Girl Garden

Girl Garden, the concluding volume of Du Brandywine's "Manic-Erotic Trilogy," is a catalogue of frantic male loneliness and anxious sexual encounters within an over-mediatized world. Jeremiah lives an isolated life within an abandoned natural history museum. Following his mother's death, he resolves to break away from his repressed, technology-bound life in an unusual fashion -- by purposely contracting HIV. As Jeremiah follows the nervous trajectory of his sexual inclinations, he catalogues romantic experiences within a tragicomic "garden" of obsolete male idealism and misguided memory. Pornographers, adulteresses, artistes, role-playing vampires, and chatbots populate an ecstatic, esoteric sexual hell - a melodramatic world of misery, electronics, and planned obsolescence. Equal parts soap opera and jeremiad, Girl Garden offers its readers a guilty, terrifying laugh at humanity as it unexpectedly drowns beneath the virtual.