Count Fosco reviews Robert Stark’s novel Journey to Vapor Island. Count Fosco has a background in the film industry in Canada.
The name of Robert Stark is a password in underground media in the English speaking world. Like “Fidelio” from Eyes Wide Shut or “Open Sesame” from the Arabian Knights: dissident, majoritarian and populist authors, activists, media personalities and artists have all be at virtual Robert Stark journalistic parties for over a decade now. While many of us quietly tuned into his show ever since our teens like Nick Caraway wondering what magnificent guests had to saw across the lawn, none predicted the storm coming. The inner book from this journalist has arrived drawing on the seemingly infinity lava flow that seems to have been spawned by the high priesthood of Kek ever since the election of Donald Trump.
The book “Journey to Vapor Island” in many ways seems to reveal something of the ID of the author, as if the story had been dictated to Sigmund Freud while under house arrest. It is replete with sexual cruelty that is typically only found in an erotic novel and yet set in contexts that many men young and old can identify with and empathize. The narrative is both jarring and replicative, both of the kind of world we live in, and perhaps the better worlds we pine for in our memories and dreams.
The hero of the novel, Noam Metzenbaum is collage of extremes, like the portrait of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Grey, though without self-reflection, leaving only the audience to judge on behalf of God and Angels. He is a man of Promethean desire, and a boy of Anglo-Saxon simplicity. He wants the world to be magnificent, and wants his place in it to match. His heart both longs romantically after an unattainable woman, while almost completely ignoring his own mother, both women playing very little part in his own external drama, but always there, pushing and pulling.
There are numerous scenes and dialogue in the book that wonderfully compliments a lot of the subjects the author has explored on his radio program, everything from Israeli Aryanism, to White Sharia to Afro-Futurism. One that stood out to me in particular was the way in which Noam by means of his friend Carlos managed to make it into the inner sanctum of the “Chads” described as a “masked costume ball” not unless the famous secret world of the elite in the Stanley Kubrick film penetrated via Dr. Bill Harford. Only this time, this is not just a matter of going to a “Bohemian Grove” or Jeffrey Epstein’s “Rape Island” for some jolly good fun. This is a mission of personal revenge. Reminiscent of Eliot Roger’s failed attempt to enter a girl’s sorority as part of his murder spree though set in a context much more justifiable to the reader.
The climatic rape of Noam followed by the beheadings of the chad’s was painful to read, and in real life, I’d find it almost fantastically impossible to believe, not to mention some of the descriptions used which can only be read cosmetically but would be very difficult for an actor to say with a straight face. Comparing a skull full of blood and semen to ketchup and mayonnaise is not something I’ve ever come across in any of the erotic works of fiction I’ve read, and yet in a sense there is something of the intention of the character of Noam, that a lot of “cranks” whether Alt-Left or Alt-Right could appreciate.
The book is about contrasts and change. Just as Capitalism, Marxism and civilization is generally, whether we talk of the boom and bust of an economy, or the struggle for reform and revolution, or even of warfare and the death of nations, the second half of the book is a lot like getting into “The Time Machine” with our antihero. Freed from jail after doing his time, Noam’s world and Noam himself has changed. He is more capable of violence than before achieving a level of respect most non-serial killers can only envy from afar: Driving around in a DeLorean adds to the comedy of the time driven transformation. And despite the moroseness of the subject matter, in many ways this story is a parody of both our popular entertainment, Californication comes to mind, and the recent fall of many liberal Hollywood icons, such as the bombastic Ari Meschel, an obvious Weinstein/Toback reference. Reading this book had me asking an old question: What would we be like if the devil was fighting in our corner, instead of against us? What would I be like if I had “The Ring of Power?” Not many people ever ask this question, always seeing themselves as good fighting against evil, but never imaging themselves as an evil failure: only ever as successful evil.
A lot has been said for and against, “Meme magic” in Alternative Media circles, some such as Davis Aurini condemning Pepe the frog as essentially anti-Christian, and a potential enemy of right and order, as much as the friend to all agents of chaos. Others, have simply laughed at it as unrealistic, a few occultists have even applauded it quite un-ironically. Robert Stark however, is using it almost as a literary device. Something to break the “fourth wall” with, only in terms of popular culture and ideological narrative being the walls, he would like to break. Despite the many problems I had with the book, it’s comic treatment of alpha males as interchangeable “Chads” and the distinctively autistic single-mindedness of the commentary, this was the sweet spot. The Author uses at the end of the day not a red pill but a blood drenched battering ram.
For many of us, despite Professor Steven Pinker recent admission “taking the red pill” on many subjects is no pleasure. It is a curse, and like Cypher from the matrix we wish could take the “blue pill.” Noam at least is given that sad happy ending on Vapor Island. Like Sebastian from The Never-ending Story, our very strange Jewish antihero Meme’s his reality into being, and in a way, achieves his crush, making his fantasy a reality. Don’t all dreamers, by night or by day wish they could achieve even this small cult fiction?