Every century produces its monuments to exhaustion. The modern and postmodern twentieth century had Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, The Man Without Qualities, Recognitions, Gravity’s Rainbow, Terra Nostra, Bottom’s Dream, culminating with Infinite Jess and 2666. All of them encyclopaedic megatexts that sought to record the totality of knowledge or to dramatise the impossibility of the undertaking. The late twentieth and early twenty-first century turned to recursive archives — William T. Vollmann’s Rising Up and Rising Down, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves and The Familiar, Alan Moore’s Jerusalem, and John Trefry’s Massive — works less encyclopaedic than labyrinthine, obsessed less with knowledge as mastery than with the architectures of its collapse.

Louis Armand’s “Golemgrad Pentalogy”* belongs in this lineage, but with a decisive mutation. Comprising The Combinations (2016), Death Mask Sutra (2018), Vampyr / Glitchhead (2021-2023), and A Tomb in H-Section (2025), the sequence does not aspire to modernist totality or coherence. It does not even aspire to irony in the postmodern sense. Instead, it operates as a necropolis: a mausoleum of texts, fragments, revenants. Its organising principle lies less in encyclopaedic accumulation or ironic deconstruction than in recursive implosion, or in other words, its distinction is not simply its scale or extent but its necromodernism.

If modernism sought to break with the past, and postmodernism to recycle it in irony, necromodernism inhabits its graveyard. It is the condition of writing after futurity, the persistence of literature in its own ruins. Armand’s sequence exemplifies this not only stylistically (montage, détournement, glitch) but narratively: its characters are structurally posthumous, its plots recursive, its world-building a spectacle of ruin.

The purpose of this essay is to articulate the Pentalogy as a necromodernist megatext. This will require us to move away from linear, sequential readings and toward a recursive framework in which characters, motifs, and structures return as revenants. Along the way, a new critical vocabulary will be developed, with a lexicon of concepts such as golemic ontology, thanatotechnics, ruinality, metastatic narrativity, and posthumous subjectivity, capable of describing the operations of Armand’s project and situating it within a global archive of necromodernist writing.[1]

 

Golemic Ontology

Necromodernism begins in the recognition that modernism’s faith in progress and postmodernism’s faith in play are equally bankrupt. What remains is persistence: the survival of literature as an undead organism feeding on its own cadaver.

Ramiro Sanchiz has gestured toward this condition, describing necromodernism as the chronological condition in which the future can be accessed only by means of recycling.[2]  Joyelle McSweeney’s notion of the necropastoral—the “political-aesthetic zone in which the fact of mankind’s depredations cannot be separated from an experience of ‘nature’ which is poisoned, mutated, aberrant, spectacular, full of ill effects and affects”^[3]—described a natural world decomposing through language. Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia offered a related figure: “blobjectivity, or the logics of petropolitical undercurrent,” and oil as the “petropolitical undead,”[4] a substance seeping through history, animating its ruins.

Louis Armand’s work radicalises these insights by insisting that writing itself is necrotic: literature is not about the undead, it is undead. Across the Pentalogy, this necromodernism takes on multiple forms: the golem as artificial life, the vampyr as cultural parasite, the glitch as systemic seizure, the tomb as textual infrastructure. But perhaps most radical of all is the condition of its characters: the Prof, Němec, Offensia, and their many doppelgangers and mirror reflections that recur after their deaths, persisting as revenants within the cycle. Narrative itself becomes a necromantic process, telling stories animated by ghosts, characters stitched together from dead body parts, plots built from textual scraps.

The Pentalogy as a whole takes its name from Golemgrad aka Golem City, the recurrent / recursive site of all five “novels.” As is known to every Prague schoolchild, the golem is an artificial creature in Jewish mysticism, made from clay and animated by the shem, a magic word placed in its mouth. It is a creature literally undead, ready for reanimation, dependent on inscription for life. In the Pentalogy, the golem figures the text itself: an artificial organism made of fragments, animated by words, condemned to repetition. Just as the golem survives only with the word in its mouth, so the Pentalogy survives only through its inscriptions, citations, and fragments.

In The Combinations, Němec describes Golem City less as an urban space than as labyrinthine ruin. The city itself is golemic, animated by inscription, condemned to repetition, to circulation without progress. In A Tomb in H-Section, the ontology is made explicit, with Golemgrad depicted as the city of no future, its streets catacombs, its people revenants. No birth takes place there that would not already be a death, the city depicted as a mausoleum, an infrastructure of the posthumous. It only recurs, a necromodernist space where temporality itself has collapsed into ruin. Hence the text’s golemic ontology: to live in Golemgrad is to persist posthumously, as text rather than as flesh. The city itself is a necromantic machine, a golem whose animation is indistinguishable from its ruination.

In its golemic ontology, the text is neither alive nor dead, but constantly reanimated by inscription staging a subjectivity that is animation without life. Literature here is a necrotic machine sustained by its fragments, condemned to repeat them. Across the Pentalogy, Golemgrad itself functions as both setting and cipher: a ruinous city that is less a geographical place than an allegorical corpse, a necropolis through which characters and motifs endlessly circulate.

 

Thanatotechnics

The Combinations, the cycle’s Urtext, is a combinatorial machine whose 888 pages in 64 sections echo the hexagrams of the I-Ching. Its architecture is one of excess and exhaustion: a textual edifice built from cross-references, détournements, and archival debris, where death is not just an event but also an infrastructure.

The two protagonists, Professor Hájek (aka the Prof) and Němec — the intellectual and the fixer — are already marked for termination. Rather than by narrative, their fates are sealed by the structure itself: a combinatorial system that ensures every possibility will eventually be played out. When for the first time, Němec “suddenly” appears at the Prof’s doorstep, his arrival comes as no surprise but rather as a pre-calculated move anticipated from afar:

His sudden appearance, therefore, might’ve surprised the Old Man, but it didn’t. Not in the slightest. It was, to quote a well-worn turn of phrase, as if he (Němec) had been expected all along: the anticipated outcome, you might say, of a gambit calculated to remain imperceptible till long after the fact & even in hindsight cloaked in uncertainties (The Combinations, 85).

This is thanatotechnics in practice: the merging of death (thanatos) and technology (technē), the writing no longer an expression of life but the machinery of death, the plot functioning as a machine designed to exhaust possibility. Characters are less agents than operators within a system that has already run its course. The “machine” is terminal, and the novel’s architecture is its mausoleum.

The bulk of The Combinations follows Němec navigating the labyrinth of Prague, photographs and manuscripts in hand, grasping after clues that dissolve into mere “fabric of supposition & circumstance” (The Combinations, 871). Like Vollmann’s historians of atrocity or Danielewski’s archivists of haunted houses, Němec is caught in an epistemic cul-de-sac: every image, every archive, already points to its own absence. His death in The Combinations is therefore less a disappearance than an erasure by over-inscription — he becomes another fragment in the megatext’s archive of lost causes.

 

Imagerubble

If The Combinations builds its tomb from combinatorics, Death Mask Sutra stages its collapse — a textual ruin built from detritus, bricolage, and détournement. Its fragments resemble recovered scraps from some obliterated archive. Terrorist communiqués appear side by side with porn-script fragments, instructions for torture, or grotesque détournements of sacred texts. Its coherence lies precisely in its incoherence, in the way it accumulates ruins without synthesis. We encounter the principle of ruinality in the very opening already:

Y2K (19100)

“Am I alone?”

The survivor wants to know if she’s alone.

That was then.

Out there, GOLEMGRAD, KAFKAVILLE, PLAGUE CITY, take yr pick. The vital signs flatlined a decade ago. 10 years then, 10 days now. Time getting shorter. History would be over before the century was.

I was working blind.

In her mind she’d once again become an instrument. She found the flashlight in her right coat pocket & stepped over the debris. Picture a map, the secret destination marked by an X. Blank thresholds of deep image-rubble. The roads there stand still, right when laws are reversed. Between one world & the next. Jerking on its wires. Rubbing out the body-chalk.

Teleology = History’s ghost.

Voices like flies beneath dead halogen (Death Mask Sutra, 7).

Death Mask Sutra opens on an already posthumous world, in which what was once living culture now exists on the life support of its own systems: writing, media, computation. Armand’s “thanatotechnics” is precisely this: technology as the continuation of death by other means. Rather than kill life, machines perpetuate its corpse.

The first word, “Y2K (19100)”, sets the tone: an anachronistic date glitch, as if time itself has been mis-coded. The apocalypse of the millennium has already happened; we are living in its debug mode. Chronology has turned to loop, and its compression of temporal scale—decade to day—is the necromodern temporal signature: history as recursive countdown, a process of continuous ending. The “survivor” who asks “Am I alone?” is less a character than a process within this system: a human remnant checking for a signal. The voice is self-consciously cinematic, but what it pictures is debris or “image-rubble”, a coinage that perfectly condenses Armand’s thanatotechnic logic: image as rubble, technology as ruin-producing apparatus. The text itself behaves like a disaster simulation still running after the collapse it simulated.

The passage’s recurrent imagery of broken circuitry and anatomical residue fuses the organic and the mechanical. Death here is reanimation through apparatus, the corpse jerking because the current hasn’t stopped, the machine as necrotic extension of the body, animating what should rest. Armand’s equation—“Teleology = History’s ghost”—is the passage’s hinge and perhaps its key aphorism. It names the necromodern condition: purpose, progress, direction—all now spectral. Teleology remains, but only as a hauntology. The modernist belief in history as meaningful movement survives as an echo in the media static. The next line clinches the diagnosis: “Voices like flies beneath dead halogen.” Even illumination, that Enlightenment metaphor, has gone necrotic. What once gave light now breeds insects.

Where modernist megatexts sought encyclopaedia, and postmodern texts labyrinth, Death Mask Sutra insists on ruin. Its form is that of accumulation without order, a necropolis of genres and discourses. The “death mask” is thus not only a theme but a figure for the text itself: a plaster cast of a face that is already gone, a residue without substance.

 

Entropology

Vampyr / Glitchhead exemplifies necromodernism in its diptych form: the vampire as allegory of cultural parasitism, the glitch as ontology of systemic breakdown. The two necromodernist principles at work are cultural survival by way of vampirising its own clichés, and the persistence of writing through breakdown, using glitch as mode of survival. The two texts are linked less by plot than by recurrence, refrains and systemic collapse, like exploitation cinema recycled into grotesque montage:  “COMMIE KILLER BLEEDS BANKERS DRY […] CORPORATE BLOODSUCKERS GET IT IN THE NECK (Vampyr, 418). These headlines don’t advance a plot — they are the plot.

The vampyr here is not so much a monster but a mode of circulation: endless reproduction of images feeding on themselves. Death is no longer event but medium — a transmissive layer through which the characters circulate like corrupted data packets. The “gothic” qualities of Vampyr underscore this machinic afterlife. Offensia, trapped in Van Helsing Castle, confronts her child-mother as doppelgänger: “Standing there, back to the door, a vision of terror. The shape of a vampyr […] yet even in terror, she cannot fail to recognise the distorted features of her own father” (182). This uncanny recursion — mother as daughter, father as vampyr, victim as aggressor — situates Offensia in a permanent posthumous loop. She is both always already dead and continually resurrected, a necromodernist figure of endless replay.

In one of the most important theoretical nodes in Vampyr, Armand calls “pandemic machine” what the novel performs everywhere else by montage: the pandemic is not just as a biological event but a logic, an infrastructure, a mode of subject-production:

The pandemic produces alienation because its logistics of segregation, quarantine, transmission, asymptomaticity, immunity, fatality produce a subject. If pandemic automatism is the final subsumption of the political into the logistical, it isn’t achieved by sheer momentum of a “contingent necessity,” but viral overproduction itself, for itself. In this circular economy, the project of social separation (integration by disintegration) achieves its apotheosis. The virus isn’t in the system, the virus is the system. (Vampyr, 412)

This passage is Armand’s clearest statement of pandemic entropology: the study of how systems metabolise decay into function. It is necromodern because it treats illness as infrastructural logic, understands the subject as administrative consequence, takes breakdown as productive circulation, and conceives of the virus as operating system. If Vampyr is a novel about the undead archive, this passage is its theory of why the archive is undead. The system cannot die because death is now its engine.

Glitchhead pushes further in this direction, abandoning the premise of a unified narrative entirely. Its aphoristic spasms read like system logs from a failing network. Offensia, staring into her mirror until she becomes pure reflection, captures the necromodernist condition perfectly:

Offensia is glued to the mirror again, staring at nothing. I SEE NOTHING. She sees thus what cannot be seen, she is what cannot be seen, she sees herself finally in her true aspect, etc. – which having seen, she now must struggle to become, the neverending struggle, the pure dialectic, UNTIL THAT DAY when Time itself must have an end, oh nothing that comes of nothing! (Vampyr, 553)

It is significant that Offensia dies in Vampyr, yet reappears in Glitchhead and A Tomb in H-Section. Death here is a condition of persistence, and Offensia herself embodies this necromodernist recursion, only to announce that the return is indistinguishable from ordinary existence: “@nyx_gLand___: How does Offensia return from the dead? / Offensia: How does anyone?” (Glitchhead, 661) Reading Glitchhead is less an act of interpretation than of endurance, exposure to a seizure transcribed in prose.

But where Vampyr / Glitchhead inhabit pulp and glitch at the level of the fragment, the Pentalogy as a whole operates across a larger temporal arc, extending necromodernism into a recursive project of world-building. Yet this is world-building only in the negative: instead of the coherent universe of fantasy or science fiction we inhabit a landscape of failure, implosion, entropy (or what Armand elsewhere calls “entropology”).

 

Posthumous Subjectivity

Recombining The Combinations itself, the Pentalogy’s terminal instalment, A Tomb in H-Section, resurrects the Prof as a quantum supercomputer’s avatar (and engineer), collapsing under fire during an abortive effort to close down the textual entanglement between the Pentalogy’s multiple dimensions (and in the process bring the author to book, as it were): “The professor staggered backward under a sudden fusillade. He looked at peace as he crumpled to the floor” (A Tomb in H-Section, 79).

Death here is neither climax nor closure, but an aperture, a glitch in the text’s circuitry that permits other figures — Offensia, the Š.V.E.J.K. conspirators, agents Sartre and Beauvoir (sic!) — to continue the scene, as if the Prof’s demise had been merely another stage direction in an endless play. A Tomb in H-Section is filled with the detritus of history, technology, myth, and pulp, woven into a prose that is at once dense and fragmentary, refusing resolution. Instead, it performs a textual archaeology, excavating layers only to reveal further ruins beneath:

The name on the gravestone.

Like & yet decisively unlike the stone next to it, & the one next to that, all bestowed w/ terminologies of category & subcategory, temporal coordinates, yet in the final telling disposed here in chaotic inventory, Nemo, Nemtsov, Nemoc, Němec, ah yes, now they’re all starting to come back, queuing 174 up for their meat, called to order. As if to be fleshed-out again in the mind’s eye parade of all things nominal, genitive, accusative, dative. Meanwhile, in the vaguely parallel time that exists outside these walls, the plague festers & the city festers w/ it. But here y’re safe, w/ yr alphabets, yr archaeologies, yr genealogies, yr etymologies, spectre of spectres, ostracized from the living – the still living – among the ever-accommodating words (A Tomb in H-Section, 173-4).

In one of the cleanest examples of necromodernism as linguistic entombment in the entire book, the passage stages the graveyard as a metaphor for the entire textual system: names, categories, grammar cases, etymologies — all functioning as the dead forms through which life continues to circulate. The gravestone is a linguistic artifact, and the name is a residue. Its variants — Nemo, Nemtsov, Nemoc, Němec — are like mutations in a linguistic lineage. This is necromodernism at its most intimate: identity as the debris of orthography. Rather than as spirits, the dead return as lexical variations, queued for reanimation by the registry of names (“called to order,” as if by a clerk).

The subject is resurrected as administrative data, as if language itself were a morgue drawer sliding open. H-Section‘s main protagonists are already “dead.” They appear here not as survivors but as revenants, textual residues, posthumous subjects of former incarnations. This is no mere narrative quirk but the structural law of the Pentalogy. Characters in Armand’s megatext have no development, just recurrences. Their deaths in one volume guarantee their reappearance in another. They exist as after-images, fragments animated by the text.

This gives us our central concept: posthumous subjectivity. In the necromodern megatext, character is no longer a psychological or ontological unity. It is a residue, a revenant, a textual effect. Prof and Němec, Offensia and the Š.V.E.J.K. agents, these persist just because the text reanimates them. They are not agents but corpses inscribed into recurrence. The “H-Section” itself is emblematic: evoking hospital, history, hysteria, hydrogen, hologram. It is a zone where the infrastructures of death and writing converge, where posthumous subjectivity becomes the only possible form of life. In this way, the “Golemgrad Pentalogy” extends the necromodern condition into sequence: not only is literature undead in its fragments, but it is undead across volumes, looping and recycling at the scale of a Pentalogy.

 

Metastatic Narrativity

Rather than a series of novels in the traditional sense of seriality and denouement, the “Golemgrad Pentalogy” is a mausoleum, a combinatorial tomb, an archive of ruins that insists on repetition as its only mode of being. It is, in the strictest sense, a literature of the dead — and for that reason, the most vital expression of our necromodern present. Across its five instalments, the Pentalogy refuses linear sequence. Each book rewrites, refracts, recycles the others. Characters die and return; motifs recur; structures collapse and re-emerge. This megatextual structure operates as a complex manifold in a state of constant (re)emergence — not as five separate texts.

In this, Armand’s project differs from Vollmann’s encyclopaedia or Danielewski’s labyrinth. The texts of the Pentalogy and their interstitial debris fields are neither comprehensive nor infinite, but rather constitute the ecosystem of a singularity. So long as the megatext is terminal, its terminality is recursive. Instead of progress as in modernism, or play as in postmodernism, its condition is its necromodern persistence. This is metastatic narrative, whose “culmination” is terminal recursion: endings that loop back to beginnings, texts that never terminate, and even less conclude, but only recur. Its central figures — the Prof, Němec, Offensia — are posthumous even in their first appearances, written already from the other side of their own deaths. Their posthumous condition is their structuring principle.

 

Literature’s Undeaths

Armand’s project demonstrates that necromodernism is not merely a stylistic choice but a mode of writing capable of sustaining vast textual architectures, even as those architectures are ruins. This is the necromodern condition: survival as return and residue. The necromodern megatext’s temporality is largely entropic — each book cannibalises the others, producing necrotic proliferation: its characters are posthumous, its narratives metastatic, its world-building ruinal.

Where The Combinations exhausts possibility and Vampyr circulates parasitism, Glitchhead glitches the textual real, Death Mask Sutra insists on ruination, and A Tomb in H-Section is a textual mausoleum of fragments. The Prof and Němec are killed in The Combinations, only to recur posthumously in H-Section. Offensia dies in Vampyr, but is back in business in A Tomb in H-Section. Terrorist communiqués in Death Mask Sutra resurface as parodic headlines in Vampyr. Even Glitchhead’s seizures echo the machine-exhaustion of The Combinations. This recursive architecture makes the “Golemgrad Pentalogy” a true necromodernist megatext.

Ramiro Sanchiz’s intuition that necromodernism describes modernity persisting as its own ruin finds here its most literal expression: a literature of revenants, where characters, cities, even entire novels survive only as residues. To read the cycle is to inhabit a necropolis of texts, where everything is already posthumous. These recursive deaths structure the Pentalogy as a textual entity built less upon futurity than on the endless recycling of remains. Rather than a monument to universal knowledge, the megatext is a mausoleum of cosmic fragments, a Book of the Dead in which the signatura rerum persists only by feeding on its own ghosts.

If modernism gave us the encyclopaedia & postmodernism the labyrinth, necromodernism gives us the mausoleum, the necropolis, the celestial graveyard. In Armand’s sequence, literature no longer seeks to master the world or to play with its fragments. It survives only as undead: vampyr, glitch, golem, tomb, dark star. To inhabit the Pentalogy is to inhabit literature after life: writing that persists as posthumous subjectivity. The “Golemgrad Pentalogy” is the black-box recording of literature’s ongoing crash, the testimony of a medium that refuses to end; that “goes on,” as Beckett forecast, not although but because it has already died.

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* The Combinations (London & Prague: Equus Press, 2016); Death Mask Sutra (Prague: Alienist Editions, 2018); Vampyr (Prague: Alienist Editions, 2020); Glitchhead (Miskatonic Press, 2021); A Tomb in H-Section (London & Prague: Equus Press, 2025). All in-text references are to these editions.

[1] For an overview of contemporary necromodernist fiction, cf. my recent essay, “Necromodernist Architectures in Contemporary Writing,” 3AM Magazine, 21 Nov 2025. Online: https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/necromodernist-architectures-in-contemporary-writing/
[2] Cf. e.g. his The Imitations series, part of his ongoing “Federico Stahl” project, “a necromodernist macronovel that builds the diverse narrative alternatives on the life-story of its main character,” becoming “a writing process and a storytelling desiring machine.” Ramiro Sanchiz, The Imitations, trans. Andrés Vaccari (forthcoming with Wanton Sun, 2026).
[3] Joyelle McSweeney, The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (University of Michigan Press, 2014) 2.
[4] Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Melbourne: Re.press, 2008) 16.

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