An acid cultural satire that skewers what we would miss most about the online world.
Cracked.com contributor Gladstone offers up an outlandishly specific takedown of online culture via the popular apocalypse comedy genre.
Readers who don’t dabble regularly on the Web won’t get it, but fans of sites like Reddit, Instagram or Facebook (or streaming pornography, come to think of it) should find themselves howling at this profane, very funny comedy about our worldwide addiction to the Internet. In fact, this satiric adventure already has fans worldwide, having first appeared in a different version on Cracked.com as short, serialized entries, supposedly from a journal found in a Dumpster in Bayside, N.Y. Basically, one day, the Internet just stops, and things quickly get weird. Activists from Anonymous and Occupy pretty much escape unscathed, but much of the population shuts down, becoming zombies with no Web-based stimuli. Other subcultures struggle to reproduce themselves in their unplugged versions, leading to the hilarious image of Reddit addicts screaming at each other in circles on the street. “Gladstone,” our narrator, begins investigating the Internet's disappearance with Tobey, formerly only an online chat buddy, and Oz—short for Ozzygrrl69—a smoking hot Australian girl whose income dried up when she could no longer shower in front of perverts via webcam. In Central Park, a former librarian dubs himself “Jeeves,” answering questions for $5 each, and quickly goes viral. When Jeeves dubs Gladstone the “Internet Messiah,” all hell breaks loose, and Gladstone finds himself on a mad dash through 4Chan meetups, epic bar crawls, the “Rule 34 Club” (you’ll have to Google it if that doesn’t ring a bell) and the narrator’s own frighteningly unstable psyche to get to the bottom of things. Strikingly similar to fellow Cracked.com contributor David Wong’s (Jason Pargin's) John Dies at the End, there’s a surprising amount of pathological drama at the book’s denouement that shows there’s a lot of brains behind all those dirty jokes.
An acid cultural satire that skewers what we would miss most about the online world.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-04502-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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