FLUX

A marketing exec unknowingly makes a devil’s bargain when he’s offered a job that’s too good to be true.

More literary alchemy than timey-wimey SF, Chong’s debut novel falls right on the emotional bubble between the cult film Donnie Darko and Charles Yu’s noodle-bender Interior Chinatown (2020). The narrative throughline pivots on one very strange day for 28-year-old Brandon, who's half Korean, queer, and confused most of the time. Working for one of America’s last magazines, he’s not really surprised when he’s fired a few days before Christmas. After he uncharacteristically buys an expensive handbag and makes a pass at the salesclerk, he falls down an elevator shaft. Then he’s offered a job by Lev, a fast-talking raconteur who works for Flux, a Silicon Valley–flavored startup founded by enigmatic Io Emsworth, a doppelgänger for convicted charlatan Elizabeth Holmes promising an equally nebulous breakthrough. By the time these machinations start revolving, Chong has already broken the timeline. When 8-year-old Bo loses his mother in a car accident, he becomes obsessed with the 1980s detective show Raider. The show’s legacy is both groundbreaking for star Antonin Haubert’s portrayal of an Asian police detective and “the most racist fucking thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” according to Lev, compounded by its star’s spectacular fall from grace. Meanwhile, Blue, 48, is navigating life after two months spent in a coma and a tenuous relationship with his ex and their daughter. Every day, Brandon comes to work, eats his breakfast, and then…he doesn’t know what happens, but he’s losing days and weeks at a time. In a story about identity, our hero isn’t always the most sympathetic cast member even in a story flush with fakers. The fantastical elements lend intrigue, but Chong seems more interested in grief and the ways it shapes us than rewarming old chestnuts about art and the nature of blame.

A paranoid and inventive cautionary tale about buying into someone else’s glitchy utopia.