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Alt Tyrant

by Hugh Blanton

When Giancarlo DiTrapano died unexpectedly in March of 2021 it brought to an end one of alt-lit’s most promising book publishers, Tyrant Books. Larger, more traditional publishers were quick to poach Tyrant’s talent; Penguin signed Gabriel Smith and Honor Levy before you could say ‘worldwide book distribution.’ Honor Levy’s first book, somewhat unimaginatively titled My First Book, made quite a critical splash when it came out in May of 2024. Readers over the age of forty were required to make multiple pit stops at Google to look up the words of Levy’s internet zoomer slang. One of the Tyrant writers, however, took their book to another alt-lit press. Amygdala Press released Trauma in Metro in 2023.

Theo Thimo said they titled their book after a headline they came across about the April 2017 bombing in a St. Petersburg subway, ‘Trauma in Metro.’ There are many current events mentioned throughout the book, sort of like a metronome helping the reader follow the timeline of the stories and poems within, such as the shooting at the GOP baseball practice in June of 2017 or the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013. The difference here, in Metro, being that Thimo isn’t using current events to moralize or appear profound. Metro opens up and we become intimately familiar with our main character within just two sentences when we learn they are masturbating and have been educated under ‘NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND.’ That’s one of the most prominent characteristics of Thimo’s prose—they get a lot across with just a few words.

These books from the DiTrapano era are sometimes referred to as ‘internet books,’ and indeed Levy’s book revolves around smart phones and texting. Trauma in Metro, despite its Gen-Z voice, is not an internet book, in fact there’s scant mention of smart phones (the protagonist does, however, have an online girlfriend). In a 2024 interview in Village Voice, Thimo said the Dimes Square crowd are losers, like a bunch of high school nerds who received conservative think-tank money. (Indeed, Honor Levy’s short story ‘written by sad girl in the third person’ makes a mockery of trigger warnings and her story ‘Cancel Me’ takes a tepid shot at mocking cancel culture.) The main character in Trauma in Metro, ostensibly Thimo themself (Thimo uses they/them pronouns, saying ‘no thank you’ to gender), describes their New York City digs as something like a Portland Antifa house: ‘of the house’s nine residents, three, including parrot and its owner, pay no rent, two, this includes me, pay little to none, another three are making haste attempts to forgo their lease, coy who just left for his job at the library and feeds me a single meal a day since inviting me in spring, and taylor for some reason lives in a van on the sidewalk outside our house.’ Thimo shuns capitalization (coy and taylor would have been Coy and Taylor under a more conventional author) for the most part. It only shows up here in news headlines and recreational drug abbreviations. Very few periods, too, leaving the reader to guess when a sentence ends, which most of the time seems to be marked by a double return.

Trauma in Metro is surprisingly humane despite a few stretches of vacuousness. ‘but this poem will be the proof that i was once born and will one day die,’ they mention once, and ‘my language and culture grown from scant communication with an estranged family.’ Thimo doesn’t skimp on the humor either: ‘ ‘forgive me lord,’ he thinks, ‘for what i must yabba dabba do’ ‘ and when a person walks into a bicycle repair shop to buy a new wheel but doesn’t know what size wheel his (or maybe a her, they are also shopping for dresses, too) bike has. I had a feeling of disconnect while reading Metro as if our narrator was disinterested. In fact, as our narrator lies to a friend, telling her they can’t spend the night because they have a date, they realize in the Uber home, ‘i’m acknowledging what has seemed a notable, persistent disconnect i have experienced w loved ones throughout my life.’ This disconnect, however, doesn’t devolve into solipsistic melancholia, if anything the narrator could use a little solipsism—at times they seem disconnected even from themself.

Thimo’s high energy prose doesn’t leave one confused, the stories keep moving along at a fast pace without the reader ever wondering what the heck is going on, such as the prose in Levy’s My First Book sometimes did. Slang is kept to a minimum and when readers come across O-PCE, or 4-HO-MET, or DCK it’s obvious that they are referring to party drugs even if the reader is not familiar with the drug scene. Thimo moves us from a depressed person stuck on the couch, to an online relationship, to a trip on the other side of the country in a paragraph sentence:

‘w few financial or romantic prospects, a recently unemployed writer lies in a depressed stupor before developing an online relationship w a 30 yr old research chemist in SF, conversing for a period of months as she begins developing chronic pain and purchasing him a ticket to the bay area, taking the BART towards mission district where the operator on the intercom announces the NBA championship victory to cheers from the passengers and fans swarming the subway car ‘you’ve come all this way,’ the chemist tells the 19 yr old as they roam her apt complex courtyard, ‘aren’t you ever going to kiss me?’ ‘

Such high-activity zooming prose runs the risk of omission and the need for retroactive continuity, but Thimo gives us everything we need to follow and understand the story. Abbreviating ‘with’ with a ‘w’ gives it its internet tone (Thimo is just as likely to use ‘with’ as they are to abbreviate it).

Thimo was once arrested for spray painting their poetry on the side of building—while in possession of narcotics. They describe Trauma in Metro as ‘ace coded’ (people on the asexual spectrum), even though there is plenty of masturbation taking place. The longest section of the book is the acknowledgments section going on for four pages with a lot of [I’ve removed this person] strewn about it. They put their devotion to poetry on display with a tattoo across their knuckles: ‘poet.’

PS: On February 23, 2026, Tyrant Books announced it may resume operations. Luke Goebel, who formerly worked as an unpaid intern at Tyrant, has acquired fifty percent of the company. The other fifty percent is owned by Matthew Johnson who previously worked in Tyrant’s acquisitions.

Trauma in Metro
by Theo Thimo, 66 pages
Amydala Books, $12.00