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The PornME Trinity
The Opiate Books presents David Leo Rice's The PornME Trinity--a brutal in its luridness look at what happens when an enthusiasm for porn goes, let's say, sci-fi meets Big Brother. Following the strange cum-drenched by night, office-relegated by day existence of Gribby, "life in the surveillance state" starts to take its toll on our easily manipulable (as we all are) protagonist.
With some sections previously published in The Opiate magazine, we're pleased to bring you all three parts of the (un)holy trinity in one sleek edition. Order your copy today and stave off porn addiction forever!
“A scathing, brutal, hilarious descent into a very contemporary kind of madness. Picking up where Ballard, Houellebecq and Cronenberg left off, Rice’s novella charts the point at which the image becomes flesh, and 21st century urban malaise takes on a metaphysical dimension. Bizarre, profound and necessary.”
-Nick Antosca, creator and showrunner of horror anthology series Channel Zero
A harrowing descent into the very essence of porn. This novella constantly makes you wonder what will happen next, while simultaneously driving you to scream at Gribby to grow the hell up already. Because you’re better than him, right? Sure you are. Why not pay the $12.99 a month to prove how superior you are, bub? Come on, you know you want to.
-Andrew Farkas, author of Self-Titled Debut, Sunsphere and The Big Red Herring
“A tale of of disembodiment and a cosmic odyssey that is as strange as it is fun, The PornME Trinity reads as comedy, with lots of sex and satire and porn and gore, until suddenly it becomes weirdly sad, with Gribby, our lonely antihero, lost in the eons missing the days when he was a slave to a screen and an office—a fate that sounds all too near and all too familiar.”
-Mariana Enriquez, author of Things We Lost in the Fire
With some sections previously published in The Opiate magazine, we're pleased to bring you all three parts of the (un)holy trinity in one sleek edition. Order your copy today and stave off porn addiction forever!
“A scathing, brutal, hilarious descent into a very contemporary kind of madness. Picking up where Ballard, Houellebecq and Cronenberg left off, Rice’s novella charts the point at which the image becomes flesh, and 21st century urban malaise takes on a metaphysical dimension. Bizarre, profound and necessary.”
-Nick Antosca, creator and showrunner of horror anthology series Channel Zero
A harrowing descent into the very essence of porn. This novella constantly makes you wonder what will happen next, while simultaneously driving you to scream at Gribby to grow the hell up already. Because you’re better than him, right? Sure you are. Why not pay the $12.99 a month to prove how superior you are, bub? Come on, you know you want to.
-Andrew Farkas, author of Self-Titled Debut, Sunsphere and The Big Red Herring
“A tale of of disembodiment and a cosmic odyssey that is as strange as it is fun, The PornME Trinity reads as comedy, with lots of sex and satire and porn and gore, until suddenly it becomes weirdly sad, with Gribby, our lonely antihero, lost in the eons missing the days when he was a slave to a screen and an office—a fate that sounds all too near and all too familiar.”
-Mariana Enriquez, author of Things We Lost in the Fire
138 pages, Paperback
Published October 1, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
August 24, 2024
It's okay. I can see why it gets compared to Ballard, but it doesn't have the deftness in writing and human psychology that Ballard had. The themes are apparent, but the story itself feels like it has me locked out - another thing that made Ballard such an incredible writer; making the reader feel included and estranged at the same time.
I quite liked the interview with Rice, but it did feel kind of hyperbolic, and at times bordering on the pretentious.
I quite liked the interview with Rice, but it did feel kind of hyperbolic, and at times bordering on the pretentious.
March 1, 2020
The solipsistic slide of human devolution isn't an academic concept, nor even a ride at some theme park, but the porn our world deserves (though maybe not the porn the world exactly wants ... at first), set to play on screens the like of which you haven't seen since Videodrome, which itself gets grafted onto 2001: A Space Odyssey in David Leo Rice's The PornME Trinity, showing us the way forward? You wish. The way backward? You should be so lucky. As you watch (oh, like the protag, you do love to watch, don't you?) Gribby, the infantilized main character sink deeper and deeper not into a world or universe of porn, but into the very essence of porn, all in a novella that constantly makes you wonder what will happen next, while simultaneously driving you to scream at Gribby to grow the hell up already. Because you're better than him, right? Sure you are. Why not pay the $12.99 for a month to prove how superior you are, bub? Come on, you know you want to.
March 3, 2020
This book is truly truly wild. Really big ideas in crisp and clean prose - satisfying, like Octavia Butler meets Dennis Cooper meets Jarett Kobek and idk, Katherine Dunn. I continue to marvel at its daring, it's pushing it but also really relevant, it keeps creeping up on me in my day to day. Check it out, I was happy I found it.
March 6, 2020
How far can a human sexual imagination go? What happens when technology unfolds your wildest fantasies and makes you question your reality? An introduction to Pornography in a whole different level- a journey to the deepest corners of instinct where the universe becomes something you've never thought of.... I read this book with one breath!
December 23, 2021
So I know everyone from the Twitterverse to Dennis freaking Cooper (!) has been talking about David Leo Rice's new story collection Drifter this year, and I swear it'll be one of the first things I read in 2022, but today I'm gonna run it back to this diminutive gem of a novella, originally published by The Opiate back at the beginning of 2020, mere weeks before the pandemic hammer dropped and sent us all scurrying back into our individual mouseholes for months on end. After diving into the deep end of the DLRsphere earlier this year with his mammoth surrealist wonder ANGEL HOUSE, I felt immediately compelled to check out what else this fascinatingly original writer had on offer, and there in the recesses of AmazonUK, insistently crying out "READ ME" in a weirdass font, was The PornME Trinity - an incisive sci-fi fable for our increasingly interior times.
Divided into three distinct sections (hence "Trinity"), PornME revolves around the person of Gribby, a nondescript office drone in a nondescript office of the future who somehow seems to spend most of his nondescript days watching internet pornography. Gribby is beyond harmless - the quintessential nobody - practically a cipher - and his tentative first step into the PornME revolution (a service which provides customized pornographic videos featuring the subscriber and those around him - essentially rendering his fantasies into on-demand entertainments) feels real in an unsettling "just around the corner" kind of way. Though the science behind these subconscious-to-screen uploads isn't really explained, the advent of facial recognition software and deepfake technology, coupled with the fact that many of us are regularly uploading pictures and videos of ourselves to the internet on a weekly if not daily basis (not to mention already existent sites like doppelbangher.com - look it up, it's gross), makes it all feel not just possible, but entirely likely to come to pass (and sooner rather than later). Soon after Gribby exhausts this first stage of his new (ahem) service, however, things take a turn for the macabre.
You see, while Gribby's first dozen or so PornMe videos feature him plowing his coworker Kellyanne in various positions around the office, much to his private delight, he soon loses control over the content his account (and presumably, to some degree, his brain) is generating. Scenes of Gribby bending Kellyanne over the copy machine turn abruptly to ones of his boss Mr. Veitch doing the same thing to him, and from there, to depictions of Gribby murdering his officemates in creatively grisly fashion, and from there to images of Gribby himself being gruesomely (ahem) offed. Though at first taken aback by each ante-upping phase in the PornME cycle, Gribby always ends up chasing the swiftly moving target of his own libido, finding greater arousal at every taboo turn. But when the Gribby being watched onscreen manifests a terrifying life of his own, the Gribby doing the watching quickly devolves into a full-on psychosis that ultimately launches him into another plane of existence. He fucks planets. He sires civilizations. He grooves to the spaced out jazz combo of Sun Ra and Hitler. He reaches the utmost heights of sexual nirvana, and then crashes and burns into the depths of cyber Hell, condemned to sit at a desk in the shadow of a giant CPU, and start the PornME cycle all over again, only this time he's the one pulling the strings, getting off to yet another Gribby wriggling helplessly under his thumb. May the circle jerk remain unbroken, by and by Lord, by and by.
Throughout this fantastic voyage of carnal atomization, The PornMe Trinity's greatest strength lies in its unwillingness to outright moralize. There are a million ways one could wring one's hands over the gargantuan, thigh-high cultural bootprint porn has come to occupy in our collective consciousness over the past ten-to-twenty years - growing in both quantity and availability at a rate that is likely sold short by the word "exponential" - but Rice eschews the usual suspects (the criminalization of sex work, the normalization of abuse, the exploitation of minors, the unpoliceable nature of online content, etc., etc.) in favor of a more metaphysical concern: namely, the dehumanization born out of all this fucking watching. By continuously out-weirding himself in stacking ever-stranger and less predictable fates atop poor Gribby's decimated member, Rice effectively replicates the same highly addictive, tolerance-raising quality that ensnares so many users into the depths of hardcore pornography in the first place - that devilish itch to see something new; something more; to see how much you can handle; how far you'll let yourself go - and all of the real-life connectivity that we forfeit when we subsume ourselves in online fantasy.
That said, by not going directly at the more sociocultural issues surrounding modern porn culture, Rice's absurdly nimble storytelling still gets you thinking hard about all of them, galaxy brain style. With its inspired design choices (the chapters are separated by an array of voluptuous mudflap silhouettes, and the cover art is a hilariously dirty homage to Georges Melies's classic silent film A Trip to the Moon) The PornME Trinity gives a sticky wink and a nod to the fact that humans have been making and watching pornography in some form or fashion for almost as long as we've been committing images to film, and that however you feel about the (ahem) ins and outs of the industry, it's likely not going away or even slowing down anytime soon. Pornography has become a fundamental part of the way humans learn about and come to understand their sexualities, and the internet is just the latest in a long, evolving line of delivery systems. The PornMe Trinity isn't looking to break the cycle - highly reminiscent in places of Harlan Ellison's beloved short story "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream," it fully recognizes that technology has already gotten the better of us on this particular front - but simply to engage with its consequences, and maybe to serve as a reminder that even after nearly two years of being stuck inside, there's more to life than just watching.
Divided into three distinct sections (hence "Trinity"), PornME revolves around the person of Gribby, a nondescript office drone in a nondescript office of the future who somehow seems to spend most of his nondescript days watching internet pornography. Gribby is beyond harmless - the quintessential nobody - practically a cipher - and his tentative first step into the PornME revolution (a service which provides customized pornographic videos featuring the subscriber and those around him - essentially rendering his fantasies into on-demand entertainments) feels real in an unsettling "just around the corner" kind of way. Though the science behind these subconscious-to-screen uploads isn't really explained, the advent of facial recognition software and deepfake technology, coupled with the fact that many of us are regularly uploading pictures and videos of ourselves to the internet on a weekly if not daily basis (not to mention already existent sites like doppelbangher.com - look it up, it's gross), makes it all feel not just possible, but entirely likely to come to pass (and sooner rather than later). Soon after Gribby exhausts this first stage of his new (ahem) service, however, things take a turn for the macabre.
You see, while Gribby's first dozen or so PornMe videos feature him plowing his coworker Kellyanne in various positions around the office, much to his private delight, he soon loses control over the content his account (and presumably, to some degree, his brain) is generating. Scenes of Gribby bending Kellyanne over the copy machine turn abruptly to ones of his boss Mr. Veitch doing the same thing to him, and from there, to depictions of Gribby murdering his officemates in creatively grisly fashion, and from there to images of Gribby himself being gruesomely (ahem) offed. Though at first taken aback by each ante-upping phase in the PornME cycle, Gribby always ends up chasing the swiftly moving target of his own libido, finding greater arousal at every taboo turn. But when the Gribby being watched onscreen manifests a terrifying life of his own, the Gribby doing the watching quickly devolves into a full-on psychosis that ultimately launches him into another plane of existence. He fucks planets. He sires civilizations. He grooves to the spaced out jazz combo of Sun Ra and Hitler. He reaches the utmost heights of sexual nirvana, and then crashes and burns into the depths of cyber Hell, condemned to sit at a desk in the shadow of a giant CPU, and start the PornME cycle all over again, only this time he's the one pulling the strings, getting off to yet another Gribby wriggling helplessly under his thumb. May the circle jerk remain unbroken, by and by Lord, by and by.
Throughout this fantastic voyage of carnal atomization, The PornMe Trinity's greatest strength lies in its unwillingness to outright moralize. There are a million ways one could wring one's hands over the gargantuan, thigh-high cultural bootprint porn has come to occupy in our collective consciousness over the past ten-to-twenty years - growing in both quantity and availability at a rate that is likely sold short by the word "exponential" - but Rice eschews the usual suspects (the criminalization of sex work, the normalization of abuse, the exploitation of minors, the unpoliceable nature of online content, etc., etc.) in favor of a more metaphysical concern: namely, the dehumanization born out of all this fucking watching. By continuously out-weirding himself in stacking ever-stranger and less predictable fates atop poor Gribby's decimated member, Rice effectively replicates the same highly addictive, tolerance-raising quality that ensnares so many users into the depths of hardcore pornography in the first place - that devilish itch to see something new; something more; to see how much you can handle; how far you'll let yourself go - and all of the real-life connectivity that we forfeit when we subsume ourselves in online fantasy.
That said, by not going directly at the more sociocultural issues surrounding modern porn culture, Rice's absurdly nimble storytelling still gets you thinking hard about all of them, galaxy brain style. With its inspired design choices (the chapters are separated by an array of voluptuous mudflap silhouettes, and the cover art is a hilariously dirty homage to Georges Melies's classic silent film A Trip to the Moon) The PornME Trinity gives a sticky wink and a nod to the fact that humans have been making and watching pornography in some form or fashion for almost as long as we've been committing images to film, and that however you feel about the (ahem) ins and outs of the industry, it's likely not going away or even slowing down anytime soon. Pornography has become a fundamental part of the way humans learn about and come to understand their sexualities, and the internet is just the latest in a long, evolving line of delivery systems. The PornMe Trinity isn't looking to break the cycle - highly reminiscent in places of Harlan Ellison's beloved short story "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream," it fully recognizes that technology has already gotten the better of us on this particular front - but simply to engage with its consequences, and maybe to serve as a reminder that even after nearly two years of being stuck inside, there's more to life than just watching.
April 28, 2020
An uncanny and riveting portrayal of the complicated relationship between human beings and technology. Through Gribby's descent into a mysterious and entrapping porn service, this book presents the ways in which technology breaks barriers between fantasy and actualization. The result is a terrifying breakdown of the self, in which consciousness retreats into the most isolated chambers of the psyche. We follow Gribby as he attempts to locate an authentic reality, and by the end we are even less sure that such an idea could exist in the twenty-first century. As a longtime friend and reader of Rice, I served as an early reader for The PornME Trinity before publication. I highly recommend!
February 11, 2021
This novella is a post-cyberpunk gem that uncannily marries the present, future, and the past (read "tradition") in a compelling way and grabs you where you can't resist -- just like porn. But it goes further, forcing us to accept that this is not so much Gribby's story but our own as we watch our (humanity's) basest fantasies play out on the page. Gribby falls somewhere between Dante and Faust, a seller of his soul who, despite himself, finds himself by the end on a soul-searching journey that brings him back to himself in multifarious forms. Gribby undergoes a strange apotheosis, a creator of worlds, and no doubt a destroyer of them and of himself. One thinks of Sade or Genet or Pasolini voyaging through the three books of the Divine Comedy only to remerge at the beginning, like a snake ready to devour its own tail. The PornMe Trinity is at once blasphemous and transcendental, hilarious and foreboding, innocent and manipulative, a dark Hegelian universe in which internal and external conflicts incessantly spawn news realities and futures until we realize that Gribby's journey through the 'pornagraphed' world is regenerative and endless and very much our own.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews