It’s the summer of 2020 in Alabama, and Beverly Jane Ornett is terminally online. To be fair, the real world has lost its charms—thanks to the pandemic, she hasn’t worked in months. Plus, her longtime roommate is moving out of their filthy apartment to live with her wealthy boyfriend, and the only people she communicates with are the weirdos and pariahs in her crappy poetry collective. And she’s spending way too much time pining for one of them, an aloof redneck she dated the previous summer. Sure, she could ponder these cascading depressing failures…or she could zone out on Xanax and watch YouTube tutorials on eyebrow threading, and videos of hydraulic presses crushing random objects; she could peruse the poetry collective’s group chat, or even go to the Domino's website and use their online tools to sprinkle virtual toppings on the pizza she’d order if only she had the money.

Then comes a chat message from an unfamiliar handle—a demon, or something worse. The demon is asking for favors, and posting Bev’s secrets online.

Now Bev has to get to the bottom of things. (Nevermind the fact that she’s not able to get to the bottom of much, except maybe a bottle of cough syrup.) In short order she’s exploring—or perhaps stumbling through—a world of viral rap stars and webcam girls, all the seediness that Mobile and the internet have to offer. (Which is quite a bit of seediness, indeed.) Maybe the truth is out there, and maybe it’s not, but either way, Bev’s life is about to change forever.

All Trap No Bait is both a gripping book about a hapless detective, and a Southern Gothic novel for the cyber age—something like the bastard love child of Flannery O’Connor and The Big Lebowski. Hilarious and harrowing, a chronicle of its depressing time and an immensely entertaining escape from ours, it’s a landmark work and an incredible debut by a major new talent—Joseph Worthen.

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The widowing of mrs. holroyd

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Modern drama and the rhetoric of theater

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All trap no bait

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