A Place Beyond Shame

Ed Steck's A PLACE BEYOND SHAME is a harrowing, original, and endlessly surprising book.

Ed Steck's A PLACE BEYOND SHAME is a long-form poetic exploration of autobiographical trauma. APBS is an excavation of memory linked to topography, site, and sight: the bleak expanse of plagued rural landscapes; addiction and terror; the house or the home; and a personal archive of horror, adult, and exploitation films. APBS follows a father and a son transform into Ghoul and Son of Ghoul over the course of dubbing films to tape, loitering in the woods searching for UFOs, and the shock and horror of secrecies hidden behind the walls of the everyday. If when you are reading this book and the horrors become too real, repeat to yourself: it's only a book, it's only a book, it's only a book...

"Ed Steck's A PLACE BEYOND SHAME is a harrowing, original, and endlessly surprising book. shapeshifting in our hands as we read it, it is as scary and wondrous as the horror films it not only references, but writes into itself. The horror genre has long been a space to explore the terrors of childhood, the way a parent can become a ghoul, to finally confess, in a scream not a whimper, all the secret things we've hidden under the bed. this book reminds me it's in the darkness, not the light, that we finally face ourselves."--Kate Durbin, author of Hoarders and E! Entertainment.

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Essay. Hybrid. Art.