“One of Hinton’s longest and craziest.
Where to begin?
Imagine Star Trek, but the ships are piloted by asshole 5 year-olds who sit in those captain’s chairs and scream at each other, stuff like, “You fucking idiot!” “You drunken bastard!”
There’s so much plot in this book. It’s really about 5 Star Trek episodes slapped together. A crew is assembled for a suicide mission to a planet inhabited by giant ants. The planet is called Dirt, and the ants make buildings out of stale bread. These ants apparently are also making some kind of bomb to fuck up the Earth.
Enter our crew. There is the captain, a drunk, who we are told multiple times is wearing skidmarked underwear. There’s a doctor, who is also a ninja. There’s a crack addict, a porn addict. There’s a really horny guy (he might also be the porn addict, I can’t really keep it all straight), and a trans woman who is frustrated because the horny guy won’t sleep with her.
Sounds like Star Trek to me!
About halfway through the prose starts to suffer. I’ve started to wonder if these are dictated through Google Docs and not checked over, or if they’re possibly plotted by someone, who then turns the typing over to someone who has a fairly remarkable grasp of English as a fifth language, but it’s quite 100% there. We all like to make fun of these self-published joints for their typos, and that’s not really my bag. Why mock typos when the entirety of the story is completely nonsensical? That’s like critiquing the window treatments on a house that’s been burned to the ground.
I learned something about reading these books a week ago. I went to Neil Breen’s latest movie, Twisted Pair. If you’re unfamiliar with Neil Breen, I feel bad for you, son.
Twisted Pair is probably Breen’s least sensical movie. Which is saying something. This man has made two separate movies where he’s some kind of robot space Jesus, and two movies where he derives power from a magic rock that he may or may not go inside of at different times.
After the movie, I was asking Poonmaster Flex if we could try and go through the plot. Because I really couldn’t make heads or tails of it. She said, “45 minutes in I just sort of gave up and let it happen.”
And I think that’s the right move.
It’s like shrooms. When you take shrooms, where you get in trouble is when you try to control the situation. You just have to accept that things are happening and let them happen. Same with a Neil Breen movie. Things are happening. You just have to let them happen.
And same with a Charles Hinton book. When you let go, stop trying to make it into the shape of a comprehensible story, you’ll be much happier. “