Drill by Scott R. Jones: Review by Gabino Iglesias
Drill, Scott R. Jones (Word Horde 978-1-95625-209-5, $19.99, 256pp, tp) August 2024. Cover by Matthew Revert.
Sometimes you’re reading a book and suddenly ask yourself, “What the hell am I reading?” This can be a bad thing or an excellent thing. In the case of Scott R. Jones’s Drill, it’s the latter. Slightly surreal, angry, smart, Lovecraftian, chaotic, and written with the kind of prose that dances between metafiction and wild speculative fiction, Drill is, more than a novel, a unique reading experience that takes readers deep into the mind of its author.
Drill is one of those novels too multilayered to be easily and effectively summarized. Luckily, Jones offers a great description of it in the novel itself: “an autofictional weird novel with horror elements.” That says nothing about the drill itself, IGLESIAS
perpetually boring into the body of God or how the novel’s narrator – author Scott R. Jones – kills God. It also says nothing about the way the narrative is simultaneously a scathing critique of Jehovah’s Witnesses, an exploration of Jones’s creative process, a playful story that interacts with readers constantly as it dances on the rubble of the fourth wall, and a look into the author’s past – especially his broken relationship with his father and the JW.
Reading Drill is reading a breakdown of the kinds of people who work for the post office in Canada. It is also being pulled into the raw emotion of losing your mother and a sort of initiation into a strange cult. This is a novel that tells you it’s in your brain while reminding you that you are to blame for putting it there. Good literature makes us feel things, and Jones makes us feel a lot here – mirth, confusion, sadness, curiosity. The mix is fantastic, especially once you forget all about classic narrative structures and embrace the strangeness and meta-everything the book offers.
I usually take notes and write down on my phone the number of pages and passages I want to revisit. Drill is the rare kind of novel that makes me stop doing that less than halfway through. Simply put, there’s a lot going on here, and I mean that in the best way possible. There is a part at the beginning of the last third of the book where Jones’s critiques of religion and the writing about the connection between himself and the JW gets a little repetitive, but not even that detracts from the onslaught of ideas, jokes, and references to his own work that the author sprinkles into the text. Jones went on a journey writing this novel, and we relive that experience as we read it.
Self-referential, unapologetically bizarre, eloquent, and dancing to the sound of its own internal drum in terms of pacing, combining humor and darkness, and structure, Drill is a rare novel worth experiencing, and it’s definitely Jones’s best one yet.
Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist, professor, and book reviewer living in Austin TX. He is the author of Zero Saints and Coyote Songs and the editor of Both Sides. His work has been nominated to the Bram Stoker and Locus Awards and won the Wonderland Book Award for Best Novel in 2019. His short stories have appeared in a plethora of anthologies and his non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and CrimeReads. His work has been published in five languages, optioned for film, and praised by authors as diverse as Roxane Gay, David Joy, Jerry Stahl, and Meg Gardiner. His reviews appear regularly in places like NPR, Publishers Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, Criminal Element, Mystery Tribune, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other print and online venues. He’s been a juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards twice and has judged the PANK Big Book Contest, the Splatterpunk Awards, and the Newfound Prose Prize. He teaches creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University’s online MFA program. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.
This review and more like it in the October 2024 issue of Locus.
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