An acid cultural satire that skewers what we would miss most about the online world.
Cracked.com contributor Gladstone offers up an outlandishly specific takedown of online culture via the popular apocalypse comedy genre.
Readers who don’t dabble regularly on the Web won’t get it, but fans of sites like Reddit, Instagram or Facebook (or streaming pornography, come to think of it) should find themselves howling at this profane, very funny comedy about our worldwide addiction to the Internet. In fact, this satiric adventure already has fans worldwide, having first appeared in a different version on Cracked.com as short, serialized entries, supposedly from a journal found in a Dumpster in Bayside, N.Y. Basically, one day, the Internet just stops, and things quickly get weird. Activists from Anonymous and Occupy pretty much escape unscathed, but much of the population shuts down, becoming zombies with no Web-based stimuli. Other subcultures struggle to reproduce themselves in their unplugged versions, leading to the hilarious image of Reddit addicts screaming at each other in circles on the street. “Gladstone,” our narrator, begins investigating the Internet's disappearance with Tobey, formerly only an online chat buddy, and Oz—short for Ozzygrrl69—a smoking hot Australian girl whose income dried up when she could no longer shower in front of perverts via webcam. In Central Park, a former librarian dubs himself “Jeeves,” answering questions for $5 each, and quickly goes viral. When Jeeves dubs Gladstone the “Internet Messiah,” all hell breaks loose, and Gladstone finds himself on a mad dash through 4Chan meetups, epic bar crawls, the “Rule 34 Club” (you’ll have to Google it if that doesn’t ring a bell) and the narrator’s own frighteningly unstable psyche to get to the bottom of things. Strikingly similar to fellow Cracked.com contributor David Wong’s (Jason Pargin's) John Dies at the End, there’s a surprising amount of pathological drama at the book’s denouement that shows there’s a lot of brains behind all those dirty jokes.
An acid cultural satire that skewers what we would miss most about the online world.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-04502-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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