A malevolent Brutalist architect's most mysterious work finds a new fan. An ad-man desperate for approval succumbs to alluring, yet horrific, commercial rhetoric. A director stages a school shooting, repeating the tragedy again and again in search of a solution. And in 1960s Upstate New York, an artistic residency meets a dismal fate-its reverberations, somehow, reach every corner of these tales. In each of these stories, creators and communicators attempt to create art, or at least to understand it. Their efforts and failures reveal the strange truth: that our ideas, and the ways we convey them, can make victims and villains of us all.

"With an ear for the rhythmic poetry of aesthetic jargon, and a Hitchcockian sense of the macabre lurking just out of frame, Ben Allee invokes unsettling questions about the nature and future of creative work that singe and linger like a lighter held to the brainstem, their implications only darkening as the world modernizes around them. Through its entwined tales of obsessive painting and impossible photography, infinite theatre and possessed dance, ephemeral sculpture and eternal architecture, Mediac digs a potter's field for all our fast-dying arts, and stands formidably over top as a brutalist monument to writing itself - perhaps the fastest dying of them all."

- Dave Fitzgerald, author of Troll

"Mediac by Ben Allee challenges the common notion of what a story collection is or should be. A theme adjoins, forms are explored, but each selection can stand on its own, and each stands out as an example of a brave new voice in American letters: intelligent, cultured, and with a sensitive ear for the subtle by which people communicate. Reminiscent of Borges, Mark Haber, and Olivia Laing, Mediac is a collection to enjoy, but also worthy of study."

- Jordan A. Rothacker, The Shrieking of Nothing