Meeting Jane Schoenbrun outside of business hours at a video store, even an artfully curated, hipster-magnet video store, can be a bit nerve-racking.
After all, this all-but-defunct delivery system for movies plays a sinister role in Schoenbrun’s riotously ambitious debut novel, “Public Access Afterworld,” which Hogarth Books will release on Oct. 27. When its characters see the Captain Video store materialize out of thin air, it usually means they are destined to eternity as content creators from hell.
But Sleepover Trading Company, the real-life video store in this Hudson Valley town, has far more benevolent associations for Schoenbrun, best known as a film director who has already paid yearning homage to slasher movies (“Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma”) and monster-of-the-week TV shows (“I Saw the TV Glow”).
“This is one of my real safe spaces,” Schoenbrun said of the store, which also sells Atari 2600 consoles and “Frasier” trading cards.
Schoenbrun, 39, who transitioned to female about a decade ago, and uses they/them pronouns, lingered at a revolving rack of retro comic books before heading to the basement, which also features a small vitrine that includes an autographed “TV Glow” DVD.
Schoenbrun’s original conception of “Public Access Afterworld,” a century- and dimension-hopping project about the frightening underpinnings of what emanates from our TV screens, might ultimately have found its way into this store as one of those shrink-wrapped box sets devoted to, say, Season 3 of “Lost.”
Building an elaborate TV realm was always in the cards; Schoenbrun started to get the word out when they showed their first film, “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair,” which broke out at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.
“I remember telling potential agents: ‘I’m not trying to be a microbudget indie filmmaker. I want to be like [the ‘Lost’ co-creator] Damon Lindelof someday,” they recalled.
We had relocated from Sleepover Trading Company to the Community Theater next door, where Schoenbrun — who has homes both in Brooklyn and in a nearby Hudson Valley town — has sponsored screenings of their own work as well as those of peers.
“I grew up so obsessed with TV shows and reading spoilers online about what was going to happen on ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ or ‘The X-Files,’” Schoenbrun recalled. (Not just reading them but, in an early attempt to wrest control of the narrative, posting a few fake spoilers along the way. “Some of them turned out to be right!” they said.)
Over time, “Public Access Afterworld” evolved from a would-be TV series into a 600-page novel that follows the life of a trans woman whose job as an online content moderator pulls her into the internet’s more ominous recesses.
There’s also a doomed romance in 1940s Los Alamos on the fringes of an experiment involving television airwaves.
And the on- and offscreen travails of Chimotera, a long-forgotten half-man-half-bat monster from a thinly veiled Universal Studios. (“Not a werebat,” Schoenbrun clarified, “since there are no full-moon changes.”)
And a series of missing young women. And a lot more.
All the while, the titular pirate network pulses in the background, fueled by the malevolent Captain Video and supplying the material for schlocky 1980s sitcoms, “Game of Thrones”-style prestige TV and everything in between.
David Ebershoff, Schoenbrun’s editor at Hogarth, said the result reminded him of one of the 21st century’s most revered works of kaleidoscopic fiction.
“When I picked up ‘Cloud Atlas’ — I just knew of it at the time as David Mitchell Novel No. 3 — I knew immediately that it would influence countless authors in many ways,” Ebershoff said. “And while they’re very different books, I had the same feeling when I read ‘Public Access Afterworld.’”
This world-building instinct started early for Schoenbrun, who grew up in Westchester and studied film at Boston University. “From the youngest age, I was making up TV episodes in the back seat of the car,” they said. “‘Now it’s sweeps week. Oh, now it’s the season finale — what characters are going to die?’ I was obsessed with getting under the hood of this medium.”
So the prospect of making up real episodes of a real show held great appeal. Almost too much appeal, in fact: “When my rep suggested I start thinking about TV, I remember saying to her: ‘That scares me because I love TV so much that I have a feeling I won’t be able to stop if I start thinking about it. I’ll do the thing that I did as a kid when I stayed up late figuring out what happens in, like, the Season 6 finale.’
“Suddenly 800 different ideas that I had had all started congealing into this cluster,” Schoenbrun continued, “from a trip to Los Alamos I had taken in 2017 to a shitty tech job that I had worked. And then I figured out more of this world and how it all related to itself.”
They wrote 15 hours a day for almost two months in the spring of 2021, until the first season was down on the page, then revisited it a few months later for what they envisioned as Season 2. The result was about 1,600 pages of scripts, the equivalent of 20 episodes of television. An outline for Season 3 soon followed.
“I emerged from my room like, This is the whole show,” Schoenbrun said. “I know where every character starts. I know where every character ends. I know how they intersect along the way. I know how reality gets, like, pulled out from under itself throughout. I have this whole century-spanning mythology that’s also its own philosophical treatise on the nature of existence!”
The only catch? Finding a network willing to sign on for a century-spanning treatise on existence — and allow Schoenbrun to retain creative control.
“I mean, I had only made a $100,000 movie at this point,” they said. “I had this overwhelming understanding that — and let’s leave the trans thing out of it for a second — who at a network is even going to sit down and read two full seasons of scripts?
“I remember one note was, ‘This lacks the sparkle of a Hulu original.’ That was an actual thing that was said. I was like, ‘My bad!’”
Schoenbrun was hanging out with Jack Haven, a friend and frequent collaborator, the night that a sixth and final network passed on the project. The two decided to blow off steam at a recording studio that Haven was renting in Brooklyn.
“It was a really late stormy night,” Haven said in an interview, “and when I got there, I found Jane already sitting at the drum set. We spent the next hour drumming and singing, and these sounds were coming out of Jane that had never come out before.”
The catharsis didn’t stop there. Before the night was over, Schoenbrun had gotten their first tattoo — MAKE IT REAL, written in Haven’s handwriting — and decided to tell the story of “Public Access Afterworld” in a different format.
“Jane is such the architect of their own reality,” Haven said. “I think they just needed that push, that validation.”
And so began the process that Schoenbrun suspected might happen all along: turning the scripts into a series of novels. (“Public Access Afterworld” is, in essence, Season 1 of the TV series.) They spent virtually all of 2023 in a one-room Hudson Valley apartment with a copy of Stephen King’s “On Writing.”
“I rewrote the first 40 pages of the book every day for almost six months,” they said. “I knew the story I was trying to tell, but I didn’t know prose.”
While Schoenbrun said they hope to bring “Public Access Afterworld” to television or film at some point, Ebershoff feels that this adopted medium lends itself even better to their strengths.
“Films come with limitations — run times and budgets and so forth,” said Ebershoff, who spent two years editing the book with Schoenbrun. “And I got to see Jane work in an art form that really has no limitations. I’m biased, of course, but I believe the novel represents Jane in their purest form.”
Perhaps the aspect that most bedeviled Schoenbrun was the impossibility of conveying music, which plays a pivotal role in their films, on the page. (The “I Saw the TV Glow” soundtrack is an indie-pop touchstone for many nostalgic Gen-Zers.) After repeatedly trying and failing to reconceive one musical montage in written form, they considered giving it its own chapter but leaving the chapter blank, “like the 13th floor in a hotel.”
(Despite more than a little bit of prodding, they would not divulge the song in question. “These things have a way of getting recycled later,” they said.)
Schoenbrun said their next big project — an eight-episode Netflix adaptation of the Charles Burns graphic novel “Black Hole” for which they will also serve as showrunner, thereby achieving their Lindelofian dream — benefited from what “Public Access Afterworld” taught them.
“I’m trying to be more nimble with it,” they said. “I don’t go into my bedroom two years early and write the whole thing.”
And now that the world of “Public Access Afterworld” has been activated, the second and third seasons — er, novels — feel like a foregone conclusion. “Jane has been pretty up front about the fact that they are just beginning in this world,” said Bill Clegg, Schoenbrun’s literary agent. “This novel has its own powerful center of gravity, but I know Jane has much more in mind.”
Jack Haven conveyed Schoenbrun’s field of vision even more emphatically. “I always feel like they are channeling very urgent messages from a very specific universe,” Haven said. “Whatever Jane does next, we have to listen very closely.”
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