All Trap No Bait
Coming from Tortoise Books August 5, 2025
“Who can capture our very modern, crumbling, funny world better than Joseph Worthen? This book is so hilarious that at first you might not notice its stark prophecies, its deep, worried interest in the funhouse mirrors of online and offline, its poetic warnings about the loss of self after logging on. The worse things get, the funnier this book gets, until it’s too late. A beautiful, enlightening meditation on the natural and unnatural world.”
—Rebecca Lee, author of Bobcat
“A dark and dirty-Southern misadventure, All Trap No Bait encapsulates how much it sucks not to have money, and the lengths people will go when they think they might get some. A bleakly hilarious examination of debt, poetry, mystery, and loneliness online and IRL, Joe Worthen’s debut is destined to be one of your feel-bad favorites.”
—Kathleen Rooney, author of From Dust to Stardust
“Worthen’s narrative shimmers with zeitgeist: this is a book about millennial poverty, the inequities of the pandemic, and the baffling chasm between our dreams and realities. At times this book is hilarious, and other times troubling, but every line sings with striking originality. It’s Lish and DeLillo and Russell but more than any of them it’s Worthen, a fresh new voice in fiction and one readers will want to know. I loved this book!”
—Sadie Hoagland, author of American Grief in Four Stages and Strange Children
“This shit’s wild. Dark-web existentialism—reads like Bolaño in Alabama. A very strange and dark and funny book.”
—Johannes Lichtman, 5 Under 35-winning author of Such Good Work and Calling Ukraine
“Joe Worthen’s All Trap No Bait is a chronically online person’s fever dream. Featuring a secret Alabama poetry chatroom, a Duck Dynasty Albert Camus, Michelle Obama deepfakes, a lookalike Harry Potter, cathartic Doom runs, internet blackmail, a mind-reading demon, and a threatening YouTube rapper. The kind of wild delusion you furiously try to blink away, wanting to touch down in the real world, but then the dark humor and demented adventures call to you, make you feel more alive than you’ve felt in years, so you scour the forest floor of your cluttered-ass room for that stray bottle of cough syrup to bottoms up to bring you back.”
—Gene Kwak, author of Go Home, Ricky!
“Joseph Worthen’s All Trap No Bait is a hilarious fever dream of mystery and black comedy, a soulful tale of modern stagnation, deep South absurdism, coronavirus deniers, lame poetry societies, and the loneliness we all feel as we walk the dark mazes of modern technology. I read this novel quickly and breathlessly, enraptured by the wildly inventive and surprising prose. The only thing that slowed my pace was the constant urge to read aloud lines to my wife, friends, enemies, complete strangers, my cat. Worthen is definitely a writer to watch.”
—Darrin Doyle, author of The Beast in Aisle 34