“Public Access Afterlife” is a novel for terminals online

There was a time when the internet was cool. Now that the Internet has become a self-regulating machine within a tenacious surveillance system, it’s understandable that memories of the cool Internet era have grown increasingly hazy over the years. But I know it’s true because I was there. The “information superhighway” is an apt nickname for a system that allows ordinary users to navigate vast networks of art and information. (“Exploded” is a relative description of how fast dial-up and early WiFi was back then.)

Much of my adult music taste dates back to the early days, watching superpixel videos of the “Numa Numa” guys dancing to Romanian boy band hits, or animated aliens piloting their spaceships to Eiffel 65’s Europop hit “Blue (Da Ba Dee).” The ancient video hosting website is a cultural portal. Sluggish Adobe Flash games dominated the afternoon. This was paradise, until it wasn’t paradise anymore.

But heaven is not lost if it was never really heaven to begin with. The dark underbelly of the web is always there, lurking slightly outside the frame behind the firewall. If something that once seemed magical can turn into something so corrupt in a relatively short period of time, its potential for malice was a feature, not a bug, from the start.

Few people can harness the light and dark spectrums of the internet as well as writer-director Jane Schoenbrun, whose films are like telegrams sent from the depths of the web’s black hole. Their work recasts the excitement of early web exploration into colorful abstractions, opening up a esoteric sense to analyze their content and origins—to varying effect. Schönbrunn’s three feature films, 2021’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, 2024’s I Saw the TV Glow, and last summer’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, are as clunky as their lengthy titles suggest. It’s impossible to watch one film, let alone all three, without realizing that there’s a lot going on in Schönbrunn , and sometimes, too much for one movie to handle. Yet Schönbrunn’s flair for image-making ultimately bears much of the burden, allowing complex ideas about identity and one’s relationship to digital media to be elegantly presented atop beautiful cinematography.

But what happens when someone known for their visual flair abandons seductive imagery entirely and lets their writing do all the work?

In Schönbrunn’s debut feature, The Public Enters the Afterlife, the filmmakers take considerable risks, stripping away the carefully crafted screen world to highlight the dexterity of their prose. At 592 pages, the book could easily feel like a smug goodbye kiss to those who have criticized Schonbrunn for its reluctance to simplify its concepts into a less dense work – including the company present. While the novels are impressive for their length alone, the shift in medium has given their elaborate and sometimes exhausting storytelling a strange new power.

Schonbrunn confidently guides readers along a winding, interconnected path, weaving between internet cults and strange digital ephemera, weaving a gripping journey of truth-seeking in an age where the Internet has made everything fictional. “Public Access Afterlife” is less an artistic pivot than proof that Schönbrunn’s world-building skills far surpass those of their film or literary counterparts.

Like their other works, Schönbrunn’s novel is deeply concerned with the Internet and its sordid electronic underbelly, using traditional media as a portal into the net’s seediest, most horrific parts. “Public Access Afterlife” is divided into episodes rather than chapters – although each episode has eight separate components, much like a TV show is divided up by ad blocks. This unique structure serves the story, which follows enthusiasts in the titular simulation realm through action that lurks beyond the static of television.

We begin in 2009, just after television signals have switched to digital transmissions, and high school best friends David Sawyer and Erin Morrison see something strange in the blurry images on their old cathode ray television screen: a broadcast from an unknown entity called Public Access Afterlife. Their lives were soon consumed by searching for sources, turning to primitive Internet message boards and video hosting sites in their searches. Before long, the dead end turns into a digital abyss, pulling the two of them into a world that will change their view of reality and the lives of hundreds of people who follow them.

This audacious mystery provides an ideal premise for the novel, and Schönbrunn can meet readers’ expectations without the additional task of ensuring the final image reflects their goals. It turns out that Schönbrunn’s writing is stronger without visual imagery. Description and style can dominate without restriction. Although their prose is sometimes redundant, even the excess flows effortlessly.

Public Access Afterlife is a fascinating book in the tradition of supermarket paperbacks from Stephen King and Clive Barker, both of whom knew their way around movies. But Schönbrunn’s innate familiarity with the Internet—its legendary creepypasta stories and disturbing YouTube videos seem to emerge from the void—makes their story different from the classics. This is a contemporary novel through and through, and Schönbrunn writes with conviction, deftly distinguishing the perspectives of different characters without slowing down the pace.

Having three movies also helps. A screenplay may be different from a novel, but both depend on the writer’s vision. The image must exist in the mind before it appears on the page. But whether that image translates to the viewer in its final context is another matter. In its filmmaking, Schönbrunn sometimes struggles to apply its broader themes within minute-by-minute narratives, creating pacing issues that reveal a dissonance between intention and execution.

For example, there’s a considerable gap between the single-shot montage sequences in “TV Glow” and “Camp Miasma.” The former brilliantly evokes the wistful dreams of teenagers, in which a character walks through their high school, accompanied by a wistful Caroline Polachek song and pale pink diary doodles. It’s a clever riff on teenage sociopolitics and the hormone-filled adolescence that so often define our identities and futures. The “Camp Miasma” montage, on the other hand, struggles with three layers of metafiction, with an ’80s horror-movie murderer stalking people at summer camp, set to the tune of “Counting Crows,” casually interrogating the audience’s relationship to nostalgia. With Schönbrunn, I often find it hit or miss.

But consistency is overrated in the current media landscape. I’m always more attracted to big ideas that have the potential to lead to massive failure. There are things you can take away from a Schönbrunn film that you’ll never get from a Martin Scorsese film, no matter how hard you try – and I’m not just talking about the trans subtext in all of Schönbrunn’s work. For an artist as formidable as Scorsese, failure means nothing. But for people like Schönbrunn, failure determines their future. Every decision has risks. And art without risk is just a product.

While I’m hesitant to claim that Schönbrunn’s main strength is as a novelist rather than a filmmaker, “Public Access Afterlife” goes a long way in proving that point. It’s not that Schönbrunn makes bad movies, it’s that their mind works like a story map with hundreds of red lines nailed between plot points. Too many overlapping yarns in a film can result in a convoluted end product, a clump of colorful material that’s too dense to pry open to see what’s lurking underneath. But at least in this novel, the yarns overlap without getting tangled. The clear view suits Schönbrunn’s cerebral nature. We can enjoy the blue sky before the clouds cover the sun.