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The podcast interview, however wide-ranging a form it may be, is one of our most inherently claustrophobic popular mediums: small groups of folks/freaks recorded in makeshift studios by lonely producers, maybe aided by an additional engineer if they are particularly fortunate. From these musings, listeners seek reassurance, intrigue, even intimacy (if not white noise), though they must often wade through regurgitated reportage, crass brand activation, mediocre bits, and parasocial mundanities to get there (the few programs you follow, dearest reader, being the exceptions that prove this rule, of course).
Lucky for us, then, that the talented, prolific, and prodigiously imaginative writer Steve Gergley seems to specialize in superheating the mundane to intensely pleasurable or horrific effects, twisting it into uncanny, droll, and often phantasmagorical designs in his novels and stories.1 His latest book-length work, Episode 3328: Ian Sharp (out now from Translucent Eyes Press), takes the form of a podcast interview transcript: it’s told entirely in unattributed dialogue, though this isn’t at all hard to parse, alternating as it does between our two speakers — football-meathead-turned-podcaster-extraordinaire Jim Wilson and his discomfiting guest, the actor/author/cult member Ian Sharp — in each paragraph.
Immediately, the form sets this work apart from your typical indie/underground horror affair; more cynical readers may cry gimmick! but Gergley’s hand steadily and smoothly eases readers into his work’s unusual rhythms — alternately halting and frisky, eerie but always finely tuned. The book resembles, to an extent, the phone sex transcriptions of Nicholson Baker’s hilarious (and tragically under-read) novel Vox; we are reminded, too, of Colin and Cameron Cairnes’ recent horror movie Late Night with the Devil, a decent-enough found footage film depicting a variety show telecast hijacked by malevolent supernatural forces (though that film’s novelty was largely drowned out by the online outcry over its use of generative AI artwork throughout its runtime). In the end, however, we are dealing here with a fiction that feels decidedly and brightly capital-N New.
Its premise is this: the lauded and mysterious figure Ian Sharp — this critic reads him along the lines of a Todd Field-type outer-Hollywood savant — guests on Wilson’s evidently long-running podcast (he’s wrapped 3327 episodes prior to this fateful sit-down, after all). Sharp, ostensibly appearing to plug his new book, instead takes Wilson down a novel-length digression, a chilling and lurid story of Sharp’s involvement with an Upstate New York UFO Jesus cult called the Light of the Second Storm, whose dogma pushes the notion that every atom in the universe is made from the soul of Jesus, and that the most powerful “electromorph” will lead 199 followers to Jesus’s palace on Ganymede in a flying, electromagnetic bubble (or “gravity vacuole”) to save the universe from a rot disease.
Sharp methodically explains to Wilson how he became involved with the cult and why its membership believes he may be the most powerful electromorph of all, the one to lead them all to Jesus’s satellitic lair. All the while, Sharp drops plenty of hints that his intentions are as dismal as his story, as his host repeatedly fails to pick up on them.
There’s a cosmic horror tale here on the level of a Brian Evenson or a Laird Barron — this book is filled with a near-constant barrage of memorably disquieting imagery — but Gergley’s storytelling complicates his horror, ratcheting up tension while also building up a playful, Calvino-esque distance from the uncanny story Sharp gives in the studio. Sharp’s tale is ludicrous, blasphemous, and, in the end, demonic; pegging it to Wilson’s Rogen-esque credulity, Bill Simmons-y armchair-athlete platitudes, and wobbling attention span, meanwhile, forms a tremendous, incisive running bit, which just may be Gergley’s biggest swing here. A sample exchange:
[SHARP:] …All members of the church will work together to create a substance known as the Holy Fluid, which is the only medicine in the universe that can cure the scorching necrosis.
[WILSON:] Huh. Okay. I guess that’s kind of interesting.
Gergley mines a great deal of dry humor from this set-up, Sharp’s storytelling and its escalating outrageousness cut with Wilson’s bro-Candide countenance butting in constantly. To his enormous credit, Gergley is never afraid to have fun with his readers, even as his novel more and more clearly drives its small cast toward total misery and oblivion. (And yes, the horror eventually does wash out the humorousness, to stunning effect.)
Near the end of Episode 3328 — Ian Sharp, Wilson mentions his habit of taking in the drab nonfiction his guests often come onto his podcast to promote as audiobooks he can listen to during his workout routine: “If an audiobook is interesting enough to distract me from ninety minutes of burning pain in my body, then I know it’s something special.” One hopes that Gergley himself is less modest with his work: his odd treat of a novel — or closet drama, or whatever it is — will stay with you for far more than 90 minutes, agnostic entirely to any burning pain which may be present as you take it in.
Good starting places in Gergley World: his previous novel Skyscraper, an immensely surreal, funny, and often truly creepy story of a young man’s coming of age working in a sinister, otherworldly office tower; the multiple luminous, often very brief stories he’s published at New World Writing; and the sharp curation at his own digital publication, Scaffold, which specializes in cutting and offbeat micro-sized fiction.↩︎
