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
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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