rated 4.75 on storygraph

once upon a time when nezuu was a wee little lad, they came across the internet shitholes that are reddit, 4chan, and pre-elon musk twitter (not that elon helped anything, really), and accidentally stumbled into one too many a thread featuring uncensored gore, explicit sexual content, and a cluster fuck of users confessing to their deepest darkest crimes and getting into fights on the internet attempting to "expose" one another.

anyone who's been on the internet at least as long as i have knows exactly the vibe i'm talking about. the kind of drama that has you sitting there scrolling for hours and hours through multiple threads, trying to get the full scoop on things. the kind of drama that starts off relatively normal but devolves so deeply that you're left questioning if you've just borne witness to a real crime, or if it's just a whole bunch of internet trolls who've capitalized on the opportunity to lie on the internet for no reason beyond attention-seeking and sensationalizing.

cooper takes this reality of the internet (and users' willingness to engage in this behavior, even as lurkers) as the basis for this book, and in the process dives into so many of the base issues of engaging with online content in our day and age: toxicity, performativity, masculinity and the toxic adherence to patriarchal standards, the difference between what is reality and what is fantasy (and people's lack of ability to distinguish between the two), the desire for internet "clout" even if it's based on lies and dramatization, and the extent to which people are willing to go in the name of ending out on top in the competition to become a celebrity online.

every motherfucker in this book is a liar. every single last one of them. they all participate in drama threads that are reviews and forum posts about a male escort named "brad", and every single one of them, at some point or the other, admits to lying and making things up for the internet fame points of having had sex with celebrity escort "brad". the fantasy of brad mimics the way drama typically unfolds on the internet, starting off very tame and normal, then devolving over time into extreme, explicit gore, rape, and dehumanization. and yet, not a single one of them steps away because of the now parasocial relationship they all have in their heads of themselves and brad.

what does it say, then, that as a reader, i too stuck through the entire book without stepping away? what does it say about me that i did entirely buy in to what i was reading, and i started trying to put together the pieces just like all the characters in the story itself? by making this read like an online thread, cooper makes us as readers bystanders and complicit in the sensationalization of brad. granted, we get more meta through our access to recordings of private calls, private faxes and emails, etc. so you could argue we're not the same as the bumbling idiots that have no reliable information but continue to engage with it regardless. we're made to feel like we have the insider scoop on it all but do we really?

i think that this book gives us as readers a lot to chew/ruminate on in terms of internet culture, our positionality and role within it, and the normalization and desensitization to extreme violence that comes with internet engagement. i could not recommend this book hard enough, but please do be warned that this is extreme horror, so please check CWs/TWs before deciding to engage!

To be a woman is a horror I can little comprehend.

At this point I will give any sapphic vampire book a try. 🤷‍♀️ satisfaction varies, but whether it’s just a fun bloodsucking romp or a contemplative literary approach, I’m interested!!

Hungerstone leans into the latter and its pace is on the slower side. I love literary fiction and I can appreciate a slow pace, but it took some convincing for me to get into this one. Ultimately, I’m glad I stayed with it. Around 25-30% is when it finally grabbed me.

The protagonist’s internal monologue comprises much of the novel and I think at times this worked against the plot and character development. Certain elements were a bit too noticeably repetitive. To be fair, I think they were meant to be repetitive to showcase the monotony of Lenore’s life and her sense of imprisonment by societal mores. Sometimes this worked well; other times it felt like we were just meandering through Lenore’s thoughts in an unproductive and almost frustrating way. Lenore’s husband also borders on cartoonishly villainous at times, and Lenore had some moments of perhaps excessive obliviousness.

The vampire novel in a skilled author’s hands can be really thematically compelling. I enjoyed Dunn’s exploration of themes such as wifehood, motherhood (or the lack thereof), personhood, burdens in society and relationships, agency, hunger and desire, feminine rage, and reinvention. All, of course, within a sapphic context. The writing was often poetic, both in the feel of the words and in the narrative structure. This author knows how to execute a tonal shift and wield a metaphor!

By Hungerstone’s end, I had enjoyed the journey despite some flaws.

Visionary, and deeply disturbing for all of the least obvious reasons.

In The Sluts, Cooper uses the format of an internet forum to explore the hazy boundary between reality and fantasy. Through a cast of increasingly unreliable, anonymous narrators, the impossibility of determining reality becomes more and more stark.

Each new post builds upon the last, in a terrifying display of performative masculinity and dehumanization, as each poster tries to one-up the depravity of the previous one. You want to write them off as miserable basement-dwelling freaks, but the terrifying part is that they feel too real.

You want to pretend it's all fiction, but it's so reminiscent of real-world internet culture that it becomes a meta experience of blending fiction and reality, both in the content of the work and the reading experience itself.

There is an uncomfortable complicity as you turn each page, and while a feeling of disgust bubbles up toward the forum-goers and their sick fantasies, there's a pull in your gut that reminds you that you too are feeding the fantasy.

Each page turned brings a low-grade hum of shame, mimicking the feeling of sitting in a dark corner of your room with nothing but the brightness of the computer screen illuminating your face as you continue to witness something you really feel like you shouldn't be witnessing.

Through this meta experience, The Sluts produces questions about complicity and collective participation, especially as it pertains to the internet. On the internet, where everyone can hide behind a screen name and an anime profile picture, personal responsibility and social consequences seem to be nonexistent.

Even though no forum-goer is technically individually responsible for the eventual outcome, the forum itself can create a vacuum of attention, speculation, normalization, and escalation. How long can you hide behind the excuse that it's "just a joke" or "just a fantasy" without knowing where the boundaries between performance and reality are for everyone involved?

The thought loop then expands to the idea of fantasy itself. The ethics of consuming extreme fiction or disturbing fantasies is a topic that gets brought up on a revolving basis, and The Sluts performs a stress test by pushing it to its absolute extreme.

Importantly, Cooper never hammers home a predetermined conclusion with heavy-handed didacticism. The Sluts instead does what horror does best by exploring possibility, and the internet forum being used as a vehicle is frankly brilliant and alarmingly relevant even 20+ years later.

There is no place that blurs the distinction between fantasy and real life quite like the internet, and as much as The Sluts is a reminder of its early years, its evolution into algorithm-driven and bot-populated sites only introduces more nuance into Cooper's questioning.

The escort forum brings up so many thoughts about toxic internet spaces such as 4chan and incel threads, but it's relevant to any site where people gather behind the comfort of relative anonymity.

While drama discourse on TikTok or community lore on a niche subreddit is not quite the same as graphic fantasies of CBT and snuff films, the mechanism is eerily similar, and Cooper expertly uses disturbing content as a way to force the reader to reckon with their complicity and the boundaries of fantasy itself.

The Sluts is a meta-literary experience that leaves you trying to reconstruct the "real" story from unreliable fragments, recreating your own Brad, imagining your own ending.

By the end of the book, you're left abandoned by Cooper in the middle of a spiral that you feel a little disgusted for taking part in, and a little sickeningly interested in reading more of.