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A disturbing examination of toxic masculinity and the darkest pits of the Internet, about a young man’s algorithmic descent into depravity in a future that’s nearly here.
“A visionary book that is at once pensive, rollicking, and truly, bone-deep unsettling. Alex Gonzalez's rekt is an absolute stunner.” —Paul Tremblay, New York Times bestselling author of Horror Movie and A Head Full of Ghosts
> be me, 26
> about to end it all
> feels good, man
Once, Sammy Dominguez thought he knew how the world worked. The ugly things in his head—his uncle’s pathetic death, his parents’ mistrust, the twisted horrors he writes for the Internet—didn’t matter, because he and his girl, Ellery, were on track for the good life in this messed-up world.
Then a car accident changed everything.
Spiraling with grief and guilt, Sammy scrambles for distraction. He finds it in shock-value videos of gore and violence that terrified him as a child. When someone messages him a dark web link to footage of Ellery dying, he watches—first the car crash that killed her, then hundreds of other deaths, even for people still alive. Accidents. Diseases. Suicides. Murders.
The host site, chinsky, is sadistic, vicious, impossible. It even seems to read his mind, manipulate his searches. But is chinsky even real? And who is Haruspx, the web handle who led him into this virtual nightmare? As Sammy watches compulsively, the darkness in his mind blooms, driving him down a twisted path to find the roots of chinsky, even if he must become a nightmare himself…
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gonzalez (Land Shark) delivers a deeply cynical splatterpunk exploration of the numbing effects of digital violence. Sammy Dominguez is a teenager when he first encounters the grimy underbelly of the internet via online forums full of gory urban legends. He copes with his unstable home life by writing and sharing stories about a creepypasta monster known as "Wax Man," a creature that stalks sad children and mummifies them in wax when they cry. At 26, following the death of his girlfriend and the deletion of his stories from the forum, he's on the verge of killing himself when a forum user named Haruspx invites him to visit a mysterious dark website full of deepfake snuff films. There, Sammy discovers a video of the car accident that killed his girlfriend. He becomes obsessed with watching and rewatching the video—and uncovering who made it. Gonzalez strives to shock with crude jokes and depictions of extreme violence (including against an infant), but balances the novel's baser instincts with crisp storytelling and a well-shaded cast that readers will want to follow through the complex and propulsive plot. The intense ugliness of the subject matter and dark sense of humor won't be for everyone, but extreme horror fans who grew up on the internet will find plenty to hold their attention.
