Author of Xerox Over Manhattan
By Anthony Carinhas
Delirium, desire, cultural collapse and fractured memory collide in Shane Jesse Christmass’s wildly inventive fiction. Across books that mutate language and dismantle conventional narrative, they explore the strange, destructive and often hilarious machinery of human behavior. Here, Christmass talks influence, collaboration, creativity and why the best literature might be the kind that refuses to be easily read.
Ghosts, Influences, and Collaboration
Have you seen The Cure in Orange? It was filmed in France and copies are very hard to find. If yes—did it influence you as an artist?
SJC: Yes, I’ve seen The Cure in Orange, loved it, watched it obsessively in high school. Where I lived, there was a television station that had to provide public access programming, news, films and soaps for immigrant communities. But when the channel first started in the 1980s, late at night they would also show a lot of interesting music and art programming. They’d broadcast things like The Cure in Orange, and I taped it onto VHS. The tape didn’t survive high school, although I do have their DVD somewhere. The concert was one of those things that completely altered my perspective. And this is 1987, so The Cure was still an anomaly with some of their biggest albums yet to come.
Interest in books change like a weathervane depending on where someone is in their life. Who and what are you reading these days?
SJC: I just finished reading some poems by Kitty Saint-Remy. I’ve also been reading Patrick Cowley’s homoerotic journals, Kay Gabriel’s Perverts, Lana Valdez’s I Rot, Holly Coleman’s Good Girl and Cynthia Ross’s The Love Ministry. I’ve got Parker Love Bowling, Mary Morgan and Linda Rosenkrantz waiting for me. And anything Danielle Chelosky releases goes to the top of the pile: I’m basically waiting for Romantic Abjection to be released. Greta Schledorn’s Now More Than Ever is a story that refuses to leave me alone after reading it. Nastya Valentine’s Ultimate Fantasy absolutely blew me away. Emma Newman-Holden’s It Feels So Good to Be a Victim is one of the best fucking things I’ve ever read. For the future, I look forward to reading some Bambi Lake and books by LittlePuss Press.
Does Hysterically Real still print your limited-edition book Delirium/Leering/Liquid Morphine if a request is received?
SJC: No, I don’t think Hysterically Real ever received requests to print Delirium/Leering/Liquid Morphine. It was always intended more as a digital artefact, a PDF that exists in the temporary landscape of the internet. I’ve always liked that ephemeral quality. The internet creates these accidental ghosts of things: links disappear, websites shut down, journals dissolve, archives become inaccessible. There’s something appealing about that kind of impermanence. Not everything has to be preserved. Sometimes things have a particular life span, exist for a moment, reaches whoever it was meant to reach, then slip away. There’s allure in that. I do like that title though, so that may play out somewhere else. Having said that, I’m contradicting myself because the work has recently been taken down. Per my request. I’m exploring the possibility of giving some of that material a physical existence. I’m working with Ira and Filthy Loot on a book that expands on some of that artwork. It’s a huge undertaking. We’ve fucked around and ended up with a 200-plus-page project that brings all the usual problems: production costs, printing, logistics, whether the venture can actually match the scale of the idea. We’re seeing where it goes. It may end up becoming something smaller and more focused, perhaps a series of volumes released over time rather than one enormous book.
You got to work with Philip Best on a sci-fi anthology called Human Rights from Amphetamine Sulphate Press. Steven Purtill also put together the art for Sex Shops of Sherman Oaks. Was that collaboration as fun as it sounds?
SJC: I think fun is probably the right word, Phillip worked with Steven, and Steven created the images and sent them to Phillip. This is just for Sex Shops of Sherman Oaks mind you. It was more a case of relying on Phillip and Steven’s previous procedures, whatever they had done on other books. At a certain point, you should step away and let other artists do what they do. Phillip and Steven are both serious about what they do. When I saw the images, I immediately thought—yes—that’s it. He nailed it. It was one of those moments where you recognize that something has landed exactly where it needs to. Sometimes you shouldn’t overthink everything. There’s a temptation to control every element, to explain what something should be, but that can kill the strange, the unexpected connections, that make art interesting. You must trust another creator’s instinct, the audience’s ability to bring their own interpretations and experience. The most interesting responses often come from the distance between what I intended and what someone else discovers. Amphetamine Sulphate is very much Phillip’s thing. He has a specific vision for how those books should look, feel and exist. When you send him a manuscript, you’re not just handing over text, you’re entering his wider artistic language. It’s more about recognizing that you’re collaborating with someone whose aesthetic vision you already believe in. You wouldn’t send Phillip the work if you didn’t want that conversation to happen. There’s a particular pleasure in seeing someone else take something you’ve created and find a visual language for it. Something you never could’ve imagined yourself. That’s one of the great things about collaboration—sometimes the work becomes more of itself when it passes through another person’s hands.
You arranged an electronica soundtrack for Sex Shops of Sherman Oaks and Belfie Hell. Where can people stream that or any music you made with Mattress Grave or Snake Milker?
SJC: I used to make mixtapes for each novel when they were released. They were essentially DJ sets, proper mixed sets, of whatever I was listening to while writing those particular books, not really soundtracks in the traditional sense, but more like a document of the atmosphere surrounding the work. Those are mostly still available on Mixcloud. The Mattress Grave and Snake Milker material is available across the usual streaming platforms, although it’s a little patchy. Not everything made its way onto every streaming service, and I’ve probably been less diligent than I should have been about maintaining the catalogue over the years. A lot of the material is also available on Bandcamp. To be honest, I’ve allowed some of it to slowly disintegrate, which is probably consistent with how I view a lot of this stuff. It’s also been a long time since I released a new Mattress Grave or Snake Milker album. There was some EP a few years ago when I recorded around eight new tracks for the Latex Texas reissue on Filthy Loot, but beyond that I haven’t really returned to making a full record.
Intimacy, Memory & Madness
METH-DTF follows an unnamed narrator and its boyfriend Samuell around Los Angeles. The psychotic breakdown is induced from obsession, mental illness and chronic substance abuse. Is this a cautionary tale or a case study on why people don’t always have the best intentions for themselves or others?
SJC: I don’t think METH-DTF is a cautionary tale in the traditional sense. A cautionary tale usually implies there is a clear lesson, you know, you should avoid this behaviour, make better choices, don’t follow this path. I’m less interested in that kind of moral framework. People rarely experience their own lives as a warning. They experience them as necessity, you must experience survival, lean into obsession you’re trapped in. For me, METH-DTF is closer to a case report of human behaviour. It examines what happens when certain impulses are amplified. The need for connection, validation, escape, manipulation, some sort of intimacy. What occurs when all that, all these impulses, collide with addiction, loneliness, psychological instability. The characters aren’t making decisions thinking about destructive impacts. I think that’s one of the things that fascinates me about destructive behaviour: from the outside, it can seem irrational, but from within your own logic, it often makes complete sense. People aren’t trying to destroy themselves. They’re trying to relieve something. They’re trying to fill a void, quiet a noise, escape a feeling, sometimes it’s good fun, sometimes it’s not. It goes back to the ideas I explored in Sex Shops of Sherman Oaks and Latex, Texas. In those books, I was interested in the way people become trapped by the stories they tell themselves. The difference with METH-DTF is that everything is pushed into a more extreme and exposed environment. This isn’t a morality play. Los Angeles was the perfect setting for that because it’s a city built around reinvention and performance. I see METH-DTF less as a warning, more as an observation, like I said, a case report. I have little interest in stories where people are simply waiting to be saved. If we’re waiting around for someone else to rescue us, we’ve already lost. The idea of salvation from the outside, like outside ourselves, is just fiction.
The Sex Shops of Sherman Oaks examines an ambiguous narrator and its partner, Madhab, as they metaphorically splatter across a cyberpunk universe on the brink of collapse. What is it about the impassioned love\hate relationship you found bewitching?
SJC: The relationship between the narrator and Madhab in The Sex Shops of Sherman Oaks was really where I first started exploring this idea of intimacy as something unstable, something that can be both magnetic and destructive at the same time. After the cast of thousands that is in Belfie Hell, I really just wanted something that had two characters. I sort of kept having the mental idea that this was my romance novel. I’ve never been particularly interested in the idea of love as a pure or uncomplicated force. Think about how love is portrayed in Horse Crazy by Gary Indiana. It’s heartbreaking, so the interesting territory is the contradiction. Someone can be the person who saves you, or enlivens you or whatever, and they can also be the person who damages you, you know sometimes simultaneously. So yes, their relationship and the universes around them was always on the edge of collapse. That theme continued to evolve with Latex, Texas, the focus moved onto memory, the psychological aftermath of relationships. How do these fucking people remain inside us after they’ve left, does intimacy create residue. We don’t just remember people, we carry weird, distorted versions of them around, this oddness, this internal lore of loved ones gone, dead, or who have left us in other ways. With METH-DTF it evolved further, that investigation became more extreme and behavioural. The person who know you best also has the ability to disrupt your sense of self. I was interested in the intensity between the narrator and Madhab, but I became more fascinated by the contradictions within that intensity. Why are we drawn to people who unsettle us? Why do the same qualities that attract us to someone sometimes become the qualities that make the relationship impossible? The Sex Shops of Sherman Oaks became a romance novel that mutated into something, how people try to escape their own isolation through another person, and what happens when they discover that nobody can completely rescue them from themselves? I was probably pouring over sad memories a lot during the writing of that book, if that isn’t completely obvious.
Xerox Over Manhattan swirls in pandemonium with characters that weave in and out of context. I’ll admit I’ve never come across the premise where a lunatic like President Ricky (as in business—not politics) berates the narrator. So wild. How did the concept of Ricky evolve for this novel?
SJC: President Ricky really began as an idea about a president, any president, not specifically POTUS, more like the president of Standard Oil, not sure why they kept resonating given that Standard Oil don’t exist, but really a president more as a character. President Ricky is this corrupt or compromised person, so that’s obviously a trope right, straight from any screenplay, but you know, fiction doesn’t invent this shit out of nowhere, there’s some historical record of power, this political power being entangled with ego, money, self-interest. I wanted to have all that come out with President Ricky. I was literally sucking up the empirical evidence on how concentrated power attracts assholes who aren’t interested in responsibility, just more influence for ill ends. So Ricky isn’t really one person, he’s a bunch of ideas inside someone. And the reason Ricky berates the narrator is because Ricky exists in a universe where everything is a transaction and everyone is an audience. Ricky can’t simply communicate—he has to perform. Even a conversation becomes a stage. He’s not interested in understanding another person. Ricky has created a world where he is always the protagonist, where modern culture rewards behaviour like this. What does someone look like when they have become nothing but an embodiment? It was also fun to write like a maniac.
Unreadable Worlds
Belfie Hell unravels in New Orleans where characters, celebrities and hip-hop artists sink into a deluge of absurdity and cultural allusion. Midway into the book your essay on creativity integrates really well with the book’s thematics. What will it take for humanity to totally revolt against social media and AI?
SJC: I don’t know if humanity will revolt against social media and AI in the sense of a dramatic uprising. I think they should. But I think it will be more complicated than that, it might be something more than a flat-out refusal. Humans are incredibly adaptable, dynamic creatures, we’ve historically embraced technologies that diminish certain parts of ourselves while expanding others. The problem isn’t technology itself, actually that’s not true the technology is environmentally impactful, but there’s a few different things going on, it’s the surrender of our agency to systems designed primarily around big tech extracting attention, data, your behaviour for coin, your desires are now monetised, stolen copyright. There were big ideas sold to us around social media—sold as a tool for connection. It’s become an environment where people began performing themselves for invisible audiences. I remember when sampling was the end of the world, apparently the camera was going to kill painting or some shit, but those things weren’t outsourcing what makes our human experience meaningful. Not sure how AI will replicate curiosity, boredom, procrastination, fixation, or personal connections to other creative people. The most radical act now might be refusing to participate in the economy of visibility, weird given I am doing an interview, but the internet created this idea that everything has to be witnessed to have value. Belfie Hell is very much about that collision, bear in mind it is a 2018 book, where celebrity, technology, identity and entertainment became one giant feedback loop. Those characters are drowning in cultural information but starving for meaning. They’re surrounded by endless expression but increasingly disconnected from genuine experience. I don’t think the future is going to be humans versus machines, even though it’s great for science fiction. I think the more interesting conflict is humans versus the parts of themselves that willingly surrender to convenience. Will humans continue valuing the strange, irrational, inefficient things that make creativity human in the first place? But as long as we live in a world where people can witness unimaginable atrocities, genocides in real time and still remain largely paralyzed, if we struggle to mobilize ourselves around human lives being destroyed in front of us, I find it difficult to believe there will suddenly be some mass awakening against technologies that make doomscrolling more pleasurable when we take a shit. But yes, revolt. Prove me wrong.
Yeezus in Furs cultivates an atmosphere that unglues peoples’ psyche the more Cult Leader becomes hellbent on vaporizing the material world. As New York falls into dilapidated freneticism, the protagonist gets to observe the destruction firsthand. What is it about neuroticism that makes it so humorous to watch?
SJC: I don’t know if neuroticism is funny in itself. I think certainty is probably funnier. The moment somebody becomes absolutely convinced they’ve discovered the hidden operating system of reality—they’re already halfway into comedy. Yeezus in Furs exists in that space where apocalypse and absurdity become indistinguishable. The Cult Leader genuinely believes he’s liberating humanity by erasing material existence, and everyone around him has their own self-deception. New York amplifies that. It’s already vibrating with too many frequencies at once. The NYC in the book contains incompatible realities stacked on top of each other. NYC feels like the perfect environment for a collective psychological event, it becomes atmospheric, starts behaving like a nervous system. Perhaps it’s about living through an era that contains conspiracy culture, algorithmic thinking, influencer spirituality, political spectacle, financial abstraction. I’m not sure a single narrative can contain all that, so that’s what is happening in the book. I’m just turning the volume up on what is already here. Is it satire? I always though satire was less about prediction and more about exaggeration. Like I said, it’s everything turned up, pushed to the point where you can’t deny it anymore.
Latex, Texas is an ominous take on intimacy around the Houston area. The chronology unfolds like cryptic cinema as Micheal sieves through fractured memories in a turbulent timeline. In a story like this—what was it like excavating into the underbelly of human emotion?
SJC: I don’t think I was excavating, perhaps exposing the residue when emotion gets up and leaves. I find I’m pretty unreliable when thinking of my own life, you know archiving my memories about how things went down. Do I remember this event as a neat narrative, in my head perhaps, but really, I remember fluorescent motel signs, carpet bloodstains, and it just becomes sentences that then mutate every time I replay the memories. Latex, Texas is assembled from those contaminations. Michael doesn’t travel through Houston, because Houston is a damaged memory system. The chronology fractures because memory fractures. Trauma doesn’t arrive alphabetically. Houston becomes essential because it possesses that strange mental geography. It’s sprawling, petrochemical, humid, endlessly expanding, so I’m generally suspicious of novels that explain emotion. Once a book starts telling me what someone feels, I’m less interested. I’m far more interested in creating conditions where the reader feels something before they understand why. I’d rather produce a kind of synthetic telepathy—an experience where you as the reader inhabits someone else’s contaminated consciousness for eighty pages. You then emerge carrying fragments that don’t quite belong to yourself anymore. That’s always felt closer to how memory and intimacy actually function than conventional realism ever has.
Tell us about the upcoming project with Charlene Elsby from Inside the Castle Press. Who was first to pitch this partnership?
SJC: I basically slid into her DMs one day. We’d been communicating for a while, I’d blurbed one of her books, and I suggested we do it. I’ve only ever asked three people to collaborate on something like this, and the first two projects just completely fell apart. Charlene was actually keen, which was the important bit, obviously. That became the propulsion for me to get on board and actually finish the thing. We had to work out the framework of how and who would write what. We went back and forth for a while about how we were going to collaborate, and it became this really good exercise in selflessness. Which, honestly, is probably how all personal relationships should operate anyway. I’m forever grateful to Charlene for the book, because it was a nice respite from some of the more challenging books I’d been grinding away at. Not that this book didn’t have challenges. It was fun. It was fast. It didn’t require me to sit contemplating the metaphysical consequence of one sentence for six months. Charlene’s editorial notes were basically just variations of her telling me to fuck things up more. That was pretty much it.
Your writing creates a new experience when it comes to reading. It’s fascinating how you break down language into a class of its own—something I’d call mutated testimony about human behavior. It’s genius. Can you tell us a little bit about the madness behind the creativity?
SJC: I think madness, if there is any, comes from refusing to treat language as a transparent medium. We’re taught that words only exist to communicate clearly. I’ve never really thought that. Language is unstable. It’s unreliable. It conceals as much as it reveals. Delirium is inside my books, not as a literary device, or experiment, but because your consciousness is fractured. I don’t think or want to think in neat paragraphs. Our lives, namely our inner lives constantly mutate. Conventional prose often tidies that experience into something more coherent than it really is. I wanted to write closer to the texture of thought than to the performance of thought. If my writing feels like what you call mutated testimony—it’s probably because I’m trying to document consciousness before it explains itself, before our horrible memories become narrative, before our trauma become anecdote, before it learns anything that makes it acceptable. There’s raw material just beneath language.
Have you read Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon? It’s notorious for being one of the most unreadable books ever published—however—it’s also one of the most rewarding for those who reach the end. What are your thoughts on people who label books unreadable versus the ones who thrust novels into cult acclaim?
SJC: I’ve read some Pynchon, although I’m much more interested in the 1960s and 1970s work, so yes, Gravity’s Rainbow stuff. The period where paranoia, technology, politics, counterculture, all collide. Gravity’s Rainbow is the monumental work everyone points toward, but what interests me more is the idea of something that’s labelled unreadable. It seems so dumb. I think that word, unreadable, often reveals more about the reader than the work itself. When someone says a book is unreadable, I wonder if what they’re really saying is that the book is operating outside the boundaries of what they’ve been trained to accept as readable. We’ve become accustomed to immediate comprehension. We want the meaning delivered cleanly, efficiently, with no resistance. But some works are attempting to reach toward things that are not easily organized into human language. Some things are just simply beyond ordinary knowledge, something too large, contradictory or strange for our peabrains to fully contain. In that sense, perhaps the problem isn’t that the work is unreadable, perhaps it’s that we are limited readers. People used to talk about the ideas around the bicameral mind, the theory proposed by Julian Jaynes, where ancient human consciousness may have functioned differently, people experiencing thoughts or impulses as external voices—rather than as internal monologue like we do today. Perhaps that is what is happening with so-called unreadable novels, certain works attempting to communicate from outside our usual mental framework. It’s a sad state when something so wondrous as Thomas Pynchon is labelled hard to read, I mean come on. It’s some brilliant science fiction, not that hard to deal with.
Xerox Over Manhattan
By Shane Jesse Christmass
A young man on a radar screen. Sewerage from the storm drain. Makeshift refugee compounds. Dishwasher used as an ice box. The luncheon held on artificial grass. Television. Late 1980s. Evangelical Christianity. Herpes medication. Cocaine and ear canals. Game show contestants. A flavoured Buddhist with black patent shoes. Mass aneurysms. President Ricky reading statistical reports. Race conflicts and routine insults. Spider legs and an open mouth. Fresh towels on translucent skin. Ash-blonde curls in the restroom washbasin. War gases and fever organisms. Spiritual exercises on a warm night. President Ricky covered in a mild analgesic. Polaroids and secondhand watches. Silverware. Glassware. Fur stoles. Blood in the railyard. Pepsi-Cola manufactured by the War Department. Plus-sized cartoons and infographics. Sexual research and monthly repayments. Soiled stairwells in dissolving hotel rooms. Shapeless emotions in residential suburbs. Documents for interplanetary space civilization kept in a shoe box. Company constructs steel-like muscles. The athletic legs of office workers. Police paranoia concerning a hippie stronghold. An imminent car crash that involves President Ricky. Reflective eye sockets that contain retractable razor blades. Lice in long black hair. Warm vapors hanging from wide lips. Great fissures in the mountain ranges of North America. Shoe fetishism and flyscreen windows. The filthy hole of President Ricky.
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Article originally Published in the Fall 2026 Issue.