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Synopsis:

A disturbing examination of toxic masculinity and the darkest pits of the Internet, Alex Gonzalez’s rekt traces a young man’s algorithmic descent into depravity in a future that’s nearly here.

> be me, 26
> about to end it all
> feels good, man

Once, Sammy Dominguez thought he knew how the world worked. The ugly things in his head—his uncle’s pathetic death, his parents’ mistrust, the twisted horrors he writes for the Internet—didn’t matter, because he and his girl, Ellery, were on track for the good life in this messed-up world.

Then a car accident changed everything.

Spiraling with grief and guilt, Sammy scrambles for distraction. He finds it in shock-value videos of gore and violence that terrified him as a child. When someone messages him a dark web link to footage of Ellery dying, he watches—first the car crash that killed her, then hundreds of other deaths, even for people still alive. Accidents. Diseases. Suicides. Murders.

The host site, chinsky, is sadistic, vicious, impossible. It even seems to read his mind, manipulate his searches. But is chinsky even real? And who is Haruspx, the web handle who led him into this virtual nightmare? As Sammy watches compulsively, the darkness in his mind blooms, driving him down a twisted path to find the roots of chinsky, even if he must become a nightmare himself . . .

Not for the faint of heart, rekt combines the cautionary warnings of Black Mirror with the seedy rawness of Chuck Palahniuk in its unrelentless examination of the emotional holes we fill with content.

Review:

Last month, during the protests in Los Angeles, most of the rest of the country watched the confrontations between protesters and police through videos on social media. Many of these videos were of peaceful protests, but there were a few that were full-on battles between authority and protesters. One of these videos showed armored vehicles rolling down the street with people on an overpass throwing huge chunks of rock and concrete at the vehicles, smashing the windshields and whatnot. I watched this video several times in a row because there were some things that did not seem right about it, like the vehicles looked and moved weird, like the vehicles were getting smashed by debris thrown at them with incredible accuracy, and like there were no insignia on the side of the vehicles that marked them as Los Angeles or even California police. The armored vehicles that were getting destroyed by chucks of thrown concrete just said “POLICE” on the side. I have not been able to find the video since the first day of seeing it, and most of my doubts about the authenticity of this video and any video I see on the internet really started after reading >rekt by Alex Gonzalez.

The novel is about Sammy Dominguez, a guy who grew up watching video clips on the internet that he should have never seen. When he was ten, he watched a guy get beheaded in grainy internet footage while at a friend’s house, and this has shaped his entire life since. When his girlfriend Ellery dies in a car crash, he uses more and more extreme videos on the internet to help him cope and further drift away from being able to function in real society. One day he gets an anonymous internet link to a webpage that had the video of Ellery dying in her car crash. But also Ellery dying in hundreds of videos, over and over, each video in a different way. He soon learns that there is a whole group of people bet on the odds of how someone will die, all with videos made with AI. This leads Sammy into an investigation on who runs this website, and if his girlfriend’s death was really an accident or set up for a huge payout.

This novel has some very disturbing imagery and actions from the main characters, but the most disturbing aspect of >rekt is that the entire idea stems from a real problem. Many videos on the internet, especially social media, can be so easily manipulated and even created from scratch. This toxic sludge at the bottom of the internet surfaces and there is no longer any way to tell what is real from what is fake. Being able to make videos of someone dying is just as easy as videos of a talking sasquatch or videos of protests being presented as riots. Alex Gonzalez’s book reflects on this and how we are a society that needs to be smarter about technology, even when society is starting to drift away from critical thinking and channels are being placed where it is being discouraged. >rekt is a prime example of how people are being purposefully misled is not in the future but is happening every single day.