Cunus (Anxiety Press, 2026) by Christian McDonough, is good. Its protagonist is also its author, and much of the book consists of personal foibles and the embarrassments he’s encountered across his young life. These digressions warp then bounce into knotty, sexual/scatological science fictions, featuring mythological creatures reworked into odd body horrors—the best of these a riff on the old Roman natural-historical canard about the pygmies and the cranes, featuring a pterodactyl-ymir-sphynx named Sharto Larto—talking objects, spirit guides, orgies, and a nebulous Orient. Cunus is, in its content, a profoundly traditional kind of book, even if the genre tradition it’s a part of only really got started one-hundred and forty or so years ago. It was written very quickly (29 days!) which is both admirable and, again, absolutely traditional. McDonough (after this, Christian, considering the number of conversations we’ve had) is a canny and omnivorous sort of operator; there is nothing about the book that suggests a real derangement. Disgusting, entrancing or hilarious, occasionally very sad and very beautiful (part of the beauty of Cunus is you may feel differently about this), the transgressions and degradations of the book are not so important when compared to how they are shared. This intense, autobiographical quality belies a book that is strangely content-less, or, rather, a book whose primary content is its very status as a communicative object, a radio broadcast on religious awakening in a country from no map.

Now this isn’t to say Christian McDonough isn’t real. But the Christian of Cunus is a kind and generous man, even in his casual conversations. The autobiographical elements bear no signs of malicious contrivance, nor its fictions. But he is an actor with some comfort in his role. The world of Cunus in its speculations—even the statements from present or future present are still in fact retrospections—because the world of Cunus is an enclosed theater. Christian attempts moment after moment to disrobe reality and find beneath it an authentic whole. The escapes into fantasy are dreams of a clear-cut world, even if it's unpleasant. But the results never pay off as Christian would want. The amphibious gigarapist Freng, Cunus’s Pikachu (though if there’s a real mascot for what Cunus is all about, it’s the nymphs) is, on the surface level, the personification of a sort of objective universal cruelty. Beneath that though, he is also an actor, and even when his motives match his actions, those actions are still a role in the play. The book’s most optimistic moments are ones where Christian places acting as the authentic whole, the world’s natural state and one that allows for joy, prospering, and community. The book’s most effortless execution of this concept comes in a short, pleasant digression about the difference between men and women, from near the end of the book:

I love to speak with women, because they are thoughtful. Also, because they are aware of sexuality and its implications, so they speak cordially with me and we can have elevated (yet thinned) conversations. With men (I have trouble with men) they want to speak roughly and have lowered (yet deepened) conversations. I often would speak about my feelings to people – especially when I was single. Sometimes, with men, I would do this and their eyes seemed wet. They didn’t know that someone could speak to them in that way. Women would smile politely when I did this, but I could see that they were very pleased with my words.

An interlocutor here, is always the audience, and Christian’s use of “pleased” is telling. The reaction is not connection but rather enjoyment. The enjoyment is the connection. Despite the grotesquery and crassness of the subject matter, this renders Cunus more erotic than pornographic. And it is fitting then, with the goal of pleasing sharing in mind, that Cunus is paratextually accompanied by so much theater—both the accompanying *Cunus Response Project, a collection of response texts to the novel by other writers, readers, and individuals from Christian’s personal life, (I enjoyed reading this as much if not more than the novel proper, I should say), as well as his intense but somehow non-annoying promotion of the book on Twitter and his online readings of the novel and its response, including a full-cast-staging of the play that occurs near Cunus’s end.

The brilliance of Cunus is in the way it reaches out and demands you to talk to it and about it, to the point that I almost question the purpose of dispensing it in a traditional codex. Perhaps it could’ve been distributed on a phone hotline, or, being utopian, by means of an app with a paid subscription attached. People could be paid to walk from town to town and speak the book from memory, busking for small change. Some of us, though, are already doing that for free. Seemingly. This is a good thing, I think, and we all ought to keep this strange little book and it’s concepts wriggling and giggling. Soon, perhaps, the Earth will be united by a brutal dictator; if they are (like Stalin, Wilson, King James) attuned to literature they will, I’m sure, build Christian a palace of solid gold to live in for the rest of his life. When he dies he will be housed in a sprawling underground labyrinth and the writers of the Response Project, alive or not, will be interred in the walls to accompany him to the land of the dead. For now, though, we’re just talking, and that is enough.