The Art of Self-Destruction

What is profoundly disturbing about the rooms is not their construction—they are only as big as a walk-in closet, minus the clothes and shelves and racks. It is what is held within them: women created solely for the pleasure of men.

These coded women, however, are for a more visceral type of enjoyment than sex. They exist to be killed.

Programmed solely to be violently harmed by the men who rent them, these holograms, called "hommies", do not fight back. They do not question their intent. These women willingly give themselves completely to the man who rents them, disappearing back into software and code once the blood is done flowing.

Until there is a glitch. A bug in the program. And one of the women, a hommie, starts to question her existence—at the expense of her user's.

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In The Art of Self-Destruction, Douglas Shoback leads readers into a world where reality fractures and the human psyche is stripped bare. Within claustrophobic rooms and neon-lit streets, people confront desires they can't control, machines that rewrite their identities, and horrors that blur the line between imagination and truth.

The book unravels the fragile borders of sanity, weaving psychological horror with speculative visions of technology and alienation. Violence becomes transformation, desire becomes manipulation, and every act of self-destruction births something disturbingly new.

Chilling, surreal, and unflinchingly human, The Art of Self-Destruction is a descent into the darkness that waits inside us all.