Photography by Lyss Lester
There is a dual hallucinatory and nightmarish quality to Christopher Zeischegg’s novel, The Magician. I am rereading the book through the haze of an all-nighter on the way to the launch party. My invitation promises a night of alter egos: “Come as you are (or not)…”
It was in this spirit of hedonism, madness, Magick, and poignant prose that guests gathered at Sovereign House in early November to celebrate the novel’s recent reissue by Apocalypse Party Press.
In The Magician, Christopher Zeischegg, a fictional protagonist who shares the author’s name, lurches through California in a hallucinatory descent into horror, gore, torture, and the occult. In real life, guests arrived in Manhattan’s Lower East Side to an unmarked door, a basement apartment, gothic white pillars salvaged from literary saloons of the past, a series of readings, an experimental performance, and a much anticipated screening of the short film that accompanies the novel.
Zeischegg is a writer, musician, and filmmaker who spent eight years working in the adult industry as performer, Danny Wylde (an alias which the protagonist of The Magician shares). Zeischegg is based in Los Angeles, but New York City loves a nod towards autofiction, and everyone loves an alter ego. It came as no surprise that the evening boasted an impressive turnout.
The launch party was presented by Lydia Sviatoslavsky of VERA PR, an indie PR agency known for its alternative clientele. Host Dan Mancini introduced brief readings by Tess Manhattan, Reuben Dendinger, and Chris Zeischegg himself. Manhattan’s reading was accompanied by a series of inspired Snapchat screenshots. Dendinger’s reading was a satirical poke at the venue and its ilk. Zeischegg’s reading was a prelude to The Magician short film, offering the audience a glimpse of his dark frame of mind at the time of its production.
The bar was open. Cheap beer and White Claw flowed.
Following the readings and remarks, The Magician short film played on a large projector, casting sound and light that consumed the space in all its subterranean glory: “playful, glamorous, demonic.”
The film ended, and I left briefly to replenish my White Claw. When I returned from the bar, the central room had been transformed into a pulsing rave-esque scene. Senegalese experimental musician iD-sus was performing, bathed in silver light as the audience abandoned their seats, forming a semi-circle around this final performance.
As evening fell into night, nightmares crescendoed into dreams.
Chloe Pingeon is a writer based in New York. She writes and edits the newsletter Collected Agenda.
