Like many novels, much of Major Arcana takes place years before our own present-day timeline. But unlike most, it very much centres the resulting juxtaposition: Simon Magnus, a comics creator who in the 1990s adopted edgy takes on American superheroes in an echo of the careers of both Alan Moore and Grant Morrison; in the present-day, he teaches literature at a Midwestern university, where administrators demand respect for pronouns and most students can no longer be bothered to read.
Whatever else Major Arcana depicts about comics, art, magic, and the past fifty years of American cultural history, its first impression is as a satire of Gen Z campus gender politics. This immediately dates it to a moment and milieu in which student social justice campaigns were the greatest threat to freedom that a taboo-breaking counter-cultural author could imagine. That was always an illusion, as the rather more serious threats posed by a neoreactionary American government are now proving beyond all doubt.
A student’s livestreamed public suicide becomes the inciting incident for this novel’s satire of how post-pandemic campus and internet culture treat Magnus’s own belief that suffering must be the “passkey” for making or experiencing transgressive art. In fact, this opening becomes what Magnus would likely admire as a confrontational and necessary entry test. Yet its stakes weigh even more heavily in 2025 than when Pistelli began serialising Major Arcana on his Substack in March 2023.
The publisher of this bound edition, a small independent specialising in Rust Belt writing, sells the story as a simple juxtaposition between Magnus and another central character, the Gen Z online occult influencer Ash del Greco. This setup would be a promising way of exploring the cultural and technological shifts governing artists’ influence on society between the 1980s, when Magnus grew up reading vintage comics and classic novels beside a New England forest, and the twenty-first century, when Ash’s eclectic occult and literary learning and communication has been purely, chaotically digital.
Magnus had to depend on traditional comics publishing (the lightly fictionalised “VC Comics”) to bring his vision to the masses; Ash—and others of her fellow influencers who also teach postmodern manifestation techniques—can reach millions simply through videos recorded on their phones, with no more friction than those imposed by social media algorithms.
This promised intergenerational contrast extends to gender, where Magnus’s and Ash’s experiences seem opposed when they first meet in the classroom but eventually find surprising common ground. Magnus took severe beatings for cross-dressing in his youth, declared themselves non-binary in the mid-2010s, and now rejects identity-based pronouns altogether, signing off as Simon Magnusself. Ash has “ridden the gender carousel” through her teens, switching between pronouns and neopronouns until deciding “that ‘she’ could in fact mean anything and nothing at all.” (Several characters’ understandings of their gender and forms of address change during the novel; I follow their preferences at each life stage.)
But the novel promised in that publisher’s blurb does not quite materialise. More of this story, in fact, is about Magnus’s 1980s-90s artistic and romantic experiences, culminating in a personal crisis and renunciation of comics during America’s last summer before 9/11. [1]
Simon enters comics via his lover Ellen Chandler, an English literature graduate freshly hired by VC Comics in similar circumstances to DC/Vertigo’s Karen Berger, who brought the Moore/Morrison generation of British creators into US comics. [2] The novel’s chief speculative fiction interest therefore lies in its engagement with Moore/Morrison lore. [3] References sprinkled throughout Major Arcana suggest Pistelli is a dedicated connoisseur of this lore. Indeed, he speaks of Moore, Morrison, and Frank Miller as his “earliest literary influences” in a career he has devoted to inspiring pleasure in complex reading.
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As a revisionist take on the escapism of Michael Chabon’s pre-9/11 Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), which played Golden Age superhero history straight, Magnus’s comics career openly blends Moore’s and Morrison’s revisionist interpretations of DC icons, including the transgressive elements that Gen Z students now criticise, much to Magnus’s chagrin. [4] Marsh Man, Magnus’s first title, echoes Moore’s Swamp Thing (1984-87), including controversy over inter-species sex. Ratman: Fools’ Errand, in which Ratman’s enemy the Fool rapes the vigilante’s Robin-esque sidekick Sparrow, merges elements from both creators’ Batman graphic novels. The attack clearly parallels the Joker’s much-criticised crippling of Barbara Gordon in Moore’s Killing Joke (1988), but with a male victim and cross-dressed perpetrator. Morrison, meanwhile, intended the Joker to cross-dress as Madonna in Arkham Asylum (1989)—in what Elizabeth Sandifer reads as “a crassly transphobic view of gender fluidity as transgressive and forbidden” even given what Morrison has declared about gender since. And Overman 3000, the miniseries that destroys its creators’ personal and artistic lives, applies Moore’s views on the superhero dream as “essentially […] fascism” to the Superman archetype with the grittiness of Watchmen (1986-87), the dystopian futurism of 1990s reboots like Marvel’s 2099 (1992-99), and a direct translation of the German “Übermensch”—Morrison’s name for a genocidaire Superman-equivalent in their first DC title, Animal Man (1988-90).
Beyond these spot-the-reference details, the novel offers ideas about the relationship between art and magic, including comics and tarot. Magnus’s ideas in these areas also meld theories from both writers. Famously, Moore and Morrison both aspired to bring themes and techniques from literary fiction and modern occultism into comics, but found each other’s cosmologies incompatible enough to drive one of modern comics’ most notorious rivalries, if not an outright magical war. (In 2018, Pistelli wondered whether “by the middle of the 21st century some critic will try to produce a book-length investigation of postmodernity by positing a similarly rival pair of powerful imaginations: Alan Moore or Grant Morrison?”; Major Arcana fuses them instead.)
In Magnus’s equivalent of Moore’s and Morrison’s philosophies, both tarot and comics allow humans to transcend linear time and simultaneously perceive past, present, and future, our closest approximation to God-like sight. Tarot, that “complex and immensely useful piece of occult technology” according to Moore’s recent magical primer with Steve Moore, does not only inspire Major Arcana’s title. It also links comics to magic through Magnus’s interpretation of tarot-deck designer Pamela Colman Smith as “the first and best comic book artist” and tarot as “a portable graphic novel” of narrative elements which the user can arrange at will. Indeed, enthusiasts will be able to trace tarot archetypes through characters’ readings and even chapter headings. For his part, Magnus believes these twin two-dimensional representations of the fourth dimension uniquely elevate readers into the divine plane of the fifth dimension, and thus towards the most exalted artistic consciousness, despite the artform’s underground origins.
Magnus’s magical education, gained from his doomed teenage love Valerie, combines important practices for both Morrison and Moore: tarot for Moore, with its links to the Kabbalah, and sigils for the chaos magick practitioner Morrison. Both creators have followed William Burroughs in manipulating symbols through contemporary media technology, and Burroughs is a direct influence on Magnus too: Indeed, reading Burroughs incites Magnus’s first magical experience with Valerie.
Magnus’s notion of the fourth and fifth dimension, decades later, draws Ash into the occult through a mysterious Tumblr’s deconstructions of Overman’s creative influences, with what the novel frames as far less generative effects. But for her part, Ash receives no genuine, soul-enhancing relationship with art until the story’s last section introduces her to a bookshop full of classic novels. Those autodidacts who transform their lives for the better through discovering print literature in bookshops and libraries are perhaps the story’s real cultural heroes.
Magnus bitterly rejects the superhero industry. This echoes Moore, of course, but Magnus’s demeanour while working in the genre is closer to Morrison’s. The older Magnus shares Moore’s frustration with fans’ superficial adoration of his characters’ violence, further exploited by Hollywood. But the younger Magnus shares Morrison’s idea that artworks like Morrison’s The Invisibles (1994-2000) or Magnus’s Overman 3000 can function as hypersigils—master syntheses of influences and experience, expressed as artworks, that can change the real world.
What precipitates the disaster of the California retreat where Overman 3000 is created by Magnus, his lover Ellen, their artist Marco, and Marco’s girlfriend Diane also comes directly from Morrison’s life. Magnus’s sudden, disconcerting transformation away from his youthful “bohemian femme” style into a hypermasculine, all-black, cyberpunk look, with a shaved head and wraparound sunglasses, is a deliberate ritual to connect himself with the archetype of anti-effeminate, masculinist power he perceives in Overman’s character. Morrison has written in Supergods (2011) that they have used both styles as ritual practice themselves. Incorporating cross-dressing into their magical rituals helped them create The Invisibles’ transvestite witch, Lord Fanny. To write the comic, they explain, they then intentionally “blend[ed] my life, my appearance, my world” with that of the team’s shaven-headed, Matrix-before-Matrix lead character, King Mob.
For Morrison, this led to a hallucinogenic trip in Kathmandu, and a vision of the fifth dimension that became a magical and creative turning point. Magnus experiences a very similar trip in California, only with hallucinogens heavily implied to have been given to Marco by the CIA, leading Magnus to see all the way through time, including a premonition of a devastating tragedy for Marco and Diane. [5]
The exalted magical intentions that Magnus renounces after this life-changing episode rebound in Ash’s timeline, after xie reads Overman, as exemplifying what Magnus comes to believe about the negative, unintended impact of his transgressive work. And Major Arcana is at its best when it steps away from the low-hanging fruit of its meditations on campus gender politics into the interiority of characters’ relationships with art. Here, the narrative does most to add and enhance, rather than to shame. Every character worth a viewpoint chapter has, or develops, a rich artistic life. Jacob’s mother Jessica, for instance, owns a vintage clothes store and expresses a philosophy of fashion which integrates this frequently dismissed and feminised artform into the novel’s view of art.
For Jessica, fashion is no less than “an art that made life possible”—first by permitting wearers to affiliate and disaffiliate themselves with others in a basic precondition for social life, then by enhancing the body’s appearance, stimulating heterosexual attraction that leads to the creation of new biological life. Fiction rarely connects these two spheres of experience quite so intimately, and yet, Jessica’s route for connecting them—unlike, say, Morrison’s—does not contain any space for dynamics of desire beyond the heterosexual. [6]
Major Arcana’s internet is therefore simply an insubstantial platform incapable of fostering meaningful critical engagement but all too capable of luring the vulnerable down rabbit holes that separate them from the real world. Among these rabbit holes is the Tumblr-fuelled Overman obsession which, immediately pre-pandemic, draws Ash and their new transmasculine best friend further into esoteric speculation about Ash’s own parentage. This coincides with the pair’s exploration of non-binary identities and shared plans for surgery as soon as they turn eighteen, inspired by William Blake’s engraving of a sexless Satan—favouring a procedure that trans healthcare providers speaking in 2022 were not actually aware had been performed on patients assigned female at birth.
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Reading the coincidence of all these developments in the first part of 2025, as Trump’s anti-trans executive orders flew dizzyingly around the USA, left me perceiving the novel’s interpretation of the internet, especially in terms of its role in the public discourse about trans youth, as uncomfortably close to the so-called phenomenon of “social contagion”—even if it is meant as a wider defence of the analogue against the digital.
It was anxious mainstream journalists who popularised the notion of “social contagion,” which was developed by proponents of the debunked “rapid onset gender dysphoria” theory, in 2017-18. The notion’s implications of biological contamination, Van Slothouber writes, suggest “that transness is infecting our children and, following [Lee] Edelman, that its spread is a destructive force.” The impression of the internet as such a vector for Ash is never far away in Major Arcana. Its affordances for gender-expansive youth, or even the reactionary right, could have been more empathetically explored. Instead, the novel casts the internet merely as the home of addictive microblogs and a manifestation subculture that Ash joins to boost her college fund in less-than-perfect faith, communicating with disillusioned young people whom she judges will trust her more than girlboss entrepreneurs. [7]
Perhaps, in a different story, Ash’s position as an online influencer might have framed today’s digital-first occultism as the very latest episode in a postmodern esoteric history to which Moore, Morrison, and Magnus all belong. Magnus and Ash have both believed that one can change reality through language, after all, just through different media: print comics for the magus, social video for the protégé. Ultimately, though, while the touchpoints of Magnus’s 1990s life and even Magnus’s experience as an adjunct college professor read as if seen from the inside, the touchpoints of Ash’s life read more as what the author might have read about. There is markedly less curiosity towards the inner lives and experience of Ash’s generation—who live in a world which socioeconomically, geopolitically, and environmentally differs so greatly from the world in which Magnus’s generation grew up, an end-of-a-century world which no longer exists.
If Major Arcana is indeed supposed to be an intergenerational confrontation between creative and cultural foils, Magnus and Ash, this imbalance between them drags it towards failure. By comparison, probably the exemplar of contemporary speculative fiction framing such a confrontation within a changing sociopolitical and intellectual climate—Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (2004) —gives readers equal access to why these rival magicians with contrasting social backgrounds and incompatible views on magic each believe what they believe, do what they do, display the flaws they display, cause the disasters they cause. Any given reader might favour Strange, Norrell, or neither in their decades-long struggle to lead English magic; but the text does not play at making us sympathise with either man, or tilt the playing field in the degrees of interiority they receive. Not so in Major Arcana.
Pistelli’s publisher may in fact have done the novel a disservice, then, by marketing it as equally Magnus’s and Ash’s story, rather than referring to it in the way Pistelli himself described it to Substack readers six weeks before release: a take on Faust with its artist even “named—with the addition of one letter: ‘n,’ probably for ‘negation’—after Faust’s legendary precursor Simon Magus.” Pistelli’s “Faustus figure just is an artist, a revolutionary reviser both of the self and of art proper, forced to confront the unanticipated consequences of such revolutionary art’s wide circulation, especially on the generations who grow up in its shadow.” Ash, on the other hand, appears in comparison to Magnus as a shadow, refracted through the predictable beats of think-pieces about online youth, at least until she settles at that bookshop and starts reading Austen, Eliot, and Ulysses.
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I am a reader deeply interested in so much of what this novel wants to do: multi-decade storytelling about media and magic; tracing changes in queer and gender non-conforming expression over time; using character conflict as a narrative device for exploring the social, technological, and intergenerational contrasts that make up culture; contextualising the personas of Morrison and Moore themselves as magical practitioners operating through art. And yet having to read through the contemporary campus scenes and Ash’s teenage life to discover how it does these things left me feeling hazed. Generationally, I am closer to Magnus than Ash, but apparently suffering must also be my passkey towards experiencing art.
Perhaps, on Magnus’s terms, the novel has done its job: I have thought about it more than any other book this year, as I try to understand what effect it might want these elements I find so irksome to have, and on whom. Is it only for readers who will chin-stroke along with the implication that we all believe in free expression and self-exploration but young people today have gone too far? When scarcely anyone in the wider world will know or care how Grant Morrison dressed to write The Invisibles, shouldn’t those of us who do just get along? Am I the oversensitive one when I refuse to overlook the gaps between my own experience and this novel’s representation in order to appreciate its art? Are the liberal aesthetic standards that would oblige me to do that a prerequisite for democratic dialogue, or a colonial and patriarchal way to make the marginalised know their place? What if they are both?
Pistelli has said he wanted the novel to explore its gender identity theme from a place of balance that can “satirize” certain “questionable practices of the last decade” without becoming “some kind of conservative anti-woke screed”—though when said screeds, now backed by federal government power, have already ruled that said practices must be eliminated, I cannot see the balance pivoting where he believes it does. The new American right does make satirical cameos—a libertarian YouTuber, a fame-hungry conservative schoolteacher, the grifting mother of a newly tradcath detransitioner. But these glimpses of digital right-wing culture are infrequent and rushed compared to how often the novel invites us to see young people with blue hair and pronoun badges as deluded in comparison to their sensible elders, even their most countercultural ones.
These are not wholly abstract questions for Pistelli. In the same interview in which he explains the novel’s handling of contemporary gender politics, he hints at some affinity with Morrison’s and Magnus’s complex relationships to gender, aligns himself with the anti-identitarian resistance to labels that he perceives in Morrison, and suggests that, as a teenager reading The Invisibles, he might have been drawn to some forms of non-binary identity if the culture had then contained them. A “more recent […] front-row seat to the gender revolution among Zoomer youth” as a college instructor has meanwhile informed his representation of the present. (I have had such a seat too, in a different country; but I can only say our sightlines have differed.)
Perhaps Major Arcana might be best read, then, as a mature author confronting the transgressive and revolutionary themes that appealed to his teenage self, through the lens of what he has come to believe about media and society, and via the sympathies he has formed during his field’s pedagogical debates. Certainly, both Ash and Magnus come around—as Moore did years ago—to Pistelli’s own mature viewpoint that only the prose novel can satisfactorily represent interiority and psychological depth. And Magnus’s views on pedagogy and transgressive art are close to queer scholars who, like Chris Castiglia and Christopher Reed or the multi-pronouned Jack Halberstam, expressed frustration in maturity at what they see as young people’s coddled desire for safe spaces and concrete labels.
In other words, Major Arcana both narrates and exhibits the intergenerational tensions stemming from how some countercultural intellectuals and artists who in their youths bravely resisted stifling conservatism and reactionary attacks, winning freedoms for younger generations, later came to view young people’s further struggles for recognition and justice as the censorship they abhorred.
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In trying to reconcile the novel’s contradictions, I returned to another foundational queer literary theorist, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who expressed the notion of “paranoid” versus “reparative” reading. A paranoid reading employs a “hermeneutic of suspicion and exposure.” A reparative reading allows for ‘pleasure and amelioration’, piecing together a text’s fragments with hope.
A reparative reading of Major Arcana would affirm there are somewhat generational differences between how queer and gender non-conforming people in North America think about fixed identities and labels. It would affirm these differences are social facts, are part of contemporary queer and trans history, are part of the author’s experience, and are very much worth exploring through art. A paranoid reading, however, might suspect at best grumpy satire, at worst a neoreactionary Easter egg, in nicknaming Magnus’s main campus building “the Cathedral”—the neoreactionary term for a fusion of media and academia that the movement believes to have Orwellian control over society. The paranoid reading haunts me until I learn from another Pistelli novel that the Cathedral of Learning has been Pittsburgh’s main campus building for decades longer than I or he have been alive.
And even then, my own understanding of queer and trans politics today leaves me feeling the novel, on its own terms, has not fulfilled what Pistelli sees as the author’s responsibility “to explore with sympathy the needs and longings of the personae of the present.” Among those personae are the younger people whose ideas about gender identity contrast with Magnus’s more mature, countercultural position.
To sympathise with how the novel historicises the differences between them, we must accept that no-one asserting their pronouns today ever needs to fear direct physical violence like Magnus used to. Yet that is not reality. Between October 2023 and September 2024, TGEU’s Trans Murder Monitoring project found forty-one recorded killings of trans and gender non-conforming people in the USA, at least half of whom were Black—an intersection the novel does not attempt to dramatize beyond Ellen’s brief affair, on the rebound from Magnus, with a trans woman of colour.
Moreover, Major Arcana’s present is already the past. The very diversity initiatives that Magnus derides as impositions on free-thinking faculty are now under direct attack from the Trump/Musk federal government, while the same administration’s bevy of executive orders assail trans people’s and non-citizens’ participation in every sphere of public life. Pistelli’s threat model was not prepared for this vicious return of conservative, state-driven censorship.
In the same week I first read Major Arcana, in early March 2025, the American political scientist Don Moynihan wrote about the climate of pre-emptive fear that was already gripping American universities as government websites began to be purged of material hinting at social inequalities or marginalised histories. Since then, the government has terminated federal grants that use any ideologically forbidden words, eliminated the Department of Education, begun deporting pro-Palestine protestors on student visas, and threatened dozens of universities with funding shutdowns unless they submit to its demands. ICE officers pulled Rümeysa Öztürk off the street on her way to iftar two days before I submitted this review. Moynihan writes:
For the past decade or so, you were told that America faced a crisis of free speech, characterized by wokeness. Some compared the atmosphere to Maoist China, so great were the chilling effects. Now, as we move into a period where the government is crushing the speech of those it disagrees with, or purging ideas (or the people who represent those ideas) it dislikes, those claims look not just naive, but reckless, since they were used to justify the real chilling effects exist.
Have the Magnuses and Ash del Grecos of this world woken up to more freedom to create, shock, and transgress in the America of Trump’s second term than they had during the autumn of this novel’s present? I find that hard to believe. But I do not live in the nation that must find that out.
Endnotes
[1] Grief for the end of the American century and uncertainty over what will follow is present from the start. The deceased student, Jacob, committed his act in a World War II army jacket; a nostalgic, apocalyptic meme of a blonde girl playing near the Twin Towers that troubles Jacob’s grieving mother enters the narrative precisely when its internet history dictates, with impressive chronological precision. [return]
[2] Making Magnus a New Englander instead of British aligns him with the region’s supernatural literary tradition and Salem’s legacy of persecuting the different, but separates him from the critical distances towards American superhero mythology formed by Moore and Morrison in working-class Northampton and Glasgow—and from their reckonings with Thatcherism. [return]
[3] This is the subject of Elizabeth Sandifer’s comprehensive, ongoing critical history Last War in Albion—an indispensable companion as I reviewed this book. [return]
[4] Pistelli had a more charitable view in 2017, reviewing Morrison’s Doom Patrol, of why Gen Z readers might feel that Morrison’s representations of marginality might fall short. [return]
[5] One could question whether the narrative has earned this borrowing from Morrison’s life, as Sandifer does with Morrison’s borrowing from the dissociative woman who inspired Doom Patrol’s Crazy Jane. [return]
[6] Magnus perceives Ash’s version of Magnus’s Overman-era black-ops look as thoroughly “de-eroticized” when Magnus meets her in class—but a fair proportion of her supposed online audience would likely disagree. [return]
[7] Ash’s callow internalised misogyny towards femininity, including that of queer and trans classmates who express their gender more conventionally than her, is what Julia Serano terms “subversivism”—an instinct that many less feminine queer people, including myself, have had to confront. [return]