Review: The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti by Stephen Graham Jones

Rating: 8/10

If drinking mercury from a thermometer didn’t kill him, maybe spray painting in an unventilated garage would. Or so Nolan’s father thought. One inspired yet failed suicide attempt after another, each with a note to his son—with only a hint of accusation.

But as Nolan sits in an empty office building, the last customer service employee for a nearly obsolete video game, those many suicide notes come back to haunt him. As do the levels of the game that no one plays anymore. And now a homicide detective is on the phone.

Maybe his father was right when he wrote that he was teaching Nolan not to give up, that the only way to understand what happened was to make it to the end of the game. But there’s no cheatcode that’s going to get Nolan through this . . .

SGJ, my therapy bill is coming your way. “The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti,” which, following the grand work of Open Road Media, is now readily available for self-flagellating readers everywhere, is frankly devastating. This novella is a lot of things. It’s meta, it’s epistolary, but above all it’s sad. Take the most heart-breaking thing you can think of… lonely pensioners, huge thanksgiving dinners that nobody bothers to turn up to, quadriplegic puppies in cones of shame, whatever… TLToND, is a concentrated tangle of utter devastation that captures the essence of all of the above. It has the nuanced mental health commentary  of something like Sofia Ajram’s “Coup de Grace,” and a disorienting, somewhat meta plot, a little like a slightly more comprehensible “Universal Harvester,” (John Darnielle). Most importantly, this painful exploration of humanity, relationships and mental illness, is certainly, undeniably written by the one and only, his holiness, the right honorable Stephen Graham Jones. It’s the kind of book that you want to never touch again, but also have to flick back through once you’ve reached the end. I’m already repeating myself, but devastating is the word… although you’ll soon be going back for more.

We follow Nolan Dugatti, who mans the customer service line for a game that nobody plays. As you’d imagine, he doesn’t really get many calls, he has a lot of thinking time. It’s thanks to the lack of foresight of one of the graphic designers, who promised a 10 year warranty, that he even has a job… until midnight, when those 10 years finally draw to a close. Of course, it’s tonight of all nights that the phone rings. Haunted by the suicide notes his father addressed to him throughout the course of his childhood, each corresponding with a feeble attempt, as well as the levels of “Camopede,” which he knows like the back of his hand, the last thing our protagonist needs is a homicide detective on the line. 

I’m tagging this as horror, because I’m a creature of habit and today, SGJ is known for his horror, but primarily because “The Long Trial…” (it’s a lengthy title, forgive me) is not quite anything else either. It has sci-fi elements, there were moments where I could have been reading Philip K. Dick and been none the wiser. There were comedic parts, I mean… death by shrimp… lol. However, it certainly evoked a visceral dread within me, and it’s uncomfortable and existential effect that would seem to suggest it’s at least part horror, depending on how you define it. What I’m trying to say is that this novella doesn’t blend genres so much as it defies, nay, transcends them completely. It’s a complicated book, with two complicated and unreliable narrators, and their complicated mental well being, or lack of. It’s complicated, because it reflects the complexity of its own content, because a book that meditates on mental health in the way that “The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti,” does, has to be, to do it any justice. This isn’t a book that you categorise, it’s a book that you experience. Pretty viscerally actually. 

I could write essays about this book… sloppy ones with coffee stains and long rambling footnotes and about 12 different explanations of what actually happens, but essays nonetheless. That would be no good. Written in… 3 days, “The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti,” is urgent, it’s relentless, and it’s a novella that should only come with a warning, not a dissertation. This book will leave you staring at the wall. You might cry, you might just feel empty, you might not get it at all, which is fine too. “The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti,” is a novella that will make a shitty day worse, a certified “feel-bad,” read, a literary splash of lemon juice on a papercut, and an all-around miserable time. I approve.