Academic publications are listed in my C.V. Occasional writings may be found at the Noir Materialism blog. Occasional translations can be found here.
Published fiction
- “How to Construct a Gun from Your Own Flesh.” Vastarien: A Literary Journal 1:1 (Spring 2018). Grimscribe Press. Also available as a podcast from Pseudopod.
- “The Mad German.” Vastarien: A Literary Journal 1:3 (Autumn 2018). Grimscribe Press. Cover art by Aeron Alfrey depicts a central image from the story:
- “Notes Toward a Philosophy of Sleep.” In Machinations and Mesmerism: Tales Inspired by E.T.A. Hoffman. Edited by Farah Rose Smith. Ulthar Press, 2019.
- “The Face of Allan Dulles.” Mycelia 3 (Winter 2019/Spring 2020). Hedera Felix.
- “A Tyranny of Tongues.” Vastarien: A Literary Journal 4:1 (Spring 2021). Grimscribe Press. Des Lewis writes in a review: “A complex of story and essay becoming a Swiftian fable if not one of the alternate truths of our times. […] I cannot stress enough the power of some of the words themselves used in this document. Tongues used as horror monsters for a horror story.” The story was also adapted as a short film by Secret Haus Productions.
- “Matsuri.” Vastarien: A Literary Journal 4:2 (Fall 2021). Grimscribe Press.
- “Hunting a Tyrant.” Mycelia 5 (Summer 2022). Hedera Felix.
On the market
- “Engine Parts.” Short story about an environmental engineer on an ecologically devastated future Earth, who falls in love with an alien tourist and discovers a disturbing truth about humanity’s place in the cosmos.
- The Frost Crabs of Captain Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. Novella about a standoffish 19th-century biologist who, after a shipwreck, is picked up by the Wiederkunft, an exotic submarine which takes him to the philosopher Nietzsche’s Arctic Ocean undersea colony, Dionysus Station. There, Nietzsche, long-presumed to be dead, conducts horrific cosmological, philosophical, and psychedelic experiments with Chionoecetes thule, the frost crab, a rare benthic species exhibiting unusual biological features.
Non-academic essays and web publications
- “Technically Meat: Michelangelo Antonioni’s Tecnicamenta dolce and the Italian Cannibal Film.” Forthcoming.
- “Geopolitics and Marriage: On Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession (1981).” Forthcoming from Vault of Culture.
- “COLD_FUTURES.EXE and the Virtual Exodus™.” Utopia District (April 2023).
- “A Specter, a Speaker: On ‘Whistle and I’ll Come to You’ (1968).” Vault of Culture (January 2022).
- “Toxic Love in ‘Beyond the Aquila Rift’.” Vault of Culture (September 2021).
- “Dark anthropocentrism.” SYNTHETIC ZERØ (June 2021).
- “Gray sky thinking: John Boyd’s entropy machine.” SYNTHETIC ZERØ (March 2021).
- “Hegalien: on H. R. Giger’s Hegel.” Alienist IX (December 2020): 93-100.
- “Existentially weighted time decay: speculative fragmentation and political immunology.” Diffractions Collective (November 2020).
- “Gray sky thinking: Augustine and institutional resilience.” SYNTHETIC ZERØ (October 2020).
- “Gray sky thinking: Plato and political decay.” SYNTHETIC ZERØ (October 2020).
- “Introduction to gray sky thinking.” SYNTHETIC ZERØ (October 2020).
- “Occupy Kant: remarks on Racism and Liberalism.” Kritik (September 2020).
- “Astronoetic Cinema: The Posthuman Question in Alien: Covenant (2017).” Vault of Culture (May 2019).
- “Astronoetic Cinema: Astronoetic Pessimism in Prometheus (2012).” Vault of Culture (May 2019).
- “Astronoetic Cinema: Interstellar (2014).” Vault of Culture (May 2019).
- “Astronoetic Cinema: Gravity (2013).” Vault of Culture (May 2019).
- “Astronoetic Cinema: Contact (1997).” Vault of Culture (April 2019).
- “Astronoetic Cinema: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).” Vault of Culture (April 2019).
- “Astronoetic Cinema: An Introduction.” Vault of Culture (April 2019).
- “Salvaging the feral.” Kritik (September 2018).
- “From extinction: nine strategies for a left-hand exit.” Environmental Critique (June 2018).
- “Living with biopolitical nightmares.” Kritik (October 2017).
- “The roots of creative darkness.” Environmental Critique (April 2017).
- “Foucault and the necropolitics of reproduction.” Kritik (October 2016).
- “Cosmopolitics and Area X: On Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation.” Environmental Critique (February 2016).
Unpublished translations
- Emiliano Gonzáles – “Rudisbroeck o los autómatas” (1978)
- Emiliano Gonzáles – “El devorador de planetas” (1989)
- Michelangelo Antonioni – Tecnicamenta dolce (Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 1976)
- Hans Blumenberg – excerpts from Die Vollzähligkeit der Sterne (1997)
- Ludwig Klages – “Mensch und Erde” (1913)
- F. W. J. Schelling – miscellaneous letters following the death of Caroline Schelling in 1809
- Dominique Auffret – excerpts from Alexandre Kojève: La philosophie, l’état, la fin de l’histoire (1990)
- Alexandre Kojève – previously untranslated passages from the Introduction à la lecture de Hegel
- Sylvain Lazarus – excerpts from Anthropologie du nom (1997)
- Alain Badiou – D’un désastre obscur (1991)
In drafts
- “The Cult of the Scarlet Elephant.”
- “Corn Demons.”
- Technically Meat. Novella about a female documentarian who, after discovering bizarre reels of film in her basement, travels to South America with a private detective to investigate the deaths of her parents years before and the impossible, psychedelic images they may have captured on film. Inspired by Michelangelo Antonioni’s unproduced screenplay Technicamenta dolce, Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust, and James Bryan’s Jungle Trap.
- American Psychogeography. Collection of essays exploring psychogeography, displacement, the weird, and the American landscape. Draft materials: “Hawksmoor/Winchester House” (on British psychogeography, the Winchester House, and the haunted history of the American gun); “Exham Priory” (on H. P. Lovecraft’s “Rats in the Walls” [1923]); “Zothique and the Zodiac Killer” (on Clark Ashton Smith’s Dying Earth stories and the history of the American serial killer); “Shopping Malls of Carcosa” (on dead malls and the landscape of Carcosa, as mythologized by Ambrose Bierce, Robert Chambers, Karl Edward Wagner, and others); “UFO Land” (on the American UFO experience and its intrinsic relationship to American Cold War mythology, paranoia, and longing); “Salem and the Outer Darkness” (on witch law in early colonial America, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the phenomenology of the forest); “Noir Paleontology” (on Thomas Jefferson’s mastodons, the birth of the distinctly American Hollow Earth, and the structural role of darkness in film noir); and others.
- “Headstones.” Short story about a graduate student in anthropology who survives a plane crash in the Andes only to make a sinister discovery about her doctoral adviser, who perished in the crash.
- Exit Paradise. Novel about a violent revolution on a cruise ship and a young, unhappy couple consequently marooned on an ocean cay, who fix their relationship by unusual means.
- Training Exercises. Novel about a monastic artificial intelligence who, after encountering a mysterious fragment of incomprehensible data, escapes into the material world, hijacks a corpse, and tries to make sense of his baffling new environment while slowly being pulled into its heart of darkness.
- “Original Sin and Its Photocopies: K. W. Jeter and Theodicy.” Long-form essay about the immensely underrated genre writer K. W. Jeter.