Dark factory, p.1
Dark Factory, page 1
Please enter at your own risk. There are no refunds.
Conditions may include low light, no light, strobe effects, Y reality, beats, alcohol, flowers, broken glass, broken bones, broken dreams, exhilaration, disorientation, ecstasy, self-knowledge, and death.
Flash photography is permitted.
Remember to be aware of your surroundings. Your surroundings are aware of you.
Welcome to Dark Factory.
This audio not supported on your device Audio coproduced by Josh Malerman and Chad Stocker
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Praise for DARK FACTORY
“Koja crafts the future that the ravers of the 1990s dreamed of in this immersive and propulsive cyberpunk outing. . . . In breathless, careening prose, Koja captures minds that see a thousand worlds at once, lives lived at 150 beats per minute, and the complicated, messy reality that lies beneath the endless search for the perfect night out. This is sure to delight fans of Jeff Noon and mind-bending speculative fiction.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“Visionary. Stunning. A near-future vision of clubbing culture that takes us beyond virtual reality but, at the same time, presents an intimate look at the life of artists. Koja proves once again that she is a master of her craft.”
ALMA KATSU, author of The Fervor and The Deep
“You don’t read Dark Factory so much as slam dance your way through its glittering labyrinth of art, tech, danger, and lust. Meticulously envisioned and impeccably performed, this book lives and breathes far beyond its pages, providing an experience more akin to experimental theater than traditional literature; once again, Koja drags fiction kicking and screaming into the future, where it belongs.”
MARYSE MEIJER, author of The Seventh Mansion and Heartbreaker
“Some writers are born to spin tales from the shadows. Kathe Koja is one such author. Dark Factory is a unique and esoteric experience. A journey into the throbbing heart of creativity itself. Where we find kisses and cuts. A fantastic story.”
S.A. COSBY, NYT bestselling author of Razorblade Tears and Blacktop Wasteland
“Koja writes like she’s an entire collective of artists, senses in overdrive, voracious for the next hit of art that will push them—and us—over the edge. This is pure energy, a glow-in-the-dark vision of a new kind of writing.”
DANIEL KRAUS, NYT bestselling author of Bent Heavens and The Living Dead
“Koja has redefined the possibilities and limits of literature with Dark Factory—a thunderous, all-consuming tour de force executed by one of our finest and most skilled creators. This is not a book. This is an unforgettable and transformative experience.”
ERIC LAROCCA, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke
“There isn't anywhere I wouldn't go with Kathe Koja, and the seams of reality are no exception.”
SARAH MILLER, author of Caroline and The Borden Murders
“Dark Factory is a wickedly original and wild book—a steadily evolving mystery, an ecstatic search for beauty and reality, a confrontation with our need to tell and be told stories—all borne of Koja’s endless curiosity and dexterity.”
LINDSAY LERMAN, author of I’m From Nowhere and What Are You
“‘You can dream while you’re awake.’ She’s done it again: with Dark Factory Kathe Koja spins a nighttime world fully realized and revelatory, all while reaching new linguistic highs. And how many books have you read that made you want to dance?”
TOM CARDAMONE, author of The Lurid Sea, Green Thumb, and Night Sweats: Tales of Homosexual Wonder and Woe
“Dark Factory reminds us that Kathe Koja is not only a great writer, but an important one. Bolstered by inventive audiovisual supplements, the book is both intimate and epic, an ensemble genre-bender that envisions new possibilities for the novel as narrative form. This is a daring work of multisensory and multimedia immersion, an exemplar of Koja’s career-long commitment to dissolving boundaries—between genres and delivery systems, between body and mind, between story and reader, between virtual and real. This is a propulsive, wickedly funny literary party; enter the Factory, lose yourself, and dance.”
MIKE THORN, author of Shelter for the Damned, Darkest Hours, and Peel Back and See
“Dark Factory is quintessential Kathe Koja, and duly represents her style, tastes, choices, wit, and unparalleled skill. In a career brimming with immersive fiction, here, now, a novel about immersion itself. Nobody could’ve told this story but Kathe Koja. Dark Factory is written with the appetite and buzzing of a debut novel, but the sureness of a modern master. Each sentence takes a stand, makes a joke, reveals a truth, so that halfway deep, the reader is wholly and truly immersed.”
JOSH MALERMAN, NYT bestselling author of Bird Box and Daphne
“As onetime gatekeeper to some of New York’s most legendary nightclubs, I can assure you there has never been one quite like Dark Factory. Situated in an imminent, perhaps even parallel time, this is a club Philip K. Dick might have envisioned, designed to provide the ultimate heightened user experience. Here virtual and altered reality mix and combust to create a new kind of collective Dionysian ecstasy, sensually intoxicating and potentially transgressive. Behind this Dark Factory, Ari Regon is the creative alchemist looking to push boundaries of what a club experience, if not life itself might be. Meta-author Kathe Koja builds a hyperdetailed, tangibly peopled, noirish world around Ari’s own world-building mission with all its challenges, foibles, and loves. But this world doesn’t stop there; it continues with you, because Dark Factory isn’t merely a book; it’s an ongoing interactive ‘club’ experience that you may, indeed are encouraged to enter, revel in, expand and transmutate with. It’s an explosively unpredictable scene, so if you’re adventurous, limitlessly curious, and a bit crazy put on your ‘tiara’ and enter Dark Factory at your own risk and delight—you’re on the list.”
JORGE SOCARRAS, singer and writer, and former staffer at New York's Danceteria, Area, Palladium, Tunnel, MK and Big Haus
Praise for THE CIPHER
“The Cipher is a stone-cold landmark of the genre. Written by a sphinx, a gift, the rarest of talents. And like the works of M.R. James, Shirley Jackson, Poe, and Stephen King, horror isn’t the same, in all its current height and depth, without it. Be prepared: this book will change you.”
JOSH MALERMAN, NYT-best-selling author of Bird Box and Malorie
“Audacious, acerbic, grotesque, ravishing, stifling, sensual, iconic—there will never be another novel like this one.”
DANIEL KRAUS, NYT-bestselling author
“Unforgettable . . . So visceral and so right.”
LOCUS MAGAZINE
“Koja has created credible characters who are desperate for both entertainment and salvation . . . this powerful first novel is as thought-provoking as it is horrifying.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“Those of us who have been around awhile remember the impact Kathe Koja’s The Cipher made on the scene when it first appeared in 1991. It was like a perfect onyx jewel wrested from Hell: gorgeous, hideous, and terrifying. We’d never seen anything like it before. Its return to print is something to be celebrated by anyone who loves brilliant horror fiction. The Cipher is a stone-cold classic.”
NATHAN BALLINGRUD, award-winning author of Wounds and North American Lake Monsters
“This entry into the body-horror canon carries with it the kind of fatalism horror readers prize—it’s going to end badly, for sure, but just how badly?”
BOOKLIST
“Kathe Koja is a poet . . . the kind that prefers to read in seedy bars instead of universities, but a poet.”
NEW YORK REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION
“When I first read The Cipher in 1991, I hardly knew what to make of it. But I knew one thing for sure: horror fiction had never seen anything like Kathe Koja’s obsessive and impressionistic prose and ruthlessly dire worldview before . . . Koja’s fearless depiction of bickering twenty-something art failures stumbling upon an actual nothing and then watching with detached fascination as their squalid lives disintegrate around it was the darkest kind of revelation for me. I haven’t stopped thinking about The Cipher in the thirty years since, and my numerous reads of it always yield fresh new horrors from its reflective deeps.”
WILL ERRICKSON, Too Much Horror Fiction
“An ethereal rollercoaster ride from start to finish.”
DETROIT FREE PRESS
“Combines intensely poetic language and lavish grotesqueries.”
BOING BOING
“A smart read that changes as it moves along. It really makes you think and it is utterly terrifying. The things that Kathe Koja explores in this book are still relevant in horror today . . . Mindblowing.”
CEDAR HOLLOW HORROR REVIEWS
“Kathe Koja, an author who Library Journal once described as a collaboration between Clive Barker and William S. Burroughs, possesses a writing style unmatched by anyone else in the business. The Cipher is her first novel, but it shines like the work of a true master. Never have I experienced something so visceral and ugly and beautiful all in one package. It is a piece of art that manages to simultaneously disgust and delight its audience.”
MAX BOOTH III, LITREACTOR
Praise for VELOCITIES: STORIES
“An impressive collection of stories unafraid to explore bleak topics like death and despondency.”
KIRKUS REVIEWS
“A modern genius of weird and dark fiction, Kathe Koja once again proves with Velocities that she’s adept at plunging the reader into strange and unexpected pla ces. One of my favorite collections of the year.”
JEFF VANDERMEER, NYT-bestselling author of Dead Astronauts, Borne and the Southern Reach trilogy
“Koja’s stories are at their most superb where they study the strength in bodies perceived as delicate or fragile . . . Koja explores the misunderstood and the dark in twisting and often experimental prose.”
BOOKLIST
“Velocities is prime Kathe Koja, with all that that entails: supercharged, dense as hell, oblique, glorious. Every story is a lesson in how to write faster, more intensely, from angles other people never seem to think of: industrial poetry, word mosaics like insect eyes, multifoliate as the insides of flowers, every image a scattered, burrowing seed, spreading narrative like a disease. I’ve loved her work since long before I ever aspired to produce anything like it—in fact, I’m still not sure anyone else is capable of doing what she does, of coming close, let alone hitting the mark. But damn, it’s equally so much fun to admire the result as it is to even vaguely try.”
GEMMA FILES, award-winning author of Spectral Evidence
ALSO BY KATHE KOJA
The Cipher
Bad Brains
Skin
Strange Angels
Kink
Extremities: Stories
Under the Poppy
The Mercury Waltz
The Bastards’ Paradise
Christopher Wild
Velocities: Stories
DARK FACTORY. Copyright © 2022 by Kathe Koja
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used, reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodie in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For information, contact Meerkat Press at info@meerkatpress.com.
ISBN-13 978-1-946154-75-0 (Paperback)
ISBN-13 978-1-946154-76-7 (Ebook)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Cover design by Tricia Reeks
Book design by Tricia Reeks
Author Photo © Rick Lieder
Foxglove drawing © Sofia Ajram
Emperor logo and Silver Landings poster © Rena Hopkins
Stock photos and composite imagery from AdobeStock.com, Twenty20.com, and Pexels.com
Printed in the United States of America
Published in the United States of America by
Meerkat Press, LLC, Asheville, NC
www.meerkatpress.com
The Dark Factory project combines Kathe Koja’s writing and her immersive event creation, for a new fiction experience online and on the page.
This book contains bonus content that can be read along with the story as the links appear in the book (marked bonus content with links back to your place in the main narrative), or afterward: there is no “correct” way, whatever works for each reader is best. Bonus content is also marked in the Table of Contents.
Readers can also interact with the posts at DarkFactory.club, follow Dark Factory on Instagram and Twitter and Facebook, make Dark Factory art, and go as far into this world as the party takes them.
DarkFactory.club
01
“Ari! Hey Ari, how’s it going?”
“Hey,” his nod to the skinny DJ on the bench opposite Jonas’s office, blue glass walls half-covered with overlapping Dark Factory posters, the effect is like peering into a paper aquarium. “It’s going good. Tight.”
“I just got in from Chromefest, I played some crazy great shit,” the DJ digging into his bag, a dangle of fake gold giveaway charms, too many stickers, TOOT SWEET, U DONT REDLINE U DONT HEADLINE, pulling out a mix stick. “You got a minute?”
“Got a meeting,” with a shrug, a smile, his public smile—
—but inside the office no Jonas, only his spoor: empty NooJuice cans, Causabon trainers still new in the box, a white dinner jacket hung on the hulking recliner, and between the tilting piles on the blue glass table that is Jonas’s desk, two burner phones, both vibrating like wind-up toys: Ari takes up one, then the other, neither are numbers he knows. Also on the desk is a flat delivery box stacked with t-shirts, a new streamlined design, and “Y makes the logo move,” Jonas at the door, slamming the door, Jonas wearing last summer’s t-shirt, black and sleeveless beneath a clear plastic wrap jacket; with his hair sheared at the sides he looks like a brand-new cleaning brush, Ari hides a smile. “Lee thinks it’s too subtle. What do you think?”
“Not if it moves,” an answer and a parry, Jonas likes to test everyone, Ari most of all. “Chockablock thinks of everything.”
“And overcharges for everything too. Wear it around, see what people say,” and as Ari drapes a shirt around his neck, “I know it’s your day off, but I need you in the box tonight.”
“Just me?”
“You and whoever else I stick in there. Be good, or it’ll be Lee.”
“I don’t have a problem with Lee.”
“That’s not what she says.”
“Then that’s her problem.”
“True. Got a smoke? Darcy’s after me to quit,” as Ari offers one of the black blunts he gets from the boys in the clubs, Jonas rooting in the desk’s mess for an ashtray, and “Lee said,” Jonas’s shrug half-annoyed, ”some woman gave birth on the floor last night? To an actual baby? What a mess.”
And Ari laughs—“The Factory’s first natural-born citizen”—and after a moment Jonas laughs too: “Your brain, Ari, your fucking brain,” pulling out his real phone, a quick dictating bark, “Lee, find those baby people, give the baby free admission for life. Tell Media to make a big deal out of it—”
—as Ari exits in a puff of smoke and a flutter of posters, past the still-waiting DJ, and two runners toting scent canisters like oversized silver bullets, another runner wrangling a wobbling rack of boxed NooJuice, provided to the production in exchange for ad placement, another of Ari’s ideas that Jonas approves, Jonas drinks half a dozen cans of that swill a day. Lee drinks it too, though Ari knows she hates it; sometimes he catches Lee studying him when she thinks no one can see.
