All The Cameras In My Room

Reviews Helen Chazan | September 15, 2026 We are being watched. In his new collection of short stories, Michael Deforge takes this for granted. We are being watched in secret, surveilled, monetized, and viewed in public as well, all of us being a performer of some sort. The stories in All The Cameras In My Room work through many iterations of being seen, and many different responses. Are we aware that we're being watched? Do we resent being watched? Do we enjoy it? Is it scary? Exciting? Erotic? The opening story, “Bugged,” returns to the fantasy terrain heavily travelled in Deforge's prior collection Heaven No Hell — the sudden collapse of capitalist society and the radical reformation of our norms, in this case in the form of a disease literally killing all technology. As blood oozes from cracked cellphone monitors and fried toasters, an unseen population is confronted by just how much is machine, how many things are devices, man made eyes and digits everywhere. The protagonist of the collection's near-eponymous “All The Cameras In My Apartment” is likewise hyper-vigilant to the presence of man-made devices and their many perceptions, his tour of all the cameras in his apartment ...