Jason Pargin's I'M STARTING TO WORRY ABOUT THIS BLACK BOX OF DOOM

I worry a bit, in the middle of the dumbest year in living memory (so far), that the people who most need to read Jason Pargin's I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, as well as those who are most going to appreciate it, are not going to bother finishing it because of its singular flaw, one that has been creeping very slowly into Pargin's work from the beginning: it's a bit didactic at times. As in there are some scenes that all but descend into Socratic dialogues.*

And there are no elements of hilarious supernatural horror (like in Pargin's John and Dave and Amy books), nor of over-the-top plutocratic science fiction (like in Pargin's Zoey Ashe books) in his latest novel. Pargin would seen to have concluded, like, say, William Gibson did before him (at least for the Bigend/Blue Ant trilogy) that the real, mundane world that we actually live in is plenty weird a setting for his brand of horrifying comedy and searing pathos, thank you very much. 

Which makes the fact that I was reading an ARC of I'm Starting to Worry... at the very instant the news first broke of the shooter at the Trump Rally in Butler, PA on July 13th of this stupid year of 2024 so freaking weird and perfect and unsettling that it made me feel like I was suddenly a bystander in either a John and Dave and Amy novel or a Zoey Ashe novel, for reasons I'll talk about here in a bit.

The plot of I'm Starting to Worry... chiefly concerns a disaffected young man, Abbott Coburn, who accepts a Lyft request from a mysterious woman who needs help transporting the titular Black Box, a roadie crate covered in band stickers, at least one of which stickers looks quite a lot like a radiation hazard sticker as depicted in the cover art, from California to Washington D.C. In Abbott's dad's tricked-out practically brand new Lincoln Navigator, of which Abbot believes his dad is more proud and protective of than he is of Abbot himself. 

We are treated, here and there, to  just enough foreshadowing about the eventual fate of box and car l, and about the subsequent fame of Abbot and the young woman, who gives the improbable but cool name of Ether when Abbott demands to know what to call her, to know that this trip they're planning is not going to go smoothly or end well. Which, of course it isn't; this is a Jason Pargin novel. His first book gave away an unhappy ending in its title! 

The duo's eventual fate is sealed by two unhappy circumstances they don't even know about until miles and days later, when one of them finally breaks the rules of the trip (don't look in the box, don't bring any devices that can track us, etc) and realizes that the Internet has lost its collective mind over their journey and conspiracy theories about it abound; the true point of I'm Starting to Worry... is thus revealed to be that said Internet has given us all a chronic case of what Malka Older named "Narrative Disorder" in her Centenal Cycle: our brains, already inclined to pattern seeking and narrative creation where neither pattern nor narrative actually exist, also can't really tell the difference between the stories it has fabricated and objective reality. Or at least not without more effort than most of us are used to expending to overcome the inherent efficiency/laziness of our brains, the better not to hog all the glucose so our muscles and organs can have some, too.

Anyway, not only did that sticker on the box capture the imagination of some of the worst sufferers ever of Narrative Disorder (aka Reddit users, which, get ready for them: big chunks of the novel take the form of conflicting theories, insults and wild speculation in Reddit threads, even unto the creation by rebels from one subreddit about the escapade of a whole 'nother one, denouncing the users and moderator of the original), but also, the vehicle Ether had originally tried to use to take the box cross country by herself... did in fact set off a radiation detector when investigators found it broken down and abandoned not far from where Abbott picked her up.

 

Oops.

So people think the pair are maybe some kind of terrorists transporting a dirty bomb to set off on the Mall in Washington D.C. No, wait, actually, Abbott is just a dupe in this plot, seduced into driving by Ether, who is a trained Russian sex-spy. No, the radiation is actually from an alien (or alien corpse) that the pair are transporting from a seekrit location to D.C. for a dramatic reveal to finally force Disclosure; Abbott and Ether are heroes! No, wait...

See why it was freaking weird to be reading this on the day a poor marksman took a potshot at the Republican nominee for POTUS?

Anyway, the mystery ropes in two unlikely "detectives" who have assigned themselves to the case: a recently retired FBI agent named Joan Key, and Abbott's father, Hunter, who, it turns out, actually does care quite a bit about his son, thank you (he's just really bad at, you know, emotions and stuff), and would really rather not see his boy go down in a hail of bullets on national TV.

But as Key and Hunter try to track Abbott and Ether -- Key to stop what she is sure is a terrible domestic terror threat that none of her former colleagues will take seriously, Abbott to save his son from certain death or even worse fates and also maybe congratulate him for finally doing something interesting with his life -- they can't help but join a howling pack of weirdos who are all doing the same thing for different reasons, spurred to action by the insanity on Reddit and Facebook, mostly, but also...

We find out early on that Abbott isn't just a Lyft driver who still lives with Daddy, but is also a YouTube streamer of middling popularity; this all really got touched off by a quick post to his channel advising that he was going to be offline for a while having a real life adventure. So some of his fans, hip to what's been going on on Reddit, etc long before Abbott himself is, are out to save him from the Evil Woman who tempted or kidnapped him into being her unwitting stooge.

And there's a big scary and heavily armed guy the duo refers to as the Tattoo Monster on their trail, too. The Tattoo Monster seems to know what's actually in the box and to believe that it's rightfully his, and is surprisingly resourceful for a dude who looks like he hasn't paid attention to anything since Hunter S. Thompson wrote Hell's Angels. In which Tattoo Monster (he has a real name but Tattoo Monster is more fun) could easily have been a character.

It all builds up to a satisfying climax in typical Pargin fashion, both way over the top and just believable enough, both coming at you out of nowhere and telegraphed almost from the first paragraph. 

In the middle, though, we get lots and lots and lots of pseudo-philosophical exchanges between Abbott and Ether, mostly about how much the world sucks and it's going to hell and it's especially bad for unattractive young white men (Abbott, who "spent half his life sensing he was in someone's way and the other half actually being in someone's way but failing to sense it") vs It's only bad from a very narrow, specific and privileged viewpoint and everyone really has a bad case of Internet poisoning and toxic levels of loneliness (Ether).

I have this theory that everything that happens on our screens is designed to do exactly what's happening here, to repel us from one another, to create a war of all against all. It's like a filter that only shows you others' bad behavior, blocking the pure and letting through the poison, to make you scared of everyone who isn't exactly identical to you. I think that, long-term, it traps your brain in a prison, that it's designed to keep you inside, alone, with only those screens for comfort.

- Ether, explaining why she refers to social media tech as the Black Box of Doom 

So yeah, if you're a fan of Pargin's old work at Crackd, his many podcast appearances on shows like Behind the Bastards, or his TikTok channel, these passages won't be too much of a bother, covering similar mythbuster-y ground to those, but they do slow down the action some and often feel quite preachy if you're already on Pargin's wavelength re: what modern technology and living standards and capitalism have done to our brains and how important it is to unplug and get some perspective -- I can only imagine but that is even worse for those who are not. So I'm sure lots of people are going to be online soon complaining that Pargin has Gone Woke or whatever new slang for pointing out that things could stand some improvement in the equity and kindness departments will be by the time the book is published later this year. 

For this was a Netgalley pick for me, and, weird July 13 experience it was for me, I'm mighty glad to have gotten it.

Pargin doesn't need fancy magic or sci-fi trappings to tell a great, and frequently funny, story. He made my auto-buy list a long time ago, but I maybe need to bump him up to must buy in hardcover.

*I'm aware that this is a strange context in which to use the word "descend" but this is supposed to be genre fiction, and Pargin's audience is not, I suspect, going to like the lecturing and arguing that characterizes a lot of the interactions between our protagonist and his primary companion. I'd love to be wrong!