The Maris Review, vol 19

I don’t want to yuck anyone else’s yum, but I will certainly watch other people go “what the fuck!?” to those yums.

What I read this week

Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics by Elle Reeve

A terrifying and fascinating deep dive into the internet troll-to-fascist pipeline, Black Pill is a diligently reported look at how recruitment for the Far Right flourished online in the 2010s.

One of Elle Reeve’s most compelling interview subjects is the creator of 8Chan (and former incel), Frederick Brennan, who I encountered previously on an episode of Reply All as well as an HBO documentary about QAnon, but who appears gentler here. Frederick bemoans the absolute havoc that free speech absolutists hath wrought. He maintains that he intended 8chan to be a “free speech-friendly” image board, he says, and he had faith in the “marketplace of ideas,” the ideal that the crowd would weed out the most dangerous and ridiculous. Instead, the sickest, most deranged and hateful shit rose to the top, and 8chan became a breeding ground for Gamergate and child porn and the conspiracy theories. I really, really wish book publishers and opinion section editors would understand this.

Lest we think that members of The Movement (as they call it) are not the brightest bulbs, Reeve makes sure to emphasize that, at least IQ-wise, they’re smart. See how they infuse a level of intellectualism to their hate, see how Richard Spencer reads all of the great fascist philosophers (oxymoron alert), see how many of his acolytes in the alt right mention The Bell Curve and its bullshit of fake science when asked for explanations of how they became radicalized. (See also Jamie Loftus’s podcast about Mensa and how most of its proudly smart members are big fans of eugenics.)

Reeve’s personal experiences are a small but crucial part of the story, and we see how skillful she must be to get her subjects and sources to trust her. As a reader I never quite trusted her sources to level with her/us but I did trust her to guide us in the right direction. She leaves us with the realization that QAnon is an example of the chaos that ensues when the incoherent musings of edge lords become mainstreamed by normies in the Republican party.

Bluff: Poems by Danez Smith

I am not the intended audience for Danez Smith’s latest collection, so I don’t want to give you a bunch of my white lady ponderings on the vulnerability of artists from marginalized backgrounds who allow us to look inside their souls. Instead, read the poet’s lovely conversation with Alex Chee and this interview by wonderful Mandana Chaffa instead.

On CoHo explainers and her constant rediscovery

My favorite thing to explain to newbies about Colleen Hoover is that “It Ends With Us” is written in the form of fan letters to Ellen DeGeneres. I’ve blown so many minds. More good trivia I like to impart is that there was once a proposed publication of the coloring book to go along with “It Ends With Us,” which was in poor taste no matter how you feel about how the book depicts domestic violence. Now, with the recent success of the film adaptation starring Blake Lively as Lily Bloom, the florist, CoHo is back and bigger than ever, sort of.

Over the weekend my husband Josh pointed out that Hoover seems to get discovered over and over again, but she’s still virtually unknown to a large chunk of the population for someone whose books sold more copies than the Bible in 2022. My favorite genre of tweet is people digging in to see for themselves what’s behind the phenomenon. I don’t want to yuck anyone else’s yum, but I will certainly watch other people go “what the fuck!?” to those yums.

Colleen Hoover didn’t come up in the traditional way, which is why book professionals imbue her with near-mystical powers that they are dying to emulate. She started by self-publishing and using BookTok to successfully find an audience before just about any other authors did. It was very easy to ignore at first. Even when Colleen Hoover was absolutely dominating the Fiction Bestseller Lists, people who worked in the industry still hadn’t heard of her.

Then came the explainers. When I was editing the Books section at Vulture I asked Kayleigh Donaldson to write about why Hoover struck a chord on BookTok, and I think hers was the best (yes I’m biased). The big Texas Monthly profile is worthy of your time, too. Skip the variety of listicles bullet pointing CoHo takeaways.

New releases, 8/27

Quiet week! But next week is big…

Christopher Isherwood Inside Out by Katherine Bucknell

That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America by Amanda Jones

A note on my previous book