The most unsettling thing about Jane Schoenbrun’s Public Access Afterworld is not any of its monsters. It is the novel’s insistence that the difference between a person and a character can come down to a production budget.
Chimotera’s consciousness is controlled through corporate ownership of his franchise, which is a sentence that should be absurd but instead turns out to be the load-bearing joke of the whole book. A being rendered in high fidelity is no more real than one drawn cheaply on public-access video—it is simply better funded. Once you accept that premise, the horror stops being about what lives inside the screen and starts being about who signed the contracts.
Bethany Peters and the Cost of Content Moderation
Bethany Peters is the novel’s center, and she works as a content moderator for a company called GlobalVill. Her job is to watch the material nobody else should have to see so that ordinary users can scroll in peace. Through Bethany’s work, Schoenbrun shows how a company forces marginalized people to function as hidden infrastructure, absorbing a society’s trauma. Bethany’s wellbeing is the price that GlobalVill is willing to pay to present a more palatable experience for everyone else. The company knows exactly what it is doing. It also knows who it can most easily manipulate.
GlobalVill does not just employ vulnerable people. It handpicks them, drugs them with psychedelics, and subjects them to a program to which they have not meaningfully consented. Schoenbrun draws the lines outward from there without collapsing into a single allegory. Conversion therapy, military experimentation, institutional abuse, corporate surveillance, and entertainment are all explored, presented as the same apparatus wearing different jackets; showing the many ways in which institutions use people’s vulnerability against them, exerting control over them even when their methods and consequences might differ.
Bethany, who could easily have been written as an inspirational figure, is instead flawed and messy. She is wounded, funny, self-destructive, sharp, selfish, and brave in bursts, and she is exhausted by how reliably other people convert her pain into stories about themselves. What she gains is not mobility but authorship, a much more interesting power: the capacity to decline an assigned role, to give people back names that were taken from them, and to force concealed suffering into view. The novel’s formal games feel earned rather than decorative, because control over a narrative has consequences for the characters within it.
David Sawyer is the more uncomfortable achievement. He believes he saves people. He recruits vulnerable individuals into a system that destroys them, using the language of destiny and choice, which is exactly how coercion speaks when it wants to sound like liberation. In fact, David is manipulated himself. He is grieving and he loves people genuinely. He also causes enormous harm—and his preference for watching over intervening turns him into the book’s most pointed critique of the audience. Schoenbrun understands that a spectator is not a neutral party, and that the man taking notes on your suffering may sincerely believe he is on your side.
Television Formats and the Novel’s Excesses
The episodic architecture carries all of this. Sitcom, prestige drama, monster franchise, true crime, social content, public-access broadcast: some become inhabited worlds, while others frame and distribute the systems that package them. Entertainment makes catastrophe digestible. Give suffering a character arc, a genre, a comic-relief friend, a third-act reversal, and it becomes something an audience can finish and move on from. As suffering returns in formats aimed at different audiences, the repetition shows how easily it can take new forms.
It is also, at times, too much. The cosmology becomes difficult to keep track of. Certain corporate and metaphysical explanations arrive more explicitly than the book needs, spelling out what the structure had already demonstrated. Several ideas recur well past the point of being established. Readers who want a tightly contained horror novel may find the digressions punishing, and I do not think every one of them is defensible.
Much of the excess is not accidental, and mostly it works on its own terms. This is a book about franchises that will not end, about trauma remade and rebooted for successive audiences, about systems that die and immediately return under a new name and branding. A leaner version would be a less honest one.
Authorship and the Limits of Escape
What holds the longest is the novel’s refusal of clean liberation. Escape cannot return the years that were taken. It cannot dissolve complicity, nor can it promise that whatever replaces an abusive system will be better than what it replaced. Anger is treated with the same doubleness: a legitimate signal that something is wrong, and a fire with no particular interest in where it spreads. Transition, likewise, is rendered as an act of creation rather than correction. Becoming yourself does not delete the frightened person who had to survive until you got here. That earlier self remains in the archive.
The question the book keeps returning to is who profits when private pain is converted into public entertainment. Schoenbrun’s answer is that the profit is real, but so is the pain, and the people generating both were never meant to see the ledger.
Article by Luna Gray
Luna Gray is a horror critic, author of No House Is Empty, and senior staff writer at iHorror. She covers cult, indie, folk, queer, and streaming horror, with a particular interest in the strange stories that linger long after the credits roll. Her work can be found at her Substack.
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Jane Schoenbrun’s debut novel turns content moderation and television franchises into interconnected forms of horror. Luna Gray examines its corporate exploitation, troubled characters, and sometimes overwhelming ambition.