apropos

Paradise Logic

& The Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen

Review written Febuary 2026. Books read Febuary 2026 & January 2025.

Paradise Logic is written by Sophie Kemp.
The Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen is written by nostalgebraist.

Individuals often commented on my normal personality.

I read this book, Paradise Logic, in the air on a trip to the East Coast recently. I’d seen it recommended in a couple of unrelated places, so I downloaded it from a super legitimate website1 and stuck it on my eReader a couple of months prior, and finally read through it a week ago.

It’s insane. It’s really the only word for it. It’s one of the most insane books I’ve ever read.

It follows the quest of twenty-three y/o Reality Kahn as she attempts to become the ideal girlfriend. Reality is… Reality is like, a mush-up of at least two people I know IRL,2 this Crip Mac guy I saw once interviewed on Channel 5 once, and current/former president Donald J. Trump… if they were a nymphomaniac twenty-three y/o girl obsessed with overtly stereotypical twenty-three y/o girl things. And really really really horny. Yeah.

Anyway, the book starts out with Reality becoming obsessed with getting a boyfriend. Then she gets a boyfriend, and becomes obsessed with becoming the Greatest Girlfriend of All Time. And that’s pretty much all there is to say on the matter? The narrative follows and is given by Reality herself and is about as cohesive as Reality herself (who I have hopefully conveyed the unhinged-ness of appropriately). The writing is stilted and blunt with its words – taking what I can only describe as a hyper-contemporary fashion (more on this later) as its usual voice. Reality’s skip-stop thoughts alternate focus between people around her and random external stimuli and take an alien (sometimes inauthentically so! which perhaps my main criticism)3 perspective to each and every interaction. And she speaks as she thinks. And her friends / lovers respond accordingly, as one would expect anyone to around such a person, until Reality falls into her own mind.

Four out of five stars. It is insane and I love it for that, but like much of my favourite media, it does not stick the landing very well. It just kind of… ends. There is an ending narrative sequence & explicit overarching moralle, but I did not think it did a particularly good job at either. The ending is a different narrative, but it is not a concluding narrative nor really makes no attempt at being one – the loose strings remain loose strings, the underexplored characters remain underexplored, the narrative of Reality cuts free from its tenuous-but-existing-so-far grasp on reality and enters fully (and lovingly) into the absurd.

But, but, but, but.

But despite the unsatisfying ending, I am glad I read this, I would recommend reading this, and I have already to some people. (Though I need to come up with a more coherent & compact & cautionary way to pitch it. There is a lot of sex, and worse things.)

This book reminded me very strongly of, well… nothing. It’s a totally bonkers book / fever dream and I haven’t read anything quite like it. The closest would be some web fiction:

Both of these are exclusively serialized on ArchiveOfOurOwn and other such sites. Lol.

It’s mostly the style of prose that ties these three works together, I think. Though The Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen (more on this later) shares some more similarities to Paradise Logic – both have a genuinely schizophrenic (TAoHS) / generally unhinged and unreliable (PL) narrator, both descend into madness in their (both unsatisfying) endings, both are… set in New York? (I have no comprehensible justification to put here, but I think the setting is an important part of the both!)5

And, yeah, the prose. That prose. Man, I’ll eat my hat if Sophie Kemp hasn’t ever read Homestuck.6

I consider all these works to fit haphazardly into a box I’ve taken to referring to when talking with friends as hyper-contemporary fiction.

These are all characterized by a couple of things – they all take a similar stilted affect to their prose, they’re all reflective of their time in a brutally honest fashion, they were all written after ~2010… they were mostly all written by an author who has read Homestuck. And they’re all really fucking weird. Some other works like this are Homestuck (of course), Jon Bois’s 17776, all of nostalgebraist’s works that I’ve read so far (The Northern Caves, Almost Nowhere, The Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen)… others I am forgetting, too. Ah, My Year of Rest and Relaxation counts. Though that’s also one I’ve had a very rough time reading and have not yet finished.7

And really, there is also a strong connection to what I’d more narrowly consider zine culture and its derivatives – Dykes to Watch Out For, Doonesbury, contemporary works sold in the bookshops of Bushwick, Brooklyn, NYC, USA (on my mind because of visiting recently – i’m thinking of em zullo’s catscratch fever and comics about a bunnygirl, to be specific).

While I am calling this all “hyper-contemporary fiction”, I’ve also referred to this genre as web fiction in the past. It’s not quite the right label for modern zines though (being serialized more so physically), and quite obviously not the proper label for neither Paradise Logic nor pre-Internet zines nor Doonesbury. So I suppose queer zines, contemporary slice-of-life serials, and web fiction all form their own overlapping sub-categorization of this broader hyper-contemporary label.

My friend said the other day that I’m too quick to ascribe an overarching motivation to things.8 Perhaps I am. Perhaps there’s nothing here, and I’m just trying to label what doesn’t need to be labelled… maybe these tenuous ties that I’m observing are mostly a figment of my imagination.

Anyway. I could and can yap for hours about all of this (many apologies to the friends I’ve subjected to such ramblings)… but enough. For now I want to talk about The Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen.

Paradise Logic

& The Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen

by rob nostalgebraist

I lolled in my indolence. The television overflowed, and poured into me.

This is a wonderful book that I read about when it came out, released all at once by an author more well known for their serial works. It is excellent, and I do not recommend reading it.

Like oh god please do not let this be your first introduction to nostalgebraist. He’s such a wonderful writer – but please, go read something shorter and more widely acclaimed like The Northern Caves. The Northern Caves is really good. (Of The Northern Caves, I would write a review, but I do not think I have much to say that has not already been said – it is a wonderful, contemporary, sensationalized and tragic depiction of fandom. (Internet) fandom, but that’s redundant. Give it a read!)

The Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen by contrast, is… well, it’s much like Paradise Logic in a way – hence the double review. Unlike Paradise Logic, it is only narrated by the main character in part – most, and the most cohesive chapters, are narrated by Herschel’s sister, Miriam Schoen, which serve to linearize and contextualize Herschel’s chapters.

I love Miriam Schoen as a character and this baffles my friends. I… wait! Where are my manners?! First, a summary.

The Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen is, in the author’s words, a Christmas story. As an item, TAoHS is a book – a book put together by the titular Herschel Schoen’s sister, Miriam Schoen. A book – a collection of books. A book in a serious sense. In the religious sense. Herschel Schoen is a prophet, and The Apocalypse is his scripture, collected by dear Miriam (more on her later). TAoHS follows Herschel’s childhood leading up and through his revelations. To pull from another review:

Summarizing the plot is easy: an ambiguously prophetic-or-schizophrenic low functioning autistic child (the titular Herschel) deals with coming out of his shell as a self-appointed Messiah. Most of the time we’re stuck in his head as he delivers grandiloquent and endless monologues about how he remembers another existence before he was born, and how there’s an Adversary in this world that wants to make everyone else forget, how he’ll resurrect the dead… then he becomes obsessed with Santa Claus and tries to embed him into his philosophy.

And yeah, that’s the gist alright.

nostalgebraist’s works can be a little lacking when it comes to plot and pacing. Their mostly serial nature9 doesn’t help with either of these. But, of course, a book is much more than just its plot. The plot, the characters, the worldbuilding, the prose… the indescribable qualia. The fragmented world you, in the process of reading, build up in your mind’s eye (distinct from the worldbuilding-worldbuilding per se). The narration.

I really appreciated TAoHS’s narration. I enjoyed piecing together the religious references and themes. I thought the chapters narrated by Herschel himself were lovely: I am a sucker for fancy crazy writing; I am a sucker for narration by a narrator to whom I cannot relate at all. This is a part of why I enjoyed Paradise Logic, too. It’s fun to read prose that doesn’t tie itself down to a Serious Narrative Style.

What I liked the most were the chapters by Miriam, however. I love Miriam Schoen as a character, and this baffles my friends, because she is perhaps intentionally written to be as much not a character as possible. Miriam’s role, in the overarching apocalypse of Herschel, is as she describes in her preface – she is a carrier for her brother’s words. She has no role, no passion, fully of herself. Somewhat later on she describes herself as a hollow shell: perfectly content and perfectly satisfied to consume, never create; to let the television wash over and fill her with its presence; to let her boyfriend’s video essays consume her, too; and all drown out any thoughts and agency of her own.

And I find this just such an interesting character. This sort of “failure character” – I don’t know if there’s quite a better epithet for it? (I want something evocative of “rotten girl” here, but that one is taken) – is a really compelling narrator for me, so compelling that immediately upon finishing TAoHS I went desparately searching for any other work with a similar narrator, landing on My Year of Rest and Relaxation (which I’ve already discussed). It’s hard for me to put a pin in what I like about it. I guess, it is mostly her frank and self-disparaging discussion on what media means for her. And not just media: what other people mean to her, whether it be Herschel or Vincent (aforementioned boyfriend) or anyone else.

Anyway, that’s all for now.

Paradise Logic gets four out of five stars; The Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen gets four out of five stars. They’re both good books and I recommend reading them; they’re both imperfect books and I can’t recommend them without reservations.

  1. I gotta find a physical copy, though. I’m a big fan of pirating eBooks – but that means I’m obligated to purchase a paper book when I like one, or otherwise like the author!↩︎

  2. William and Mitchell, for those who know either.↩︎

  3. I did think the writing could be too heavily Quirky at times, what with some of the shit Reality says – there is a fine line between being completely insane & out of this world; and being intentionally obtuse & obnoxious! Unfortunately, quite a bit of Reality’s rambles fall into the latter… I had to just be content with ignoring them and moving on, pretending they were in the same intermediate style as the rest mostly are. Not great, Sophie Kemp could have done with being a little more discriminating here.↩︎

  4. Pronounced /shun/. Thanks, train from ACN.↩︎

  5. Modern Cannibals is set mostly on the highways and hotels of Nevada, by comparison, but enough of it. Go read a review by somebody who appreciated it if you’re so inclined – I didn’t appreciate it, and indeed didn’t finish, so it would be unjust of me to speak of it.↩︎

  6. I don’t actually know if Sophie Kemp has read Homestuck. Regardless, the similarities between Paradise Logic and Modern Cannibals / The Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen are enough to stick it in this box.↩︎

  7. Nothing about the plot/prose (as in Modern Cannibals), but… I found its narrator’s New York decadance (hey, New York again!) distasteful enough to need to put the book down for a while. I’ll get back to it sometime.↩︎

  8. The context here was my dislike of New Yorkers. They’re terrible! They run into you with their shoulders and with their cars and I found (almost) everyone extremely cold in conversations… anyway, I wanted to encompass this behaviour all as “New Yorkers don’t care about strangers”. Which, I dunno, I really do feel tracks also from how I overheard people introducing themselves – always as a friend of a mutual friend, never through shared interests or anything else. But I only spent a few days in New York! I’m probably just being a judgemental bitch.↩︎

  9. Though TAoHS is an exception! It was dropped all at once on Christmas day. And some chunks of Almost Nowhere came out in batches… ch. 31-34 and 43-48, and maybe more I am unaware of. But, I think TAoHS keeps some seriality in its style.↩︎