Every Woman Adores a Fascist: Teleplasm by Audrey Szasz – Danielle Chelosky
March 24, 2025
Audrey Szasz is less a writer than she is a machine, pumping out diabolical epics year after year for both Amphetamine Sulphate and Infinity Land Press, sometimes as long as four hundred pages. Her newest, Teleplasm, falls on the shorter side at one-sixty pages, but it’s as evil as ever. It was my first time proofreading the London-based writer—an intimidating task—though I found few mistakes to fix, and some suggestions I’d made were a result of British vernacular I was not familiar with (I’m just a Long Islander with mostly Italian lineage, to be fair). Despite the way the prose seemingly flows from Szasz’s fingertips in a deluge, she doesn’t leave a mess that has to be cleaned up.
Amphetamine Sulphate—conceived by Philip Best in 2017—looms on the outside of alt lit, tucked in a safe corner of cult status. Along with Szasz, inimitable authors Thomas Moore and Isabelle Nicou often publish succinct, visceral books about alienation and heartbreak through AS. Last year, AS released a dynamic collection of six short stories by Dennis Cooper, without whom so many writers in the scene would not exist. Nonetheless, AS is a small but passionate team; when it comes to proofreading, the authors take a look at each others’ work. Best ships out books himself, often penning handwritten notes on postcards to readers. Now, despite my involvement in the publishing process, I am reviewing an AS book. Sure, the ethics of this may be questionable, but AS has never abided by conventions anyway.
No one does degradation quite like Szasz. In Teleplasm, Sloane Epstein is our delightfully tortured narrator and Dr Novák—a revered 49-year-old psychotherapist and psychoanalyst, as well as broadcaster and columnist—is her adored fascist, as Sylvia Plath would put it. “This is what Dr Novák was watching last night as he tied me in elaborate knots, whipped me, and made me fellate him,” Sloane declares before launching into a lengthy list that includes the Challenger explosion, 9/11, a lethal Formula One crash, and gay men being burned to death for their sexuality. This serves as a prime example of Szasz’s knack for capturing the simultaneous horror and hilarity of debasement. I recall watching Szasz perform at an Amphetamine Sulphate reading in October 2022, the room exploding with laughter as she relayed disturbing lines in her childlike falsetto. Despite many White Claws, I was shy introducing myself to Best, Szasz, and Moore, but a couple of months later I would end up working with them after befriending Best, who, contrary to his controversial reputation after years of yelling his head off in notorious power electronics band Whitehouse, is one of the most kindhearted people I know. At the reading, my friend and I sat on the floor after failing to find a seat. Almost everyone in the space was wearing an elaborate black outfit. It felt like a funeral. Szasz had everyone in a trance. She let the pages fall to her feet.
Quips abound in Teleplasm: “If you’re a burden you should kill yourself.” “Narcissism reaps its shallow reward, a slight return. Bitcoins, pennies from heaven.” “So talk about the weather with a social climber.” “Life is so sweet when finessed with such expensive simplicity. And I want to kill myself sometimes.” The scenes that are the most upsetting can also be the funniest. For instance, Sloane meets Dr Novák’s mother. Mrs Novák wonders who Sloane is; at first, Dr Novák ignores the question, before finally responding, “She’s my patient, you stupid old hag,” not even looking up from his iPhone as the words leave his mouth. It’s absurd but also severely unsettling, a man humiliating two generations of women—one his elderly mother, one his young lover—at once.
The most haunting element of Szasz’s work is that it’s relatable. Every relationship in the world has a power dynamic. There is degradation in everyday life: “I cannot take this anymore. I am so scared of losing you,” Sloane begs, a startling moment of simple, universal pain. The intense dynamic between Sloane and Dr Novák almost comes across as alluring at times, as Sloane accepts her role as inferior, basking in “a perverse sort of masochistic pleasure” rather than striving to maintain power and dignity like the rest of us do. Could there be a sense of control in complete submission? Sloane can be convincing: “Can’t wait for you to drain me, baby. Can’t wait to submit to your caprices once again. It’s like stealing candy from a baby. I just cannot decide if I am the candy or the baby.” Teleplasm would not be so absorbing without Sloane’s refusal to be a victim, without her playful attitude contrasting the abuse she endures. “You see me as broken, but I see myself as complete; I am Marie Antoinette pretending to be an innocent shepherdess.”
Sloane is the most charming of unreliable narrators; she babbles like a schizophrenic on the streets of New York City, and she is her own muse, mutating with each new metaphor: “I am the decommissioned rubber factory, the controlled demolition of the gas chambers. We all love a tall chimney stack that looms above a remote town. We love its billowing black clouds of smoke. Priapism is always reassuring. A totem pole, an obelisk, a crooked spire.” Teleplasm’s world is magnetic; there’s danger in every crevice. While driving through the grasslands of a five-star resort and watching the wildlife, Dr Novák ponders aloud to Sloane as he steers with one hand on the wheel and the other on her thigh, “Imagine if I tied you up, out here, and left you to be attacked by these wild animals.” References range from U2 and Brian Eno to Salò and Catherine Breillat, barely tethering the dark realm of Teleplasm to our own dimension, where we’d rather ignore what happens in the shadows. We don’t want to admit the euphoria that can come with being demeaned. We don’t want to recognize that sadomasochism is everywhere, only the ropes and whips are often invisible. “They want to consume me, degrade me, nullify me. Attraction as annihilation,” Sloane contemplates, a sentiment that she eventually discovers within herself as well: “Sometimes I get the impression (or sensation) that I am still in love with her but actually I hate her fucking guts and long to humiliate her,” she admits of Mrs Varga, a school counsellor who molested her when she was a young teen.
In an era of too much writing about girlhood and too much self-proclaimed “transgressive” writing, Szasz is offering another opus that masterfully combines the two. Femininity has never been so fucked up, and depravity has never been so much fun. Yet Szasz remains largely underrated, perhaps out of necessity; women aren’t supposed to adore fascists, after all.