In contrast to Here Goes Nothing, this apoplectic, one-second in the future dystopia, set in the U.S of today—right now—constructed and embedded with a meta context of very current historical events, actually hit similar themes in a very different, but much more effective way. There’s a mass suicide epidemic that breaks out. Beginning with the daughter of a pharmaceutical mogul (analogous to the Sackler family), she papers her walls with OxyContin and leaves the world. Her younger brother goes to a facility to treat adolescents with mental illness and absconds with a supposed prophet to save the world from all too-real factional elements as a civil war breaks out in America.

What is unique about this is that it would be absurdism, if it weren’t integrating the meta context via interjections from the author himself, serving as infodumps of the real world factions or natural disasters; tapping the vein of the predominate current anxieties. So when the book shifts into an act that feels bombastic and slightly askew and absurd, it’s constructed of elements and problems that counteract that dissonance, giving more credence to what would be a kind of thrillery, wild and violent, sometimes plain strange, plot.

It effectively taps into very real frustrations. For me, there’s an element of catharsis in not deviating from the anxieties I have. Acknowledging them and trying to wake up Americans in a non ahistorical, nor satirical, very plain and literal way. Because satire isn’t working. Frankly, 90% of the time it feels like it allows the reader to dismiss what is being subverted, these days. So how about running right into the anxiety? Will that wake some people up? It used to be that imperialistic countries would make their citizens docile by providing a much better standard of living than the rest of the world. America can’t claim that, but tries to, because of propaganda and indoctrination.

So, why not just have the civil war kick off and include the elements that are so stupid, such as Qanon, and bring up the American price tags of items on a guy who stormed the capital during the fiction, and the maths of the cost of one of the richest men in the world to find and destroy women he sexually assaults across the globe. Why not talk about of empathy is helping or hindering humanity address global issues?

Though, this book is certainly leaning into the white male neo-liberal space and not great at intersectionality at all—I do think it’s novel and it did stir something up in me that tired satires and boring dystopias, at this point, always attempt, but fail at. This is at least not skirting past the problems and forced the reader to confront them during a book that would otherwise probably be simple escapism, like many of the rest that claim to be About these issues. I’m sure it’s not a book many will enjoy or want to pick up for those reasons. I found it reduced my anxiety for a story to handle things the way this does though, and hadn’t expected that.

The audiobook has narration from the author himself interspersed, but the meat of the thing is from someone else, who was quite good. A solid performance that got the job done and didn’t bother me. No emotion really, but good inflection (3.5/5)