In this season-ending episode of Wake Island, guest co-host BR Yeager—author of Negative Space and Burn You the F**k Alive—joins us for a hall of mirrors conversation. Together, we get into David Leo Rice’s latest book, The Berlin Wall, using it as a lens to examine violent cusp figures like Anders Behring Breivik, Timothy McVeigh, and the Columbine shooters. We take a gut check for 2024, exploring the height of disenchantment that drives us to embrace disharmony in a world where consensus...

Daddy’s back. 
 ROOM TEMPERATURE, haunted houses, video games, childhood memories, publishing with an indie press, supportive teachers, Flunker, and more 
 Dennis Cooper's Blog. 
 FLUNKER, six fictions, 124 pp., c/o Amphetamine Sulphate: orders open. UK/Europe: orders open. 
 SOCIAL: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod  Instagram: @wakeislandpod David's Twitter: @raviddice David's site: raviddice.com 
 
 
 
 
 
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In this episode with Steve Finbow, we tease out the point at which a body ceases to be considered a person and chart the development of trauma over time, tracing the fine line between disgust and desire. We get into the motivations behind necrophilia and corpse desecration, examining the boundaries of how taboos can become normalized. We discuss the role of the soul or consciousness in elevating necrophilia to a mythic realm and the pursuit of the death drive in objects of beauty. We also...

From the critically acclaimed author dubbed “one of today’s finest practitioners of nonfiction” (The New York Times Book Review), a breathless true crime tale of sex, religion, and murder in the deep South. Mike and Denise Williams had a tight knit, seemingly unbreakable bond with childhood friends, Brian and Kathy Winchester. The two couples were devout, hardworking Baptists who lived perfect, quintessentially Southern lives. Their friendship seemed ironclad. That is, until December 16,...

Fear. Disgust. Pity. The cripple evokes our basest human emotions—as does the monster. Told in lyric fragments, The Backwards Hand traces Matt Lee’s experience living in the United States for more than thirty years with a rare congenital defect. Weaving in historical research and pop culture references, Lee dissects how the disabled body has been conflated with impurity, worthlessness, and evil. His voice swirls amid those of artists, criminals, activists, and philosophers. With a...

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 Magician, Body to Job, The 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...

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...

Every city has that motel. The motel on the edge of town, the mythical place you dare not go. Logan Berry goes there. In this episode, we calibrate a magical framework for understanding the world through a seance Logan conducted at the Skylark Motel. We get into cutting off spectral appendages, invoking chaos, exploring hoarder homes, practicing automatic writing, and Ultratheater.   Additionally, we discuss if relentless exposure to depravity makes us evil, and why occult commerce lacks the...

“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...

"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...

Today on the show we have documentarian Aaron Brookner. His film Uncle Howard is an intertwining tale of past and present, the story of filmmaker Howard Brookner whose work captured the late ‘70s and early ‘80s cultural revolution in New York City. It is also about his nephew Aaron’s personal journey 25 years later to discover his uncle’s work and the legacy of a life cut short by AIDS. Howard Brookner directed the 1983 documentary Burroughs, as well as a feature film, Bloodhounds of...

BR Yeager‘s debut novel, Amygdalatropolis, is about an incel dissolving into his online world of depravity. And if you want to read something that can push the isolation of quarantine into even darker spaces, where location and body merge into nightmare fuel, you’ll also enjoy BR’s latest novel, Negative Space which is like if the Children of the Corn were connected by message boards into the afterlife.  Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius Follow us on social at: Twitter:...

Nina Renata Aron is the author of GOOD MORNING, DESTROYER OF MEN'S SOULS: A Memoir of Women, Addiction & Love - a scorching memoir of a love affair with an addict, weaving personal reckoning with psychology and history to understand the nature of addiction, codependency, and our appetite for obsessive love.  Nina is also the Editor of the new Playgirl magazine and specializes in writing about girls, books, art, and sex.    Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius Follow us on social...

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...

Welcome to the final episode of Wake Island! Bruce Wagner is on the show.  BRUCE WAGNER is a novelist and screenwriter known for his apocalyptic yet spiritual view of humanity as seen through the lens of Hollywood. His books include: Force Majeure, Dead Stars, I’m Losing You, Wild Palms (graphic novel), I'll Let You Go, Still Holding, The Chrysanthemum Palace, Memorial, The Empty Chair, I Met Someone, A Guide For Murdered Children (writing as Sarah Sparrow), and ROAR: American Master - The...

Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World In this uncompromising essay, Jonathan Crary presents the obvious but unsayable reality: our ‘digital age’ is synonymous with the disastrous terminal stage of global capitalism and its financialisation of social existence, mass impoverishment, ecocide, and military terror. Scorched Earth surveys the wrecking of a living world by the internet complex and its devastation of communities and their capacities for mutual...

Dr Megen de Bruin-Molé is a Lecturer in Digital Media Practice with the University of Southampton. She specialises in ‘monstrous’ historical fiction, adaptation, and contemporary remix culture, and she is currently interested in the digital afterlives and appropriations of historical archives and ephemera. Her book Gothic Remixed: Monster Mashups and Frankenfictions in 21st-Century Culture (Bloomsbury 2020) examines remix culture through the lens of monster studies, and her co-edited...

Jarett Kobek is a Turkish-American writer living in California. His novel I HATE THE INTERNET was an international bestseller, translated into nine languages, and published in twelve countries. His other books include: ATTA, Do Every Thing Wrong!: XXXTentacion Against the World, Only Americans Burn in Hell and The Future Won't Be Long. Motor Spirit: The Long Hunt for the Zodiac It’s 1969. Evil lurks in California. From a Napa County hippie child murder to Haight Street gang bangs to...

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...

We talk about burning down the plantation and doomed lovers on the run.  BUD SMITH works heavy construction and lives in Jersey City, NJ. He is the author of Teenager (Vintage, 2022), Double Bird (Maudlin House, 2018), Dust Bunny City (Disorder Press, 2017), among others. He is also a creative writing teacher and editor. In the intro, David and I talk about Gregg Araki's The Living End. The interview with Bud starts at 12:08. TEENAGER: Two teenagers, in love and insane, journey across the...

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...

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...

In the intro we talk about Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher and animating atmosphere of the desolate landscape of Pennsylvania's coal region with author Meghan Lamb.  Failure to Thrive (Apocalypse Party, 2022) follows the interconnected stories of three families as they navigate issues of disability, illness, and substance abuse in a former coal town: a landscape that is itself sick. A married couple argues over how to raise their neuroatypical child. A former nurse cares for her aging father,...

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...