Author(s): Charlene Elsby

FICTION | APOCALYPSE PARTY

"One of my favorite contemporary writers. Each of these vicious little stories is a perfect articulation of the madness of being a conscious entity. Elsby’s voice winds its way into your head and smashes about like a trapped heron."
—B.R. Yeager, author of Negative Space

"Elsby's easy tone and accessible prose conceals a complex malignant design. The naked mind speaks from an isolated place inside the cruelty of everyday power structures with flat affect, leaving the reader to sort out the relentless inequity, outrage, and pain. Bedlam is exactly the kind of brilliant and unapologetic trauma I crave."
—Joe Koch, author of The Wingspan of Severed Hands and Convulsive

"In a series of scathing monologues, Bedlam is searching for an exit, craving for escape while stuck detailing the minutiae that keep us in place (the hairdos, the joggers, the dick pics, the doors, the death, the men...), as our new lives wait indefinitely—aging badly, somewhere in the near distance, before they’ve even begun."
—Gary J. Shipley, author of Terminal Park

"Elsby taps into the worst parts of ourselves and presents them as mundane grotesquery. The cruel things people do to one another daily are presented in a chilling, matter of fact way alongside passages of interiority that terrify because one might see them as a mirror. That's the true, wicked power of Bedlam."
—Anthony Dragonetti, author of Confidence Man

Charlene Elsby wrote Hexis, Psychros, Affect and Musos. Her essays have appeared in Heavy Feather Review, Bustle Books, and the LA Review of Books Philosophical Salon. She's on Twitter as @ElsbyCharlene.