A striking collection of interconnected stories which use horror to critique the absurdities of philosophy.

Notes from the Crawl Room employs the lens and methods of horror writing to critique the excesses and absurdities of philosophy. Each story reveals disastrous and de-humanising effects of philosophies that are separated from real, lived experience (e.g. the absurdity of arguing over a sentence in Kant while the world burns around us). From a Kafkaesque exploration of administrative absurdities to the horrors of discursive violence, white supremacy and the living spectres of patriarchy, A.M. Moskovitz doesn't shy away from addressing the complex aspects of our lives. In addition to offering often humourous critiques of philosophy, these works are also, somewhat ironically, pieces of philosophy themselves. Each story seeks to move a subject area forward offering the reader the capacity to think through ideas in a weirder and more open way than traditional philosophy usually allows. An antidote to philosophy that seeks to close down and shut off the imaginative potential of human thought, Notes from the Crawl Room revels in the unsettling and creative potential of stories for revealing what thinking philosophically might really mean.

"Kafka wrote that ‘we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us’. Notes from the Crawl Room makes its mark more insidiously, uncovering the wounds that already exist in us and our institutions, those parts of ourselves we prefer to disavow. Disappearances, burnings, hauntings, and the violence inherent in reason: A.M. Moskowitz’s vanished selves exemplify the words of the playwright Sarah Kane, another master explorer of the psyche’s nightmarish corridors: ‘It is myself I have never met, whose face is pasted on the underside of my mind.’ These are tales of psychic horror that creep under the skin and burrow their way inexorably to the heart." - Emily Berry, poet and editor

"These uncanny stories of philosophical horror surprise, delight and perplex. Notes from the Crawl Room is at once a warning of what happens when the philosophical impulse is taken too far, and a reminder of how seductive that impulse can be." - Amia Srinivasan, Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory, All Souls College, University of Oxford, UK