All Trap No Bait - by Joseph Worthen (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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 two 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 the implications of 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 Dominos pizza site 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 about her online tormentor 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.

Review Quotes

"This s$%t's wild. Dark-web existentialism--reads like Bolaño in Alabama. A very strange and dark and funny book."

--Johannes Lichtman, 5 Under 35-winning author of Such Good Work and Calling Ukraine

"Joe Worthen's All Trap No Bait is a chronically online person's fever dream. Featuring a secret Alabama poetry chatroom, a Duck Dynasty Albert Camus, Michelle Obama deepfakes, a lookalike Harry Potter, cathartic Doom runs, internet blackmail, a mind-reading demon, and a threatening YouTube rapper. The kind of wild delusion you furiously try to blink away, wanting to touch down in the real world, but then the dark humor and demented adventures call to you, make you feel more alive than you've felt in years, so you scour the forest floor of your cluttered-ass room for that stray bottle of cough syrup to bottoms up to bring you back."

--Gene Kwak, author of Go Home, Ricky!

"Joseph Worthen's All Trap No Bait is a hilarious fever dream of mystery and black comedy, a soulful tale of modern stagnation, deep South absurdism, coronavirus deniers, lame poetry societies, and the loneliness we all feel as we walk the dark mazes of modern technology. I read this novel quickly and breathlessly, enraptured by the wildly inventive and surprising prose. The only thing that slowed my pace was the constant urge to read aloud lines to my wife, friends, enemies, complete strangers, my cat. Worthen is definitely a writer to watch."

--Darrin Doyle, author of The Beast in Aisle 34

"Who can capture our very modern, crumbling, funny world better than Joseph Worthen? This book is so hilarious that at first you might not notice its stark prophecies, its deep, worried interest in the funhouse mirrors of online and offline, its poetic warnings about the loss of self after logging on. The worse things get, the funnier this book gets, until it's too late. A beautiful, enlightening meditation on the natural and unnatural world."
--Rebecca Lee, author of Bobcat

"A dark and dirty-Southern misadventure, All Trap No Bait encapsulates how much it sucks not to have money, and the lengths people will go when they think they might get some. A bleakly hilarious examination of debt, poetry, mystery, and loneliness online and IRL, Joe Worthen's debut is destined to be one of your feel-bad favorites."
--Kathleen Rooney, author of From Dust to Stardust

"Worthen's narrative shimmers with zeitgeist: this is a book about millennial poverty, the inequities of the pandemic, and the baffling chasm between our dreams and realities. At times this book is hilarious, and other times troubling, but every line sings with striking originality. It's Lish and DeLillo and Russell but more than any of them it's Worthen, a fresh new voice in fiction and one readers will want to know. I loved this book!"

--Sadie Hoagland, author of American Grief in Four Stages and Strange Children

About the Author

Joseph Worthen is a writer from South Carolina. His fiction has appeared in The Masters Review, Wag's Revue, Hobart, Gigantic Sequins, Bodega, NOÖ Journal, Expat, and others. He lives and teaches in Banner Elk, North Carolina. His website is www.mezacht.com.