christ on fucking earth. i have not been this gripped by a book in years. every time i wasn’t reading it i was thinking about it, and every time i was reading it it felt impossible to drag myself away. i finished it today, at work i have these little five minute breaks every half hour or so and i was using every single one to devour this. seriously one of the best books i’ve ever read. the first night i started i stayed up until 4am reading. every second i just had to find out what happened next even when every time it was more fuckshit gore and rape. so fucked up. felt like i was getting crushed.
im a classics student and read mostly stuff from 2000 years ago, and this was my first foray into something… truly modern? written by someone like me? the first novel i’ve ever read that captures what the online world is really like. i’m used to seeing posts and videos about the internet and internet culture, but i’ve never read a book that mirrors it back to me (the reason for that is of course that terminally online geniuses don’t get bookshop book deals that reach my corner of the earth, and i haven’t ventured much into this realm before. more fool the me!!! i am incredibly excited to read more of your stuff, and find other people with similar stuff. shoutout to paying for an .epub). it was also completely hilarious! based and waterpilled! so many times i laughed out loud.
also the most refreshing portrayal of autism i’ve ever consumed. i feel like i clung too much to the bastion of the unproblematic as a teenager after i got diagnosed, and this was exactly what i needed at this point in my life. every use of “retard” was cathartic (all the “faggot”s too lol). i feel somehow more secure in my autism after this.
incredible gore, viciously affecting, graphic rape scenes, the whole book was overstimulating in the best way, i’ve read few books that feel so vivid and bright. your descriptive prose was phenomenal. the whole book felt drenched in neon and blood (and piss and cum and energy drinks and sweat and tears and vomit and pizza grease). today while i was reading it i bought a pizza for lunch and drank my monster energy just to try and feel it all more than the words.
just obsessed with the characters and their relationships too, holy shit, will be thinking about trianon and insul and oenone til the end of my days. and the climate change stuff was great too, very casual, so real. lots of things (the autism, the sexuality and genderish stuff, the climate change stuff) felt touched on so realistically and subtly, just really well done. the school shooter stuff was crazy. it was kind of refreshing too to see that portrayed so bluntly, without i think the precise fear that usually surrounds the phenomenon, but without also the cruel glee that you’ll find 4channers espousing. i am australian, so mass shootings are not really on the public consciousness as much as they are in america, but in late high school i kind of voyeuristically looked a lot at online columbine fans as like an exercise in cringe, fascinated by their weirdness and their obsession with that shooting. also by coincidence the morning on the day i started this book i was at the site of the worst mass shooting in australian history, so it was kind of on my mind.
fuck. so glad i came across this book, so glad you wrote it! i write a bit myself (lots of blood and vomit and such) and you have inspired me to write even more (and even weirder). can i ask like where you got the idea from, or how it came about, like i guess the creative process lol? like what was the first idea you had that made you go yeah this needs to be a book? and did you always know it would end with them alive and together? also god sorry for all the questions but how did you come up with the names they are so fun. if you’ve answered these before do just link me or something lol. anyway. big outpouring but i needed to say it! just haven’t been so engrossed in a book for ages.