All the Cameras in My Room
Creator: Michael DeForge
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
Publication date: April 2026
There’s always a satisfying reward for putting time into one of Michael DeForge’s books, submerging yourself in the weirdness-with-a-message that feels new and familiar every time. With the marvellously-named All the Cameras in My Room featuring 15 stories across its 202 pages, it’s a series of dopamine hits from laugh-out-loud hilarious to shocking, impossible sex scenes and all kinds of 21st-century angst in between.
DeForge, who’s based in Toronto, Canada – a city exceeded in size in the U.S. and Canada only by New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago – has much to say about modern lifestyles. A prolific creator, he turns in socially-aware books on a regular basis and is visible as an activist on issues including sponsorship of literature’s prestigious Giller Prize. It’s easy to find reflections of DeForge’s passions in his colourful, wild work, such as 2019’s Leaving Richard’s Valley, in which he commented on groupthink, the absurdity of our property ownership system, and changing friendships, all in the guise of a quest undertaken by cute and cartoonish characters wandering a scary world.
This new short story collection – DeForge’s second – is filled with diversions and astute thoughts on mass culture and surveillance societies, and it’s packed with eye-meltingly bizarre settings; take, for one example, an apparent orgy between all the Universal Monsters. Frankenstein’s Monster, you may be happy to hear, has a huge metal screw for a penis. The interactions, if you want to call them that, carry serious conversation but are presented vertiginously, in contained but twisting, upturning panels that add to the sense of unease. There’s an inescapable sense of “Whaaaa?”.
DeForge’s work has a rich seam of absurdity through it, even as he mixes melancholic moments in with the horror of bleeding appliances and urban paranoia. It reaches fascinating levels of weirdness, with his idiosyncratic, highly-colourful style producing endless little fellows with bunny ears and the like. It becomes most accessible when you embrace the silliness and recognize it’s taking you into a deeper message. This creator may be ready to get a quick, almost cheap reaction, but he’s using to make a point: for example, in the story “Larry Seedyseed”, there’s some of the funniest near-taboo humour I’ve seen in a long time, while also spraying out a real environmental message, so to speak. It’s a special feeling to laugh at a masturbation joke that’s actually quite intelligent and simultaneously so cheap you might choke. (Sorry not sorry, as we say in Canada.)
As for the short stories, they work well. Usually, DeForge’s longer-form storytelling style will tear along at a clip, taking you on a page-turning experience across a whole, wonderful book such as Brat (2018), which spoke about celebrity culture and gaining notoriety at any cost, or 2022’s Birds of Maine, set in a bonkers, but somehow lovely, socialist utopia which is of course quickly ruined by a human. In the shorter form, DeForge can present his ideas in a compact way, still making his points using fantastical style, distorted pacing and absurd layouts, but more effectively, though each time he does take whatever page count he needs. Sometimes with DeForge it’s hard to figure out who the book is for, and this time the contained length of the stories adds to their accessibility or, at least, opens the door to variety, almost like a themed anthology.
Here’s the short version: Michael DeForge makes compelling books that pay off, and All the Cameras in My Room can join his growing oeuvre as another success. It’s a bag of clever laughs.
All the Cameras in My Room is out this month via Drawn & Quarterly
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