As one of my favourite movies of all-time, the experience is probably always going to be a positive one. It’s interesting that this starts at the end, just like the film, but gives away the main twist. I kind of dug it though, because it makes you instantly question everything, which you ought to, and probably wouldn’t have done otherwise. I’d wager a large portion of the film is verbatim too. Most scenes I could see in my head play out even as I read them, and there wasn’t that much additional context being added beyond that.

For such a solipsistic, unreliable narrator, he spends a lot of time saying what is happening, with little interiority. It’s a very cinematic novel. Just like the film, the book seems to also get a lot of readers that don’t understand the satirical nature of it. It is an indictment of toxic masculinity and an acknowledgement of how young boys, just like the narrator, and those others like him who join, who become susceptible to recruitment through tapping into this generational underlying anger. There’s enough empathy and biting criticism that it evens out, not giving a black and white theme or message. Rather, it endeavours to provide a kind of power fantasy and show just how grotesque it is. Not to mention how the narrator themselves could have been fractured to that point to begin with. It’s a terrible cycle that just keeps repeating, co-opting culture and young men—unless, as we see, there’s some manner of intervention.

I do think the movie surpasses the source material, though. But only because the book is written in such a way as to not offer more than the movie, and the movie having a structure that’s more appealing—possibly more thought provoking (depending on the viewer anyway; reading reviews of the movie show some people have no idea what it’s actually about).