Utter Goodness
By Audrey Lee
Farthest Heaven, 120 pages, $17
A Prisoner’s Cinema
By Justin Lee
Passage Press, 264 pages, $30
As a child, I spent an inordinate amount of time watching survival shows. I Shouldn’t Be Alive was the one that stuck with me the most. What fascinated me about them was how much they contrasted with my own life: I could watch a convincing reenactment of some poor sod struggling for his life on the top of a mountain or the bottom of a crevasse or deep in the jungle, all from the comfort of my warm blankets, often past my bedtime (sorry, Mom and Dad).
This article is from The American Spectator’s summer 2026 print magazine. Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive the magazine.
My curiosity also led me to learn some not-quite-fun facts. For example, if you’re ever buried by an avalanche, the best thing you can do is to spit. You’re going to be tossed and turned every which way by the force of the snow slide. You’re going to be trapped in a small pocket with very limited air, and you’re not going to know which way is up. You won’t know which way to dig, all while knowing that if you choose wrong, you’ll suffocate. That’s why spitting is useful: gravity always works, even under the snow.
In other words, to know which way is up, you need to know which way is down. To seek the light, you need to know the darkness. And if you want to know which path you ought to take, you need to know which others are available to you. One of the advantages of stories is that you can, in some terribly impoverished way, experience the lives and struggles of others.
I’ve found that conservative works often fail to measure up in this regard. In their (correct) assessment that stories should seek to inspire rather than deconstruct, they’ve allowed their righteousness to blur the line between is and ought. Without mortal danger, after all, one cannot truly have life-or-death stakes. The Sound of Freedom, a critically acclaimed movie by many on the right, is the ultimate example of that. While nobody can doubt the nobility of the cause of ending child trafficking, one can certainly doubt the nobility of the characters portrayed in the movie. These are people with families and children of their own, casually embarking on a mission that could easily see them killed, or worse, on behalf of people they don’t even know. That’s heroic, but it’s also unearned. Why do these people value their lives so little in comparison to others? It’s not that one cannot come up with a compelling answer; it’s that the movie largely doesn’t try. The characters are not people as such; they’re idealized moral avatars of a cause.
I don’t know many idealized moral avatars, but it seems tautological that they don’t require any further inspiration.
In other words, The Sound of Freedom, like most conservative stories, was focused so much on being a conservative story, or frankly, a non-liberal story, that it lost focus on trying to be a good story.
Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our summer 2026 print magazine.
Two conservative short story collections, refreshingly, are a change from the usual tedium. These are Audrey Lee’s Utter Goodness (Farthest Heaven, 2026), the shorter and sweeter of the two, and Justin Lee’s (no relation, to my knowledge) A Prisoner’s Cinema (Passage Press, 2025).
Beware, though: these are not age-appropriate stories, and they are not for the prudish or faint of heart. This is because they speak to the human condition in ways other conservative works simply don’t. Right-wing art often shies away from portraying life as it is. To show depravity, the thinking goes, is to endorse it.
Many on the right are now thinking better of that. For example, Evie Magazine, a conservative women’s publication, recently published its “Sex Edition,” which covers exactly what you would expect. That it did so was panned by some social conservatives, but the wisdom of it was plain. The right, in essentially giving up talking about Eros beyond simple platitudes, had ceded commentary on a massive part of the human experience to the left. The results were both disastrous and predictable.
Art can have many purposes: to inspire, to condemn, to illuminate. But to do anything, it first has to relate. To make people think of their lives as they ought to be, it needs to first reach them as they are. If conservatism is true — that is, if it speaks to the underlying nature of human beings and reality itself — it cannot be utopian. It cannot be clean and pure, because the world isn’t.
Short stories are one of the oldest forms of narrative. The appeal is simple: unlike a novel, a short story can be read, or told, in one sitting. The tradeoff is that they must be, well, short. And yet at their best, their brevity can say quite a bit. One of my favorite details from my favorite short story, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s White Nights, is that you never learn the narrator’s name. So obsessed is he with his limerence, Nastenka, that he never thinks of himself. And she thinks so little of him that she never says his name, either. A longer narrative would almost certainly demand it at some point, but the short story facilitates the creative choice, which says so much about both of the characters.
Utter Goodness is the more grounded of the two works. There’s nothing magical or fantastical about it, although it certainly has its share of allegories. The best single word to describe it is Americana. Lee puts you in the shoes of different Americans as they face all sorts of modern trials and tribulations. These range from a fitness instructor to a cult member to a battered wife to a horse to even, perhaps worst of all, a journalist.
The most evocative, to me, was “American Girlfriend.” The title is deliberately euphemistic — the character and her entourage are, at best, gold diggers. And yet, it’s also a human story — of how the point-of-view character ended up there, her feelings toward the man who became her benefactor, and so on. It’s not something she intended; it just kind of happened. Despite the distinctly unrelatable subject matter, it was a very relatable feeling. It’s the easiest thing in the world to just go along with something, to take the path of least resistance. Because of that, it’s worth remembering that doing so is often perilous.
Some of Utter Goodness’s stories are short even by short story standards — not even three pages. But they all evoke, in the positive, intended way, the question every author wants his or her audience asking: what does that mean? It’s a fair question, and sometimes it seems like there might not be an answer.
The answer, if there is one, is likely to be found in the form of a Hunter S. Thompson quote before the beginning of the first story: “It’s our country,” he says. “[I]n a democracy, you have to be a player.” Though Lee’s characters include the virtuous and the vile alike, they all feel human. Yes, even the horse.
A Prisoner’s Cinema is without question the darker book. That epithet is evoked by the title: prisoner’s cinema refers to a phenomenon in which a person kept in prolonged darkness will begin experiencing colorful, brilliant hallucinations.
In a roundabout way, that’s what the book is. The characters of A Prisoner’s Cinema, to one extent or another, have their souls shrouded in darkness. All of them have something: addiction, resentment, narcissism, grief, or cynicism. All of them are haunted by it in grotesque, esoteric ways that explore the more ugly parts of human nature that are nevertheless all too human.
It’s also highly introspective: intermixed with the stories are no fewer than three chapters of the author discussing the meaning of the book, as well as his own character and motivations, with a stand-in for Satan.
If Audrey Lee’s book will make you cringe, Justin Lee’s will make your soul recoil. In particular, the titular story, “A Prisoner’s Cinema,” evoked Crime and Punishment in a more modern, depraved, and horrifying way. The story follows the stream of consciousness of a murderous pedophile, Cal, as he’s being executed. It also features the nonproverbial devil on his shoulder, who’s been egging him along to where he now finds himself. The character is given a surprisingly humane and believable story. This is not a person who was soulless or without a conscience, which makes his monstrousness all the more disturbing. And as with Raskolnikov, one couldn’t help but feel complicit in what the point-of-view character had done. While excellently written, I was relieved when that story ended and I could go back to being somebody who isn’t a murderer.
And yet, I came away from this feeling like I learned something — about morality, about human beings, and even about myself. The obvious impulse is that this person is a moral monster and should be killed immediately. He is and he should, but that’s not interesting or informative. What we learn is that Cal did not become a monster overnight. He became a monster through small, repeated acts that accumulated until he had been twisted beyond recognition.
A Prisoner’s Cinema is a scary book, but more importantly, it’s a horrifying one. The distinction is important. The first horror movie I ever watched was Halloween. While without a doubt it was very frightening to the 10-year-old me, it was only surface-deep. The horror in A Prisoner’s Cinema is internal, within the mind of the characters and, by extension, ourselves. You can’t just shoot it and make it go away. Well, I suppose you could, but that would be… counterproductive.
The through-line between the two stories is the presence of religion and shame. While both works are neck-deep in characters who sin, especially sexual sin, this is always descriptive, not prescriptive. While we often understand them, sympathize with them, and see ourselves in them, it’s plain that they are violating a preexisting moral order and are suffering because of it.
These characters, all of them, also have flashes of humanity. Of knowing what they should be doing and, all too often, failing to discharge it. That’s precisely what makes them feel relatable and human, and it’s what allows these works to credibly examine the darker aspects of human nature.
Conservatives have long struggled in the arts. Those artists who are conservatives have therefore had to deal with significant hurdles in producing anything of national prominence. The talent pool is smaller, the means of distribution narrower, and the incentive structure weaker. That’s to say nothing of the financial difficulties: conservative donors, for whatever reason, seem to have less interest in the arts outside of narrow passion projects.
The cultural zeitgeist on that may, at last, be changing. New conservative book publishers are publishing new conservative books that are aimed at popular audiences and are not ideological screeds. The rise of AI, combined with social media, portends the possibility of bypassing the institutional and financial gatekeepers to conservative film and animation.
The latter Lee’s book might be especially relevant to the modern political moment because, just like his characters, the conservative movement has found itself in a rather dark place and is psychologically tearing itself apart in rounds of inwardly directed recriminations, infighting, petty feuds, and conspiracy theories that have failed to cease even after the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
It’s unlikely any conservative art, regardless of its quality, will make an immediate impact on the prospects of the second Trump administration and the MAGA movement. But just like the art found in the ruins of Rome inspired the Renaissance, so too might this conservative cultural capital, created in a perhaps fleeting moment of hegemony, inspire whatever form the American right takes after Trump.
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