Description

This book is the sequel to D. Harlan Wilson’s Outré. Coming in 2026 from Guide Dog Books. More details will be available soon. In the meantime, here’s the prologue:

Notes from the Overground

The essays included in this collection emerged from a months-long bout with what my doctor likes to call “Overground Psychogenesis,” a term that sounds more serious than it actually is. In fact, every human being experiences some degree of this retro-Ballardian, pseudo-Kubrickian, hyper-Phildickian affliction, but as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari say in Anti-Oedipus (1972), there are only “zones of intensity, fields of potentials,” the fluctuations of which make the dire sameness of our collective identity appear individualistic. My default neurology ensures that my “zones” and “fields” are more pronounced than normative flux schizophréniques (trans. “schizflows”), which I exfoliated in my novel Outré (2020) with some rigor but perhaps not enough cohesion and clarity. Usurper is the so-called retombées (i.e., fallout or “sequel”). This monograph further develops key themes, characters, plotlines, arcologies, psycho-histories, and modulations in Outré while attempting to map fresh terrain in the fields of Science Fiction, Film, Media, and Literary Studies. That said, you do not have to read Outré to “understand” Usurper. Only subtext matters to me, but the overtext of this book stands alone in the tundra well enough. In this light, the title of the book is just that, as I always try to outdo myself with every new writing project: a usurpation of my former being (i.e., the author who wrote Outré). There is no fixed self and that author is dead. Roadkill can’t defend itself and it’s as impudent as it is imprudent of me to abuse a corpse, even with a harsh turn of phrase, but I have no tolerance for my bygone iterations. Those iterations have acted inappropriately on many occasions and deserve what they get. Nevertheless, I make no excuse for these essays or “embrainments,” as the President of the United States of America calls them (he’s one of my editors, and a fine one). Doubtless the embrainments, like dreams, are merely the abjected offshoot of my psyche under duress during a rough patch in my life. And yet they were and remain very real to me. But my experience with the real is different than yours, just as yours is different from everybody else’s. All we can know is our own subjectivity; everything we see, think, and feel is filtered through it. The idea that other people in the “objective” world might experience something similar to us is just another symptom of a subjective pathology that thrives on casual, chronic deception. However, please don’t mistake my modus for unearthing some kind of subjective and/or objective Truth. I don’t believe in Truth. I only believe in Surface, and in Usurper, I have removed the Zebra’s stripes from its hide and rearranged the camouflage in such a way that might render some kind of artistic appeal. For me, art is everything, but art is nothing in the absence of innovation, or at least gestures toward innovation. I’d much rather read a unique book than a good one. Good books are good firestarters. Literature has been stagnating since the twentieth century and the efforts of the high modernists. Postmodernists made some interesting moves, but they mostly rode the coattails of their predecessors. Let us do something New (qua Ezra Pound). Let us reclaim what we have lost before we can’t get it back. As usual, you may enter this schizoanalytic rhizome from any doorway. Read it backwards or forwards or in arbitrary swoops. Read it high and dry or down and dirty. So forth. The more you experiment with your readerly performance, the more my writerly performance will make (non)sense. This is a book about you and I, after all. Finally, then, let us make like J. Alfred Prufrock and “spit out all the butt-ends of [our] days and ways.”