Andre Jarema, a Belgian émigré chasing success in London, is an imposing figure in his way— not in appearance, exactly, though he does have a stage presence something like a prematurely awakened wintering bear. His aura of largeness is more the way he looms over the music, insinuating himself on top of it in a way that is not quite smothering, but damn close. It is obvious that he is a slave to his passion. Jarema seeems to dwarf the rest of his band in both spirit and artistic hunger. Indeed, …

Richard Thomas’s eSingle “Victimized” reads like a vignette from Sin City— concise, dark, and comfy as a broken rib. Set in dystopian future where the legal system has turned into a kind of auxiliary blood sport, “Victimized” is a breathless revenge fantasy beyond the reach of morality.
In this future, defendants in violent crime cases are given a choice: take your chances before a jury, or step into the ring. If you choose the ring, your opponent– if anyone even shows at all– will be someone hurt by the crime in …

The internet suddenly seems different. A little sublime. Everything and nothing. I don’t know if this is an epiphany– if it is it’s certainly half baked. Nor do I know if it was necessarily incited by my exposure to Catherine Daly’s work, or if it’s merely a thought that arose simultaneously during the course of the conversation we had. Her work is not expressly technological in nature, but I think there is something in the way she seems to find dual uses for everything that makes it feel that way. In To …

Out of Touch by Brandon Tietz is a new entry into the arms race of transgressive literature, informally reignited by Chuck Palahniuk a decade or so ago. It’s an increasingly dysphoric genre; moral bankruptcy is the new black. One wonders how deep into pure unfeeling we can descend before there’s no earth left to move. Yet here is a book with a rather elegant twist: Tietz binds his narrator, Aidin, so literally to the typical themes of the genre– abandonment; addiction; intense family dysfunction– that he is inextricable from them.
You see, Aidin can’t feel a thing.  Literally. He suffers a condition that’s …

Some fairly prominent elements of Stephen Prosapio’s Dream War might seem familiar; for example, the concept of cutting-edge technology that allows trained operatives to invade other peoples’ dreams in order to ferret out hidden information, or even to plant new information, all to nefarious ends.
If this sounds like a rip-off of Christopher Nolan’s Inception, wait: Prosapio’s copyright on Dream War is from 2007, predating the film by three years. And furthermore, it’s only in the practical machinery of the dream-link concept that Prosapio’s novel resembles Nolan’s film. The sum products diverge wildly. …