This double book review previously appeared at The Last Estate 100 years ago.
THE SPIDERâS WEB VIBRATES
DRAGON DAY by Matthew Pegas. 2021. Terror House. 136 pp.
DOX by Alex Beaumais. Tragickal Books. 2021. 225 pp.
Politics is one of those subjects youâre supposed to shy away from in polite conversation. It touches everybody in some way, we all more or less know all the current wrinkles, yet it vexes everybody, some people to the point of boiling over into violence. Fiction exploring political violence has been a gymnasium of the mind to safely lift heavy matters, to figure out where to arrive, since Dostoyevskyâs novel critiquing nihilism and political revolution, Demons. Novels treating the current political scene, and in particular the resurgent world of right-wing ideology as it plays out onlineâthe alt-rightâprovide gym equipment much in demand for strengthening muscles long-neglected by the leftâs supposed stranglehold on the arts. Two new novels by Matt Pegas and Alex Beaumais nobly follow the rightward intellectual excursions of young male characters, but the extractions, the retreats, the settlings, the fearful warnings that result differ greatly in quality and literary merit. The sum impressions gathered are that the subject matter of alt-right flux is too radioactive and garish to fully contemplate; further novelistic treatments must be written.
Matthew Pegasâ slight, buzzy novel Dragon Day is an academic thriller disguising a bizarre political treatise. Why do I say bizarre? Because I canât quite say with certainty where it ends up, or if to the contrary it is meant to be a kind of sampler of political philosophy as it exists in 2021. Maybe on some level a political novel like Dragon Day is not supposed to traffic in positions that are agreed or disagreed with. It is not didactic. The environment that the novel explores is the hotbed of political ideas and idealism begging to run rampant that is the contemporary college campus, where minds are for the most part free from economic concerns to run to whatever fanciful destination they can. In the most extreme case, as this is, it explores what motivations can there be for political violence.
Everyone wants to know why the school shooter does what he does, why the incel mass murderer does what he does, why people on the fringes resort to extreme acts to express themselves. A void is created after the dust settles that no amount of CNN talking heads and analysts and investigative journalists can fill. Speculation abounds and criminal psychologists are wheeled out to give explanations, but it all feels so dissatisfying. It still feels that way after reading Dragon Day, but at least someone has attempted to use the scope of fiction to examine it.
The novel is, technically, spoilable so I will resist the urge to spill all the beans here, should you want to support the author and Terror House by purchasing it. Itâs a thriller and it does have some credible twists like much genre fiction. Weâre informed from the very beginning that this is a chronicle speculating on what could have led a college freshman, Toby Sharpe, to set off a bomb at âDragon Day,â an annual parade at the very progressive Lockden University in Pennsylvania, an hour west of New York City, killing 23 other people and wounding dozens more. The point of view from which the writing is done is more than a little blurry; weâre told that the book is written by Charles Jason, a PhD candidate at Lockden U. who knew Toby for a short time before the bombing. Uptight MFA students who canât abide inexplicable POV shifts: stay away.
Who was Toby Sharpe? Somebody who didnât fit in, somebody who was not too swift with the ladies or with anybody for that matter, and, in one very early and very shocking scene that sets up a good deal of tension for the rest of the novelâs 136 pages, a victim. The characterization is there: Toby is a romantic wet squib having a misfire with a girl named Zoe who must spell out her lack of interest to him and give him the old âI donât think I should be dating anybody right now, Iâm at collegeâ line, which never fails to be misinterpreted by the dumpee.
I have a limited amount of interest in the so-called ideological content of an incel manifesto. For people who have been living on Neptune, or maybe just have been living lives where (bless them) such exotic nomenclature was not necessary, incels means âinvoluntary celibates,â young menâletâs be realâwho canât convince anybody to have sex with them. The truncated self-inflicted terminology tells you all you really need to know about the brainpower of the unlucky in love: intelligent, taxonomy-obsessed, needing to reduce a common phenomenon of life (most people arenât getting laid) to a specific label from which to launch an attack on society. Toby never calls himself an incel, but thatâs besides the point. His sexual rejection is presented as a crucial ingredient for his apparent anti-social outrage.
As a satire of academia and the intricate gobbledygook that is foisted on young minds by the ivory tower, Dragon Day is not quite successful. Itâs too perfunctory to be a useful dissection of the life of the mind; perhaps had the novel been thicker we could have marinated in the intellectual stockpot for longer, allowing the ideas to penetrate and the laughter to be richer and more skewering. Toby falls under the spell of a popular young English professor named Wallingford who tries to indoctrinate the boy into Derridean theories about the connection between a writerâs prose style and his penile dimensions. Research funds are set aside to solicit info from writers about their peckers in tandem with their writing abilities. Much is made of the âphalgorithmâ that gets used to measure a writerâs syntax. Charles, the PhD student who was working with Wallingford on these theories, gets booted out in favor of Toby, who is thought to be more malleable for Wallingfordâs true intellectual aims.
What would an academic thriller be without a nefarious professor pulling the strings behind the scenes? Spoiler doctrine forbids me from telling everything; suffice it to say, the faux-Marxist professor has raised the stakes beyond mere dialectical materialism or Critiques of the Gotha Programme: as befits a thriller weâre talking about the future of Western civilization. Strap in for some crypto-fascist accelerationist chaos magick tug of war between the extreme left and extreme right. The political thrust of the novel all gets a little murky and would be easy to make fun of if it werenât unsettlingly like what you would find broadcasted in an incel terroristâs over-thinking blog post. Those interested in the finer points of what Pegas is trying to say about the current disruptive threat of the alt-right are encouraged toread the book. Perhaps one of the greatest resonances is that a Nietzschean âtranscendence of moralityâ mainly appeals to little men swimming in excess sexual pneuma, but that is threat enough when bullets, bombs, and out-of-control vehicles are readily available. God is, as usual in indie lit productions, totally absent from the proceedings.
Bombing a college campus, to the bomberâs chagrin had he lived, carries consequences which the reader of Pegasâ novel must contend with. A fallout that is less dramatic and handled with more skill and literary value is the âdoxxingâ at the heart of Alex Beaumaisâ novel Dox. On November 22nd, 2021, the day I finished reading Beaumaisâ debut novel, reports came in about photos being published of trans activists in front of JK Rowlingâs house. It was decried as doxxing, or publishing the home address of someone as retaliation for their politically objectionable opinions. In Rowlingâs case her doxx-able offenses were her now-famous objections to trans rights and their mangling definition of what constitutes a woman. Rowling has for several years occupied, in the minds of many people, the role of transphobic, out-of-touch celebrity betraying a generation of sensitive readers. Quickly people on Twitter, out for Rowlingâs blood, chimed in that the photos could hardly be called doxxing as Rowlingâs address in Edinburgh is well-known to anybody consulting a tourism website; people take photos there all the time.
There is, at least apparently, no such ambiguity to the doxxing experienced by Rick Speer in Beaumaisâ novel: in his portrayal it is a frightening, career-ending, reputation-destroying act of disruption that may as well spell the end of oneâs life. Speer, a libertarian blogger who has amassed a small fortune in Bitcoin and who has more than flirted with far-right politics online, is being exposed and blackmailed by volatile antifa types who come to his house, throw rocks through his window, and film themselves having an altercation with him in the parking lot of his Toronto condo. In a frenzy Speer shuffles through his options, which include fleeing to other countries, paying off the doxxers, and suicide. The novel is about other things, as well, but this experience lies at the center of the narrative and propels the plot forward.
In the authorâs very capable hands, Toronto, Canada is portrayed as a choke point of globally conscious, highlyeducated urban youth seeking meaning in 21st century culture wars, a more interesting battleground than Pegasâ university campus. Politics is ever present and ever-important; the online universe, for this class of tapped-in young city-dwellers, is a whetstone of political philosophy against which to grind many ideological axe blades. The novelâs landscape is of a tense, fearful place, and the social media environment inhabited by the characters is one saturated with opinions and, in the constantly watching eyes of the Internet, a thirst for accountability. We know this from watching the news, or more specifically by hearing of the crushing spectacles of denunciation performed by online mobs seeking vengeance in a hyper-mediated biosphere of unforgiving political correctness. Beaumais dramatizes this phenomenon, highlighting the fears of very public revelations felt by people trapped by their own actions and utterances as recorded by the eternal posterity of the Internet.
The most remarkable aspect of the novel as I read it was its intelligent and bewildering prose style, studded with au courant political and cultural jargon, a whirlwind encyclopedia of refined political positions as examined under a fearless 2021 microscope. Rick Speer reflects to himself upon the arrival at his worldview vis-a-vis the trolls of the right wing:
At some point between indulging these people and wishing he could delete them like his Internet history, Rick had to admit that, though he hated anarcho-capitalists, PUAs, 1488ers, trad-Christians, accelerationists, NEETs, and Nazbolsâhe hated them half a degree less than the general population. It was just too easy for normies to believe falsehoods and become human shields for consumerismâŠYou could see the cognitive dissonance in genetic-testing kits, which revealed your separateness down to whether you carried a Neanderthal allele for sneezing after dark chocolate but whose commercials showed everyone as octo-racial, with freckles, an epicanthic fold, a flat nose, a copper afro.
The portrait of Rick Speer as a man seduced by alt-right ideas and yet a sympathetic victim of mass bullying is a risky one, but Beaumais wins our indulgence by putting Rick through an ordeal that in some ways has little to do with culture wars. The doxxing central to the novel is bookended by a beginning and ending having to do with a Polish man and his three daughters, the OgĂłreks, and Rickâs encounters with them. Bela, one of the daughters, is dating Rick while her very uptight sister Ariel looks on with extreme displeasure, because as right-wing (he would say libertarian) as Rick is, Ariel is ultra-left and driven by left-wing grievances and struggles with her own white privilege. The sections where Ariel and Rick debate politics around the dinner table are, unfortunately, weak spots in the novel, where the veneer over the ânovel of ideasâ is at its thinnest. Beaumais and Pegas struggle to extricate their novels from this ânovel of ideasâ rubric with varying degrees of success: Beaumais shows strain while Pegasâ wheels come almost completely off the cart. Beaumais excels at narrating the inner workings of his charactersâ minds and is less assured at this outward dialogue of bickering, educated strivers. The portrayal of Ariel as an unpleasantly PC, essay-writing shrew is perhaps meant to strike a satirical tone; maybe people in Toronto talk like this in reality, and I have just never crossed paths with them.
Dox is a great book for readers wanting to visit the world of the present day and engage with intricate ideas and politics of the moment. It is not an escape from a politics-drenched media environment but a thorough, satisfying diving-into.
Highlights of the novel include the middle section dealing with the doxxing and a section nearer the beginning where Bela and Rick inadvertently drink a water bottle laced with MDMA and go to a nightclub. The elucidation of the two uncertain loversâ intoxicated thoughts and actions while in a crowded place full of sensory stimuli was wonderful. The right-wing âThinking Manâ is given three-dimensions, relationships, activity, relatable failings, so that the going askew means something to us later.
Indie lit, transgressive writing, âcyberwriting,â being countercultural, has its share of political manifestations. I have felt the neoreactionary spiderâs web vibrate but have never really come face to face with the spider itself. Maybe the spider metaphor is all wrongâtoo many Shelob associations, not enough Attenborough, spiders being, like neoreactionaries, just a part of the natural world we live in now.
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Follow up thoughts from 2024: This might have been the best piece of writing I did for the dormant arts/culture magazine The Last Estate, in my opinion. It was the first thing I sent them. I have since done a little light research of my own into certain aspects of the Alt-Right, by no means exhaustive. I might want to reread Dox. I am stalled currently in the task of completing a novel which touches on politics in the 21st century in an indirect way. One gets the feeling that it is easy to slip into ham-handedness with fictional treatments of material such as neoreaction among millennials and creative types. But itâs in the air.
Me as a kid in the Finger Lakes region of NY State.
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