WAKE ISLAND

In the early years of Wake Island , around 2020 and 2021, we talked constantly about portals. The pandemic felt like an exit from one era and an entry into another. Eventually we stopped talking about them. Maybe because nothing had changed as completely as we imagined or maybe because we’d already passed through the portal and forgotten there was ever a door. Lately, I’ve started to feel another...

This week on Wake Island, we spoke with Adam Axler, author of American Triage: From 9/11 to Fahrenheit 451, a memoir about more than two decades inside American emergency medicine. Adam was a paramedic at Ground Zero and went on to spend years working in emergency rooms before walking away from healthcare and into another life, selling and collecting vintage science fiction books. What’s strange i...

Our guest today is Gideon Jacobs , a writer, performer and artist. I actually met Gideon over ten years ago when he was the creative director at Magnum and I was a photo editor at TIME. We were both working inside institutions built around photography and the idea that images, however complicated and subjective, had some direct claim on reality. It’s surreal to reconnect now, at a moment when that...

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 is...

Today’s guest is Dr. Teodor Mitew . He’s a systems thinker, historian, and digital media scholar at the University of Sydney, and the author of a new book called ⁠ T he Red Queen Trap: Complexity, Collapse, and the Myth of the Future ⁠ , along with a volume of Balkan Neogothic short fiction called T ⁠ he Samodeva Queen ⁠ and the ⁠ Turbulence substack ⁠ , where he focuses on complexity, systemic tr...

Our guest today is Derek McCormack , a writer, artist, and fashion connoisseur who’s spent three decades turning nostalgia into something profane and elevated. His new book, a catalogue called The Sh*thole Opry Collector’s Guide, imagines Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren as hillbilly vampires designing punk-influenced jewelry for other vampires visiting the Grand Ole Opry, the emanation point...

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.

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. Get full access to WAKE ISLAND at wakeisland.substack.com/subscribe

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...