In the sequel to the critically acclaimed Outré, a novel that explores the future of cinema through the unlikely vehicle of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, D. Harlan Wilson turns to James Joyce’s Ulysses as a source of inspiration, entertainment, and social commentary. Outré tells the story of an aging movie star battling the tyranny of filmmaker Donovan Ogg and an antagonistic, seemingly omnipotent Studio. Set in an irreal dystopia, Usurper focuses on Donovan’s prodigal son, Caliban Ogg, who cannot crawl out from under the shadow of his father’s massive legacy as he struggles to adapt the so-called “Doomsday Edition” of Ulysses for the big screen. But this tale is ultimately a point of departure for a broader study of our benighted culture.

Multifaceted and interdisciplinary, Usurper transcends storytelling to expose and analyze the relationship between commercialism, art, and identity. Wilson’s crushing grip on the text collapses science fiction into psychohistory, film studies into gonzo journalism, memoir into manifesto, and theories of truth into myths of the future. With as many intellectual and artistic layers as any connoisseur of modern literature could desire, Usurper’s dominant quality may be the darkly playful humor that drives home the thesis of Wilson’s entire oeuvre: Reality is shaped by the forces that destroy it.

Coming in 2026 from Guide Dog Books. Free advance reader copies are available for reviewers. Usurper can also be preordered and downloaded from NetGalley.

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SCHIZE

"An existential orchestra of prose." —EUGEN BACON, author of An Earnest Blackness and editor of Afro-Centered Futurisms

"Entering Wilson’s worlds is like entering into a parallel reality with its own laws of logic and nature, an exercise in systematic delirium, focused and absorbing, and somehow urgent, as though something essential about the universe and Everything is being revealed before our eyes. He is a very singular writer." —ANDRÉS VACCARI, author of Hypercapitalism and Even Animals Are Machines

"Engaging, confounding, and utterly original, Usurper makes it abundantly clear that D. Harlan Wilson is fascinated by the more idiosyncratic contours of film and its surrounding culture. His theories on filmic consciousness, explored in previous books like Outré and Strangelove Country, can be seen creeping in the shadows of the book and enriching the entire text, with an authorial sneer at the content-mill blockbusters and franchise cash grabs that populate the current cinematic landscape. Usurper never settles into one place, one character, one timeline, into the past, or toward the future. It’s everywhere and nowhere, all at once. Dream logic and hypnagogic flows of events bump together like tectonic plates in constant collision." —WE THE HALLOWED

"Despite its title, Usurper: Essays on the Death of Reality is a novel—one that tells the story of an attempt to adapt James Joyce’s Ulysses for the screen in a dystopian society. Wilson has a penchant for heady ingredients, and this book—the sequel to Wilson’s earlier Outré—rarely goes where you’d expect." —REACTOR MAGAZINE