Sator Press

$15/204 pgs

No other time in history has been more inundated with public creative outpourings than our current Internet-seduced zeitgeist. With every tweet, Tumblr, and wall update, content is generated at an ever-maddening pace, arguably devaluing itself because of its sheer mass and filter-free characteristics, shrinking an already near-extinct collective attention span. No surprises there. But have all the worthwhile ideas already been spewed? And if so, can it be possible to profit, vastly, by simply plucking from a storage bin of useful but already used templates, and regurgitating them with a new-car foamy, pixilated sheen? Armed with Douglas Coupland’s mass-cultural savvy and a satirical panache that might be a bit more restrained than Bret Easton Ellis’ and less grim than Don DeLillo’s but no less biting, Eric Raymond, in his first novel, Confessions from a Dark Wood, chronicles one young man’s immersion into the post-idea marketplace, and his hilarious and heartbreaking search for meaning in an economy where authenticity is the least fashionable commodity.

Nick Bray is a 33-year-old San Franciscan by way of Florida who toils at a temp job for Purv, an Internet company specializing in “the unity of woman and machine,” basically videos of young ladies fornicating with reassembled dishwashers. After getting fired, Nick returns to his childhood home for his English professor father’s funeral and is accosted by an “intern” who provides him with a mysterious invitation to interview for an executive position at LaBar Partners Limited, a global capital brand management consultancy firm whose CEO, Pontius J. LaBar, is a former student of his father. After an epic round of bullshitting- in which his ‘exemplary moral lassitude’ is lauded profusely- Nick begins work as a highly paid vice president at LaBar, joining a coterie of likeminded “utterly [otherwise] unemployable” corporate swindlers (including an orangutan named Shelby living in his own glass-walled office) who attempt to subdue clients with avalanches of impenetrable jargon and carefully orchestrated urbanity. Nick’s suddenly opulent lifestyle is funded by the outlandish Pontius, a man who keeps a full-size replica of his “driving” Porsche in his penthouse office and lives in constant fear that his faceless competitors’ “air of exclusivity” surpasses “his own manufactured enigma,” and who funds Nick’s endless days of travel and lackwit brainstorming that are only broken up by Sadie, his possibly underage quasi-girlfriend-slash-apartment-mate whose hobbies include getting tattoos of major corporations and making plans to be the nation’s first domestic suicide bomber, and the constant, inconvenient appearances of the smart-aleck ghost of his father. Continue reading →