Interview with a Cultural Vampire
How two years of writing and wandering have Preston Pyle questioning society more as a concept than for its qualities
Q: It’s been almost six months since you published The Palest Snare. When can we expect your overdue project, The Spiral Stair?
Hey, that rhymes. I’m pleased to announce that Spiral Stair will launch on April 18, 2026, at the LA Times Festival of Books. I hope to see you there!
Q: How has The Spiral Stair changed from what you started out building?
When I started writing The Spiral Stair, I wanted to build an epic science-fantasy series that could step into the space left by the thematic collapse of properties like Star Wars and, to some extent, The Lord of the Rings. Plus, I wanted a science-fiction series that actually incorporates recent discoveries in physics. In the first year of the project, I marched toward that really quickly. But in the second year—this year—it became incredibly difficult. The process of packaging the book for editors and publishers who probably wouldn’t want it in the first place drained me mentally. Around August, I realized that science fiction, besides being very crowded, is also quite constricted—almost more conventional than people admit. I still love writing it, and I have a good deal of the second book written, but I don’t think it deserves my complete attention anymore.
Q: How did The Palest Snare and that intense revision stretch push you toward a more explicit philosophical thesis?
Around June, I was furiously editing The Spiral Stair after publishing The Palest Snare, and it was the kind of editing round where you’re threading themes across the whole book. I knew I’d reached the point where my philosophies had to coalesce into a solid thesis; if any academic or critic reads the book, they’re going to want to point to some sort of palpable argument. I knew the last major philosophical movement in this line was Jacques Derrida’s post-structuralism, and that since it arrived in the sixties we’ve basically been stuck trying to move from: “Okay, the world is tough and there are no absolutes like good/bad,” to: “So now what? How do we actually live inside that, instead of spending all our time just critiquing it?”
Q: For readers who don’t live in theory-land, how do you explain post-structuralism and what you’re trying to do beyond it?
Post-structuralism is the idea that structures—armies, governments, universities, Instagram—corrupt symbols and language so that participants can’t have a “pure” experience or achieve that lovely philosophical ideal of transcendence. For me, post-structuralism is the best way to explain why the word “America” means different things to different people. Is it a land of opportunity, or a dying imperial power? What drives that meaning?
Symbols. Symbols are communicated through language which—after being spoken, written, enacted, and enforced—forms societies. Within those societies, myths and values are encoded as culture. How we remember these systems, how people exert power on these systems, and how much we desire change or permanence in these systems all shape our interpretation and use of language—which then drives further change back into society. Symbolism is a loop.
There’s no way to achieve transcendence in a loop of infinitesimal, equal-and-opposite reactions. This symbolic loop—very much like how a computer program runs—is, to me, a better way to view the world than the absolutes embedded in Christian or classical philosophy. I think the reason I call my framework “post-societal” is that it’s fundamentally tearing down our assumption that society, in and of itself, is “good.”
Q: Where does Christian or classical philosophy fit into this picture for you, especially in the United States?
Even though “religion” still guides about two-thirds of Americans culturally, our true faith is in our laws, institutions, and politics. That’s where we do battle. Not in our souls, but in the square of public opinion. I think that needs to change. If we saw our values as more of a progression than an absolute written thousands of years ago, we’d be more willing to admit that many things in our society are not working for us. We might be able to flush out the people wielding hidden power over our desires and over the way our memories get metabolized into identity.
Q: So in that light, how do you think about religion and its ability to preserve symbolism?
In essence, this is what religion is: not just a set of beliefs, but a long-running symbolic encoding. No one really cares to remember that Jesus was executed for flipping tables in a market outside a sacred temple. Zealots and Roman opportunists later attached symbols of divine purity to that emotive act, and out of that synthesis they birthed a powerful opiate that has taken more than a millennium to flush from our system.
Q: Where did you get the idea for your next project Jailbreak!, and how does it carry these post-societal ideas?
Jailbreak! honestly comes from my current obsession with Infinite Jest and noticing its sort of encyclopedic style as a better vessel for these “post-societal” thoughts I’ve been developing. We’re living in a time where, instead of everyone starting their cybernetic journeys from the same “homepage,” we each have our own domain, our own society of one, pulled by strings we can’t see, along a track laid down by the larger system.
The result is a loss of resonance. Cause and effect no longer speak to each other. The exhaustion and discontentment you feel are the residue of a greater collapse: declining birth rates, increased income inequality, an economy built on derivatives. In this slow American decline, you can trace the cracks back to flaws in the structural design. I think we have the tools to correct it, but it’s really a question of getting out of our own way.
Q: You said this greater collapse makes us exhausted. What do you mean by that?
I think the first literary character I ever really identified with was Meursault, in Camus’s The Stranger. His exhaustion with the postmodern condition—the obvious roots of our pain combined with his powerlessness inside the social inheritance he’s stuck with—shows up as this sick kind of rebellious indifference. It isn’t a lack of care; it’s a resignation of meaning.
The connections he has left—to pleasure, to nature—are about all we get when our actions can’t change the structure or culture we live within. That’s where a lot of us are now. We’re exhausted, not just from work or politics, but from living in a loop that keeps asking for performance without ever returning real meaning.
Q: Once we admit we’re exhausted, your next question is “What works?” What are you really asking there?
My thinking went to this notion that if algorithms and systems rule our lives, how would they approach ethics? Since we literally require millions of GPUs to command our environs these days, it feels right to build an ethical framework based on the recursive loops in their programming.
What is the “source code” that explains how structures get steered to drive inequality? What’s the blueprint that warps desire and memory so that neighbor is turned against neighbor in this new cold civil war? I’m less interested in another moral sermon and more interested in mapping the architecture: which loops generate exploitation, which loops could be tuned toward repair.
Q: If society isn’t allowing us to approach transcendence, what goal are you writing toward instead?
The problem, I realized, is that most philosophical frameworks—from Kierkegaard to Kant—treat transcendence as a side of the equation, a clean endpoint. For most of its history, we’ve approached the absurd existence Camus describes with the built-in assumption that anything blocking us from transcendence is something to rebel against.
But today, when so much rebellion feels scripted—when “revolution” often means executing the same constitution in a new skin—we still haven’t absorbed the idea that not all transcendences are created or experienced equally. Transcendence isn’t just a goal; it’s a kind of structure.
Postmodernism and post-structuralism told us that language has been used to corrupt structures: racist housing laws, the abolition of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the PATRIOT Act. We took that to mean that any structure is bad. We’ve spent thirty years since the fall of the Soviet Union building and breaking structures with no end goal—fighting for the sake of fighting—because we know we’re not fair. We probably have religion to thank for that, too. As I said, it’s still a guiding light for about two-thirds of the country.
So the goal for me is not transcendence, but coherence: a way of living inside the loop where our structures don’t lie to us, where ethics is less about purity and more about how well the system returns a signal.