James O’Meara reviews Robert Stark’s novel Journey to Vapor Island; Magical Miserablism: Robert Stark’s Myths of the Near Future.
“Robert Stark has achieved something remarkable here. He’s taken the basic elements of a common kind of alt-Right narrative — basically, the youth who, because of his intelligence and sensitivity, becomes a murderous outcast from a degenerate society — and managed to avoid these miserablist results by infusing them with his own private, even idiosyncratic, obsessions.
Precisely by their personal nature, they communicate a brilliant energy to the narrative, lifting it out of the realm of a necessarily pessimistic Present Year realism and into a kind of magic realism whose conclusion — here is the key to the achievement — never feels tacked on like a Hollywood ending but rather seems a satisfyingly integral part of the work.”