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When an artist restages real terror attacks as the next great pop-art product, a burned-out New York ad man is the only one close enough to figure out that the new culture of carnage may have a serious downside—everyone's total annihilation!
Terror is the New Black
Keith Vaughan is a washed-out New York ad man totally disenchanted with the industry he once loved. Then Keith discovers Sheena Red. Sheena is the art world’s newest star. She’s young, brilliant, and obsessed with terrorism as the ultimate spectacle. Her new movement is called “Horrorism,” and its pieces do not merely comment on atrocity—they recreate it by restaging actual terror attacks, but this time reduced to pure form. Poison gas blooms through a studio audience as spectators reach for masks that may or may not save them. Sarin leaks into the subway. Buildings fall. As the bodies pile up, the critics swoon, and the media asks whether mass death can be the next great American art form.
As Horrorism escalates from obscene provocation to corpse-strewn spectacle, Sheena and her collaborators are circling a final work grand enough to make Horrorism immortal—and obscene enough to allegedly expose the civilization which made it possible. The only thing that might be standing in the way is a gifted young copywriter who is the one person close enough to understand the seduction and the sickness of what they are creating.
Savage, stylish, and morally radioactive, The Horrorist is Fight Club inside an ad agency, American Psycho in the age of viral spectacle, and J. G. Ballard’s Crash in a world where catastrophe has become content. Debut novelist and sometime ad man Leo Vladimirsky asks what happens when a society trained to consume spectacle finally gets the grand exhibition of terror and carnage it has so desperately longed for.
"When you read Vladimirsky, it’s easy to find yourself nodding along until you shouldn’t. There’s always a piece of buckshot in the meat; a pinhole in the spacesuit; a bone shard in the flowerbed; a note of bitter almond hiding in the Scotch. To say more would be to prepare you. So have a seat, get comfortable, and enjoy . . . but watch your back."—Trevor Quachri, Editor in Chief, Analog Magazine
"Sharp, witty, and bold, Leo Vladimirsky's writing shows his deep love of language, care for humanity, and respect for speculative literature."—Justin C. Key, author of The Hospital at the End of the World
"Sardonic wit. Art. Pathos. Despair. Terrorism. Bullets. Advertising. And the best portrait of New York City since Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn. I’d kill to have written it."—Eileen Gunn, author of “Stable Strategies for Middle Management”