WAKE ISLAND

Roddy Bottum is a co-founder and keyboardist of Faith No More, one of the most singular and important bands of my lifetime. I'll never forget how mesmerized and spooked out I was by Angel Dust — how it made everything else on the radio sound so bland by comparison. I'm genuinely grateful that a creative force like that was running wild during my teenage years. But his memoir, The Royal We...

Wake Island is back. It’s been a long hiatus, a lot of life changes and transitions... the usual upheavals that seem to have hit everyone over the last year or so. We’re kicking things off with past guest of the show , Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh, a philosopher, writer, and teacher, and a vector for a lot of the ideas that shape the tone and approach of Wake Island. What I love about listening to Jason...

Written by David Leo Rice and Paul K This is the final entry in our Substack project, which set out to explore the energy, sickness, and imagery of 2025. If you enjoyed this entry, feel free to go back and read our previous passages. We’re hoping to release more podcasts and Substack posts in 2026.

Derek McCormack is a small town pervert and the author of The Well-Dressed Wound and Castle F*ggot, both published by Semiotext(e). His most recent book is Judy Blame's Obituary. This collection brings together for the first time McCormack's fashion journalism. He writes about and interviews fashion figures that fascinate him, tracing the ways they inspire and inhabit his novels. The result is a s...

Daddy’s back. 
 ROOM TEMPERATURE, haunted houses, video games, childhood memories, publishing with an indie press, supportive teachers, Flunker, and more 
 Dennis Cooper's Blog. 
 FLUNKER, six fictions, 124 pp., c/o Amphetamine Sulphate:  orders open . UK/Europe:  orders open . 
 SOCIAL: Twitter: @ WakeIslandPod  Instagram: @ wakeislandpod David's Twitter: @ raviddice David's site: raviddice.com 
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In this episode with Steve Finbow, we tease out the point at which a body ceases to be considered a person and chart the development of trauma over time, tracing the fine line between disgust and desire. We get into the motivations behind necrophilia and corpse desecration, examining the boundaries of how taboos can become normalized. We discuss the role of the soul or consciousness in elevating n...

From the critically acclaimed author dubbed “one of today’s finest practitioners of nonfiction” ( The New York Times Book Review ), a breathless true crime tale of sex, religion, and murder in the deep South. Mike and Denise Williams had a tight knit, seemingly unbreakable bond with childhood friends, Brian and Kathy Winchester. The two couples were devout, hardworking Baptists who lived perfect,...

Christopher Zeischegg is a writer and filmmaker who spent eight years working in the adult industry as performer, Danny Wylde. He is the author of  The Magician ,  Body to Job ,  The Wolves that Live in Skin and Space , and  Come to My Brother .  His latest book CREATION spans a decade’s worth of writing on art, violence, sex work, and friendship. Acclaimed author, Christopher Zeischegg, confronts...

Last year, David Peak released "The World Below," a midwestern gothic tale intertwining two rival families whose animosity sparks amidst a ritualistic occult murder mystery, amplified by heroic doses of LSD. Published by Apocalypse Party, a rapidly acclaimed purveyor of top-tier horror, "The World Below" is a testament to their commitment to darkness. This book seamlessly blend...

Every city has that motel. The motel on the edge of town, the mythical place you dare not go. Logan Berry goes there. In this episode, we calibrate a magical framework for understanding the world through a seance Logan conducted at the Skylark Motel. We get into cutting off spectral appendages, invoking chaos, exploring hoarder homes, practicing automatic writing, and Ultratheater.   Additionally,...

“The omnicidal will to constitute an infinite decision implies one of two things: either to kill the unfinished, or to let the unfinished kill.” In the second part of our conversation with Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh, we delve deep into the realm of unreality. We explore topics such as the labor associated with maintaining the criminal enterprise of the dream, the suffering and expenditure associated w...

"Every storyteller harbours a secret desire to be the one who tells the last story, just as every maniac wishes to inscribe the last fateful madness on earth." In this episode with Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh we walk with vertigo to summon the authors who play at the borders of insanity and intoxication. We get into the territories of the night and mania, both of which are the premise of Jaso...

Enter the Amity-verse with Wake Island. In this episode we get into channeling dark energy from the media vortex surrounding America’s most infamous haunted house in Amityville, Long Island. In addition we also talk about: Hauntings as a manifestation of trauma, the mythology-making behind the nearly 50-year Amityville horror house phenomenon, demonic media spectacles, the allure and menace of the...

Jarett Kobek is a Turkish-American writer living in California. His novel I HATE THE INTERNET was an international bestseller, translated into nine languages, and published in twelve countries. His other books include: ATTA, Do Every Thing Wrong!: XXXTentacion Against the World, Only Americans Burn in Hell and The Future Won't Be Long. Motor Spirit: The Long Hunt for the Zodiac It’s 1969. Evil lur...

James Pogue is a journalist and essayist. His first book is called Chosen Country: A Rebellion in the West .  James recently wrote an article for Vanity Fair called Inside the New Right and it’s not only a great piece of journalism but it struck a cultural nerve. Not only did it go viral but it even got a shout out on Twitter from the likes of Jeff Bezos and Glenn Greenwald.  In this con...

Lindsay Lerman is a writer and translator. Her new novel, WHAT ARE YOU (CLASH Books) is out now. Her first book I'm From Nowhere was published in 2019. Her essays, short stories, and poetry have been published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Entropy, Hobart, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. She is currently adapting her short story Real Love—which first appeared in NY Tyrant Magazine—for the s...

Adam Lehrer is a writer and an artist living in New York. He is the founder and co-host of the System of Systems podcast, and the founder and curator of the Safety Propaganda collaborative media platform. Communions is Adam's debut book - out now from Hyperidean Press . Communions : Channeling hallucinated versions of dead artists and junkies, these fragments access the uncanny allure of shared ex...

Will American fantasies of purifying violence dissolve upon contact with reality or will the illusion break into civil war?  Find out on this eps w/ ⁦ Stephen Marche ‬⁩ author of The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future  We also get into: American wildness, bloodlust, foment, genius, and the apocalyptic longing for an endless frontier.  The United States is coming to...

We speak to Dr Dylan Mulvin , Assistant Professor in LSE Department of Media and Communications, about his book Proxies: The Cultural Work of Standing In , which examines the ways in which proxies shape our lives, the histories of their production and how we delegate power to represent our world.  You can download a free copy of Proxies: The Cultural Work of Standing In at https://d...

JUSTIN KEENAN is a writer and narrative designer on Disco Elysium which is a groundbreaking open world role playing game. In it, you’re a detective with a unique skill system at your disposal and a whole city block to carve your path across. Interrogate unforgettable characters, crack murders or take bribes. Become a hero or an absolute disaster of a human being.    In this episode...

In this episode with Jonathan Greenaway (Theology, Horror and Fiction: A Reading of the Gothic Nineteenth Century & The Horror Vanguard podcast) we arrive at the New Flesh while peeling back the layers of a nightmarish society in stasis.   We get into: necro-neoliberalism, depressive hedonia, unspent energy mutating into gothic maw, our struggle to be and remain human, nostalgia neut...

In this episode we try to articulate the fog of our time, away from fear, toward the pervert’s embrace of absurdity, uncertainty, spiritual warfare, gallows humor, the distinction between happiness and joy, and the strange, redemptive sanctum of the heroic pervert... Erik Davis, PhD, is an author, award-winning journalist, sometimes podcaster, and popular speaker based in San Francisco.  He is the...

James Grauerholz is a writer and editor. He is most famous as the bibliographer and literary executor of the estate of William S. Burroughs. He worked as Burroughs’ assistant, and became his friend, business manager and editor until the author's death in 1997. Grauerholz wrote biographical sketches to a Burroughs reader Word Virus , and edited a posthumous release of Burroughs diaries Last Words:...

Blake Butler is the author of seven book-length works, including Alice Knott (Riverhead),   300,000,000 (Harper Perennial), Sky Saw  (Tyrant Books), There is No Year  (Harper Perennial),  Scorch Atlas  (Featherproof Books), and Ever  (Calamari Press), as well as the nonfictional Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia (Harper Perennial). He is a founding editor of H...

Rosecrans Baldwin is the bestselling author of Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.  Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles is a provocative, exhilaratingly new understanding of the...