Beyond the Planet of the Vampires by Ulrich Baer (CLASH, 2025)
"Ulrich Baer's Beyond the Planet of the Vampires is a boldly experimental queer horror novel that defies genre conventions. With incantatory prose, philosophical depth, and avant-garde inventiveness, this campy yet existential work immerses readers in otherworldly realms where fear, desire, and (non)identity collide. Blurring the boundaries between speculative fiction and art, Baer masterfully explores themes of power, abjection, and transformation in a way that is both unsettling and mesmerizing. Perfect for fans of avant-garde horror, radical queer literature, and experimental fiction, this novel demands a visceral, emotional engagement with its hauntingly beautiful—and terrifying—syntax. This book is mandatory reading for fans of boundary-pushing literature, fragmentary storytelling, and provocative cosmological queer horror, this novel beckons those who crave the strange, the infernal, the ecstatic, and the forbidden."
Beyond the Planet of the Vampires is an anti-enlightenment gay pulp horror novel of the aleatory. Smoldering in a social abjection reminiscent of Genet's outlaw anti-heroes, the narrative erratically loses and regains consciousness during an apocalyptic space invasion of Mario Bava's psychic vampires, reaching across intergalactic fathoms in search of future victims. Encouraging the reader to dissolve in the flux of its strange syntax, this book acts as a psychopomp towards infernal differentiation. Reveling in the alternating pleasures of submission and domination, Baer's text locates the homoerotic in the homosocial camp choreographies of becoming a man.
* Beyond the Planet of the Vampires will be released on June 17th, 2025. *
"My favorite poetry is when we get to be creative with the poet. Ulrich Jesse K Baer provides space between his corresponding brilliant ideas for us to climb into the poem with him. Arrive at this book by leaning into the gears of your imagination! Deer Black Out reminds me walking is falling and catching ourselves with our feet. I am grateful for his challenging, emotional labor--"departed, yr stanzas/my withheld image of you/thins its swung moonlight." Let's get falling and catching ourselves! Let's go upstream to Baer country! I am an enormous fan of this poet and his book!"
- CAConrad
“Engaged on a transverse plane of psycho-physical consciousness, Ulrich Jesse K Baer is aware that the body existentially wages war for survival on a plane of societal infamy that institutionally condemns not only the book’s basic lingual anatomy but also empowers the existential scale it implies. Certainly not the static grounding that appears as chronological consequence but as living aberration.”
- Will Alexander
Midwestern Infinity Doctrine by Ulrich Baer (Apocalypse Party, 2021)
Midwestern Infinity Doctrine is a boundary-pushing work of contemporary experimental literature and weird fiction. With its philosophical depth and unsettling atmosphere, the novel ecstatically shatters traditional narrative forms. A must-read for those drawn to avant-garde speculative fiction offering an intellectually engaging and otherworldly experience.
“Ulrich Jesse K Baer’s philosophical and entropic Midwestern Infinity Doctrine is more of a backward sermon than a doctrine, a sermon that sits on the edge of science and time, giving quenched counsels on existence, on survival, on livelihood, on the search within the UlrichJesseKBaerself: where the birth of the protagonist meets the birth of the author. Here language battlecrawls as a paranormal dual citizen of reality and lexical electrostatics. Everything in Baer’s penultimate world is comodulated for depth of chaos and for depth of furtive estrangements between logic and beauty. A place where language could experience post-traumatic disorder in science with some order and some chaos. Here the linear lives within the subliminal sequencing of itself, breaking out a kind of disco of sorrow, hypervigilant texts that hope to dance into bijections by abandoning itself to lexical chance. Here the abyss of Baer’s prosaic, cryogenic world does not thaw, but hyperventilate from insularity and significant enigma. The speaker is a surgeon of the nascent. A machine or an aperture that ejects snowclouds of lucid ambivalence. Of course, in the rhetorical exploration of the self, there is the reader, the cyborg, the villain, Ivan Ooze, then Paul Newman, and then Clarice Inspector who show up for Baer’s inexact mathematical party dressed like bullets out of an experimental pistol, all hoping to miss us softly, a few inches, from our true literary artery. Be colossal and enter with cosmic form."
- Vi Khi Nao
