Guide to Zerennism
The growing literary movement rocking the Earth to its molten core
Welcome to Zerennism!
Zerennism is the wildfire literary renaissance exploding on Substack and, soon, the galaxy. While its provenance is profound and complex, we can start by distilling it into a few qualities found across Zerennist works:
A commitment to sincerity and love of creative works without winking and irony
Form follows function, where the density and craft choices follow the spirit of the work
Genre-blending: life has no genre, why must art?
Zerenner, a mononym of a man tangentially related to the earth-shattering Zerennism movement, continues to build on his world-class oeuvre of works. We are delighted to provide this guide to help new subscribers find their bearings.
And now, from the man himself.
Is this on? Oh ok.
Hello all, Z here. Here is a suggested guide to start reading my work. I don’t consider myself a genre writer like horror or fantasy but sometimes I’m not very traditionally literary either, so thinking of my work is best as an idea or a movement—Zerennism—versus an aesthetic branding.
Basically, it’s about the feeling I try to capture and the freedom from rules.
LATEST POSTS
For You, I Banish Time
Our lives are a pandemonium of kisses, tears, and clenched fists, and we call this madness ‘Time’, and the more we obsess over clocks and dates and causality and sequential logic, the more we miss how sublime it all is at once.
This was a fun experiment writing from a more alien point-of-view. How would a whale with a Warhammer 40-tinge perceive the world?
They tend to have poor eyesight, so I wrote the sensory experience through sound and touch.
The Mountain that Moves also struggles to convey his thoughts into human language, represented by his strange neologisms and whalacular lexicon.
Eat Me - 270 words - humor
The voiceovers are fun. Consider this a companion piece to Fry Myself.
Why Can't I Let Things Go?
Why can’t I let things go? Why can’t my mind relax? I’m driven to keep doing and keep going, past pain past discomfort past boredom to get something that I want.
Why Can’t I Let Things Go? - 800 words - lyric essay
Hotness is a circle - 3900 words - dark humor
START HERE
Wet Neon - 4000 words - jazz noir farce
“Wet Neon” was a lot of fun to write. As soon as I had the first few sentences—“I was born when I hit my head” I couldn’t stop. I have this strange urge to try to write the literary equivalent of jazz, and I let it run here. Mark is an unreliable narrator navigating a rapidly escalating situation in real time, but he never lets it get him down.
In terms of technique, I only loosely edited Mark’s tangential thinking. I also like the layered narrative, that it reads differently upon second reading and you realize it begins in media res. I’m pretty pleased with it.
All I Ever Wanted - 1000 words - telegraph-style punks-in-love
“All I Ever Wanted” actually started out with the idea. I have a fascination with punk and outsider culture that stems from growing up in kind of a funky town near Appalachia, and I wanted to write the love story of two punks, realizing the dream of their generation, of actual revolution, and being faced with an impossible decision.
I knew the style had to follow theme. The writing style is very distinctive—fragmented to the point of telegraphic, punchy yet still vivid in imagery and metaphor. Articles, prepositions, pronouns: you can dump a lot of them out if it fits the content. Punk rock grew out of a rejection of increasingly pretentious prog rock, and this could be seen as a rejection of the perfectly constructed sentences of polite society.
How else would you get this banger: “Private security piss pants, hostage dance”?
Aisha - 2700 words - dystopian medical horror
Perhaps my darkest piece, “Aisha” is the horror we find when capitalism, ancient elites, and medical advancements reach their final form, where the only assets the lower class has left are their time, their bodies, and their very human forms. Aisha and her coworker, Billy, descend into their hell—a luxury longevity center’s underground level.
Here I use sparser, clinical prose. The revelations here are the themes and the psychology of the protagonist, not the writing technique itself. Literary fireworks have their place, but for this story I let nothing overshadow the horror of the journey. If “Wet Neon” is jazz improv, this is minimalist classical.
Evil Men - 200 words - dark social horror poem
This is a simple, raw poem about one of the great crises of our times: the impotence that good people face against the endless evil all around in plain sight.
GET WEIRDER
Pagan Winters Pulls Me Deeper - 1100 words - gothic myth
This story is the feeling, the rush, of being pulled into something huge and deep and bizarre and having no control over it. Is it good or bad? Both but in the way also that it’s beyond mortal comprehension. A myth.
I revised this draft probably four or five times until I found the right voice: archaic, mystified, reaching for concepts he barely understands.
Zomelletes in the Zitchen - 1400 words - whimsical magical relationship cringe
“Zomelletes” began as a whimsical atmospheric piece about a fun magical kitchen: things are cozy and fantastical. The narrator speaks to the reader in second person POV, extolling their virtues and desperate for affection. The reader may not be impressed.
I’ll always go on the roof for you - 1500 words - absurdist dark comedy
This is a cute, lighter piece despite covering dark subject matter. The bumbling everyman voice keeps the atmosphere immediate and candid, even as he’s wondering where penguins live or defending his son from a disturbing image outside his window.
Fry Myself - 200 words - absurdist fiction
GET DARKER
Eldritch Isabelle - 3200 words - eldritch maternal horror with a twist of dark humor
The man on the bike - 1300 words - literary horror
The Night I Met a Predator - 1900 words - nonfiction essay
POETRY
I’m not telling you to revolt - political poetry
Don’t revolt.
IRAN, WAR - 116 words - poetry
This is a moment caught in time as we watch the unthinkable unfold again and again.
dog walker - humor poem
The Priest and the Crow - gothic folk horror
THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
Six Stars - 85,000 words - epic science fiction novel
Six aristocrat children in the far-future paradise of Elysium are forced to flee their home. In their wake they leave destruction, revolutions, and twisted love as they fight to survive and reunite.
I wanted to write a science fiction epic that I would be thrilled to pick up off a shelf. It mixes ideas from horror to family drama to far-future sci-fi alongside fantasy a la Gene Wolfe with a dash of China Mieville.
This is actually what I want everyone to read—don’t let the size intimidate you! Think of all the binging you’ll be able to do. This should finish posting in its entirety by April or May 2026.
This book is completed and won’t change except typos and minor editing.
Great outline of your work love it!
Great stuff. I'm happy the algorithm connected us.