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 . . .
Review:
“Rekt,” is not an easy book to read. It is a nasty, gritty reminder of just how irredeemably grim a place the internet can be. It is a jagged, glitching scream into the digital void. It is a “feel-bad,” vile, depraved time that repulsed me further with each development. I wanted to factory reset my brain, “digitally detox,” and not just touch grass, but roll around on my lawn until I forgot all about it. I didn’t do that, I suffer from hayfever, so I had no choice but to keep reading- and I did so in the same way I might scoff a box of chocolates, or aptly, doom-scroll the internet. Compulsively. “Rekt,” is an honest novel that compels and disturbs in equal measure, one that feels shaped by strange forums, anonymous users and the second page of Google. The irony of hearing about “Rekt,” on the internet (and being gently bullied into reading it), writing about reading it… on the internet, and then subsequently promoting it… on the internet is not lost on me, but that is what makes “Rekt,” so relevant, so tangible, and thus, so scary. It’s not speculative fiction, it’s just an average Monday afternoon.
We follow Sammy Dominguez who lost his girlfriend Ellery in a devastating car accident. When he was younger, and lost his Uncle Ted, he turned to a murky website, in which he wrote pastas about “The Wax Man,” and once again struck by grief -grief with teeth- he logs back in. He finds the website changed, and most of his stories archived or deleted, but there is a message. On that message is a link. That link leads to Chinsky. He clicks it and watches his girlfriend die. Many times over. And others too. People who are still alive. There are firecrackers and slit wrists and overdoses, and Sammy finds a strange catharsis from watching. A twisted kind of peace. Consuming instead of grieving.
The book gets its hands dirty with the unmoderated underside of the web: fringe forums, strange video links, anonymous users. With “Rekt,” Gonzalez poses the question, can you truly click away from something once it’s inside you? Often we talk about the internet like it’s a place. “I’m going online,” “I was raised on the internet,” “She lives on instagram.” Gonzalez makes that metaphor literal. The internet here is weaponized. The web isn’t sleek and clinical; it’s sticky. It’s gritty. It tangles. It seduces. It becomes a wacky funhouse mirror of grief and voyeurism. A huge chunk of the book’s genius though is that we are unable to look away from Sammy and his reprehensible behaviour. Are we not consuming his downward spiral like content? Doom-scrolling his downfall with glazed-eyes? Was my morbid, chocolate-scoffing style fascination with this book, and the vile things that happen within it really any better than the morbid fascination Sammy had with Chinsky? At first, perhaps not? It’s food for thought.
Of course, Sammy Dominguez is no hero. He’s barely a protagonist. He’s, if you’re feeling generous, a lost, grief-stricken student who’s in way over his head. If you’re not, he’s a self-destructive pervert. But, Gonzalez writes him so compellingly, that from the get-go we are hoping he does better, and gets better. Maybe it’s because his spiral begins not with malice, but mourning. Instead of community, ritual, or therapy though, Sammy finds catharsis through snuff and gore and all things dark web. “Rekt,” is a good reminder that trauma doesn’t always make people noble. Sometimes it just breaks them. It explores grief at its most dangerous, a version that festers, scabs over and calcifies into something rotten.
“Rekt /ɹεkt- an online spelling of “wrecked,” usually describing someone being hurt or defeated or even killed in a snuff film.”
Alex Gonzalez’s debut is nothing short of stellar, it is shocking, subversive, and skin-crawlingly smart. But let’s be clear: “Rekt,” is not fun. It’s not the kind of book you curl up with and sigh contentedly over. It sits in your chest like malware. It installs itself quietly in the background and runs in the dark, taking up memory, distorting perception: you won’t close this book so much as crash out of it, dazed and blinking.
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