Justin Taylor
Justin Taylor is the author of the novel The Gospel of Anarchy, the story collections Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever and Flings; and the memoir Riding with the Ghost, His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Bookforum, and the Oxford American. He is a contributing writer to The Washington Post Book World and the director of the Sewanee School of Letters. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
Why not close out the year with the interiority of an incel heated to a rolling boil and transformed into an active shooter? If you like, think of it as someone putting Tom Waits’s “Little Drop of Poison” on the jukebox. The menacing, ersatz Travis Bickle narrating this cold open is the voice of the toxic online “streets” in Justin Taylor’s novel Reboot, out in paperback by Vintage this month. Taylor’s novel is Frankensteinian in that it attempts to gather strange, monstrous limbs of contemporary life—reptilian and hollow earth conspiracies, the manosphere, BoJack Horseman, Twitch streaming, QAnon, celebrity and its corresponding fandom—and reanimate the corpse of popular culture. It's also Young Frankensteinian in that the book never takes itself too seriously, even though the characters think nothing could be more grave than their particular hardships. In this way, Reboot is brilliant satire in the DeLillo mode. Taylor is one of the few unapologetic stylists out there, and whether he’s following protagonist David Crader’s hard reset or chronicling environmental collapse, every sentence is written with great care.
