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It is a rare and notable event that I, a committed if idle completist, choose to not finish reading a novel, if one would elect to categorise this as such. I chose not to complete this pamphlet (see what I did there?), although to remove all trace of its existence on my shelves, the itch at the back of my woke, lefty-liberal, eco-non-fascist, Guardian-reading mind, would be to also remove the salience of a good cautionary tale.
Let me start with context. Mike Ma was close to Sam Pink (another author of dubious moral merit, perhaps) and on the same screen as one of my literary heroes, Kurt Vonnegut, on the Global Network of Discovery (GNOD)'s literary map, where readers can see what other authors readers were reading, constellated around the author in context. In this case, the author may have been Delicious Tacos after I may or may not have suggested someone on the internet who said some words at me to have a read of his book Finally Some Good News.
Klaxons should have been heeded when spotting Bronze Age Pervert - author of satire (?) Bronze Age Mindset - but for some reason I deduced Ma was the popular Chinese family name and Mike an Anglicization of a difficult to pronounce given name, as is common. I had after all, recently finished novels by Tao Lin, Cixin Liu and Rachel Kuang and was greedy for some other, new lived experiences to absorb and appropriate.
What-ah mistake-ah to make-ah!
He is, of course, a very blond, very white, American (possibly of Irish decent) militant accelerationist and right-wing influencer, with demonstrably close ties to some very nasty pieces of shit (in my opinion) like Milo Yiannopoulos.
Of course he is.
And so you may therefore guess what this self-published toilet paper and its "follow-up" Gothic Violence is all about.
You're wrong. It's worse on all the levels.
It could be an angry joke, of course, but the evidence is against it. It could be a biting commentary on a broken society, but I suspect not. Even Mahoney described it as something like a breakdown of a novel (I paraphrase, but honestly my search history is dirty enough without looking for quotes from this muppet, the shape on him).
And it's bad.
So I binned it off, around page 40, before any of the real (or is it? Yes it is) violence kicks off, and shortly after my brother, for whom I hold no great hopes of sagacity at that time of day, picked it up and flicking through it said, "Hmm, oh, that's nasty."
Of course, you may wish to make up your own minds, as is your right and I applaud your choice, I really do, should you wish to challenge my hastily but solidly formed opinion, but for the record, you don't have to pay for it - a fact I wish I had known in advance - as it's free to download on some pretty sketchy far-right websites, should the urge take you.
No paid links here today, Amazonian overlords.
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