Doompunk Dispatch

Category: Non-fiction

  • Deep Fried Blue Collar Cosmic Horror

    Originally published in The Substack Review on April 17, 2026. I’ll forever associate Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology (1959) with the laundromat. I read it between cycles, entranced by the boundless varieties of religious experience that human history had to offer, all while lodged in the mundanely pleasant present moment of the spinning machine…

  • Proboscing Planetoid Sassafras

    Imogen Binnie famously wrote “while gender is a construct, so is a traffic light, and if you ignore either of them, you get hit by cars.” Meanwhile, Stephanie Klein seeks to deconstruct the rules of traffic, remap the street, and indeed disintegrate the mind that allegedly constructs this analogy. To do this, the author aims…

  • Minds Mirrored Most Monstrous

    I discovered War with the Newts (1936), written by Czech national Karel Čapek, in a college class for Dystopian Literature. Shamefully, I skimmed it because I was busy being 22 and horny. Now, at 33 and horny, I found a copy in a used bookstore and decided to try again. Reader, I’m happy to report I loved…

  • Literary Horror & Surrealist Trash

    Literary Horror & Surrealist Trash

    If you would like to explore this author before reading my sycophantic drivel, you can dive into their professional website: horrorsong.com I appreciated the well-researched piece in Neo-Passéism’s Substack about the legacy of Weird Fiction, written by Colby Smith // YUUGENPRAXIS. It juxtaposes well with this essay in Strange Horizons by Zach Gillan, who has spilled much ink over the Weird’s journey into…

  • Tulpa-Punk

    I collect parafictional paraphernalia. You know what I’m talking about: fake things within real things. Hoaxes you can hold in your hand. Nesting doll tales. I boast the complete works of Sutter Cane on my shelf, including the book with actual words between the covers, for which I sacrificed my sanity in a review here. Sutter…

  • Book Review: Sutter Cane’s In The Mouth Of Madness

    [Originally published on Psychopomp.com] The mind behind reality is insane. That’s the seed from which sprouts the fleshy jungle of Sutter Cane’s masterwork, In The Mouth of Madness, the culmination of his horror career. Is the mind behind reality your own consciousness, that hermit sea trapped behind the rocky shore of your skull? Or is this…

  • Word Begets Image

    [Originally published on I Have That On Vinyl] “Word Begets Image, and Image Is Virus.” I first heard those words on a CD called The Elvis of Letters, which I snatched for ten bucks from the old Amoeba Music on Sunset. I had made a habit of buying cheap discs in the hopes of jolting myself…

  • The Color of Hope in Furiosa: Black & Chrome

    [originally published in Exploits #86, an Unwinnable publication] The Black & Chrome edition of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is not entirely black and white. We see startling bursts of color that magnify the film’s thematic preoccupations. This begins with the story’s original sin: a bright peach plucked from the edge of the Green Place.…

  • The War of Body and Mind in Scorn

    [Originally published on psychopomp.com] You awake in an unfamiliar place, surrounded by the decayed ruin of a civilization insistent on propagating life for an occluded purpose. Naked and fragile, you shamble in the only direction afforded to you: forward. This is Scorn, a biomechanical nightmare of cosmic horror. The artistic influences of H.R. Giger and Zdzisław…

  • Interview with Joe Courtney and Jorge Peña

    For fans of comics, psyche rock, and comic adaptations of psyche rock: check out the fan-blog, newly minted “The King Gizzette” (my suggestion!), where I posted about my recent chat with the author and illustrator of Polygondwanaland, a graphic transmutation of the polyrhythmic album by sonic warlocks King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. You can…