rekt by Alex Gonzalez: Review by Paul Di Filippo

rekt, Alex Gonzalez (Erewhon Books 978-1645661597, hardcover, 368pp, $28.00) March 2025.

Here comes another startling debut novel to give us all hope for the future of the field in the hands of a new generation of writers. But unlike Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory, another recent standout premiere, this book is not conducted in a “civilized,” literary, cultured manner. Its domain is not the corridors of state, nor the drawing room, but life’s gutters. It is pretty much a punch in the face—or perhaps more precisely, the feeling of having your face forcibly rubbed into a smelly, foul morass. This is not to say that the book does not exhibit an immense amount of narrative skill and creativity. Far from it. Gonzalez knows exactly what he is doing, what kinds of effects he wants to produce in the reader, and what kind of worldview he wants to convey. The book and its characters—especially the protagonist, Sammy Dominguez—are gory, nihilistic, despairing, megalomaniacal, and sociopathic. And those are their good qualities! Nonetheless, the text constitutes a propulsively readable hellride, and what is arguably, in the end, a high-minded and damning depiction of postmodern callousness, power imbalances, degradation, lack of empathy and general all-round going-off-the-tracks of what we laughably call “civilization.”

Due to this nature, the publisher Erewhon has seen fit to include trigger warnings for a roster of terms that looks like George Carlin’s famous “Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television” routine times three.

And I should mention that the first half of the book is particularly irredeemable—on the surface. (Whether or not this is a smart tactic to inveigle readers or not is debatable.) It depicts pretty much a purely naturalistic descent into a perverse hell, and the reader begins wondering when and if the speculative elements will ever surface to add some fantastika heft to the tale. Are we just reading a twenty-first century update on the novels of Hubert Selby, Jr.? True, there are some scattered minor unreality teasers early on, but they are easily dismissed as paranoia. But when the whole apparatus behind our hero’s troubles finally erupts into view in the second half, the book succeeds in counterbalancing its harsh verisimilitude with mind-blowing Secret Master shenanigans, without losing its razored sharpness.

Sammy Dominguez is an average young man living in Florida. (What other state could host him?) He is enrolled in college at age 22, but kind of an academic screwup. Yet he has good parents, and a solid relationship with his true love, Ellery, a fellow student. Life could still turn out good for him.

But Sammy’s psyche conceals a festering wound. At age ten, he did something that left him—rightly or wrongly—feeling responsible for the death of a favorite uncle. That led him in high school to have an abnormal interests in online videos of violence. But he has kept this demon tamped down as well as he can.

Then Ellery dies in a car crash (not a spoiler!) and Sammy, in the throes of grief, begins his one-way journey into the inferno. Like a person who cuts themselves to alleviate psychic pain, he begins sampling videos that are more and more raw and brutal just to feel something, anything. Finally he exhausts 4chan and reddit and makes a connection to the dark web. And there he stumbles on a group of people who will rip the curtains from our consensus reality and make his life truly unbearable.

But before that happens, we meet other folks in Sammy’s life. Best friends Jason and Maria; a woman named Becca who seems primed to take Ellery’s place and possibly turn Sammy’s life around; another woman named Alexa who is a lively hookup and partially in tune with Sammy’s darker side. But Sammy disappoints, betrays and eventually abandons them all, deciding to deploy seemingly deepfake dark web videos to thrust aside all friendship and help.

Finally hitting what seems like rock bottom, Sammy is contacted out of the blue by a Black woman named Jay and her boyfriend Izzy. Jay is tough and merciless and obsessed, while Izzy is somewhat wimpy and tag-along. They reveal to Sammy the real actors and agents of his ongoing fate, people who manipulate unsuspecting normies like chess pieces. Jay is determined to kill as many of these Secret Masters as she can, in revenge for the death of her brother, and she enlists Sammy in an uneasy alliance. At this point, the book morphs into a noirish, surreal thriller, whose tone might be compared to some of the Parker scenarios of Richard Stark (Donald Westlake).

Finally, a very clever coda of some dozens of pages, cast in the form of computer screenshots and other documents, adds several layers to Sammy’s ultimate ending.

Because the tale is told in Sammy’s first-person voice, Gonzalez had to nail the contemporary vocabulary, syntax, rhythms, and themes of such an estranged young man, and he does so flawlessly. Lots of fresh slang and cultural referents lard Sammy’s thoughts and speech. Also, his anatomization of his own sadness and lack of hope are conveyed not in any kind of pseudo-scholarly, allusive manner, but rather in metaphors common to his own life. Sammy may be despicable, reprehensible, frightening and dumb, but he is his own authentic self.

Readers who enjoyed Max Barry’s Lexicon and/or Matt Ruff’s Bad Monkeys, and who at the same time can cozy up to Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, will find Gonzalez’s novel their cup of hemlock-laced Redbull.

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