“What do we do with trespassers?” Gabriel Hart asks the gathered group in the back storeroom at the plantation. Its walls are hung with curing tobacco plants. They had kept me in the freezing locker overnight and I think I’m going to lose part of my ear to frostbite. Hart clicks a pen over and over, staring at me. He looks impatient, like he’s been dragged away from writing a record review that’s due in 24 hours.

 

“I say we feed this motherfucker to the gators,” Jake Blackwood says. “Shorty and Lucinda haven’t had writer meat in, I don’t know, months.” He’s taller than I had even imagined him. He’s wearing firing range eye protection and a Ruger GP100 on his hip. He looks like he could rip a copy of Ducks, Newburyport in half with his bare hands.

 

“Remember that investigative reporter who came around wanting to do a story on the disappearances?” Sybil Rain says. She’s done up in a cherry red cheerleader outfit and sucks on a blue lollipop, and her hair has matching streaks of azure in it.

 

“How much money do you have on you?” Derek Maine asks me. He’s sitting in a scraped-up wooden chair that is backwards, like he’s a corrupt cop four hours into a weary interrogation. 

 

“I’ve got about $45 in my wallet,” I say. “You can have it.” I hold out the wallet to Maine. He snatches it out of my hand and begins thumbing through the contents. “Plus there’s a gift card to Southside Mall Cinemas that has about $25 dollars left on it,” I add, my voice quaking.

 

“I’ll take that, thank you very much.” Sybil Rain strides forward and plucks the card out of Derek’s fingers. “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is coming out and I love me some Milk Duds.”

 

“What are you going to do with me?” I say. 

 

“See you later, alligator,” Stuart Buck says. His eyes look more cruel and malign than they did on the screen. 

 

“After a while, crocodile,” Sybil Rain says after taking out her lollipop, finishing the sing song. 

 

All of their expressions look more cruel and malign. They look like a cross between the family in those horror movies where Instagram influencers go off the beaten path looking for quaint locales to shoot photos in and find chainsaw death, that and Mad Max supporting characters who in a chaotic laughing frenzy would rape and murder fleeing citizens, civilization crumbling at the edges of mankind. The Last Estate plantation is near a swamp that is notorious for tourists getting lost in, no cell signal. Later skeletons turn up with bones clean of all meat, “swamp accidents,” they say.

 

Minutes later I find myself in a specially made harness dangling upside down above a gator pit. Gators lash the dark water underneath me with their tails, impatient. I have to think fast. I can’t believe I’m going to buy it in the power-grip jaws of some monster reptiles. 

 

“What’s going on here?” I hear a voice above me inquiring, bored. It’s William Duryea and he looks down at me squirming for my life. “Oh, another one.”

 

“What do you need, right now?” I shout.

 

“What we need is a whole lot of money,” Jake Blackwood says. 

 

“I can get it to you,” I say.

 

“Start talking.”

 

I’ve always been a lousy salesman, can’t close the deal, can’t even get people to look my way. But now I had to tap into the inner car dealer inside me, because I was wheeling and dealing for my life.

 

“I know a sure-fire way to make some easy money,” I say.

 

“Let’s hear it,” Gabriel Hart says. Each one sounds more bored and less troubled at the thought of lowering a man into a pit of death than the last. “And make it fast, I have to write 3,000 words on mic placement in Jad Fair and Daniel Johnston’s 1989 collab album It’s Spooky.”

 

“Amazon,” I say. 

 

“What about it? We hate Amazon.”

 

“Do you know a guy named Peter Rook?” I say.

 

“Never heard of him,” says William Duryea.¹

 

“Well you should. He’s an outsider writer from Canada and he taught me some secrets of how to punk Amazon in self-publishing.” I had interviewed Rook months before, since I had some half-assed idea about writing a book about writers in “outsider lit” in the Twittersphere, but then like most things with me the book had an ambitious first few chapters, moderate applause, quotation on Radio Panik 105.4 FM out of Brussels, then collapsed into confused mumbling. Now Rook could be my ticket out of this mess. I hope he doesn’t mind.

 

“What did he say?” Sybil Rain asks. She sounds slightly curious but like it would just take one boring reply from me for her to lose interest and toss me fully to the reptiles.

 

“Get me away from these alligators and I’ll tell you.”

 

They all look at each other, weighing the options. They decide to haul me up and toss me into a chair with the harness still on me, a stark reminder that I could be right back down there in an instant. Blackwood, sending a clear signal, sits down across from me at a table and puts his Ruger down on it with a clunk. The silent inquisitor. “Start talking.”

 

I gulp. “Ok, Rook told me about his experiences writing niche erotica and manipulating the Algorithm at Amazon to maximize sales. He didn’t tell me any of his pen names, and I didn’t push him. He told me about how you could analyze the sales rank information of erotic novels and stories in various niche and sub-niche markets, figure out what keywords were visible on the covers and in the titles and blurbs of these best-selling novels—their sales page—and exploit those. He said, ‘I geared everything I did, not just towards cramming those keywords in, but finding out which ones had the most visibility in search engines.’ He told me he had a background in studying formal logic and computer sciences at university, and that he used this in studying the sales of books on Amazon. Ever heard of hucows?”

 

Before anyone speaks Blackwood nods and says: “Hucows, oh yeah, lemme tell you. Milk of a different ilk? It’s lactation erotica. Ulrika Udderson, Sinistre Ange. Hucow BDSM, ‘how I became a hucow at the farm.’ That’s pure 100% sexual calcium, boy. Hard bones.”

 

“Rook said that some of these hucow books would sell two or three copies every day,” I say. “He said he would examine the sales rank of books that had the keyword ‘hucow’ in the title and compare it with another book of the same genre, maybe with the big breasts on the cover, but without the keyword in the title, to conclude what it was about the first book that was selling vs. the second book.”

 

During our phone interview Rook had said that Amazon’s search engine at the time had been like the “ancient pre-Panda Google SEO,” and now Amazon’s search engine is more closely like Google’s in that the best spots are now sponsored ads. There had been a perturbation of the Algorithm, like to that caused by Google’s new filtering system of 2011 to combat content farms. “The Algorithm”: a supernatural entity which people speak about as if it is a cross between Adam Smith’s invisible hand and the oppressive, omnipotent eyes of Quetzalcoatl’s techno-shaman elite, in need of propitiating human sacrifices.

 

“There’s even gay lactation fantasies like Henry the Hucow,” I go on, “which boggles the mind, but somebody is paying for that. Rook told me that he had gotten into this strategy to phreak Amazon via Something Awful.” 

 

Here as I sit in the chair I feel the floor slipping out from under me to a degree. I know next to nothing about any of this Internet history, I’m just talking to keep a last fingertip’s grip on life. Something Awful started out as a comedy website for nerds in 1999 but eventually became a larger-than-life Internet phenomenon with bustling forums full of nefarious activity. In 2018, Gizmodo ranked Something Awful as 89th in its “Top 100 Websites That Shaped The Internet As We Know It.” The forums at Something Awful spawned, among other things, Weird Twitter, 4chan, and the Slender Man urban legend that those poor girls believed was true which led to murder. It was at a Something Awful forum on business and careers that Rook told me he had gotten wind of a woman who had been selling erotica on Amazon, and he got hooked up with a community of people who were exchanging notes and best practices for publishing it—critiques, encouragement, project management. He told me about how writers were selling off whole catalogues of erotica stories to each other for ten cents on the dollar, selling the worldwide rights, which the buyers would repackage and change a few things, like cover design, then republish. 

 

“Another example of this niche erotica is Adult Baby Diaper Lover (ABDL) erotica,” I say. “Arrogant domineering millionaires turned into infants by dominating ‘mommy figures’ who literally put them in diapers. Rook didn’t tell me about this one, I learned it from Mark McGurl in his book Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon, where he highlighted this subgenre as an example of the way Amazon acts as a sophisticated mechanism to serve highly specified genre fiction up to consumers. ABDL is just another example of this phenomenon. And authors are making bank. I guess people like reading about guys in diapers.”

 

“That’s sick,” Stuart Buck says.

 

“Yeah,” I say. “But Amazon is selling these novels like Snickers bars, and you could too!”

 

William Duryea, clearly the alpha male in the room, waves his hands as if to silence the room. “Who says we need money?”

 

“Well, by the looks of it…,” I say, turning my head to look at the dicey surroundings. 

 

“We don’t need interior decorator advice from you,” Blackwood says, picking up the Ruger and calmly rotating the seven-bullet cylinder. 

 

“I’m just saying, if you ever wanted to pick up a few extra bucks, you could turn this place into a factory for smut. You’ve got some writers here, no?”

 

Derek Maine and Gabriel Hart look at each other. Just then I hear a loud creak and a door opens. Everyone’s heads turn to look. A large object rolls into the room, what I can only describe as an archaic wheelchair running off steam power, with a figure dressed in black sitting in it. Its head is obscured by a cube of black glass; it looks like a person with a head inside an aquarium full of black water is sitting there. 

 

William Duryea looks terrified. It’s destabilizing because like I said, this is the alpha male of the group. If he’s scared, what does that spell for the rest of us? 

 

“Rudy, I hope we didn’t wake you up,” William says. 

 

The figure in the wheelchair, like a 3rd stage Guild Navigator in a royal court, takes a microphone from its armrest, holds it up to the black aquarium head and speaks into it garbled static which the microphone translates as the sentence: “There’s writing for money, and then there’s writing for money.”

 

There’s a tense pause. I figure I’m dead anyway so I just say, “Oh I agree. I know it’s beneath a lot of people. This was part of my conversation with Rook. He talked about how he would rather be completely invisible and unknown and be able to pay the rent, than to go for Twitter followers. In fact, he implied to me that writers who avoided the grubbiness of things like commercially viable genre fiction were showing a form of ‘privilege.’ He also told me that social media such as Twitter does not sell books at all, that a newsletter sent out to people who’ve already bought one of your books is a better form of promotion since that group has already demonstrated an interest and a willingness to spend money on your writing. Ross was a goldmine of advice on matters literary and commercial that I would love to share more of with you.”

 

Rudy waits for the others to show some sign of life, which they do, nervously, so he takes up his microphone and says, static translated into an imperial decree, “Take a vote. Get rid of him—or put the trespasser to work for us, writing erotica and pulling in the dollars.”

 

The votes on my fate, some of which they get from other hidden rooms at the Last Estate and via text, were chilling:

 

William Duryea – die

Gabriel Hart – die

Derek Maine – die

Jake Blackwood – die

Stuart Buck – live

Sybil Rain – live

Miss Unity – live

Pat Dry – live

Rudy Johnson – live

Sofia Haugen – die

 

It’s a tie. It’s decided by a flipping a coin — a wooden nickel marked “Redeemable at the [REDACTED] Mississippi Homecoming July 1973” — that I am to live. 

 

Like the bursting hucow hooked up to the teat cups of the milking machine, I am here connected to this iPhone and this laptop. I’m handcuffed to this desk in the basement of the Last Estate, ever aware of Shorty and Lucinda the alligators, caught between my captors and Jeff Bezos, cranking out the words. I write erotica and other Kindle Publishing fare to benefit the Last Estate coffers.

 

One last note on the subject of money and literature: The Romantic poet Lord Byron insisted that he was a Gentleman and that Gentlemen do not accept payment for their poetry. Centuries later some certain analogous prejudices still linger in various subtle forms: “Gentlemen do not do business with Amazon.” Even before I was under the care of the Last Estate, with its gulag-quality room and board, I was on disability. I was on food stamps and did the EBT dance at the supermarket checkout lane, jumped through bureaucratic hoops to qualify. I don’t know Peter Rook that well but I might say that Rook and I have this in common: we are not Gentleman authors, and that unlike some of the literati on Twitter we must sully our fingers with tacky banknotes, filthy lucre, the ink of commerce. Such is the reality of the Algorithm, the Big Algorithm which governs material life on this planet.

 

 

1. Editor’s note: Yes, but only because, as I’d later discover, “Rook” is a nom de plume (if you consider him an artist) or an alias (if you consider him an artist of the confidence variety). I do know “Peter” but won’t incriminate him here because he’s under the Estate’s protection. (Also, he told me that his name appearing on a site with a page rank as abysmally low as The Last Estate would do irreparable harm to his personal brand’s SEO. Bleak.)