Christian McDonough is a twentysomething writer from Texas, a writer of one thousand poems, likely more, at this point. He has also written a novel, his first, coming out in just a few weeks. His Cunus. I reached out to Christian when he asked if anyone wanted to review his upcoming release, entitled Cunus, which he kept referring to as “my Cunus.” I kept repeating the phrase in my head over and over and laughing, it became a half-wit mantra I would mutter aloud, referring to any object around my house. An evocative word, something vaguely sexual and furtive, almost a medical term, almost something uttered to a psychotherapist. I need help with my Cunus. Christian was kind enough to show me his Cunus, along with a secondary text, a book of responses by other people who had seen Christian’s Cunus, with Christian responding to their responses.

Cunus starts off with a preface, in which Christian describes the process of writing the book over 29 days, stating that his aim “was to fully express and transcend myself, to go beyond my limits and change”. He explains that during this marathon month, everything vile and hidden was expunged from his soul and laid out on the page, as a sort of cleansing ritual. A way to feel free, unencumbered, lightened, a way to move on. What follows, aptly enough, is a difficult and unpleasant read. 

Cunus is a novel, something akin to autofiction, more akin to a passed kidney stone. The first cunushalf is a reflux attack of various repugnant thoughts and sensations from Christian’s childhood, clearly churning in his stomach for decades. There are a lot of circular, sexual preoccupations, as you could likely gather from the title alone. There’s imagined incest, crude comments about former classmates and teachers, an omnipresent and cloying castration fetish. Each of these recollections is usually preceded or followed by a dramaturgid aside, in which a motley crew of split personalities address each other and Christian himself, often tormenting him for his transgressions. These juxtaposed scenes of jerkoff juvenalia and hallucinatory transcendence produce a jarring effect, but also beg an important question: what is this guy so upset about? We reach the answer near the end of Book I, in the bulbous folds of “Blaureene”. It is in this chapter that we find Christian at his most lucid, as he walks us headlong into the heart of the Cunus, the center of the spiral: a breakup. A pained, piddling breakup with a woman named Maureen. And as soon as the name is evoked like a keyword which rips the world asunder, we careen off the meatcliff into the Latter Cunus.

Book II of Cunus takes everything from the preceding pages and mulches it into a bufotenin fuckstorm. When describing it to outsiders, the only thing I could muster was “It’s like Burroughs’ cut-up work written by a guy who seems like he’s trying to get over a really bad porn addiction.” I don’t think this does Cunus any justice, but it also doesn’t give it any clemency. Rapid fire scenes of frogs devouring each other whole, kingdoms rising and falling, clown torture, are interrupted with scenes of Christian having sex with his real life girlfriend, waxing rhapsodic about the size of her breasts. The kaleidoscope turns, Christian runs from a zombie nightmare, then immediately attends a film screening of his own life with his ghoulish interlocutor. There is a sort of flashbulb brilliance in these scenes, despite their overall unsavory nature; language dissolves into a goopuddle, then stretches out into regimented lines of a play, as each of Christian’s shardselves take turns violating each other in the pursuit of conjunction, putrefaction, finally coagulation.

I was surprised to find that the dyad to Cunus, its Response Project, was more than double the length of the primary text itself. It is composed of several short works reacting directly to the Cunus, the contributors mostly sourced from a Twitter(?) groupchat. Most of the responders are other writers or editors, there’s a really great response from Burial Magazine’s Z.H. Gill, there’s an entire Kenji Siratori novella. Some responders attempt to situate Cunus within a literary subculture, some express their disgust and bewilderment, others use the opportunity to craft their piecemeal vision of the Christian life. The most interesting responses come from figures in Christian’s real life; there’s a response from his brother, one from his former therapist, even one from his current girlfriend, who features heavily in the novel. Reading these initially gave me the feeling that they were some sort of elaborate ruse, Christian pulling the puppet strings on another set of marionettes, but there’s no real reason to believe that he wouldn’t expose himself to his family and friends. To each of these thoughtful (and occasionally thoughtless) responses, Christian proffers his own, mostly in the form of either defense or admission, but sometimes in the form of a smutty sonnet, a sigil, or a slice of another Cunus. 

Cunus and its Response is the beast with two backs, separate yet inseparable, two sides of the same loin. After finishing, part of me feels empty and used. Christian spews and screams in his cribsty and makes all his friends watch, then makes them write a book report on all that they’ve seen, which is exactly what I find myself doing now. It feels like the most egregious end result of narcissism, vulnerable and belligerent in equal measure. But even if this is true (which it probably is), I feel the Cunus is instructive, that one could learn from the Cunus. The disdain I feel for most works of contemporary “transgressive autofiction” comes from a tendency of their authors to take specific “rough patches” in their lives (drug addiction, sex work, etc) and to elevate them to an objective principle of Higher Evil; look how depraved I am, I was, look at all I’ve wrought, isn’t it horrible, so cruel? In reality, these instances in their lives are banal, and their reflections on them are not particularly interesting; they’ve opted to build a fictional edifice of their lives in order to provide themselves with some sort of validation, to make their experiences more interesting. Less graciously, most of these people are lying, and just writing pornography. Christian is a good, honest boy. He doesn’t lie. The sucking cunuswound is a maudlin recounting of a failed love, there’s no big, gratuitous reveal of a life of sex slavery, of irrevocable trauma. These are incredibly banal occurrences over the course of a life, and Christian’s emotional response to them makes them feel like truly psychotic issues to have. And he does write it as pornography, but of a fractalized, fuckbrained type. The emphasis is placed less on fictionalizing his own life to gussy it up, but on painstakingly recording every loose nut that falls off the wheel, every temper tantrum, every repressed slur, every pornsick phantasia. And maybe it was indeed therapeutic. 

Afterwards, I found myself idly reflecting on my own experiences in a Cunusian register, turning over every slimy stone to find a bugsmear, and it felt cathartic. It felt good. Returning to the response project, I noticed a disquieting line in its preface, where Christian reflects on the work in toto, confessing “I don’t know myself any better now, do I? I’m only more sure of the nothing that I am. This is good”. This is bad, I think. It feels bad. It gives me the impression that Cunus is a blown wad, a premature finish, that this attempt to overcome base impulses would come to an ignominious end, sinking deeper and deeper into the mire. I dwelled on this, and I wanted answers; not answers to why Cunus was made, but if the conversion had been true, if I were witness to a Saul becoming Paul. I could have sent over an email to Christian asking him this directly, but I didn’t want to face the possibility of a fawning, self-flagellating response, so I decided to take matters into my own hands. I decided to act on my will. I decided to transform Christian into Mister Cunus, who after all, is the one I’ve been speaking to regarding this review. I will remove Christian from the equation entirely, and I will allow Mister Cunus to speak. 

Below is an interview with Mister Cunus, a creation of my own, named after Christian’s current handle on social media. Mister Cunus will now speak in the language that I have provided to him. Mister Cunus is now mine. And in the spirit of these Cunic Wars, I present to you,

ORGAN BANK: Welcome to our Oubliette, Mister Cunus, please make yourself at home. When I think of your work, I think about a lineage of ejaculatory literature, a tradition that Cunus somehow wriggled itself into. You have Guyotat writing Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers as a means of coping with the carnage of the Algerian War, others before with WWII. On a lesser scale, you have Hubert Selby Jr. writing The Room still drying out from heroin and alcohol. And then we have Cunus. So what exactly is your problem?

MISTER CUNUS: I was raped 52 times in the back of a gay bar. There was no safeword. I went back a week later and was raped 52 times again.

OB: Wow, that’s really interesting. Not really. Did you just make that up? Do you think you need to be a rape victim to write about rape? That doesn’t really sound like self-overcoming. It sounds like slave morality. I took you to be an honest guy with an honest book.

MC: You’re right, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!!! I was just trying to fit in.

OB: It’s okay. For all of the abjection in Cunus, the actual transgressions relived aren’t really that crazy. You agonize for pages and pages about making some off-color jokes in school, or thinking about your teacher’s ass. 

MC: I say horrible things, horrible, awful things. I think awful things. I don’t want to say them or think them anymore. I needed to express them. But it makes me feel terrible.

OB: Not going to play into this, so I’ll keep talking about Cunus. There are long parts of your Cunus that are structured like a play; I saw in one of your interviews that you were inspired by Polish avant-garde poets and playwrights. Those parts read to me like Cho Seung-hui’s plays, like the one where the son accuses the dad of molesting him and the mom just responds “Oh shit! Oops. Sorry, John”. 

MC: The name sounds familiar.

OB: He was the Virginia Tech shooter, he wrote them in his creative writing class, I think that one was the deadliest school shooting of all time. I think he might have shot up that class specifically. Crazy stuff. Actually, Cunus reminds me a bit of Matthew Harris’ “Death Sentences”, do you know about that? This guy who was a lecturer at UCLA wrote it and sent it around before making terroristic threats towards the school and ended up getting arrested. I think he’s on a long-term psych hold. There’s sections of Cunus where the writing is really similar. 

MC: That’s terrible.

OB: Or Mitchell Heisman, the guy who shot himself on Harvard campus in broad daylight, he wrote this really long suicide note and sent it around to his friends before he died, where he goes step by step through the philosophical reasoning he made before deciding to kill himself. He seemed upset about a lot of things. 

MC: Are you saying that I’m like a mass shooter, that I want to traumatize people?

OB: Well no, those guys seem to have a lot of social and emotional problems, or I guess had them, but it doesn’t really seem like you do. You have relative success within the sphere you operate in and seem to have a lot of friends, friends willing to review your book and write about it, enough to fill up another whole book. Maybe emotional problems.

MC: I don’t even know some of those people, I said that in the response project. Why are you acting like I don’t have anything wrong with me? 

OB: Well, you don’t need to get mad about it. We’re trying to have a conversation. I do think there’s something deeply wrong with you.

MC: But why do you get to say that?

OB: That’s how this goes. I get to depict you as the histrionic wallower and me as the cool-headed, self-abnegating interviewer treating it like state mandated sex offender therapy.

MC: Isn’t that a violation? You’re violating me.

OB: Sure, but what are you going to do about it? You don’t have a voice here.

MC: But you aren’t calm and collected. You’re being cruel. You’re being mean. This whole idea is mean. 

OB: Yeah, probably. I’m just trying to figure out where this all comes from. Because it does seem like you’re looking for a response, maybe not a traumatic one. You seem to want people to see you as disgusting and abject, as beyond repair, as inherently repulsive.

MC: I am disgusting. I am repellent. I’m a filthy retarded faggot.

OB: Do you see what the problem is? It’s like when a guy comes up to you on the street jacking off, and you yell at him to get the fuck away, and he jacks off faster because he also gets off to being publicly humiliated. Like, what do you do in that situation?

MC: Maybe try jacking off yourself.

OB: I don’t want to! I would rather not publicly masturbate. I’m indulging even by doing this. 

MC: Did you even like anything about my Cunus? It sounds like you just hate me, hate everything about me.

OB: I liked the part about watching gay porn for the first time, I had a similar experience. Seeing two guys on steroids all huge kissing each other on the mouth. I thought it was horrific. I was in art class with this juggalo kid who maybe had fetal alcohol syndrome, he would draw furry porn in front of everyone.

MC: Did he draw them fucking eachother in the ass? Did he draw them with big cocks?

OB: He would draw them with human feet and make the feet really big with stink lines, and draw them drinking and shooting heroin or smoking meth.

MC: Did you want to have sex with him?

OB: Not really no, I wasn’t attracted to him and also it seemed unethical anyway. I liked the more poetic writing too. The fake Nietzsche parts were funny, was that meant as a joke?

MC: No, I was being serious. I wanted to talk about pushing past my own boundaries, the memories that limit me, that keep me writhing as a cockpile fiddling on the floor.

OB: That sucks. I was hoping it was a joke. That’s what I find irritating, there’s a lot of grandiose talk about ecstatic rebirth, cycles of degeneration and regeneration, but at center of these rotations is the fact that you dated a woman who probably has BPD. I think I’ve done that like, at least 5 times. 

MC: That sounds awful.

OB: It’s fine, it’s not that big of a deal, which is my point. And the childhood dream stuff too; when I was a kid, I used to have recurring, vivid night terrors, like full blown hallucinations, of the zombies from Zelda coming into my bed and ripping me to pieces and sticking their fingers in the stumps of my limbs and peeling my face off. And eventually I just started repeating the word “erase” out loud at night and focused so hard my vision would become gray and I’d pass out. The zombievision went away after a while forever. You could have just dealt with it that way, right?

MC: It doesn’t really seem like you dealt with it, you just buried it. What if they were there that whole time and you just got lucky, every time? What if they were picking the skinbitties off of your bones right now?

OB: But why do you need to tell everyone about it? Why do you need the attention?

MC: Why are you telling me this?

OB: I don’t know. I just glanced over the response project again and I realized someone else beat me to the punch with a fake interview. I think it’s fine because that person just took sections of your book for your responses, whereas I’m actually talking to you right now, so it’s different.

MC: Are you telling yourself that or me?

OB: I’m not really that worried about the novelty of it. It’s a different approach.

MC: Do you think that this is going anywhere? Do you think you’re getting anything out of this, is it bringing you closer to some sort of truth? Some sort of higher purpose, higher meaning? Or is it wasting your time? It’s definitely wasting mine.

OB: I don’t know if there is a truth to find, I think the thing your last therapist said about avoiding vulnerability is real, I don’t think you’d give me a straight answer in the first place. All I want to know is, are you better now? Are we going to see a sparkly, new Christian, naked as the day you were born, in front of God and everyone?

MC: There will never be an end to what seeps out of my Cunus. Cunus and Recunus. There can always be more to say, more to expose.

OB: Will it be a cleaner Cunus?

MC: Nothing can be cleaned when it was once dirtied.

OB: That’s fucking stupid. That’s the point of cleaning. That’s why you clean anything.

MC: Let a hundred cunusbloom.

After wrapping up the interview with Mister Cunus, I did feel more free, more light, and decided to give Christian himself an opportunity to speak. Below is Christian’s response to my response.

“Here’s my response!!!

MY RESPONSE

I want to try to overcome my tendencies with these responses to responses, especially since your response/review is in response to the response project itself.

I think my way in is with your comment on the preface to the response project, that me being more aware of the nothing that I am “is bad.”

I was not entirely sure what I wanted when I began the Cunus Response Project, I think there was something sado-masochistic in it, because of all the shame I felt about my cunus at the time, wanting to be berated for writing what I wrote and wanting to force others to take it, secretly hoping they’d love me/it for it.

There’s a consistent feeling whenever I receive a cunus response. A kind of deadening, an inability to interact with the world around me for a bit as I think about how I was perceived. I retreat into myself instinctually, to process it.

This is part of what I was getting at in the response project preface. Ultimately, it feels as though it means nothing, in that the responses as a whole do not have a concrete meaning for me that I can clearly expound upon, but they have an experiential meaning which does something to me over time. I feel as though it helps me to overcome my need for attention, my need to be perceived, my need for love or hate, for pure sensation.

For years, I’ve wanted people to love me and adore me, to be moved by me and think that I am important and special. I imagined, like I’m sure many people do, that this would complete me in some way, that something would change and I’d be forever happy.

Some part of me has always known that this would not be the case, but I hadn’t experienced enough of the feeling to know it properly. I think I have now.

Beyond this, in coming to know myself all the more, I have also come to realize that the more one knows themselves, the less they are that thing. You can only be yourself insofar as what you are being is unknown to you. The self-awareness of an act distances you from the act itself and you are then performing yourself rather than being yourself. Further, the more you become truly aware of yourself, the more you change and develop. I’ve realized then that, at bottom, I am nothing (just like everyone else) — that is to say, we are infinite and everything, we are endless possibility.

But don’t get me wrong! My desire to be loved, to have attention, etc., and the ambition towards it, has only grown all the more! I’m just more honest about it now. I’ve accepted it. I want to be seen as a Godly, Saintly figure, or some kind of ~guru~, and I’m hoping now, in saying this, that people will see it and be excited about it for me, or disgusted, or slightly irritated, etc. I’ve been looking into different recent quasi-religious figures who built little followings around them, trying to figure out how they did it and seeing if I might be able to do the same. Why not!

I’m thinking Gurdjieff is the best figure for me to learn from. I think I can relate to him in a significant way, he was a trickster, like me and Witkacy.

Again, though, I want to do all these things for confusing, comical, ultimately unknowable reasons. And I want to be nice and good, too!”

Cunus and the Cunus Response Project will be available for all to gawk at through Anxiety Press on July 27th, 2026, which is also Christian’s birthday. You can keep up with the news at his Cunusite.