"All angular footage (<45°) that continues through
the Event remains classified and unobtainable and, in any case, is said to be inconclusive." The Event by Henry Bean is a horror fiction novelette (about 12,000 words long), written between 2018 and 2020 and published in late 2025 by
Jewish Currents, concerning the aftermath of a horrific catastrophe in the Middle East. Initially it is framed as a research overview three years after "the Event"; it then becomes more personal.
Illustrations by
Adam Liam Rose.
Audio version available (77 min.), read by the author. Content notes include: genocide; mass death of humans and animals; destruction of the entirety of "the entire area west of the Jordan River—the state proper and the territories"; anti-semitism; murder; suicide, including the suicide of a teenager.
Note: This is probably the most lightning-rod sf/f story I've ever posted to MetaFilter. Thus I am simultaneously posting it to the front page
and to FanFare. In the front-page post discussion I expect the discussion will go far afield from this story. On Fanfare I hope people will discuss the story itself.
"A strange fire has consumed the land between the river and the sea." (summary from
the podcast audio version)
For context:
Jewish Currents describes itself thusly: "Founded in 1946,
Jewish Currents is a magazine committed to the rich tradition of thought, activism, and culture of the Jewish left."
Jewish Currents published
The Event in its Fall 2025 issue; it was initially paywalled, then made available to read for free on July 9th, 2026.
Author Henry Bean, who is Jewish, wrote and directed the 2001 film
The Believer, the based-on-a-true-story drama of an American Jewish man who becomes a neo-Nazi. In early 2004, he
wrote for The Forward about living in New York City, the fear of Y2K, and the terror and aftermath of the September 11th attacks. Near the end of that piece, he asks questions that he also explores in
The Event:
Yet behind these fears and hopes slumbers a strange thought: Is there a part of us that longs for this disaster we are forever trying to escape? In some mysterious, unarticulated place, have we always envied the Egyptians their destruction, and are we therefore grateful for our own September 11, as if only after the shoe has dropped and catastrophe befallen us can we finally put aside both terror (that last plague stuck in Pandora's box) and hope and simply live our lives? If so, then maybe it is time to go back to the wonder we felt when the disaster was fresh, to the questions we'd just begun to ask.
Bean began to write
The Event in 2018, and finished it in 2020.
Josephine Riesman,
"who shepherded it to publication", calls it
an "incredible work of Borgesian fiction", that
had "been turned down everywhere".
"It's not a 'Mystery Box,' in that there is no conclusive 'answer' to find, but the quest leads you to better QUESTIONS, which is the point of all great Jewish texts imo". She suggested that one can prepare for reading
The Event by reading
"On Jewish Skinheads", her piece on Bean's film
The Believer. Bean said to her that the process of writing the film involved:
"...a celebration of the Jewish love of the dialectic, the Jewish love of the thing and its opposite. 'I'm unsatisfied by the thing, and I'm unsatisfied by the opposite. But if you put them both together, I can dig it.'"
From
The Event:
Over the past month, Prempeh and I have been making our way around the perimeter of the Event Field. It is a trip I had been scheduling and postponing for over a year, and in the end both the board and the staff strongly urged that I take her with me—i.e., they think I'm getting difficult, perhaps unreliable, and want someone along to confirm (or refute) my reports.
There is of course a significant tradition of speculative fiction in the epistolary form of scientific papers, such as
Sarah Gailey's "STET" (
previously on MeFi) and
"Footnotes" by C.C. Finlay (
previously on MeFi).
The Event starts with a level of scholarly reserve that, by the end, dissolves into assertion of subjective experience, describing the visceral yearning for the fatal and mysterious geographic phenomenon -- that yearning reminds me of Junji Ito's horror comic "The Enigma of Amigara Fault."
The long disquieting description of how a society reacts to a fantastical catastrophe reminds me of
"Burning Men" by Maria Farrell (
previously -- includes author commentary in the comments), and of Ursula K. Le Guin's short stories that take a more anthropological/xenoanthropological tone, such as in her collection
Changing Planes.
Other comparisons I've come across:
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski,
Jeff VanderMeer's Area X series,
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut,
"Very Solaris in both its tone and subject",
The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier, the Stalker video games, Chernobyl disaster history,
The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland,
"The Relationship of Ink to Blood" by Alex Langer and
"Liecraft" by Austin Wagner (per
this recommendation).
Other people's reactions to the story include:
- on the r/scifi subreddit, varied reactions positive and negative
- Alex Gude: "The Event, by Henry Bean, is about a supernatural fire destroying Israel and Palestine. It explores how some topics can't be acknowledged or discussed directly, only obliquely, a theme Bean brilliantly reinforces through the story's structure." (Bluesky post, full review)
- "It's SO tempting to apply the themes of the story to the way October 7 changed everything, so keeping in mind its earlier origins just makes it more powerful...."
- Liam Connell: "This has something of the bleakness of something like 'The Screwfly Solution,' but there's a terrible humanism underneath as well. It's a tremendous work of fiction, and it has made me pour a whiskey and stare at the wall."
- "i don't think a spec-fic short story has moved me like this since Premee Mohamed's 'Not Lost (Never Lost)'
- Zachary Gillan says it "hits all three tendencies" in the definition of "weird fiction" he promulgates:
As we all know, weird fiction isn't just bizarre happenings: it troubles genre boundaries, it insists on the inexplicable and unresolvable, and it dedicates itself to the unsettling of the (story)world.
- Katie Dee: 'okay this is immediately up there with "Inert" from the Wrong Station podcast, "SCP 184: The Personal Log Of Norman Richards," and HP Lovecraft's "At The Mountains Of Madness" for me in my top 5 short stories ever'
- "This reminds me--and I hesitate to say this because I am afraid it will be taken as criticism and not high praise--as something very much in line with the best of SCP stories, except unconstrained by that community's reluctance to dive deeply into issues of politics and conflict."
- Max Asher Miller: "One of those stories where you totally understand why it was rejected but also that's exactly why fiction as a capital market holds art back"
- very short discussion of the Abrahamic context/undertones
- Andrew Middleton:
One of the pleasures and challenges of running a map store is deciding what fits and what doesn't. Is it a map? Is it sufficiently mappy?
This is geography fiction and I think it would it would fit in perfectly.
- "allegorical speculative fiction, done in that good way allegory can be where it snarls and twists its way out of one-to-one correspondences."
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