It is the summer of 2020 and Beverly Jane Ornett is stuck in Mobile, Alabama; unemployed, broke and terminally online.

She is desperately addicted to her poetry collective, group chats, bad habits and people she probably ought to stop thinking about. Then an unfamiliar account begins messaging her, asking for favours and leaking her secrets. Whether it is a troll, a stalker, a demon or something more banal and therefore worse becomes the engine of Joseph Worthen’s extremely online Southern Gothic debut. 

What starts as a kind of shabby cyber-mystery quickly broadens into an account of the psychic sludge of pandemic-era internet life. Bev moves through webcam clubs, viral musicians, DSA circles, shitty apartments and half-abandoned online selves with the competence of a detective who is, unfortunately, Bev. Contemporary without desperately advertising its contemporaneity, All Trap No Bait is especially good on the internet as a place where nothing really disappears.

First edition, August 2025. Tortoise Books, USA. Paperback, 308pp. Near fine. Very light shelf and handling wear; clean internally.