IG for updates!    

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Jul 07, 202101:26:55
Dennis Cooper - I Wished
May 27, 202101:26:46
Brian Evenson - The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell

Brian Evenson - The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell

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. 

THE GLASSY, BURNING FLOOR OF HELL comes out in August 2021 by Coffee House Press - preorder here.  

A sentient, murderous prosthetic leg; shadowy creatures lurking behind a shimmering wall; brutal barrow men―of all the terrors that populate The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, perhaps the most alarming are the beings who decimated the habitable Earth: humans. In this new short story collection, Brian Evenson envisions a chilling future beyond the Anthropocene that forces excruciating decisions about survival and self-sacrifice in the face of toxic air and a natural world torn between revenge and regeneration. Combining psychological and ecological horror, each tale thrums with Evenson’s award-winning literary craftsmanship, dark humor, and thrilling suspense.

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May 12, 202101:15:37
Peter Vronsky - American Serial Killers: The Epidemic Years 1950-2000 (featuring David Leo Rice)

Peter Vronsky - American Serial Killers: The Epidemic Years 1950-2000 (featuring David Leo Rice)

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. 

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius 

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May 05, 202102:08:23
Justine Bateman - FACE

Justine Bateman - FACE

Bateman’s directorial feature film debut of her own script, VIOLET, stars Olivia Munn, Luke Bracey, and Justin Theroux, and had its World Premiere at the 2021 SXSW Film Festival.

Her best-selling first book, FAME, a non-fiction about the life cycle of Fame and society’s strong need for it, was published in 2018 by Akashic Books. Her second book, FACE, is also a best seller. It’s about women’s faces getting older and why that makes people angry. It was released April 2021 by Akashic.

Her writing has been published by Dame Magazine, Salon.com, and McSweeney’s. An advocate for Net Neutrality, Justine has testified before the Senate Commerce Committee on its behalf in Washington DC and served as an Advisor to FreePress.com.

Her former acting work includes Family Ties, Satisfaction, Men Behaving Badly, The TV Set, Desperate Housewives, and Californication.

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius

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Apr 28, 202101:13:29
Sam Tallent - Running the Light

Sam Tallent - Running the Light

Sam Tallent is a comedian and author. His debut novel is Running the Lights, and it’s about a road comic named Billy Ray Schafer who embodies the archetype of a tragic road comic – trapped in the wreckage of his wasted career. In this conversation we get into being in punk bands, dealing with hecklers, taking mushrooms in the Poconos, watching magic shows on acid, boat acts, Brody Stevens, Ron White, Carrot Top, Vegas residencies, and the beauty of nihilism.  

“Brilliant writing. Astounding. One of the best books I’ve read. Ever. The best fictional representation of comedy in any medium.” - Doug Stanhope, iconoclast  

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius 

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Twitter: @WakeIslandPod   

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Apr 14, 202101:09:27
Chris Kelso - Burroughs and Scotland: Dethroning the Ancients: The Commitment of Exile
Apr 07, 202101:31:11
Chris Zeischegg - Baise-moi + Sauvage
Mar 24, 202101:15:35
Gina Nutt - Night Rooms

Gina Nutt - Night Rooms

Jump down the rabbit hole with Gina and I - in this episode we talk about: the enchantment of malls, movies like It Follows/Poltergeists/Showgirls, child beauty pageants, synesthesia, pandemic dreams, the final girl archetype, and the lost magic of video stores. Gina's book Night Rooms is an atmospheric dreamscape of memories intertwined with horror movies. Night Rooms is out now from Two Dollar Radio.

 "Jumping between past and present with ease, Nutt slashes to the center of issues like motherhood and depression and ultimately emerges as the quintessential final girl of her own film... Nutt has a knack for short, sharp lines that skip the brain and go straight to the heart." —Gabino Iglesias, NPR 

“In a horror movie, an infected character may hide a bite or rash, an urge, an unwellness. She might withdraw or act out, or behave as if nothing is the matter, nothing has happened. Any course of action opposite saying how she feels suggests suffering privately is preferable to the anticipated betrayal of being cast out.” 

Gina Nutt is the author of the poetry collection Wilderness Champion. She earned her MFA from Syracuse University. Her writing has appeared in Cosmonauts Avenue, Joyland, Ninth Letter, and other publications. 

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius 

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Mar 22, 202101:37:11
David Leo Rice - Drifter: Stories
Mar 17, 202101:25:51
Audrey Szasz - Tears of a Komsomol Girl
Mar 10, 202101:11:18
Betsy Bonner - The Book of Atlantis Black

Betsy Bonner - The Book of Atlantis Black

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) 

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius 

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Feb 10, 202101:35:26
Derek McCormack - Castle F*ggot

Derek McCormack - Castle F*ggot

Derek McCormack's latest book is Castle F*ggot (Semiotext(e)). His previous books include The Show that Smells, The Well-Dressed Wound, Grab Bag and The Haunted Hillbilly.
We talk about: the childhood memories and objects that inform Derek's aesthetic, confronting cancer, American vs Canadian kitsch, what makes camp, crystalizing shit into shit necklaces, lethal coziness, the emotional center of Castle F*ggot, ebay shopping on ambien, shopping at Barneys, weird celebrity sightings, theme parks, marshmallowy children's cereal, fashion, and did I mention shit!?
Castle F*ggot is a dark satire about an amusement park more deranged than anything Disney could imagine: a playland for gay men called Faggotland.
Castle F*ggot is Derek McCormack's darkest and most delicious book yet, a satire of sugary cereals and Saturday morning cartoons set in an amusement park more deranged than anything Disney dreamed up. At the heart of the park is F*ggotland, a playland for gay men, and Castle F*ggot, the darkest dark ride in the world. Home to a cartoon Dracula called Count Choc-o-log, the castle is decorated with the corpses of gays—some were killed, some killed themselves, all ended up as décor.
"It is really just one of the best books ever, and maybe the greatest novel ever written." Dennis Cooper
Make sure to follow Derek on Instagram at:
www.instagram.com/derek_mccormack/
Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius
Follow us on social at: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod
Instagram: @wakeislandpod
The Star of Bethlehem is played by TRG Banks
Dec 16, 202001:46:23
Steve Finbow - The Mindshaft
Oct 28, 202001:18:21
Thomas Moore - Alone
Aug 19, 202054:19