Max Lieberman

One of the most brilliant speculative fiction conceits I've ever encountered, introduced and sustained expertly.

Well-drawn characters, tinged by its chosen genre.

Things to say about our world, its bifurcations and cleavages, and what we do and do not choose to see.

Pulpy adventure science fiction like only Harrison could write it. “Serious” in that he’s not in Stainless Steel Rat or Bill, the Galactic Hero mode, but there’s plenty of satire here.

This isn’t literature, and it’s at least 60% escapism to help the ideas go down easy — every beautiful woman wants to sleep with the hero; there mustn’t be 10 pages that go by in the whole novel where he doesn’t have a drink or six.

But the villains are carefully chosen, and the gap between the world’s elites and its permanent underclass doesn’t seem as outlandish as it did upon publication (the treatment of Israel as basically heroic is also a snapshot in time).

Onwards to the sequel, Wheelworld.

Honors old rhythms and dead epistemologies. Conjures, and refuses to explain.

Titling your novel "Horror Movie" is writing a big ol' Publisher's Clearing House check. Like Peter Straub's "Ghost Story," or Robert Evans' "Love Story," Tremblay is staking out an ambitious plot in a densely populated genre. He's arguably going even further, writing a book about that genre as it exists in an entirely different medium. I'm pleased to report that the check clears.

This novel is organized into three different sections, presented in rotating fashion so as to keep key plot revelations veiled.

First, the screenplay of the titular horror movie. The script, which was filmed but never released back in the mid-90s, is an elliptical genre vivisection laden with symbols that the book's narrator (mode: deeply unreliable; profession: horror convention "celebrity," trading on his notoriety from acting in said movie) suggests "add up to nothing." I'm not sure how this script would work if filmed, but as a narrative conceit to build dread and introduce us to its in-universe author, it kills.

Second, snarky observations about the experience of making a new, shinier, better financed version of the movie in the 2020s. The unnamed narrator comes across during these chapters as a stock jaded Gen X alternaguy. He's full of disdain for the successful people in front of him, and equally full of self-loathing, knowing that his persona and career is entirely the creation of his (more talented, less living) friends. There is, ultimately, more going on with him than we see here — but for most of the book, it's like reading a less-clever version of Chuck Klosterman. Horrifying indeed.

Third, memories about the making of the original movie, and fleeting glimpses of the narrator's life since then. The film itself was never finished, for the same reason that it is notorious, which is of course also why it's also being re-made/-booted/-financed by IP-hungry Hollywood 30 years later. Those secrets, too, are eventually revealed, and they're the most satisfying (and to me, the only truly emotionally moving) moments in the novel.

This was the first book by Tremblay that I've read, and I'll certainly seek out another.

El Akkad is a beautiful writer who can turn whimsy like a knife.

I agree with nearly all of his diagnoses. I abjure his prescription.