Atrocity Exhibitions: Grieving in the Tik Tok Underworld

“A short, sharp, and entirely perfect shock—elegantly conjures the paranoia and disorientation of living, and grieving, in the online age.”—PHILIPPA SNOW

“A cosmic nightmare. Dragging Ballard's interrogation of death, spectacle, and eroticism into the social media age, Williams picks at the screen to reveal the festering—but wilfully ignored—wounds at our fingertips. This ruthlessly self-aware and bitterly funny book searches for signs of life among the remains of a lost civilization, before the internet made performers of us all and things like art and shame were considered important. It's an undertaking I wouldn't wish on my worst enemies, but remarkably Williams stares deep into the digital abyss and finds it full of beauty.”—EMMA GARLAND

Atrocity Exhibitions: Grieving in the TikTok Underworld is a short sharp literary shock from acclaimed songwriter and musician OWEN WILLIAMS. With blistering honesty, Williams examines the particular grief he feels in the wake of his mother’s suicide through the prism of a certain social media platform —‘The Atrocity Exhibition’. Through the Exhibition's various galleries and spaces we come into contact with trauma-grift, ‘lolcows’, cruelty, paganism, Joan Didion and illness, de Sade and sexuality, and of course J.G. Ballard—all dissected with the deftest of prose touches and building into a frank accounting of the delusions and deceptions we all build so much of our selves from—both on and off-line.