The Deep Reads
Gnostic Villains on Earth
A Season
Three American novels about evil that doesn't answer to anyone. The white whale, Popeye, and Judge Holden, villains who stop reading as men and start reading as something older and worse, running the world like it's theirs. We read Melville, Faulkner, and McCarthy through that lens, with the memoir Blood Meridian was built from and a crash course in Gnosticism to sharpen the knife. Sixteen weeks, one section a week, no skimming.
How it works. The read goes in order, one section at a time. Read the week's chapters, then the dispatch lands on the Substack and the video on the channel.