Review: Psycho Holosuite

Psycho Holosuite

Various Authors
Zizek Press
Street: 09.01

Usually, when I pick up something for light reading, I don’t expect to be going in for existential dread, but this thing gave me night terrors. Psycho Holosuite is something of a companion to Gupter Puncher Issue 16; they were both produced by the same people and have a similar theme: vague existentialism and horror. The main difference, I think, is that while Gupter Puncher is lighter and kind of passingly touches on those subjects, Psycho Holosuite dives right in. This zine opens with a short story about astronauts slowly drifting into oblivion, which is probably the funniest bit here. The rest varies from essays on horror films, context-less chapters from a book, and stories about possessed little girls. All of these, if you read them in one sitting like I did, build up a sense of vague dread that reaches its peak in the last short story about a man who is jumping around through time and experiencing life completely out of order. I can’t tell if I disliked this or if I just read it too quickly when I was tired, but my mental state afterward isn’t something I’d care to revisit. –Alex Gilvarry