We are all participating in the disposal process. That’s the first thing you have to vibe when you pick up Casey Anthony, Renowned Trapeze Artist, Joseph Goosey’s strange novel, published by Schism Neuronics. This isn’t a book that wants to sit on a mahogany shelf and be admired. It doesn’t beg to for respect. It asks to be handled, exhausted, and for the reader to feel implicated. What Goosey gives us is an awareness, frantic, saturated, sometimes beautifully ugly, leaking out of a name America has spent over a decade consuming, repeating, and flattening into detachment.
Goosey dean’t give us a biography and people should never even think that they’re getting one before even opening the book. He gives us a haunting. Early on, the novel declares that “the portrait to follow has been shaped without due process,” and from there the name Casey Anthony stops behaving like a reference point at all. It’s a noun. It stretches. It mutates. It loses the boundaries of personhood. What emerges is not a life story but a state of being, a linguistic container for guilt, obsession, and projection. The name doesn’t anchor the book. It destabilizes it which, let’s face it, is so much better.
From what I can find, this is Joseph Goosey’s first fiction novel. If that’s truly the category we’re placing this in. Transgressive perhaps. He previously published a full-length poetry collection, Parade of Malfeasance, and an earlier chapbook, STUPID ACHE, and that background shows in the book’s fixation on language, rhythm, and formal breakdown rather than plot or resolution. Form in this novel here prods you to wonder where the line between poetry and fiction truly is. But after reading this 5 times, I’ve decided I don’t give a fuck and no one else should either. Good writing is good writing.
The prose moves like a fever dream after drinking Four Lokos while listening to Lana Del Rey. One moment we’re inside a grotesque Russian Orthodox home where parents are whipped and blinded like horses, and then suddenly Casey is the in-house counsel for Nickelodeon or failing upward through a five-day stint as a fiction editor at The Atlantic. Scenes reset without warning. The sense of self warps and fades. Jobs appear and vanish. Identity is temporary. It’s funny, but it’s the kind of funny that makes you check your BPM on your Apple Watch later. Goosey’s relentless satire turns the American landscape into a rotting set piece, familiar and unbearable at the same time.
The real gut-punch arrives when the book finally stops pretending the name actually belongs to anyone at all. By the end, Casey Anthony is no longer a character. Perhaps she never was. Casey Anthony becomes a condition. The story insists on this, over and over, until resistance is futile. “Casey Anthony is you.” “Casey Anthony is your high school girlfriend who is getting married.” “Casey Anthony is the springs of the mattress on which you deceive.” Identity doesn’t dissolve here. It spreads like some viral meme on Twitter. No one knows how it began. But it’s there. Casey Asnthony migrates from person to memory to object, attaching itself to shame, envy, intimacy, and infrastructure. It becomes transferable and inescapable. Late stage capitalism dressed up in pop culture Americana.
This is why the book’s use of other famous names matters. Charlie Sheen, Kim Kardashian, etc. Fame collapses them into symbols, and symbols circulate freely. They aren’t references or commentary. They’re proof of concept. Once a name becomes culturally regurgated enough, the soul becomes lost and the brand starts spreading. Goosey treats names the way contemporary life treats people, interchangeable, repeatable, stripped of interiority, endlessly reusable. Privacy doesn’t erode in this book. It calcifies. Everything is archived. Everything is searchable. Recognition becomes a cage.
This is transgressive fiction at its most honest, not because it is trying to shock, though it does, but because it refuses the idea that language is stable or clean. Goosey obsesses over grammar, phrasing, and institutional verbiage, lingering on words like dissolution as if they are small acts of violence. Meaning does not collapse under spectacle here. It frays, stretches, and keeps going anyway.
If you’re looking for a reimagining that offers closure, catharsis, or a moral lesson, look elsewhere. Goosey isn’t here to fix anything. Joseph Goosey is here to show you guilt being removed manually, with a kitchen knife, and to remind you that forgiveness, if it ever arrives, “should arrive without regard for hairdos or blood alcohol content.”
It’s brilliant. It’s disgusting. It’s exactly what we deserve.