Montez Press invites you to a conversation around our newest release, neonoir novel Jaw Filler by Maz Murray & Charlie Markbreiter, on Monday 15th December, from 7 - 8.30pm at Housmans Bookshop, 5 Caledonian Road, N1 9DX, featuring a Q&A hosted by writer So Mayer. Tickets are free but booking is essential.
'You don't need dysphoria to be trans. You don't need a body at all.’
When Detective Sean Hastings is asked to investigate the disappearance of Character, he enters the First Trans Commune in Sim World, a virtual reality cult community imagineered by transfluencer Kevin, and bankrolled by a mysterious tech company, VSI.
Haunted by the death of his cis gayguy college bestie and their shared diasporic dilemmas, Taylor, VSI’s token QTPOC face, sees potential in Kevin’s ability to Release trauma into the virtual world. Meanwhile, Casey, Sean’s ex, hopes Releasing will cure their Long Plague. Then femme fatale Mitchelle reappears. And the plot twists.
A pulpy neo-noir romp through the anxiously assimilated transmasculine id, Jaw Filler asks: who is VSI, and what do they really want? Can you be your own dad? And if Character’s mind is trapped in Sim World, then where is his body?
'Jaw Filler instantly joins the canon of outlier literature: jaw-dropper, more like.’ - Isabel Waidner, author of Sterling Karat Gold
'It’s like The Sluts meets Double Indemnity but everyone is trans. I had an absolute blast.’ - Macy Rodman
'With Jaw Filler, Charlie Markbreiter and Maz Murray offer a searing, noir-flavored lens into the world of terminally online guys and our insecurities, fantasies, and wild imaginations of ourselves and each other. I will be discussing this in therapy and billing Charlie and Maz for the expense.' - James Tom
‘There’s something faintly Brazil about Jaw Filler: wilful and breakneck, self-aware yet never cynical, paranoiac but always coyly – unarguably – plausible. Calling it a pastiche would be stupid. To do so would overlook not only the ravenous delight Jaw Filler takes in the melange of its genre conventions, but also, more importantly, its surgical commitment to grounding a narrative in what I can only succinctly describe as genocide-reality. Murray & Markbreiter have achieved the extremely contemporary and impossible to falsify: true camp darkness.’ - Hesse K., author of Disquiet Drive
Maz Murray is an artist who makes films, writing, performances and things. They had their first institutional solo show at Focal Point Gallery in 2024. He’s currently working on a collaborative performance, PLOT HOLE, developed while an awardee at Studio Voltaire.
Charlie Markbreiter is the author of Rapid Onset: Anti-Trans Culture and U.S. Imperial Decline (Bloomsbury, 2027) and Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella (2022). He is a PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center.
So Mayer is a writer, editor, bookseller, organiser and film curator. Their most recent book is Bad Language (Peninsula Press, 2025), a memoir and manifesto on language and power. Their first collection of short stories Truth and Dare, from Cipher Press, and was long listed for the 2024 Republic of Consciousness Prize and Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Their recent books include A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing, a book-length essay on queer films, bodies and fascism for Peninsula Press, and their most recent collaborative projects are The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K Le Guin (Spiral House), an illustrated anthology of writing on Le Guin’s cartographies, Space Crone by Ursula K. Le Guin (Silver Press), The Film We Can’t See (BBC Sounds), Unreal Sex (Cipher Press), and Mothers of Invention: Film, Media and Caregiving Labor. So works with Burley Fisher Books, queer feminist film curation collective Club Des Femmes, and Outburst Arts in Belfast, as editor of catflap magazine. 
@suchmayer.