This comfortably joins the club of such disparate cross-medium artists as Jane Remover and Conner O'Malley in representing a hyper-aware, skin-crawlingly paranoid scatterbrain and over-indulging sex-obsessed self-repugnancy that, like it or not, feels like the sound of right now. I usually see this kind of thing get called 'terminally online', but if you spend any time out-of-doors, you'll realise that everyone under a certain age is infected with strands of it through cultural osmosis, and I don't except myself. Kemp writes with the voice of an academic who spent her formative years posting superwholock fanfics to a 12-follower Tumblr account, so she's as well-equipped as anyone to embody the internet era diaspora. Infinite media subsumed, Greek Mythology filling out the back pages of a cum-stained porno mag. A billion existences of thought at your fingertips, but the corporeal life left rotting in the muskiest corner of four stagnant walls. Reality so desperately wishes for a cohesive narrative to take control of her life, but those died with the last millennia. She can barely express a thought as a coherent word or action. We are all aliens transmitting thin simulacra of human interaction, so I suppose it was only a matter of time until someone wrote a book about one. I mean, it's not subtle. Her name is Reality.

Two thoughts:

1. I would have liked to see this even try a little bit to end. I know we're writing to theme, I know the surrealism is in line with that, but it's a cop out. I know an "I couldn't figure out how my story was going to get from c to d" when I see it, and no amount of repulsive acrobatics is going to distract me from the fact that this spends 30 pages on a series of wet farts. I like an anticlimax, I think it'd be generous to label this as such.

2. This will be an incredibly interesting cultural artifact in 20 years, an M:I-2 level summation of the aesthetic obsession of the era, down to the colour grade and the scent. But for now, it's almost stomach-churning to be delivered such a concentrated dose of self-reflexive ugliness. I recognise too many of these thoughts and feelings from the grooves of my own brain. I offer congratulations on successfully transmuting the ambient sadness of the moment into literature. I'm too well acquainted to do more.