THE MEME

In Kent’s debut novel, a series of disparate documents holds the key to a mysterious societal shift.

In a near future wracked by income inequality, the world’s three richest men die in quick succession, the first seemingly of old age, the second at the hands of a mentally ill gunman, and the third killed by a drone. In a leaked confession, the shooter of the second man claims he had been “haunted and ultimately possessed” by an image later known as the Meme—a pixelated photograph of an alley wall with 10 words written in blood: “The Richest! In Order! With Order! By Order! For Order!” Before long, the world’s wealthiest people start dropping like flies in what comes to be known as the Meme War. As a result, the mega-wealthy break up their estates as quickly as possible. Decades afterward, the world’s oldest man—who shares a name with the author—makes a deathbed confession taking credit for the Meme, although the story isn’t quite as simple as that. In a dossier of mixed documents with multiple authors, the fictitious Kent lays out a story centuries in the making—one that involves cargo cults and Soviet defectors, an artificial intelligence, and the black box of a downed airplane recovered off the coast of Antarctica. Together, these fragments purport to tell a tale of the greatest societal revolution in human history, but the old man won’t give up the truth easily. Instead, the documents form a puzzle that the reader must solve to learn the secret history of the modern world.

Author Kent performs a sort of ventriloquism act in these pages, mimicking the language of various documents and characters, although when he narrates as his fictional persona, he tends to take on a baroque theatricality that is reminiscent of the works of Jorge Luis Borges or H.P. Lovecraft: “time capsules often take the form of bitter pills,” he warns the would-be reader in his prologue. “As you digest this one, explore the contours of your resolve and ruminate on what they mean for your life, beliefs, and actions, for these may be about to change.” The work that follows is more of a linked collection of stories than a proper novel, and the connections between the various pieces are not always obvious. Readers may also find the final puzzle to be somewhat of a letdown, if only because the author works so hard to stoke the reader’s expectations along the way. Even so, the individual chapters are each enjoyable in their own right, as Kent has a way of capturing contemporary concerns, such as income inequality, in grand, gothic terms. Furthermore, the inclusion of real-world phenomena, such as the early-20th-century John Frum cult and the 2014 disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, to say nothing of Kent’s fictional twin, lends the novel a charming aura of verisimilitude. Fans of Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves (2000) and similar metafictional mysteries will likely enjoy this addition to the genre.

A layered, paranoiac puzzle book with an impressive sense of atmosphere.