An immortal faery queen from a magical gynocratic island arrives in Los Angeles to track down her missing daughter. This is actually the entire plot of a novel entitled Only Americans Burn in Hell. Of course, as in Jarett Kobek’s previous book, I Hate the Internet, the fictional element is a foil, with most of the pages devoted to sociopolitical diatribe laced with various kinds of life writing.
It’s also basically the same diatribe in both books, against a global society in which ‘everyone’s life is still dominated by the whims of the very rich and the social mores of the slightly rich’. Everyone’s to blame: President Trump’s supporters are referred to simply as ‘the Fucking Assholes’, no worse than ‘liberals in the celebrity branch of American governance’ and ‘the faux-left who write books for Rupert Murdoch’. Twitter outrage is ‘a shitty iteration of the Church’. And ‘the socialists are the most annoying people in America’.
But what Kobek really can’t bear are the mechanisms, primarily within both social and mass-market media, through which we persuade ourselves that ‘everything is going to be okay’.
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