Editor’s note: The following double book review was abandoned—typewritten, stapled, and wrapped in swaddling clothes—in a thrift store bassinet on the steps of the Last Estate. Not ones to leave an orphan homeless (or increase our workload by turning down free content), we decided to take in this “bastard from a basket,” as Daniel Plainview would say, and give it shelter within the virtual pages and conjured walls of the estate.

 

A review of:
DRAGON DAY by Matthew Pegas. Terror House. 2021. 136 pp.

DOX by Alex Beaumais. Tragickal Books. 2021. 225 pp.

 

Fiction exploring political violence has been a gymnasium of the mind to safely lift heavy matters since Dostoyevsky’s 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 online—the alt-right—provide gym equipment much in demand for strengthening muscles long-neglected by the left’s 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 settlings, the fearful warnings that result in the two works differ greatly in quality and literary merit. 

 

Matthew Pegas’ slight, buzzy novel Dragon Day is an academic thriller disguising a bizarre political treatise. Why do I say bizarre? Because I can’t 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. 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. Media speculation in the aftermath 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. It’s a thriller and it does have some credible twists like much genre fiction. We’re 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 “Dragon Day,” an annual parade at the very progressive Lockden University in Pennsylvania, an hour west of New York City, killing Toby and 22 other people and wounding dozens more. The point of view from which the writing is done is more than a little blurry; we’re 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 can’t abide inexplicable POV shifts: stay away.

 

Who was Toby Sharpe? Somebody who didn’t 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 novel’s 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 “I don’t think I should be dating anybody right now, I’m at college” line, which never fails to be misinterpreted by the dumpee.

 

The amount of interest we have in the so-called ideological content of an incel manifesto might be limited. 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 “involuntary celibates,” young men—let’s be real—who can’t 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 aren’t getting laid) to a specific label from which to launch an attack on society. Toby never calls himself an incel, but that’s 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. It’s 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 writer’s 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 “phalgorithm” that gets used to measure a writer’s 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 Wallingford’s true intellectual aims: taking literary phalology to the next level. During a visit from Toby during office hours, Wallingford begins massaging the student’s shoulders and giving him the inside scoop:

 

 

“The truth is, I’ve exhausted the limits of what can be accomplished using penis measurements and writing samples,” Wallingford said. “I want to continue the study of male sexuality started by literary phalology, but now I want to hone in on an exhaustive study of one young man, and, well, Toby, I want that young man to be you.”

“What?” said Toby, jerking forward.

“Just relax, bud,” said Wallingford. “You’re so tight, I can’t imagine carrying around all this stress is good for you.” Toby tried to take the professor’s advice, squeezing his eyes shut. Relaxing had never been something that came easily to him, especially not around people he wanted to like him.

“Now that Charles is out of the picture,” said Wallingford, close behind Toby’s ear, “I think I’ll be able to speak much more frankly with you about what my work is really about.”

 

 

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 we’re 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. “Wallingford’s idea,” Pegas writes, “was that by sowing chaos, feeding into either side of the supposed debate, he was bringing the whole system down.”

 

The political thrust of the novel gets a little murky and might be easy to make fun of if it weren’t unsettlingly like what you would find broadcasted in an incel terrorist’s over-thinking blog post. Those interested in the finer points of what Pegas is trying to say about the current disruptive promises of the alt-right—and there is a lot to be chewed on there—are encouraged to read the book. Perhaps one of the greatest resonances is that a Nietzschean “transcendence of morality” 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 bomber’s chagrin had he lived, carries consequences which the reader of Pegas’ novel must contend with. A fallout less dramatic and handled with more skill and literary value is the “doxxing” at the heart of Alex Beaumais’ novel Dox. On November 22nd, 2021, the day I finished reading Beaumais’ debut novel, reports came in about photos being published of trans activists in front of JK Rowling’s house. It was decried as doxxing, or publishing the home address of someone as retaliation for their politically objectionable opinions. In Rowling’s 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 Rowling’s blood, chimed in that the photos could hardly be called doxxing as Rowling’s 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 Beaumais’ novel: in his portrayal it is a frightening, career-ending, reputation-destroying act of disruption that may as well spell the end of one’s 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 author’s very capable hands, Toronto, Canada is portrayed as a choke point of globally conscious, highly educated urban youth seeking meaning in 21st century culture wars, a more interesting battleground than Pegas’ 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 novel’s 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 Nazbols—he 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 consumerism…You 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 Ogóreks, and Rick’s 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 “novel of ideas” is at its thinnest. Beaumais and Pegas struggle to extricate their novels from this “novel of ideas” rubric with varying degrees of success: Beaumais’ chassis shows strain while Pegas’ wheels almost come completely off the cart. Beaumais excels at narrating the inner workings of his characters’ minds and is slightly less assured at this outward dialogue of bickering, educated strivers. At the dinner table when Rick first meets the Ogóreks, the political scrimmage is set as European history is quickly invoked:

 

 

Rick said, “Are you guys Polish?”

“Yes,” Ariel said. “What are you?”

“Kraut-Anglo. My father was born in Germany.”

“I’ll trade you Szydło if you give us Merkel,” Ariel said, smiling at her formulation.

“Deal.”

Ariel smiled and then thought about this: “What?”

 

…

 

Rick looked surprised. “Germany is always in the middle of outside forces. I guess kind of like Poland, but we actually, well, nevermind. It just seems like Germans are always marching too hard in some direction.”

“Maybe you’d like our history instead, of being invaded and dismembered by foreign powers?”

“Um, sorry.”

“It’s not like you did it,” she sneered. 

 

 

The portrayal of Ariel as an unpleasantly PC, essay-writing shrew is perhaps meant to strike a satirical tone; she “prioritizes finding allyship over determining whether someone’s apartment got morning sunlight,” concocting an acronym “JILEBAFIRG” as a scorecard of issues: justice, immigration, labor, environment, banking, abortion, feminism, inequality, race, and gay rights. Rick falls short of Ariel’s estimation: “[H]is dog-whistles on race and immigration cast him in the reject pile. And that wasn’t even counting the money he was giving Bela or the militancy of his haircut.”

 

Whatever faults of characterization exist are minor enough to be lost in the panorama. 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 lovers’ intoxicated thoughts and actions while in a crowded place full of sensory stimuli was wonderful. The right-wing “Thinking Man” is given three-dimensions, relationships, activity, relatable failings, so that the going askew means something to us later.

 

Indie lit, writing accessed through Twitter, “cyberwriting,” is countercultural, and in the pandemic years this has its share of political manifestations perhaps surprising to the artistically minded. In reading and exploring the scene, I have felt the neoreactionary spider’s web vibrate but have never really come face to face with the spider itself. Maybe the spider metaphor is all wrong—too many Shelob associations, not enough Attenborough, spiders being, like neoreactionaries, just a part of the natural world we live in now.