Subcutanean (2020) is a queer coming-of-age novel by Aaron Reed. The narrator Ryan is an introverted college student whose love for his closest friend, Niko, goes unrequited. Subcutanean is a horror novel. Ryan and Niko discover a vast basement under their dilapidated off-campus house that branches into parallel worlds—the Downstairs. And they get lost in it. Subcutanean is an experimental novel. Human-written but procedurally-generated, no copy is the same as any other copy.
The printed book (or ebook) reads as a cohesive, linear textual object. Nothing indicates that the story inside is variable, that every copy of Subcutanean is different. “Each time a book is ordered,” Reed explains in an online talk about the novel, “a different version of the text is rendered from a source text containing many possible variations of individual words, sentences, and even entire scenes.” That source text is written in a bespoke markup language Reed has playfully called .quant—a nod to the principle in quantum mechanics that a particle can exist in multiple states at once. As Emily Short notes in her review of Reed’s novel, the proliferation of versions of Subcutanean fits the novel’s themes of alternate pasts, divergent simultaneities, and uncertain futures. An infinitely variable novel makes perfect sense for an infinitely variable multiverse. And yet at any given instant, a reader has access to only one version of that world.
Until now! Introducing the Subcutanean Variorum, a digital workbench for studying Subcutanean.
Background
In the fall of 2024 I taught Subcutanean in a course called Transmedia and Vast Narrative. It was great. The novel resonated with students. Reed visited the class over Zoom. We began every day by comparing our copies with each other, an idea I borrowed from Andrew Ferguson. Students were often confounded and delighted by the variations between the 25 copies in class. Minor changes, such as a single preposition—”two keys on this side” of a door in chapter 5 of one copy, or seed, becomes “two keys for this side” in another version of the same chapter. Such a small change, but it gestures toward the spatiality of the Downstairs, and how that spatiality might be cleaved.
Other changes signal subtle thematic shifts. One seed might mention Ryan’s copy of Clive Barker’s Imajica, while in another seed Ryan has Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren. The switch invites consideration of those intertextual references and also gives insight into Ryan’s frame of reference for understanding—or not—the parallel worlds he has stumbled into.
There are more dramatic variations my students discovered as well. Distinct sources of Ryan’s deep-rooted trauma. Different versions of Niko. Multiple endings.
There are so many variations, in fact, that I wish we had spent more time methodically comparing variants using the approaches and theories that come from book history and textual scholarship, where variorums are a stock tool. At the end of the day, though, we tended to focus on the similarities between variations, that is, on the overarching trajectory of Ryan’s story, which remains mostly the same regardless of which seed you’re reading.
I also wish we had dug deeper into the underlying .quant code that generates each unique seed of the novel. While the code wasn’t widely available in 2024, I had purchased the Subcutanean Collector’s Edition USB key in 2020, one of the goodies from Reed’s crowdfunding campaign for the novel.
The flash drive contains 10,000 unique copies of the novel, the original .quant source files, and the Python 2.7 scripts that parse the source code and generate the actual book (in text, PDF, HTML, or ebook form). The Python code is fascinating, formally and procedurally. You can trace the way Reed was thinking about the novel’s composition—by which I mean both the way he wrote the novel and the way the code assembles the disparate parts of the novel. The .quant code is revealing as well. It includes comments from Reed that don’t make it into the novel itself. You can see how some decision points in the novel are weighted, meaning some variations are less likely to occur than others. All of the copies of Subcutanean are different, but only some are rare. You can dig into variables and macros, uncovering a vast procedural map obscured in any single copy—or even a handful of copies—of the novel.
Alas, there’s only so much a class can do in two weeks with a text as complex and variable as Subcutanean. I ended up leaving the question of code aside, though I wanted to return to it later myself.
So here are the two impulses that drove my creation of the Subcutanean Variorum. First, a way to systematically compare multiple copies of the novel. Second, a way to study the source code of the novel. My path forward was eased in January 2025, when Reed released the full text and source code of Subcutanean—along with 10,000 variants of the novel—under a Creative Commons CC-BY-4.0 license.
Suddenly students, teachers, researchers, and readers were free to share, remix, and even sell Subcutanean, so long as the original work is attributed to Reed. I set to work building The Subcutanean Variorum, a digital workbench for Reed’s novel, designed with both students and scholars in mind.
The Subcutanean Variorum
At its simplest, the Subcutanean Variorum allows readers to compare any two or three copies of the novel side-by-side to discover how the story shifts between versions. But that side-by-side comparison is the most basic feature of the variorum. The digital workbench includes multiple view modes, including a Track Changes mode that shows word- and sentence-level additions, deletions, and revisions between multiple copies of the novel. For example, comparing Seed 60001 with Seed 60025, we can see in Chapter 2 how a single word change—hangover/memory—alters what we know about Ryan. Similarly, our understanding of Niko changes if we know he has board game buddies instead of philosophy buddies.
The Collation mode shows changes at the paragraph level, quickly revealing which paragraphs have changed the most between versions. Below we’re looking at the start of chapter 16 for Seeds 60001 and 60021. At a glance we can see two paragraphs in blue on the right are unique to Seed 60021. The first person narrator Ryan in this variant seems grounded in the material realm. He is awakened by his needs and considers his environment more carefully than the version of Ryan in Seed 60001.
The Subcutanean Variorum includes a number of analytical tools to help readers make sense of the complex generative mechanics underlying what appears to be a unified, stable textual object on the surface. In source code mode, clicking the <> in the lower right corner of paragraph texts reveals the underlying .quant code of that paragraph, making it easy to toggle between Subcutanean‘s text and code.
The example above shows Part 1 of Seed 60014. Readers can see right away there are multiple ways that novel could open, with the possibilities delineated by the vertical pipe (|) within the square brackets. Note the {maybech1Niko}. This is a macro defined elsewhere in the code, and we can see that there’s only a 20% chance that Ryan invokes Niko’s name here, an indication of the distance between Ryan and his friend.
At the outset of every new generation of Subcutanean, the parser passes through a file called globals.txt, which establishes story-wide variables—macro-level details that impact the story across multiple chapters. The Variables tool lets you inspect these variables, showing a variable’s definition juxtaposed alongside its appearance in the novel. Here, for instance, we’ve exposed the @cdrom variable, which inserts an anecdote about an old adventure game.
The Variorum includes a host of other visualizations, such as the story pathways, which compares major story beats of a single version of Subcutanean against a sample size of 10,000 versions of the novel. Then there’s the interactive walkthrough of the final “boss fight” at the climax of the novel:
These visualizations are explanatory, using the tools of distant reading to tease out patterns and outliers that any single reading of the novel might overlook. But they’re also meant to be evocative, conveying at a visceral level that immensity of Subcutanean‘s possibility space. I won’t show it here, but do check out the CAVE, an attempt to capture the paradox of the Downstairs—overwhelming vastness coupled with an enclosed, claustrophobic feeling.
Built for Teaching, Research, and Sharing
The Subcutanean Variorum includes several tools geared toward students, teachers, and researchers. Let’s say you’ve found an intriguing juxtaposition of similar-but-not-quite-the-same passages in two different seeds. Any view can be bookmarked to return to later. Teachers can copy a deep link of the specific view and share it with students. Double clicking any paragraph in any view opens a note panel, allowing easy annotation of passages and code. The notes are stored in your browser, so they are totally private. But, notes can be exported and imported. So I as a teacher could annotate some passages, export the notes, have my students import them, and respond to my annotations with their own notes.
The variorum is preloaded with 25 unique copies (Seeds 60001-60025), but users can generate new versions and upload them for comparison. I was especially pleased with this feature. While Aaron Reed released the source code with a Creative Commons license, it’s ancient Python 2 code that most casual users will have trouble executing. Now anyone can generate their own copy of Subcutanean. Just fill out the form, and you’ll find the book in your inbox in a matter of minutes. Like Reed’s original project, each version of the novel generated by the Subcutanean Variorum has a unique seed and will be different from any previous—or future—copies.
Back in his 2020 talk about Subcutanean, Andrew Ferguson argued that the novel defies standard approaches for understanding textual variants. Reed’s work “poses a problem that is perhaps new to textual studies,” Ferguson observed, “in that it is essentially impossible to produce a variorum text of Subcutanean, that is, a compendium of all published versions of the text, for the purposes of scholarly comparison and additions.”
Ferguson is right. It’s impossible to compile all possible versions of Subcutanean. But the Subcutanean Variorum is a start. Twenty-five versions of the novel. Data visualizations of ten thousand versions of the novel. Generate and upload even more versions. Analyze, annotate, discover, share. Get lost.