Hello all! Welcome to this week’s Melendy Avenue Review. I have two reviews of recent ebooks, one a free download by the author’s choice, the other a free download because the author’s a fucking Nazi and fuck him and the money he thinks he deserves. I also took a stroll around East Boston and took pictures of some murals! Enjoy!
CONTENTS
Reviews
Robert Evans, After the Revolution
Michael Mahoney, Gothic Violence
Lagniappe
The Observed Life, with Peter: The (well, some) Murals of Eastie
REVIEWS
Robert Evans, “After the Revolution” (2021) - Robert Evans hosts a bunch of podcasts! That’s close to all I know about him. A lot of people I know like his podcasts. I vaguely know some people who dislike him because he works for Bellingcat, which produces a lot of Russiagate paranoia, but it doesn’t seem he works that beat. I don’t listen to many podcasts these days but I heard somewhere he wrote a sci-fi novel about America after it fractures in a civil war. Evans also worked as a conflict journalist in places like Syria so I thought it’d be worth looking into, especially as he distributes it as a free ebook.
It’s the 2070s! The US broke up decades before. Most of the action takes place in Texas, which became a sort of weak libertarian republic, and basically allowed factions both right and left to control parts of its territory. There are three viewpoint characters. Manny is an Austin-based “fixer” for journalists from abroad looking to report on the wars in North Texas between Christian militants and the forces of the Republic and leftist militias. Sasha is a high school girl in the “AmFed,” the American rump state in the northeast, who runs away to join the Kingdom of Heaven, the “neo-Calvinist” (autocorrect wants to say “bro-Calvinist” and there’s some truth to that) ISIS-analogue growing on the plains. And then there’s Roland, a radically biologically modified former supersoldier missing large chunks of his memory who gets bribed into a “one last job” by an old friend. They all get embroiled in a surprise offensive that the Kingdom launches that threatens to overrun Texas.
One of Evans’ many podcasts is called something like “It Can Happen Here,” about the possibility of a civil war in the US, and my understanding is that it basically layers his experience doing conflict journalism onto American conditions. That’s more or less what you get here too. Sasha, for instance, is pretty straightforwardly a white American Christian skin for the sort of young people who got radicalized online and ran off to join ISIS in the 2010s. The Kingdom is ISIS, there’s an equivalent of the Syrian Democratic Forces defending Austin (without, interestingly, as much of the ethnic angle, though there’s more people of color there than among the Kingdom), there’s the “Christian states” in the South kinda-sorta supporting the Kingdom kind of like Saudi, the Emirates, Turkey etc supporting Islamist militias against Assad (paranoiacs who insist that Evans is a NATO pawn will presumably think he soft-pedals that angle here for Reasons), etc etc.
Evans makes the good choice to not linger too much on worldbuilding, and where he does, it’s on something stranger (more anon). Mostly he does action, and he’s a decent enough action writer, not one of the greats but this is a respectable first try. His extrapolations on technology — the key importance of drones, some bio-modification stuff I’m not sure I “buy” but which is fun — work pretty well and aren’t overplayed. The Kingdom is mounting an offensive based on a new technological exploit- I’m normally not into that as a plot point in scifi but it works here, as Evans depicts the Kingdom as first and foremost opportunistic, an infection exploiting weaknesses, from the corruption and pointlessness of life in Texas and the AmFed to technological flaws, half-consciously, and we’ve seen that everywhere in the twenty-first century from the altright (remember them?) to… well, mostly other right-wing formations… Manny at first wants to make enough money to escape to Europe, but gets waylaid by the offensive. Sasha gets smuggled into the Kingdom, likes it at first, then finds herself in an arranged polygamous marriage with a rapey douchebag.
This leads us to Roland, the post-humans, and the strange role Evans gives them. It’s worth noting that along with contemporary wars and ideological madness, Evans also writes a lot about drugs from a participant-observer perspective- the post-McInnes Vice magazine mix. As far as I can make out, post-humanism in this world originates with the US military, who “chrome up” soldiers with nanotech, gene modification, internal computers, etc etc. It's all more organic than Terminators — think blood nanobots rebuilding shot-up tissue rather than “liquid metal” — but Roland’s powers meet or exceed many of those of your T1000s. But these ain’t your granddaddy’s robotic, mission-oriented cyborgs! Their extreme abilities also come with extreme desires for extreme experience. The history comes in bits and pieces, but it seems that Uncle Sam’s cyborgs, after being used for numerous war crimes in the 2020s, go rogue and try to take down the state in a vaguely anarchist direction! Things get fucked, they lose, many of the post-American states pass strict regulations on bio-modification (the Kingdom renounces all of it but does some creepy backdoor nonsense with it), and so the post-humans mostly retreat to the abandoned, climate-ravaged deserts, mountains, and plains of the continent.
It’s too much to say they “save the day,” but a major player in the story, the thing that stops it from being a tale of Protestant ISIS ravaging Texas, is the post-human nomad city of Rolling Fuck. Rolling Fuck is basically Burning Man as Burning Man would like to imagine itself. They wander the plains, having crazy sex, drug, and danger experiences enabled by their demigod-like powers (I don’t like the way people call superheros gods these days- I get it’s meant to refer to pre-Christian gods but we are all products of monotheism and I’m sorry, if you’re not omnipresent, you aren’t like god as we know Him). They stay out of politics. But then the Kingdom makes the dumb move of jacking some of their people. At first, they try to send Roland and Manny in to sneak them out. That goes south, so Rolling Fuck goes to war.
Like I said, the action and plotting are decent, especially for a first time novelist. It is… “trauma informed,” and I’m curious to see how that will play out as trauma-thinking wends its way further into the popular consciousness. Knowledge costs- Manny knows war-torn Texas at his expense, Sasha learns fundamentalism is Bad at her expense (not as harsh as it could have been- Evans knows the boundaries of what his public will accept, probably for the better), and no one pays more than Roland, for learning what it’s like to be post-human and having post-human experiences, being a walking hub of history’s wheel. Even where Evans doesn’t make Roland’s prior experiences clear, there’s just a constant fusillade of self- and other-inflicted bodily abuse, just constantly taking tons of drugs and also getting shot all the time.
Knowledge costs, it’s traumatic, but it also makes you human, or post-human. Not just on its own- it can make you sneaky, like Roland’s ex-handler, or subhuman, Sasha’s bro-Calvinist boyfriend. It needs proper management, “technologies of the self” if you will- Rolling Fuck’s drug and sex experiments, and its war ritual of sending little drones to collect the information of the people it slaughters and playing their little social media videos for the civilians back on the truck. Arguably, the implied values and worldview behind this is as interesting as the post-civil-war stuff, for its leaps and its gaps both. It’s a flexible view of humanity, more flexible than the “standard” current view, but I wonder at its bending and breaking points, particularly the idea of what seems to be a universal idea of trauma… but anyway. All in all this was pretty good, especially for a free ebook by a podcaster. ****
Michael Mahoney, “Gothic Violence” (2021) - In case you go looking for it, the author of this book goes by “Mike Ma,” and is a D-list fascist social media figure, a former running boy for Milo Yiannopolous (one only wonders what absurd abuses Yiannopolous would make a notionally straight dumbass go through to belong in his circles; and one is much more shaken by the knowledge that whatever Mahoney did for Yiannopolous, it was likely more honest and less demeaning than anything else Mahoney had ever done). I don’t play with these fascists and their nicknames- when I reviewed Mahoney’s last book, the worst book I read last year, I hadn’t bothered to google him. I saw Mahoney give his new novel five stars on goodreads and beg for purchases of his self-published work and reviews to help further juice sales, but only by people who had read it, he insisted. Well, who am I to deny such a cri de couer? Especially when I can illegally download the book online (if Mahoney wants one red cent from me, he can come find me in Boston and have the “authentic experience” he is always whining about trying to get his thirteen-twenty-nine)?
At first, I was thinking this one might be better than “Harassment Architecture,” Mahoney’s prior and first literary effort. After all, “Gothic Violence” has a plot, which should be a marked improvement on its predecessor, which didn’t really have one. “Gothic Violence” follows a Mahoney-Marty-Stu narrator character who belongs to a group of Florida-based fascist surfers who use violence of various kinds to disrupt our corrupt social order. “Surf Nazis Must Conquer,” or, a callow brain-damaged Chuck Palahniuk’s take on “The Turner Diaries” - doesn’t sound good, sounds better than “Harassment Architecture.”
Well, Mahoney manages to disappoint even these low expectations. He can’t concentrate on a plot because he fancies he has important things to say. He thinks he’s an aesthete and a philosopher. So you get long (this isn’t a long book, but still) passages of undergrad writing workshop-style prose describing dreams and visions, interspersed with what there is of the plot and various manifesto-style passages about this or that thing that bothers him (his trans panic, a lot of stuff about lifting weights and drinking raw milk). It hasn’t got much more focus than “Harassment Architecture,” even with the notional inclusion of a plot.
Mahoney attracts attention for his prominence on “accelerationist” social media (“accelerationist” was a lefty thing, for a long time, still is in some quarters, but has mostly migrated to the fascist right- like “libertarian”). To the extent there’s a point to all this, it’s the destruction of our social order through violence and terror and the reemergence of “natural” “strong” men, our natural leaders, yadda yadda. Would these strong natural men have as much patience as Mahoney seems to expect they’d have for his shitty maunderings, or would they whack him with a stick to stop the noise? The idea that anyone even remotely close to an ubermensch, however defined, would want to bother with books like this isn’t the dumbest part of the “might makes right” apocalypse scenario, but it’s the part I thought about most often.
At the end, after his gang routs the system from Florida, the Mahoney-Marty-Stu wanders the beach and encounters a magical hangman who makes some dumb speeches, and then Mahoney makes his own little speech (he doesn’t indicate the hangman hangs around to listen- the closest to realism this book gets) about how whether damned or saved, he will never be ordinary (he says “average,” because he is stupid, a bad writer, a worse “traditionalist,” and can’t help but punt to rationalist-statistical language, even at the apotheosis of his transcendence- what he means is ordinary).
The only way in which any of this — this book, Mahoney’s performance of self, the whole tableau — could be regarded as anything other than ordinary is that it’s unusually shoddy, amateurish. Even then, it’s probably about ordinary for self-published work in that regard, too. He cribs flagrantly from a cheap list of recent literary figures — Palahniuk, Brett Easton Ellis, Tao Lin — that rank high among both the noxious cultural weeds (I have some time for Palahniuk but he probably hasn’t been good for literature) and the commonest role models for young men who fancy themselves literary. He can’t help but make fussy little points about lifestyle while he’s trying to pretend to be above it all. Completely predictable ones, too, for deeply insecure boys of his generation: lifting weights (why always lifting? Sheer muscle mass won’t help you that much), undercooked meat, old clothes, the usual mask-off context-collapse “I need to bolster my manhood and don’t care who notices how frantic and embarrassing my efforts in that direction are” stuff. Celebrity culture stuff, can’t keep himself from that, either- weirdly old, too, he was born in the nineties but obsesses over The Strokes, of all bands- are they retro, now?
Above all, you see the desperate desire for self-expression, the utter incapacity to get a point across, the dim quarter-awareness (less in the content than in the tone) of the bourgeois boy raised to believe that he has things to say that, in fact, he has nothing at all in his mind that’s worth the breath coming out his lungs, not that that’s going to stop him. That combination is as ordinary as grass, and has a banal origin: we didn’t tax his parents enough to force him to work for a living. Just another thing for us to fix- stick it on the list. ‘
LAGNIAPPE: The Observed Life, with Peter: The (well, some) Murals of Eastie
Apparently, East Boston was chosen as a site for a touring global mural project about rising seas, the importance of oceans, general “contemporary crisis” stuff recently, so there’s a bunch of new murals there now. I don’t go to Eastie often. It’s not very convenient- no surface-level connection from downtown Boston, for instance, just tunnels. But I went and it was pretty nice. Rapidly gentrifying, even by the area’s standards, in some pretty jarring ways, but that’s contemporary urban life for you.
What does Mithra think about all this??
> Above all, you see the desperate desire for self-expression, the utter incapacity to get a point across, the dim quarter-awareness (less in the content than in the tone) of the bourgeois boy raised to believe that he has things to say that, in fact, he has nothing at all in his mind that’s worth the breath coming out his lungs, not that that’s going to stop him.
Omg, this is beautifully put. This is why I keep coming back to your writing!
I used to be a disgruntled culture war blogger. I tried to put art, humor, and style into my blogging. At one point I realized the Ben Folds song "Rocking the Suburbs" was about me and got miffed. Then, after many life experiences, I realized that Ben Folds was *right* and stopped blogging altogether. I hope this guy eventually learns, not to be a better stylist, but that he doesn't necessarily have anything to say.