I don’t feel like summing up the context for this post. Suffice it to say that there’s been a smidgen of conversation on social media lately about the supposed lack of decisive ‘internet novels,’ perhaps pointing toward the tendency of highly visible fiction’s general inability to unpack and extrapolate rather than merely embody and reflect. To be honest, this is so preposterous to me that I have a hard time tracing the actual intent of such a statement, which seems to be a mix of several factors:
a general popular dearth of technical and historical expertise about the internet’s origins and utility beyond the effects of social media and surface web shopping
an overt pressure on ‘internet concerned’ prose to be identified by slang, web surfing lingo, social media interactivity, and crass advertisement
a bizarre underestimation of the way ‘the internet’ as a cultural presence has changed the world IRL, including both social and representational relationships, as well as the psychological and metaphysical effects of existing in a culture increasingly dominated by infinite access, surveillance, and interpersonal shattering
an unwillingness, thereby, to define and understand the underbelly of the beast, in so many words, including both dark web implications and the general effect of the multitudinous meta-immersive factors have on who we are and how we consume and share space
lastly, and perhaps most importantly, an obvious resistance in the vast majority of visible media to publish work that breaks the model of the illusion; meaning that the days when authors were given enough rope to explore outside the boundaries of the way we already think about what we think about are essentially nil; that a tidy little package that might be easily recognizable as THEE ‘internet novel,’ as from a Ballardian or Delillian thinker, are no longer really the objects that get bought and groomed in today’s literary market because in order to boot up the marketing machines that are all but vital to even high end names finding traction in the American forum almost unbearably must be rather easily confined and therefore made relatable through marketing with sufficient force to crack the seal of the general state of enforced silence that we exist inside (which the internet itself, once an epoch-shifting utility for sharing and spreading information, has somewhere along the line become a disillusioning force against in becoming infiltrated with corporate propaganda, bot behavior, and a fatigue so rich it never sleeps)
(I realize this concluding sentence of the previous section has gone nuts which is also an obvious feature of any good ‘internet novel’ but I’ll digress from my digression now and maybe come back later to listing important traits of ‘internet novels’ - suffice it to say, though, that without making a mess, you have not made something that embodies the fucking internet, and you should write about family drama or something instead of pretending to be a web contemporary)
Blah blah blah blah. Long story short is that it’s horseshit that there are no great internet novels, and that the fact that we even could imagine there aren’t is a product of the current model of the internet itself—a spayed and neutered free-for-all of horseshit and bad faith, where what feels like freedom from a distance is often modern slavery in disguise. If there’s any one thing an ‘internet novel’ should do—besides exploring its presence and effects over time since the 1960s, including all the various forms it has taken throughout, as well as the effects of those forms on who we are—I would argue that it should be to act as an antidote of sorts to the delusion and misinformations posited by the very same megacorporations who we expect to be the deliverers of news; to reclaim the notions of connectivity and freedom of expression from the gape of moneychangers; and, if we’re really cooking with gas, to be as fucked up, funny, brutal, spastic, and rhizomatic as the burning soul of the beast itself.
To that end, amidst my drive to point out the apparently underrepresented notion of an ‘internet novel’ that has been around as long as the entity itself in various forms, below I’ve assembled a list of five of my favorite internet novels of all time. I want to point out here also the browbeaten difference between an ‘internet novel’ and a ‘novel about the internet,’ which is a thin and probably nit-picking notion to begin with, but does hold some water when comparing the two. What makes a ‘novel about the internet’ an ‘internet novel’? Besides just acting as an antidote to some of my hangups above, I would pose that an ‘internet novel’ somehow embodies both the map and the territory; that it doesn’t just borrow tropes and slang from the websites and apps we all know, but shows, in some way, the effects of existing somewhere amidst a simulacrum and a meatbody, surrounded by billions of mostly faceless people doing the same.
I don’t think a criterion of the ‘internet novel’ need be that it’s socially inspired, or even a reflection of the fracture of mind that takes place over time in the light of a digital network that feels larger than life. An internet novel might as definitively be about geometry, architecture, or death rather than necessarily attempting to represent anonymity, commerce, or shortened attention spans, and really the question of what makes an ‘internet novel’ for me comes down to feel as much as it does form.
In closing this introduction, I want to refer back to when I was a kid watching Inspector Gadget on TV, and how Penny, the titular character’s daughter, carried around an electronic book of sorts, through which she could hack and revamp various aspects of her environment or access illicit data that otherwise went missing from her father’s search. The ideal ‘internet novel,’ which indeed might not yet exist yet at the level of a Gravity’s Rainbow as a system-based construction itself, should likely aspire to similarly unanticipated unwieldiness as a reflection of the metaphysical ideation from whence the internet derived as an idea. In that way, a true ‘internet novel’ could just as easily exist before the internet ever did, predicating the very information that would allow it to emerge into consciousness with logic and style far more essentially human than most technology could ever imagine.
As for the books below, I’m using post-9/11 here as a limiting factor, in that the surrealistic violence of that mark in history also represents a line in the sand of sorts, where much of the world stopped being so able to distinguish between digital life and the realm of flesh. Pre 9/11 internet novels, of which there are scads, are even less likely to gather reputation among those looking for the true end-all be-all web tome, as hard as it is to remember from here what the world wide web looked like before it became the Playboy Mansion for dipshit influencers. Nevertheless, each of these five should be essential reading imo for anyone who wants to wag their tongue about present day internet lit with an eye to pushing the form beyond its bounds.
Because I’ve already ended up writing more than I meant to, I’ll be breaking this post up into a few.
Dennis Cooper, The Sluts (Carroll & Graf, 2004)
No surprise that DC sets the table here, having long been one of the vanguards of exposing the unlimited void-space hidden amongst us. No surprise, either, that the first defining post-9/11 novel is by a gay man, whose expertise about the textures and tones of web speech comes from a deep understanding of parts of the human aboveboard society tends to want to smother. The Sluts is patently also one of the defining novels that could get stuck under a ‘not for the faint of heart’ tag—one of the great ways corporate cultures teaches its students to swing wide of their fears—as it contains some of the most explicit, excruciating, violent, horrific ideation you could ever wish to imagine if you’re the sort who tends to swing wide of fantasy, necrophilia, and abuse. DC’s fascination with Marquis de Sade, and specifically the site-driven stories-within-stories-within-stories-within-ideas style of 120 Days of Sodom, is as patent as it has ever been throughout his work, literally stuffing these pages with uninhibited exhibitions of the sort of cruelty entwined in care that at this point feels so widespread and ingrained in the web you might not even be sure why you sick of a single hour doomscrolling on Twitter.
Appropriately, much of The Sluts takes places in web forums, beginning on a gay male escort message board where users review and rate their hookups and eventually leaking out into personal ads, message boards, and email before looping back around to where it began. The cast of voices we are enmeshed with its multiplicative and various, often to such an extent its hard to be sure who is really who at any given time, and with a wide array of levels of authenticity, demeanor, and intent. Much like exploring the same sorts of sites online, the reader is pulled along a thread of linked and embedded stories that center around the existence and fate of an escort named Brad, who is known as a bit of a bell-ringer, and therefore becomes highly prized among a variety lecherous and desperate men before also becoming a major concern w/r/t to safety and survival. Without wading too deep in the plot—which there definitely is one, though it must be accumulated and evaluated rather than shown or told—the novel quickly becomes an enigma wrapped in a mystery where what we think we knows changes from page to page. The horror (and horniness) of the scenes and sentiments themselves take a passenger seat to the spinning plates that surround an urban legend in the flesh, blurring the line between reality and fantasy so completely that the nature of the story itself keeps changing form just as fast as you consume it.
The story, thereby, comes alive more so through the voices and their various intersections across media than in any one all-consuming manner. Sometimes it is the sheer mundanity of the way the various presences operate in the wake of seeking satisfaction from a remove that sets fire underneath what might appear to actually be going on in the backgrounded action that its exposure through the web (and into fictional prose) can only basically jerk off about. The lack of actual action besides in its being related through language that feels casual and familiar, if perverse, gives the book the feel of “an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom,” as borrowed by Roberto Bolaño from Baudelaire (another huge DC icon) as an epigraph for 2666. It feels a bit like you wish you could put the book down and that you could tear it to pieces and eat it, so unhinged and profane are the spaces it forces upon you in 4D from 2D. It relates an energy we might reserve in the present present for surface web sites like 4chan or Reddit, though here imbued with an energy that feels much closer to a time before the sore the internet has become designed to hide from us got popped. The Sluts feels essentially early post-9/11 in this way, where the monster has begun to slink out of its bag but has not yet become engulfed by the elephant in the room that most any regular internet user today would recognize as an ambient destructivity that can’t go back in the bottle we used to hide in the closet before it became visibly endemic.
All of this to say, The Sluts is a extremely fun book to read, not only with how it shapeshifts in form and pulls from the cribbed mannerisms of web talk, but because in dissolving the borderline between fascination and brutality, DC opens a can of worms we can all feel breathing down our neck like a sicko cartoon. In being bloodlet through humor paired with shock and awe, there’s something of a relief to see ventriloquistic shadowplay allowed to breathe and explore itself without simultaneously being forced to ‘go there’ even as a ploy; we can almost feel the book breathing, getting surly, even as it’s obviously only language, and even then still veiled behind layers and layers of identity that the characters themselves have no real way to prove.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, as is easily mistaken about much of DC’s work in general, this novel is also very emotional, not only due to its brutality, but with the strange ways its most tender and fluid humanity leaks through. By throwing us into a virtuality populated by beings who don’t fear the repercussions of letting themselves speak in a way they never would so visibly offline, we get caught in the gears, in a way, between what’s actually at stake when the people behind the avatars are laid bare. Deep psychology, desire, and inventiveness emerge from exploring the decadence within, leading for once not just to a cesspool, but a space where language and image falls away, and we can see into the parts of people that most would do anything to keep hidden, even in fiction. By slashing the veils, we’re able to reckon with humanity in a more sincere way, as during roleplay, without having to immerse ourselves in literal pain and misery as flesh—I wouldn’t quite say it’s therapeutic, but more so like a reckoning within a nightmare that mostly only appears to us, if we’re lucky, through dehumanizing mass media and its fear of the unmarketably uncanny. Forced to the fore, DC asks not only that we don’t pretend the darkness exists, but that it lurks within us, wanting out whether we like it or not, and it’s a gift to be able to do so in this way—aesthetically, with style and joy as well as twistedness—rather than to be squared off each in our own boxes pretending we aren’t what we are.
Besides its simulation of web experience, thereby, The Sluts embodies and expands the notion of an ‘internet novel’ by exposing the space that gets warped in being pressed between conditions of individual reality that our sense of the unbound but still heavily mediated communal reality we believe we inhabit abstractly construes. Unlike web novels that want to convince of you of their ‘brand’ by parroting shorthand, harping on abused tropes of cultural identity through place and time, or even just overloading you with fragmentary detritus in an attempt to remake the dominant vibe of major social media on paper, this one embodies the whole by zooming in so close to one frame in a picture of hell that once you’ve seen it, you can’t put it back. Instead of distracting you, negging you to convince you something is cool and sexy, it inverts its own subject directly by breaking the medium across its knee right at the bell and casting you forth into the void behind the void, for better, not worse. There, from my view, is an ideal the true ‘internet novel’ becomes defined by—not mere rubberneck navel gazing for grazing’s sake, but a glory hole into the universally unnameable.
That’s enough digressive circling out of me today. I’ll be back shortly with notes on a few other favs, including:
Povel by Geraldine Kim
LIVEBLOG by Megan Boyle
Amygdalatropolis by B.R. Yeager
The Valeries by Forrest Muelrath
and maybe more if I don’t get sick of this silly topic.
Great post, Blake.
Terrific stuff, which I say as someone who also thought Penny's computer-book was the coolest thing ever.