Rats Nest

Fiction. Poetry. Mysterious and sometimes hallucinogenic, RATS NEST builds a narrative out of the complexity and dialectical uncertainty that many people feel about being alive in the 21st century.

This first full-length book by Mat Laporte introduces readers to a protoplasmic, fantastical underworld, as navigated by a self-reproducing 3D Printed Kid made especially for this purpose.

As the Kid descends the layers of a seemingly never-ending pit, its nightmares and hallucinations--recorded in stunning detail--unfold in twelve chilling chapters of unreality that will make readers think twice about what it means to be a human (or humanoid) on the planet we call home.

"RATS NEST is a fragmented and extended transmission from 'the world's first 3D Printed Kid.' It is a dissident, noir, cyberpunk diary that recalls the monotony of service/ office labour and projects that struggle onto the failed tropes of 'what the future may hold.' Here, the future is a recursive failure of both affinity and empathy, launched from the outer reaches of a space-time where both identity and narrative are in flux. This is a work that simultaneously calls to mind Ovid's Metamorphosis and the prose of Philip K. Dick, both Alice Notley's Descent of Alette and the riotous 'cut-up' novels of Kathy Acker. Has Mat Laporte eaten our dreams? Are these texts the cognitive-enteric-cybernetic remnants of a necessarily alienated posthumanity? 'Bursting forth from the primordial/ id itself . a flickering/non-linear flood of fact and sensory data, ' Laporte has engendered for us an austere and gorgeous horror." --Liz Howard