Millennial Horrors- Part One: Cosmic Horrors of Daily Life
“If you are an individual employed by a corporation or an institution,’’ he said, then the odds are leveraged against you. The larger party always wins. It can’t see you, but it can crush you. And if that’s the working world, then I don’t want to be a part of it.”- Ling Ma, Severance, 2018
Over the past decade, following works of fiction and nonfiction describing daily life in contemporary society written by and about people in their twenties and thirties (the so-called “millennial” generation), it has been interesting, and disturbing, to watch the focus of these accounts change. From accounts dealing with typical coming of age, “quarter life crisis” absurdities of arrested development or existentialist musings about life under social media, a note of dread, real unironic dread, began to creep into many of the novels I read. As the idea of millennials began to appear in media more frequently, as it became more apparent that the crises of the current moment were not dissipating with adulthood, as the oldest among them/us began turning forty, the vibe shifted.
Even before the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, these works evoked an unsettling feeling all too familiar to many, and the overarching thought that there was nothing we could do about it. The quotidian inertia of much past literary fiction, even if approaching something of the zeitgeist of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, along the lines of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, perhaps, feels inadequate to the frightening gravity of the situation, the uncertainty of the future, personal or societal.
Whether bildungsromans, “autofiction,” or other forms of popular or literary fiction or more speculative genres, I cannot help noting a certain motif of cosmic horror leaching into many novels. Whether directly leaning into the horror genre for their work, such as Ling Ma’s 2018 novel Severance or Ezra Claytan Daniels and Ben Passmore’s 2019 graphic novel BTTM FDRS, or couching their dread in a more literary realist mode, like Halle Butler’s 2019 The New Me, these novels approach the everyday existence of 2010s U.S./Anglo society with a certain bleak fear.
Of course, the idea of this large and diverse arbitrary group all featuring the same personality types aside from all being born to a certain time and place in history, is a simplistic, even unhelpful distinction used mostly to try to sell stuff. However, this specific time has, I feel, affected the people born into it, no matter their circumstances and background. While people born to this period are certainly not unique in the gravity of their particular situations, these exact circumstances are, and we currently do not have the benefit of knowing it all turns out okay, in the end, to fall back on.
While they may not directly discuss the overarching doom of climate change or economic or racial inequality, these issues loom over any writer working today, and as time has passed, I have found fear and alienation to be more and more an undercurrent of so much I have read. In the next few entries, I’m going to discuss some of the fiction I have read recently that address various aspects of this sense of impending doom over contemporary society, beginning with a few that use supernatural or horror elements to comment on conditions of life in the early twenty-first century.
A good place to begin, I think, is with Australian writer Elizabeth Tan’s enigmatic 2017 novel/collection of short stories, Rubik. A wild conspiracy wall of a book, Tan creates an intricate tapestry of contemporary life, weaving in all the weirdness and darkness that imbues it, from online fan forum drama to guerilla marketing.
Following several loosely connected threads, including the tragic death of a young woman, a super popular anime, Aussie meat pies, a cult-classic sci-fi novel, a viral video, voice work, modeling, and the art world, the stories are each distinct in form and tone. From correspondence between a lonely receptionist and the bot trying to sell him cheap electronics to a journalism student operating under action video game logic, Tan shows an impressive versatility throughout. Yet each viewpoint flows into each other in ways both obvious and subtle, leading me to pour back through the stories looking for connections.
Experimenting with form and genre in a way I found extremely compelling, Tan examines the ambiguous presence of technology and pop culture in our lives in an extremely realistic and yet also exceedingly strange way. I really enjoyed the Perth setting, which seems like just the sort of minor metropolis where such strange and yet familiar things are happening. Capturing the absurdity of the modern world, Rubik is among the most accurate depictions of the zeitgeist I have come across yet, and Tan’s compassion for the triumphs, tragedies, and secrets of her characters is inspiring.
Despite the tapestry being created by Rubik, its threads do not come together perfectly and I find myself thinking about the book after finishing it, wondering about the puzzles that persist, what clues did I miss? What is the timeline? Where did this all begin? In many ways, that is the most realistic part of it, especially in regards to our constant bombardment of the vaguely relevant information we confront daily on our social media and news feeds. How does it all fit together? If only we could have a wider lens, perhaps it would all make sense.
Similarly, US author Ling Ma’s Severance is an intricately plotted, darkly humorous, and deeply thought provoking rumination of “millennial” ennui, the immigrant experience, labor, and a deteriorating environment, all told through the lens of an ersatz zombie apocalypse.
Ma writes in a witty, engaging manner, weaving together her diverse themes in a way that feels altogether natural. Her protagonist, Candace Chen, survives the virulent Shen Fever, a fungal infection that affects people by trapping them in loops of nostalgia and routine, after having become trapped in a routine herself, performing rote office work as Manhattan crumbles around her. After joining a ragtag group of survivors led by the sinister IT nerd Bob, she embarks on a cross country journey in search of Bob’s promised Compound, a place where life may continue as before. In between these gripping scenes of Candace, in the present, negotiating Bob’s authoritarian “Stalks” and rituals, she reminisces about her life in the years leading up to the collapse. This has some of the most interesting scenes in the novel and I was extremely impressed by how adeptly Ma was able to weave these elements together, exploring multiple threads yet leaving much for the reader to unravel for themselves as well.
In particular, I found it interesting how the novel sets its action in late 2011 when I feel we knew things were starting to go bad in our late-capitalist stage society, but the other shoe had yet to drop. I feel like I’ll be thinking of, and returning to, Severance for quite some time to come.
The graphic novel BTTM FDRS by US artists Ben Passmore and Ezra Claytan Daniels tackles the horrors of gentrification in an amusingly literal way. Colorful and gooey, Ben Passmore’s wonderfully shaded art complements Ezra Claytan Daniels’s incisive writing as we delve into the Bottomyards, one of Chicago’s rapidly gentrifying low-income neighborhoods. Not backing away from discussing such difficult subjects as race, gender, and colonialism in addition to weird monsters, Passmore and Daniels’ work is as thought provoking as it is fun.
When Darla moves into an odd, renovated building to have a cheap, live-in-studio for her fashion design, she quickly finds things are not what they seem. Having grown up in the neighborhood herself before embarking on a successful college career, she is shocked to find her presence forcing out the building’s former tenants, but even more shocked by the things that also continue to haunt it. Along with her “authenticity” obsessed friend Cynthia and a cool but mysterious neighbor, Darla confronts her creepy landlord, a conspiracy obsessed utility worker, secret surveillance, and hidden mushroom crops, to say nothing of “Chucky,” as it begins to make its presence known. Like Ma, Passmore and Daniels use these stranger elements to comment deftly on the more mundane, if equally destructive horrors of contemporary life.
Finally, another US writer Halle Butler’s work The New Me was another affecting novel that I also find myself thinking about even several years later. Bleakly humorous (or humorously bleak?), something in Butler’s writing here really captures the alternating ludicrous and horrific mood of the current period of history in the United States. While in contrast to the previous works, keeping her setting entirely within the realm of “realism,” dread practically oozes from the narrative. Despite how mundane and relatable the everydayness of the story is, the hopelessness and despair coming through shows you don’t need aliens or ghosts or even serial killers to have something truly chilling.
The bulk of The New Me is narrated by 30-year-old Millie, as she starts a temp job in the office of an architectural magazine publisher in Chicago and quickly begins to spiral into a helplessly witty void of self-sabotage and doubt. Butler interrupts her reflections with some hilarious third-person perspectives of various people around her, that all feel equally sympathetic, equally lost.
As illustrated by these asides, we find Millie’s choices have little import, as forces equally arbitrary work against her from outside her awareness, from the neighbor who calls in the weird smell of neglect coming from her apartment (only for the landlord to wave it off as “just the pipes”) to Millie’s younger, ambitious boss, who is just as obnoxious to their superiors.
Millie even nods to this herself, her favorite show being a true crime doc she watches on her laptop. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for something truly horrifying to happen but the end was, in itself, all too familiar (and horrific in its own way). On the other hand, it was reassuring to see this contemporary fear depicted in such a sympathetic way.
In the next entry, I’ll discuss some recent novels I’ve read that focus on one of the deepest conduits for cosmic horror in contemporary life, the internet, and what, exactly, is meant by an “internet” novel.