Fan Club
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Average rating5
15
Ratings1
Average rating5
“Mayer lays bare the terrible destiny of a society obsessed with social media stalking and celebrity relationships.” —Julia Heaberlin, bestselling author of We Are All the Same in the Dark In this raucous psychological thriller, a disillusioned millennial joins a cliquey fan club, only to discover that the group is bound together by something darker than devotion Day after day our narrator searches for meaning beyond her vacuous job at a women's lifestyle website—entering text into a computer system while she watches their beauty editor unwrap box after box of perfectly packaged bits of happiness. Then, one night at a dive bar, she hears a message in the newest single by international pop star Adriana Argento, and she is struck. Soon she loses herself to the online fandom, a community whose members feverishly track Adriana's every move. When a colleague notices her obsession, she’s invited to join an enigmatic group of adult Adriana superfans who call themselves the Ivies and worship her music in witchy candlelit listening parties. As the narrator becomes more entrenched in the group, she gets closer to uncovering the sinister secrets that bind them together—while simultaneously losing her grip on reality. With caustic wit and hypnotic writing, this unsparingly critical thrill ride through millennial life examines all that is wrong in our celebrity-obsessed internet age, and how easy it is to lose yourself in it.
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Twenty Something Angst Turned Fever Dream. This is a book that you can largely pluck the exact details out and have a version of pretty well every single angsty twentysomething “My life sucks and this pointless job is draining my very soul” tale out there. At least through the first third ish. Then our lead character allows herself to be drawn into an obsessive and honestly creepy “fan club” of a singer (consisting of exactly four other members). Around the 50% mark, some feature of the narration or possibly just a lack of editing turns the tale into more of a fever dream, where all of a sudden we're sporadically getting the perspective of the very singer the narrator is now obsessed with. At this stage, the book becomes much harder to follow in any logical form, and the reader just has to adapt to diving into the crazy and holding on to whatever shred of sanity ties you into the “real” (ie, the reader's own) world, because with the combination of knocks to her head, illicit drugs, and other factors... it becomes truly less clear for a bit what is real and what isn't, in-story. But then we come out of that for the ending, which is one of those abrupt ambiguous types that many other readers have problems with and I personally rarely do. (Nor do I here.) Ultimately I'm chalking up the weirdness of the back half to a lack of editing rather than a functional error in storytelling, which preserves the five stars for the overall book. Recommended.
I almost gave this book 3 stars. I was right there, even though it felt a bit disjointed, and was unbelievable much of the time. It was fascinating to see into the minds of the rabid fan cult. To see deep into the people who become so obsessed with a famous person, that they think they OWN that person. Erin Mayer mentioned more than a few times that these types of people want to crawl into the skin of their idol. Make their life their own. That they feel they have full power over that person's life. Truth be told, since I entered the world of KPop fandoms I understand how this can manifest. It's not hard to cross the line from fan, to obsessed.
Despite how slow this felt at times, and how much I wanted to shake some sense into our unnamed narrator, I carried on. I guess I kind of understood where she was coming from. To have nothing, to belong to nothing, and then to suddenly find meaning and belonging is a feeling that is too easy to sink deeply into without much thought. Even when she discovered that the people she was spending time with were terrible, she kept choosing them over and over. It's sad, but it's not beyond the realm of reality. I will saw though, it was so very frustrating. If that's what Mayer was going for, then it worked well.
The ending killed it for me though. All that time invested, and then the ending was just so lackluster. I almost rated this three stars, but I couldn't forgive that ending.
