Jane Schoenbrun seems dreamy and slightly distant. Speaking over Zoom from their rustic home in the Hudson Valley, the 39-year-old filmmaker and author’s blue eyes are slightly unfocused behind glasses and veiled by strands of curly hair, hinting at the surreal scenes that populate their art: suburban kitsch morphing into horror, love merging with violence, and, everywhere, people getting lost within their own minds.

Talking with Schoenbrun through a screen feels fitting. In their debut novel, Public Access Afterworld, as in their films Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026) and I Saw The TV Glow (2024), the camera is a central motif through which they filter questions about what it means to self-actualize in the digital world, particularly as a trans person.

Schoenbrun began writing Public Access Afterworld, out in October from Hogarth, as a TV script before they even started shopping I Saw the TV Glow, which was eventually picked up by A24. When they talk about the creative freedom they found in writing fiction—an experience very different from filmmaking in Hollywood—it sounds like the novel may be Schoenbrun’s preferred medium. “If all of the work I do is like a realm,” they say, “this novel is very much the center of the realm.”

Public Access Afterworld is a speculative thriller that switches between the perspectives of Bethany, a 20-something trans woman and content moderator for a video sharing platform, and a cast of characters whose lives intersect via an alternate dimension that exists behind all screens. The government and Big Tech have conspired for nearly a century to kidnap certain “crooked” people—mostly queer people and women—and transport them to this dimension, where they extract TV shows from their minds.

The novel is formally sophisticated, belying Schoenbrun’s years of on-screen storytelling, with a prologue framed as a story told to the omniscient, unnamed narrator when they were a teenager at a juvenile correction center. It was there—a place that’s a cross between a conversion camp and mental hospital—that a patient named David Sawyer would gather everyone after lights out and describe the fake TV show “stuck inside their brain.”

Schoenbrun, who grew up in Queens and describes themself as a child of 1990s suburbia, has complicated feelings about a career in the entertainment industry. They worked as a production assistant while attending Boston University, and after graduating in 2009, they went on to write for Filmmaker magazine from 2011 to 2018. They fully pivoted to filmmaking around the time they came out as trans in their early 30s, and their first feature film, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, premiered at Sundance in 2021.

“The screens that are making our reality and holding it in place are straining and unsustainable, because the world is kind of ending,” Schoenbrun says. “And I’m working from within these languages and these genres that can be tools of control. I want to destroy entertainment, even while I want to entertain.”

Schoenbrun says writing a novel allowed them to approach storytelling with an autonomy they never experienced with film, due to the limitations of the medium and the economy surrounding it. When they revisited the original Public Access Afterworld television scripts a few years ago, they realized they felt too “protective” of the story to hand it over to producers, who would most likely “commission a pilot episode and then give me a bunch of notes to change things.”

Public Access Afterworld is the first installment in a planned trilogy, and Schoenbrun says they’re on a quest to write “something complete about early transition—the period of going through adolescence into trans adulthood that I feel like I’ve been on for the past five or six years.”

The book is full of false heroes, including Bethany. Schoenbrun explains that the character is motivated by “chasing catharsis” around her gender identity, sometimes at the expense of her own wellbeing and the people she loves, and speaks to the systemic challenges trans people face in America.

“As much as we would like to liberate all wrong that has been done against people from non-normative backgrounds,” Schoenbrun says, “there is something that is, like, a story being whispered at bedtime in this place run by creepy Christians inherent in that desire. So that needed to be complicated.”

Public Access Afterworld—which takes on the perils of social media platforms as well as broadcast television and film—stands out from Schoenbrun’s movies due to what the author calls its sociological ambitions. Among the book’s sprawling cast is a nonbinary minigolf course employee named Jules, who is addicted to screens as much as the miscellaneous drugs they stash in their office. “I think if all of our screens went away—you know, snap your finger magic trick—it would be like, three months before people were in the fucking streets,” Schoenbrun says. “Those screens are opiates. They keep us busy, they keep us satisfied.”

Schoenbrun is a big theory reader—particularly the works of Marxist theorist Mark Fisher and French sociologist Jean Baudrillard—and their novel can sometimes feel heady and heavy-handed. The book is replete with symbols worthy of a Freudian case study: a giant, glowing egg full of every broadcast TV show ever made; sedated bodies with tubes in their heads; and shelves of blank VHS tapes in a video store, a locale that also appears in Schoenbrun’s films. At the same time, though, Public Access Afterworld is brimming with vivid characters and cinematic cliffhangers.

The novel is also, like Schoenbrun’s films, darkly hilarious. They say the ability to switch between drama and comedy and absurdism comes naturally to them. Their m.o.—in speech as well as in writing—is to hook people with a quippy one-liner or sharp critique, then reel them in with sincere reflection. At one point during our conversation, Schoenbrun calls a cis lesbian character who dies unexpectedly near the middle of the novel the “queen of corporate pride” before somberly commenting on how queer people “slot ourselves into the power structures that exist around us.”

And Schoenbrun believes that Public Access Afterworld can speak to anyone living through the current political moment, trans or not. “I’m very confident in this novel’s storytelling and its dramatic pull,” they say, “and one’s ability to care about these characters as complex individuals, and to recognize parts of oneself in the characters.”

Even Chimotera, the movie monster famous in the world of the novel, is not excluded from Schoenbrun’s meditations on human emotion and consciousness. In the latter half of the book, readers are thrust into Chimotera’s POV as he is killed in each film, then reanimated in the next installment, with only a faint understanding of his existential predicament.

“I’m so proud of that section, and the way that Chimotera is feeling unlike himself,” they say. “I relate to that in many ways as a trans person, but I also relate to that in many ways as a victim, like we all are, of neoliberal rot.”

The ravages of late techno-capitalism aren’t going away anytime soon, and Schoenbrun expects to spend many years working on the trilogy and its characters. “The first book is about coming into your identity as a trans person and an artist,” they say. “The second book is about figuring out if there’s a way to live healthily after all of that—or just if there’s a way to live, in general. And the third book is about building new worlds.”

Talking to them, one gets the sense that they did not create Public Access Afterworld so much as translate a world that already exists in their mind. They summon us to huddle together in the dark and listen closely as they read it out.