After opening with three contained stories of a, emphasis on the singular, person, a thought process, a perspective, three stories of refracted and scattershot solitary confinements, gold-lined handcuffs of anxieties and uninteractions, traps of ritual and bile, desperate mechanisms, the dripping tapwater that quenches the ever building fear of (*cough*) rejection, socially, personally, internally, that clouds every waking moment of a worldscape of acceptance without understanding, some of the decade's finest hyper-contemporary literary fiction, mind you, the book collapses. At first, you'll think that's fine, and hell, maybe it is, it's a controlled apocalypse, a conscious analogue for the isolationist pipeline of a segregated online social space that has slowly devolved into a never-ending sea of one-person pod-beds. There's no question, it's a good analogue! The question is whether it's a good book. First becoming too cute by half in a righteously revolting reddit-AMA pastiche, then too cute by whole with an eye-rolling and winding metafiction jumpscare that doesn't commit nearly hard enough to its faux-blog-post structure, before properly jumping ship with some deadly poetry and some far-too-pleased-with-itself-for-how-obvious-it-is autocritique. But when it's on, it's on. Characters suspended in symbiotic relationships with their own simpering desperation, in every instance, viscerally (haven't dusted this word off in a while) cringeworthy, but fundamentally real. Depending on who you are, the humiliations of your past, the specificity of the sexual fantasies you masturbate to, this will rock somewhere between disturbingly viable caricature and a lived experience (I know because I alternated between both responses, sometimes within the same paragraph), and you just can't ignore how much of a giddy workout for the sweat glands and neck muscles certain sections are. If Paradise Logic was a book of the soul, this is one of the flesh, not just of the nascent sickness but of real-time manifestations. Just like that book, worth your time, I recommend it and I don't, I was disappointed with the last act fizzle, and the first thirty pages were hysterical. As with Kemp's, a brilliant time capsule, maybe even more so with it being so many at once. It warms my heart that the first story's titular The Feminist, that guy, that specific combination of self-degrading and self-mythologising, a relic of the late 2010s, cast in amber, gets to live perpetually. Bless.