Strange and Utterly Human
A wildly inventive collection of interconnected speculative stories—spanning the multiverse, demonic attachment, and life after death—from an electrifying new voice in fiction.
An aimless ghost haunts his ex-girlfriend for evidence that she’s actually upset about his death.
A group of teens discovers a machine that purports to predict the best day of its users’ lives.
A drunken posse descends into the woods in search of clowns that have been terrorizing their small town.
Morbidly funny and brilliantly observed, Out of Body is an atmospheric, dead original feast for the senses.
—From the Publisher
Ninth Letter is delighted to feature Out of Body (September 2026, William Morrow), a debut collection of short stories from Chris Vanjonack.
Read Rory Strong’s review of the collection and an intimate conversation between Vanjonack and Strong about the multiverse, the real vs. the surreal, and hauntings both real and metaphorical. Plus, read “The Spirit Moves You,” an exclusive excerpt from the collection that will sweep you up in a whirlwind of strange, propulsive flash fiction.
Review of Out of Body
by Rory Strong
The last time I saw Chris Vanjonack, he’d taken a two-hour bus ride to come to my father’s funeral. Not long after, I was mailed his forthcoming collection Out of Body (September 2026, William Morrow). It arrived at exactly the right time. Vanjonack’s preoccupations—death, ghosts, the afterlife—were suddenly mine too. His book made me laugh out loud, and then it made me weep so loudly it alarmed my roommate through the walls.
Within Out of Body, Vanjonack manages a delicate dance of addressing early 21st century societal concerns—climate catastrophe, the specter of fascism, the pandemic—with alacrity, sincerity and an earnest sense of humor that shades in the spaces between its morose fascinations. This collection addresses relationships, loss, and alienation with a refreshingly precise, clear-eyed tone: I really am rooting for his characters, even when they can’t seem to root for themselves. It’s never gross, or gaudy, or trying to tell you how smart it is. Rather, the pieces in this collection enrapture and delight with their conceits: teenagers spooked by the knowledge that their best day ever is behind them; drug-fueled conspiracists hunting clowns in the woods; a daughter wrestling with her untimely demise and her bitter final words to her mother. One story involves the notion of time travelers abusing their role to get drunk at the end of all temporality—who among us wouldn’t want to piss on the charred ashes of a broken world?
Vanjonack’s work is a laser focused exploration of characters whose connections to the supernatural won’t save them, but instead further complicate their lives as they navigate the concerns of both this world and the one beyond. In Out of Body, Vanjonack delivers a debut of strange, speculative stories that confront the reality that the things that haunt us make us all the more human. These stories not only come alive—they raise the dead.
The Spirit Moves You
by Chris Vanjonack
After the third incident, I begin to suspect that I am experiencing missing time. One moment I’ll be grazing my dick from left to right as I urinate away in the office bathroom, and the next I’ll be stumbling across a thin walkway overlooking the 405. I always come to someplace different—a bowling alley, a movie theater, the Venice Boardwalk—and I always awaken disheveled and preposterously dressed. My shirt will be inside-out, for instance. My pants will be on backward. Lipstick smeared across my belly like crayon over drywall. I cut out alcohol. I cut out red meat. I take long, dedicated showers. I enter the threadbare apartment of a man from the internet who claims to know what I am going through. He has also experienced missing time, he says, although it was just the once, for him, when he was little. He begins his story breathlessly, but then he breaks down as he approaches the climax. A fishing trip, a childhood crush, a beam of light—something different happened to him, and something different is happening to me. Damp with tears, I black out driving home and wrap the hood of my car around a utility pole. I black out at my arraignment for public indecency. I black out during community service, during an investor presentation, during sex. No one will make eye contact with me after they’ve seen me lose consciousness, but still I retain the occasional fragments: blurred vision, panted breath, heat against skin. I wake up in motel rooms occupied by screaming tourists, my bottom half bursting out of women’s slacks three sizes too small for me. I wake up among the ruins of a shipwrecked freighter rusting away on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. I wake up on the Santa Monica beach to find a thin dusting of sand sprinkled across my original blue jeans as the tide laps against my ankles. I consider therapy. I consider an exorcism. I consider suicide. On the Lyft home from a cave at the edge of Griffith Park, I discover a crumpled note inside an unfamiliar pants pocket. I think I know what’s happening to us, it reads, and the handwriting is precise, feminine. I’m not doing it on purpose, but I don’t want it to stop, either. Do you understand? Write to me and keep the message on you until we meet again. I scribble question marks onto a sticky note and leave it in my pocket until I black out at an all-hands meeting and then wake up on the stern of an in-transit water taxi, the sea breeze tussling my hair and someone else’s hoodie clinging to my chest. I think our bodies are being possessed by incorporeal forces, explains the message that she’s left in the front of her sweatshirt. One spirit is taking control of my body, and another is controlling yours. I think they’re longing for each other. They’re using our bodies as conduits, but it’s like they’re rusty. Like they’ve forgotten how to move around so good. I write her back asking what she thinks we should do about it, and, two blackouts later, I receive her response. Enjoy the ride, reads the piece of paper that has been shoved into the crotch of my underwear, and I come to anticipate her cryptic dispatches. I wake up inside a porta potty and pat myself down before exiting. I write discursive post-scripts. I zone out during work calls wishing my body would be compelled to action. More fragments from the blackouts: curved lips, eyeliner, a tangle of limbs. I think you came onto my foot last time, she writes. I threw away my crusted sock, although I wished later that I might have kept it. My forearms become spotted with swollen hickeys. Bite marks form a makeshift constellation from my right nipple to my left. Her notes evolve into longer notes, into multiple notes, into letters. She tells me about her husband and her daughters, who she loves, she says, even as she has the urge some nights to drive north until she’s so deep in the redwoods that she can’t see the sky. She wants to dig a hole, she writes. She wants to eat dead things with her hands. I masturbate endlessly to her handwriting. I take long, indulgent walks. I am only aware that our bodies have managed penetrative sex when she tells me so. I can still feel you inside, she writes, and I wake up eager to lose consciousness. I compose myself cheerfully at The Grove, in the bedroom, and at the office, even as HR tells me that, if it happens again, they won’t have any choice in the matter. The skin of my cock turns pink, and then red, and then, desiccated, peeling. My shaft is cranked threadbare. I apply lotion. I pound Gatorade. You’re gonna have to get a vasectomy, she instructs me. I think they want us to procreate. They had us digging around inside my arm for my implant. They tried to rip it out of me. I make an appointment at Planned Parenthood, and they charge me an extra hundred to reschedule when I black out in the waiting room. For three days following the surgery my groin swells and bruises, and then I come to soaking wet and gasping for air on the rock barrier underneath the RMS Queen Mary with a pain that has spread far beyond my genitals. A gash appears across my backside. My knuckles are battered. My left eye is swollen shut. I was wrong, she writes. I think they want to hurt each other. After the next blackout: They’re maybe even trying to kill each other. And the next: Badly concussed. Your blood was still on me. I want you, I want you, I want you. She retains a perfect grammar even as her handwriting deteriorates, and my head buzzes so bad that it takes me nearly an hour to pen a two-sentence response. I strap a patch over my eye. I limp into the office. I swish blood into the sink. How much worse could this get? she asks. I can’t have the girls finding out about me turning up naked and pummeled on the sand or something. I vow to make this safer. I am going to physically restrain myself, I promise her. And then I want you to do whatever they want you to do to me. I try to put in for PTO and then realize I’ve lost access to my company email. Unburdened, I handcuff my wrist to the bedpost and lock the key inside a safe. The conscious hours are anguished with arousal, until finally I black out and then wake up to find my underwear ripped into two tattered halves, a spittle of ejaculate crystalized over my thigh, the bedstand lodged against the doorframe. For a moment I am glowing and euphoric, hungry, but then I taste something funny and I realize I am choking and then I spit up the note that she apparently stashed inside my mouth. Leaving town ASAP, I translate through the wet. I’ll miss the girls, I’ll miss Dan, all these little rituals. She’s scribbled out the next sentence so dutifully that I can’t make out a single word. I hope we find each other again one day, our spirits or our bodies. I’ll dig for you. I reread the letter hoping I’m too concussed to understand, but although I am concussed, I do understand, and at first that night’s possessions are listless, intermittent. I black out lying on my chest and come to lying my side. I black out underneath the covers and come to above them. I black out at 3:32 A.M. and come to at 3:33. Finally, like some perverse swan song, both spirits seem to inhabit my body at once, and the fragments I discern from this possession are sharper, stranger, their focus darting from object to object across my apartment with a crazed uncertainty. I eventually come to bruised and bloodied and surrounded by detritus. My refrigerator has been emptied, the sink dank with bitter ejaculate, the toaster floating upside-down in the bathtub, electrical cord still tethered to a scorched outlet. God, I figure, bleeding. She must have gotten so far away so quickly. I drag myself to the hospital. I reposition the bed. I scrub dried fluids. My body remains vacant that night, and the night after, and the night after that. In time, I begin driving again. I reenter the job market. I redownload dating apps and reply to long-dormant text threads. The urgency of the past few months seems to diminish with each passing day, refashioned gradually into a hazy dream of a stranger with my body and my desires but none of my control. I keep my head about me. I maintain control of my faculties. My days are structured, orderly, professional. A playlist for the gym. A podcast for the commute. A meal-prep container for each day of the week. Sometimes I go days without speaking to anyone. Sometimes I blink and I don’t know where I am.
From the book OUT OF BODY. Copyright © 2026 by Chris Vanjonack. To be published on September 22, 2026 by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.
In Conversation: Rory Strong and Chris Vanjonack
Rory Strong (RS): In trying to find an entry point into this interview, I kept returning to hauntology (Derrida, Lucy) The relevant idea is that it doesn’t matter if we believe in ghosts because we’re haunted by things all the time. It led me to think about sex in your book, particularly in “Open Spaces,” where the couple travels to all these national parks and have sex in the haunted spots they’re finding. I’m thinking that every sexual encounter is, like, haunted by all the other encounters we’ve had leading up to it.Do your characters have a say in the things that haunt them? Do we?
Chris Vanjonack (CV): I like how you put that: every encounter is haunted by the encounters leading up to it. Each character in the book is haunted by specters of collapse and permanence. They’re either in this state of paralytic horror over the knowledge that things can end, or in total disbelief that a thing really has ended, that their actions are irreversible. I don’t think they have much of a say on those fixations—but, even if they don’t realize it, they absolutely have a say in what they project those anxieties—those hauntings—onto. A disproportionate number of protagonists in this book think they’re haunted by failed relationships, but the thing that’s really fucking them up are the pieces of themselves that have collapsed—or threaten to collapse—their lives as they know them, whether that’s an obsessive perfectionism or a capacity for violence or a desire for what one character calls an “intangible excess.” They all have this clawing feeling that if they don’t have everything, they have nothing, and it’s easy to project that onto another person.
RS: The specter of current events is in here too, though not so much as to be garish. The clown sightings of 2016 feature prominently in one story, and then there’s sprinklings of the pandemic and the climate crisis and some allusions to the Trump administration throughout. Your stories feel at once otherworldly and of this world. How do you craft a world that feels at once familiar and alien?
CV: I dislike didacticism in fiction, but I also dislike stories that are ostensibly set in the present but seem to take place in an alternate universe where social media doesn’t exist and COVID never happened and where we’re not all walking around under the thumb of fascism and climate collapse and all these other horrors that command our attention in ten second increments.
For example, with a few exceptions, there seems to be this feeling of utter disinterest in grappling with the pandemic throughout most narrative fiction. But it’s this massive thing that happened to us, right? It changed the lives of pretty much everyone I know in one way or another. People moved, people got together, people broke up. And the way someone responded to it at its peak—whether they were wiping down groceries or going out partying or somewhere in the middle—tells us something characterizing about that person. I think there’s an impulse to avoid including it in fiction because none of the possibilities feel particularly flattering. But then how could that time have been flattering? It was really fucking scary. A lot of people died. A story set in 2026 that doesn’t at least obliquely address the way that period impacted its characters’ lives is, to my mind, much more of an alien depiction of the world than anything in this collection.
Which is a long way of saying that it matters to me that even the most outlandish stories be grounded in the real. Kelly Link describes the fantastic in fiction as a kind of “intensifier,” and when you slip the speculative into stories that are already tapping into our shared experience of this past decade’s political, public health, and environmental disasters, you’re intensifying the feeling of that experience, and I’d almost always rather feel a story’s politics than be told a story’s politics.
This was a big part of the goal of “There’s Clowns in Woods,” which takes place during the 2016 election and uses, as you mentioned, the well-documented clown sightings from those days as an entry point to the story. Part of the project of that story was to try and mix all these loaded elements together—Trumpism, civil unrest, QAnon, violence, the specter of the pandemic, and anxieties about how all this shit will impact our kids—together into a big stew to try and capture what all of this feels like when you try to hold it in your hands. I wanted it to capture a sort of Joy Williams feeling, like you’re so close to interpreting the meaning but so far away from it—realistic in terms of content but surrealistic in terms of the depiction.
RS: I’m new to Joy Williams as of the past 60 days, probably, and at least her short fiction seems fairly realist so far. Am I missing something? Does she get weirder?
CV: She’s got this story, “The Farm” that I was just teaching last night. It’s realistic in terms of content but surrealistic in terms of the depiction. It’s about this woman, Sarah, who’s experimenting with sobriety after running down a kid in a drunk driving accident. There’s this quote that gets at what I mean here about interpretation and meaning, do you mind if I pull it up?
RS: That’d be great.
CV: So midway through the story, Williams writes: “There is a certain type of conversation one hears only when one is drunk and it is like a dream, full of humor and threat and significance, deep significance…When Sarah had been a drinker, she felt that she had a fundamental and inventive grasp of situations. Now that she drank no longer, she found herself in the midst of a great and impenetrable silence.”
RS: As an ex-drinker, that line really hits.
CV: That dichotomy really excites me, the idea of jolting the reader back and forth between feeling drunk and feeling sober, everything ripe with meaning and significance one moment and then marred in that “impenetrable silence” a few pages later. I’m as guilty of this as anyone, but I think my generation has this tendency to wildly over-interpret their own lives, to pathologize and over-narrativize as a way of avoiding that silence, and so a lot of these stories are about a doomed search for meaning, whether that’s through drugs or limerence or the idea of getting something exactly right via endless iteration.
In most of these stories, the characters are seeking meaning through some form of intoxication and then inevitably there’s this awful come down. It pairs interestingly with the entire current wave of fabulist literary fiction, particularly given that stories written in this mode are often built around a premise that explicitly literalizes the abstract, the plot and the metaphor holding a direct 1:1 correlation. When you try to layer that much excess meaning onto something, it’s just another attempt to drown out the silence.
I hope the structure of the collection is in conversation with this. Every story in the book is adjusting the dial of metaphorical coherency. The first few pieces are very much written in the vein of what I described above: they’re pretty on the nose about the animating metaphor. But the deeper you get into the book, the less direct the metaphors are, the more you have to sort of strain for meaning in the same way that the characters are straining to make sense of what’s happening to them, which is closer to how it feels to be alive, you know? You’re still trying to process what happened yesterday and then some more shit gets piled on top.
RS: I wanted to bring up “There’s Clowns in the Woods” because to me that’s the most substance-heavy piece. I just love them out in the woods surveilling the clown camp and taking more and more drugs.
CV: Inserting drug trips into the story lets you easily access a lot of what we’ve been talking about—a search for meaning, this grasping at significance, a literal high and then a literal comedown. “Elizabeth Kaplan’s Best Day Ever” is directly about this. Elizabeth is obsessed with partying and knows—or at least thinks she knows—that the best day of her life is going to pass her by in her mid-twenties. So the thing that she’s really worried about is the comedown, about what happens in the months of years that follow. “Death and decline and decay,” is what she’s afraid of. It’s another way of worrying about collapse.
RS: That sense that the best is behind us, isn’t that the sense of millennials in 2026?
CV: It’s got to be, right? It’s not a coincidence that the best day of that character’s life is purported to be just a couple of months before the first cases of COVID-19 hit the states. I don’t mean to keep going back to the pandemic, but I really do think of it as an intensifier for everything that’s mal adjusted in our country. We were asked to wear masks and to think about our neighbors, and it drove a not-insignificant portion of the country insane. People stopped giving a shit, people got meaner, people forgot how to talk to each other. Which is a shame, too, because there was a moment there, when a lot of us were social distancing and thinking meaningfully about the role of essential workers and talking seriously about mutual aid and about defunding the police, when it felt like better things were possible. And even on a personal and interpersonal level, I wanted to be anywhere but where I was. I was bored and lonely and afraid, but I was also kind of giddy about what might come next after vaccination.
Through that lens, it makes sense that we’ve seen this rush of pop culture about the multiverse in the wake of the pandemic, whether it’s Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, or all the universe-hopping superhero junk. The novella at the end of the book is about the multiverse, too, and I wrote the first draft of that during the long and lonely period between the start of the pandemic and the first wave of vaccinations. It came out of imagining other lives for myself, of wanting to literalize that feeling.
RS: Let’s talk about the novella: “Heaven is Fine for Girls Who Miss Their Mothers.” We see what happens after the afterlife in that piece, and the nature of that existence is a mystery that’s established earlier on in “Phases,” with the question of what happens to ghosts when they transcend, which in the story is the “term for the troubling phenomenon in which, without fanfare of explanation, ghosts just seem to go missing.” We get to see what that transcendence looks like in the novella, but there’s still a lot of mystery in there. Some would fill that mystery with God, but this seems to me like a world without God. How do mystery and the supernatural function in text without a unifying sentience bringing it all together?
CV: I love the feeling of mystery in fiction, and so often a good mystery is a weird place. I’m thinking of that shot at the end of the first season of LOST where they’re staring down the hatch, or those flashes of the Black Lodge throughout Twin Peaks, or the inexplicable dimensions to the titular house in House of Leaves. There’s nothing like it: that realization of a subterranean space that you want to know everything about as soon as you’ve glimpsed it.
Putting the collection together, I knew Elizabeth was going die in a car accident in “Elizabeth Kaplan’s Best Day Ever,” and that she’d re-emerge as a ghost in “Phases,” and that the book would end by following her into the after afterlife in “Heaven is Fine for Girls Who Miss Their Mothers.” I had the title for the story before I knew what the story’s conception of “heaven” was going to look like, and it took what felt like endless iteration to land on the notion that’s presented in the book, which—probably not coincidentally—is that this character is going to have to painstakingly witness all these other possible iterations of her life. I wanted the presentation of this to come across as ethereal and overwhelming, closer to being lost in the woods or staring out into space than anything resembling the pearly gates. It owes a lot to David Eagleman’s Sum, which is this great book of 40 conceptions of the afterlife that are presented via flash-fiction.
RS: I wanted to discuss the nuts and bolts of cracking the novella. A lot happens in “Heaven is Fine…” In some universes, Elizabeth stays with her high school sweetheart; in others, she encounters a machine that predicts the best day of her life; in some, she gets crushed to death by a piano. How were you able to keep all these disparate threads of events together?
CV: It totally kicked my ass, writing this thing. Over the five or six substantial edits there’d be ten pages cut here and then twenty pages added there and then another fifteen cut and so on, and of course every little detail that you add in or take out needs to be accounted for in all the other universes. It was a huge headache, and I wasn’t happy with the ending section until maybe a week before final edits were due.
I was lucky to have the support and patience from some friends and trusted readers while working through it, particularly my MFA thesis adviser, Ted Sanders. We’d hole up in his office and diagram the branching timelines, and it was this real feeling of discovery. I’ve joked that I never want to write anything this complicated again, but there’s really nothing I love more than a creative project that might turn into a disastrous quagmire. And maybe it is! It’s so long and so iterative that I think it’ll be a real love-it-or-hate-it situation for most readers.
RS: I remember when you were working on it. We’d meet at that coffee shop in Long Beach and I’d be like, Hey, Chris, how you doing? And you’d be like: This fucking novella, man.
CV: I practically lived there that summer, at that coffee shop. I was insufferable.
RS: I told you it made me weep, right? I didn’t write down the page number, but there’s that moment where it goes: “There are universes in which you get as far away from your mother as possible, but you only bear witness to one of them.” Can you just tell me more about the novella?
CV: My initial pitch was that I wanted it to feel like a dirtbag Tree of Life (Malick, 2011). I wanted it to have that same sense of embodied wonder that Malick applies to the creation of the universe, or the mercy of a dinosaur, or the image of a forest through a child’s eyes applied to, you know, smoking out of a bong in a dank basement, or making out above a sewage drain, or having a monosyllabic heart-to-heart over the music at a punk show. The idea being that all of this grody mundanity takes on a sense of spiritual significance by virtue of Elizabeth having missed out on all this because she died. So much of the book is about regret, and so it felt only right that the collection would end by thinking through an overwhelming cacophony of possibility of what this dead girl’s life might have looked like if she had lived. Which is hopefully a little ecstatic and a little sad and a little uncomfortable.
RS: Yeah, I think that’s why it hit me so profoundly, because with each iteration of her life and the things that happen to her within them, I was thinking about the things that have happened to me. I just turned 30, you know, and I had this monumental year of all sorts of things happening.
There’s this moment in the novella where it really overcame me: “Your mother lectures you on the importance of saying I love you whenever you say goodbye to her. You always say it just in case, she explains, immediately flustered. You watch yourself begin to process this notion of there being a last time for anything.”
CV: That’s something I remember very vividly from when I was a kid, my dad dropping me off at school and giving me a version of that lecture when I didn’t tell him I love you when we said goodbye. But then it freaked him out because, you know, very sincerely, I started saying things like: “I love you…just in case.” Just a very unsettling thing for a child to say. Very The Omen coded.
RS: I had this weird experience recently with one of the kids I work with at the school. I had my iPad out, and I was going through scanned photos of my dad for the fucking slideshow for his funeral, and then this kid was like, Oh, who’s that? And I was like: My dad. And he said, Where’s your Dad? And I told him he died. And he looked at me, this 5-year-old kid, and he goes: I don’t know why your dad died.
CV: Whoa. What’d you say to that?
RS: I said, “That’s a really good point, E—. I don’t know either.”
CV: Damn, E—. Kids have a way of getting to the heart of it.
RS: Are you ready for your last question?
CV: Give it to me.
RS: What happens after we die?
CV: I hope to never find out.
Chris Vanjonack is a writer and educator from Denver, Colorado. A recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Award, his fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in One Story, Book of the Month Club’s Volume 0, Recommended Reading, Barrelhouse, Ninth Letter, DIAGRAM, CRAFT Literary, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and teaches creative writing at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop. His debut short story collection, Out of Body, is forthcoming from William Morrow in September. He is represented by Ian Bonaparte at Janklow & Nesbit Associates, and by Will Watkins and Josie Freedman at the Creative Artists Agency.
Rory Strong is a writer and musician in Portland, Maine. Their creative work and interviews have appeared inTupelo Quarterly, Electric Literature, The Plentitudes, and elsewhere. They are currently working on a series of collaborative poems with D. Beveridge.
