by Edward Champion

The Atlantis Hotel (NaNoWriMo 2022 #3)

In the third installment of this outrageous (and quite possibly deranged) NaNoWriMo experiment, events start to get spicy back in Myrtle Beach!

(Start Reading the Novel from the Beginning: The Dead Writer)

(Previously: The Coat Basket)

By Tuesday morning, most of the Grande Dunes weekend revelers had checked out of the Atlantis Hotel. It was an unremarkable seven-story concrete eyesore with inexplicably Euclidean gables and gilded veneers constructed without thought or care in 1996 by failed Reform Party candidate Harold Triton at the beginning of his midlife crisis, which had been reported on by one of Ezmerelda’s former Iowa classmates decades later in a glossy Conde Nasty magazine that carried the telltale stink of a perfume sample that had been so potently redolent that at least three dozen readers canceled their subscription after developing a severe and life-threatening skin rash — a potential class action lawsuit that had been halted and hushed up with Newhouse money and that had inspired a veteran advertising executive to give up his morally bankrupt career for a far more purposeful but comparatively thankless life feeding the starving hordes in Sri Lanka.

The investigative article had somehow landed this boisterous rollerblader a coveted ASME for no other reason other than that the classmate (who was more of a skater than a writer, truth be told; the dude still kept at his Salchows and spins even as the fearful middle-aged demarcation point of forty was escalating ever closer) had simply said what everyone in Myrtle Beach already knew: namely, that most of the tony and tone-deaf golfers in this affluent development were fond of building whatever the fuck they wanted to. That was the way you won writing awards in the 2020s. Spell out the bleeding obvious with a Capotesque flair for sensationalism and land a lucrative book deal and then realize that you really had nothing particularly earth-shattering to say once you signed the contract and spent all day playing Elden Ring on your PlayStation 5 and dodged those weekly calls from your agent who demanded to know why a bad haiku about Jeremy Strong had been your only output in the last six months.

It was not so much that these hopelessly dull developers had big dreams or essential passions. They simply had vast sums of inheritance money to spend and family lines to live up to. They couldn’t very well let all those elocution and ballroom dance classes go to waste, could they? They couldn’t allow their surnames to not be mentioned regularly in the social register or the newspapers or, more recently, the remarkably virulent gossip blogs that flourished online much like anthracnose decimating a beautiful hardwood forest. No, they needed to matter. And they didn’t know how.

And so they built edifices. Ugly towers that would never grace the pages of Architectural Digest with walls that were frequently pissed on by those who were born and raised in Dirty Myrtle and who didn’t have money.

While their great great great grandfathers had built vast fortunes from the indigo trade, these very rich and very uncultured ciphers lamented their impotency and their wrinkles and their more frequent need to pee and the wagging fingers of doctors who told them that they should exercise more and that they should not sprinkle so much salt on their dinner plates. They often stared at their limp and increasingly useless chorizos in the bathroom mirror after taking their showers, feeling nostalgic for the youthful days in which they could summon a chubby without poppping a Vardenafil.

The Atlantis Hotel was one of many such dubious monuments that had emerged from this craven desperation. It had never quite conjured up an aquatic theme to suit its name, which had been randomly selected by Triton on a bourbon-soaked night when Triton and his friends carried on a vivacious and increasingly deranged philosophical conversation speculating about how mermaids fucked. The only decorative allegiance to the underwater city that Plato had so eloquently described in Critias was a series of oblong aquariums that had been placed at random points in the hotel lobby. The fish often died because the staff were overworked and underpaid and were often screamed at by the guests for perceived failings. And the manager had the unpleasant duty of regularly inspecting these fish tanks for some diamond blue discus that had expired and floated to the edge after spending the last week desperately waiting for Tetra Color Bits. Que Sera Sera. It was truly a miracle that nobody had thought to contact the ASPCA, but then animal rights were the least of Myrtle Beach’s worries.

But because the hotel was so mediocre and poorly run, it became a venue where you could hole up in plain sight. No self-respecting Myrtle Beach resident would ever be caught dead there. At least that was the working theory. And when the locals did frequent the place for salacious afternoon delights, they would often adopt strange disguises. Overcoats, sunglasses, wigs, even a prosthetic nose if they had any aspirations to run for political office. One bellboy with a photographic memory had kept a running list in his head of the regulars he could gouge for sizable tips by mentioning their real names when he unlocked their rooms and sustained a lucrative six figure sideline in gratuities that he would never have to report on his tax returns. (He was later audited by the IRS and arrested for tax evasion once they questioned how a minimum wage employee could afford a flashy pool house. The impulse to build in Myrtle Beach was hardly confined to those in the top tax brackets.) And while there was grumbling and grousing among the hotel regulars, the high cost of schtupping your secretary during a long lunch hour was more than atoned for by the fact that nobody who checked into the Atlantis was ever discovered.

Because of these circumstances, Sophie Van Kleason was happily flogging two of her subs in Room 312 on Tuesday morning. One was new and being initiated into her den of play. The other had cadged his way into her graces after six months of increasingly desperate texts. They were both quite naked and both quite sad, kneeling on the puke-green carpet to escape their miserable go-nowhere lives and serve their mistress. All was going very well until the new one made a rookie mistake.

“Can you sit on my face, Mistress?”

“Slave,” shrieked Sophie, “did I give you permission to speak?”

“No, Ma’am.”

“Do not make that mistake again! You will do what I say when I say it!”

“Yes, Ma’am!”

“Do you not worship me?”

“Yes, Mistress!”

She tugged at the three-inch leash attached to the greenhorn’s ball stretcher. The insubordinate’s scrotum grew pinker and more ridiculous and his balls bulged larger beneath the tightly bound leather ring, but his cock stayed hard and hungry. And he started to whimper. This was a good scene. And if she kept up the tension, she knew she’d have the two fellating each other in the next fifteen minutes.

“Will you obey?”

“Yes, Ma’am. I’m sorry, Mistress.”

“Now prepare yourself.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

This unruly sub — the freshest acquisition among her rotating base of seventeen — was swiftly disciplined with a hard blow to his solar plexus. Her daily workouts with Rollins had not been for nothing. She hit him with a two-by-four freshly cut at Home Depot over the weekend, discreetly packed among the other implements in her ever-growing larder of toys. The hunky twentysomething who had scaled her lumber had well-toned biceps and a taut and delicious ass that she wanted to adorn with bright blue bruises. If only her husband would make a modicum of effort with her instead of going out to film his Nature Walks, she wouldn’t have to live this way!

This guy had been so nice to her! Naively nice. The kind of nice she liked because it was so easy to manipulate. So nice that they had exchanged numbers and he had called in sick that very day after accepting her invite to join her at the Atlantis for some fun, little realizing the full extent of what he had signed on for. She still didn’t know if his name was Chris or Jim. But that didn’t matter. Because anyone who came into her lair was addressed as “slave.” Now this worthless and quite handsome man was actually sobbing, the snot dribbling in rivulets beneath his fine fleshy nose. And this made her very happy.

She turned to the other sub: the tubby middle-aged bitch with the long graying beard who was soon going to learn his place. This was Mike Harvest, the daily book critic of a prominent newspaper who had unfavorably reviewed three of her husband’s books with a belabored snark that had outworn its welcome ten years ago. Harvest had never amounted to much. He had only managed to publish one book during his twenty years as a book critic. That is, if you could call a collection of photographs that other people had snapped a book. He had made the four hour drive to the Atlantis from his home in Savannah. He was trying to buy time. Two Slate reporters had recently uncovered an incident that had occurred seven years before at his old Connecticut home that involved a prominent publishing executive and his close friend, the Jakester, whom he had been forced to cut ties with. Being dominated by Sophie was his idea of lying low.

She slowly leaned into Mike’s ear and purred her most seductive whisper.

“Do you wish to be insolent?”

“No, Ma’am.”

“Good. Now if I unfasten your hands, will you stay obedient?”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“Yes, Mistress.”

It was a consensual non-consent setup, which meant that Sophie could do anything she wanted with these two men. She slid the smooth leather masks over their skulls, tightening the straps as much as possible, and the two subs made stertorous attempts to breath. She smiled as their four suffering eyes bulged with horror and pleasure beneath the thin slats of the masks.

There was a knock on the door.

“Banana,” she said.

“Banana?” asked Chris or Jim.

There was no greater turnoff than a newly broken Chad who couldn’t remember the safeword.

“For fuck’s sake, scene’s over. Didn’t you listen?”

More knocking. Louder. More persistent.

She pulled off the masks.

“No bullshit. Did either of you tell anyone you were here? Mike, did you tell your wife?”

“No!” cried Mike. “I didn’t!”

BAM! BAM! BAM!

“Are you going to answer the door?” squeaked Chris/Jim.

“Look, I can’t have any more trouble,” said Mike. “I had to beg the editor to keep me on staff after that Slate story.”

Sophie slipped on the hotel bathrobe. She could feel the lustful eyes of the two men studying her meticulously sculpted body. That was the funny thing about men. Even when they were in a tight spot and needed to use their minds, they still abdicated to their dicks.

“Just wait.”

“Can you at least untie us?” shrieked Chris/Jim.

She opened the door.

An unsmiling man in a weather-worn fedora, a wool twill suit, and the blandest burgundy tie you could find in Topeka stared at her. He had a manila envelope beneath his arm.

“Mrs. Van Kleason.”

“Who are you?”

“My name isn’t important, but my clients are.”

“You’re not the bellboy, are you?”

“No.”

“I gave him $200.”

“I gave him more.”

“How do you know who I am?”

“Easier than you might think. Mrs. Van Kleason, I have some news about your husband. You may want to put something on. We’re going to be very busy.”

(Next: All the Ugly Horses)

(Word count: 6,345/50,000)

by Edward Champion

The Coat Basket (NaNoWriMo 2022 #2)

In the second chapter of this NaNoWriMo experiment, news of Paul Van Kleason’s death has started to make its way into the New York publishing world. And there seems to be only one man who can perform the appropriate damage control!

(Previously: The Dead Writer)

Seven hundred miles away, in an inexact north by northeast line that can be reached by jumbo jet in about one hour and forty-two minutes, there was a man who was decidedly more alive, far more important, more physically fit, much smarter, and somehow more anonymous in his business dealings than Paul Van Kleason.

His name was Bill Flogaast and he had far more power that any of the neighing infants who feigned “publishing insider” status could ever imagine.

In his thirty-four years in the biz, Flogaast was one of the last men still standing. He had survived numerous mergers and downsizing campaigns. He had inveigled tempestuous authors and bribed humorless book editors. He had methodically turned one book critic with a sizable Beanie Babies collection into his personal stenographer, persuading a bestselling horror writer to declare her his “friend” on pre-Elon Twitter, and this lonely and pathetic and heavily Botoxed woman had the sad naivete to believe that she still formed her own opinions about books. He had personally ensured that a Tory vulgarian who taught creative writing at Bath Spa University would never get his novels published in America. He sent fruit baskets and slipped Franklins to the right people. He silenced attention-seeking troublemakers by having his publicity army of ten send thick packages in the mail stuffed with galleys that were perfectly tailored to their sensibilities. Give these dumb and obnoxious kids all the books they could ever want and they would usually shut the fuck up. They would even photograph themselves on Instagram holding the galleys above their heads, as if these volumes were elephant skulls sawed off after a six month African safari. And it was he who had managed to persuade six media outlets to adopt a “No haters” policy for their review coverage, bringing an end to the literary takedowns that had caused several authors to sob for hours on the phone to him. It wasn’t that he was against tough criticism. He just wanted to spend more time in the Hamptons and this was strictly a time-saving measure.

He had covered up nine physical assaults, twenty-two incidents of sexual harassment, one fatal stabbing, and he had even managed to get some Nobel-obsessed jackanape who freelanced for The New Republic to spin an author’s ugly heroin overdose as a quiet death from natural causes. He kept an Excel spreadsheet tracking bad behavior from eighty-two authors (half of them had been on the Shitty Media Men list) who still had ongoing deals. Under Flogaast’s watch, their notorious deportment had never reached the newspapers. He had outsmarted the whisper network and orchestrated omertàs to ensure that any gadfly who could make a significant dent in sales with some lengthy online jeremiad would never be taken seriously. You could never get them on the work, but you could shred their character into confetti that was finer than anything you could ever buy at a party supplies store. Bill Flogaast knew that these gullible rubes were more interested in yukking it up about personality rather than discussing the merits of an award-winning backlist title. Before his career had been cruelly destroyed, Oscar Wilde had declared that great minds discuss ideas and small minds discuss people. And Bill Flogaast knew that the publishing world was no different from any other microcosm: a collection of small minds. Just look at the way these insects got stirred up on social media over a Slate hot take or the way they wasted time trying to dissect flash-in-the-pan “movements” such as Dimes Square. Sure, they held up Cormac McCarthy, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, and Thomas Pynchon as rightful geniuses, but these literary people clearly preferred to discuss who was fucking whom rather than what the S-Gerät symbolized in Gravity’s Rainbow.

And the best thing about all this was that he could persuade these media people that they were the ones who landed the stories. What they didn’t seem to understand, even when he provided flagrant clues, was that Flogaast had been pulling the strings all along.

Flogaast had stared down cutthroat German capitalists who were fully prepared to sodomize his livelihood for the greatest possible financial gain, winning them over with plentiful whiskey poured at predawn hours in East Village speakeasies. He spilled juicy dirt on famous writers as the Germans became increasingly inebriated while he nursed his drink, leaving a tiny tumbler half-full over the course of several hours. The Germans were too busy singing Marlene Dietrich songs at the most loutish and deafening levels to notice Flogaast’s modest alcohol intake.

Flogaast was the only man in publishing who remained on a first-name basis with the many Daves of the literary world. Every other publicist who had attempted the ambitious goal of Dave unification had either developed a $200/day coke habit or had gone nuts and checked into Bellevue. The literary Daves were truly that toxic, that insalubrious, that soul-destroying. One publicist had tried to warm up to the notoriously difficult David Rosemary Bier — author of a manifesto that made an undeniably hypnotic argument for eating red meat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day. This sad bastard, who had started off so optimistic, had leaped over the guardrails of a Midtown rooftop bar to his death shortly after Bier had vowed to “destroy” him with the help of his Hollywood friends.

But Bill Flogaast was made of sterner stuff. David Fitzjoy, author of the bestselling novel The Rectifications, was widely known to be an insufferable pain in the ass. A chronic mansplainer who scoffed over having his large and vastly overrated novels edited and who wasn’t nearly as perspicacious as he thought he was and who didn’t know how to keep his mouth shut and who wrote a self-serving New Yorker profile about the late Jonathan Coaster Wells, the long-suffering, long-haired, beanie cap-wearing author who had frequently used water as a metaphor in his viral commencement speeches and who had deforested 70% of the world’s trees with his 2,400 page epic, Inexhaustible Laughs. But it had been Flogaast who had coached Fitzjoy over many months to be more palatable and who had secured the splashy Sunday profile in the New York Times that caused everyone to give Fitzroy another chance. Just as he had reinvented David Lithium as a neglected treasure who was far more than the forgotten MacArthur Fellowship-winning author of Fatherless Manhattan. Dozens of publicists has unsuccessfully tried to persuade Lithium to stop name searching himself on Twitter and sending deranged emails to total strangers who didn’t care for his books, but only Bill Flogaast had the finesse to convince this admittedly aggravating author to find the inner peace he needed.

This nimble éclat bought him additional years in the industry. Flogaast had perfected the art of sleeping no more than four hours every night and only sleeping with his wife. Unlike the vast majority of men in the publishing industry, Flogaast understood that dick discipline was a significant factor in securing your career longevity. He had seen so many promising talents self-destruct over the years because they didn’t have the control that he had. He had politely declined all scandalous rendezvouses and enticing afternoon delights. Let weaker men get their rocks off and pay the hard price of alimony for a reckless tryst.

Besides, he did love his wife. Well, mostly. It had been some years since he last felt the full frisson that had first drawn them together at a Newport News barbeque festival, although she would probably say the same thing if you could somehow persuade her to spill a small morsel about her life. And she never did. Only three people in the building knew her first name and the only thing that this dull trio had in common was that they were the ones the shareholders listened to during quarterly earnings calls.

He would tell any author going through a divorce that most marriages are little more than economic partnerships — good for reducing taxes, buying homes, keeping down costs, and having a dedicated plus one for social soirees to insulate yourself from relentless speculation over what kind of unbearable asshole you had to be to never find someone who could tolerate your close company longer than six months. The sooner you understood this, the more successful you would be in work and life. He hadn’t sold his soul exactly, although nobody at the publishing house really knew about his private life. And because Flogaast exercised such exquisite self-control while speaking his mind, several skeptics came to understand that he could be trusted, even though he revealed nothing about himself at all and sat back and smiled while others flapped their traps. It was difficult to know who Flogaast’s closest friends were. Because they never factored into his public image. Yes, he had confidantes. But he never advertised who they were. Bill Flogaast one of the rare people in the early 21st century who never posted daily pictures of his lunch on Instagram. If you asked all the tech companies to share their collected data and assemble a dossier on Bill Flogaast, they wouldn’t be able to tell you a goddamned thing.

And when he wasn’t doing all this, he was fond of pickling vegetables in the four homes he owned in various parts of the Northeast. A suitable metaphor for the PR racket. Take those slimy cucumbers and contain the problem before the motherfuckers on social media used a third-hand rumor to cancel some wildly intoxicated bestselling author who had merely made the mistake of believing he was still twenty-five, sliding his liverspotted hand onto the wrong ass.

In his early sixties, Flogaast had more energy than most of the unpaid interns and a formidable understanding of human psychology. He had learned early on that, if you knew where the bodies were buried, you would get very far and stay very high. (In Flogaast’s case, he was sitting twenty-three stories above the growing throngs of homeless people berating random strangers at subway stations, knowing that he had the capital and the privilege to never waltz with the Midtown minions, thus decreasing the likelihood of getting randomly stabbed by some unmedicated basket case that the disastrous mayoral administration of Eric Adams has never once considered helping.)

On Tuesday morning, Bill Flogaast sat in a Herman Miller chair listening to the soothing clacks of a Newton’s cradle perched on the rightward corner of his massive executive desk. The desk had once belonged to Ronny Monson and was gifted to Flogaast after this energetic executive editor had dropped dead of pneumonia at the age of seventy-six. He knew that Jimmy Compton, the mediocre soyboy from the California Central Valley who had replaced Monson, had it in for him. That hopeless fuck couldn’t write to save his life. He’d actually attended the same high school as that disgraced podcasting jackass in Brooklyn who had made a big stir in the literary world ten years before and who didn’t even have the guts to go through with his suicide attempt. Nobody paid attention to that loser anymore. And maybe that was Compton’s fate too — that is, if he didn’t fail upward. It was a small world. People were connected in ways they didn’t realize. And maybe this was what fueled all the Sun Tzu hijinks in publishing. But that’s the way it was in business. You had your time. Some Machiavellian careerist would eventually get you in the end. And he knew Jimmy Compton would strike. He just didn’t know when. Maybe Flogaast could branch out on his own and start an indie publicity firm. He had the contacts. He had the moves. He’d make more cash.

The phone rang.

“Bill,” said the quavering voice.

“Yes?”

“I think we have a problem in Myrtle Beach.”

Flogaast smoothed the fine strands of his graying auburn Van Dyke and steepled his fingers.

“Tell me everything you know.”

Next: The Atlantis Hotel

(Word count: 4,451/50,000)

by Edward Champion

The Dead Writer (NaNoWriMo 2022 #1)

I didn’t anticipate participating in NaNoWriMo this year, but my fingers started typing and this 2,500 word chapter essentially wrote itself. You may be offended by this!

[AUTHOR’S NOTE: I never had any intention of participating in NaNoWriMo, that annual occasion where writers all around the world cobble together a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. But in three hours, the following 2,500 word chapter spilled out of me. I became driven by the mischievous glee of writing a novel that not a single house would ever have the stones to publish and I had a lot of fun putting together this story. I may carry on with this experiment. I may not. But I thought it would be fun to offer a glimpse of my weird and iconoclastic creative mind. I suspect I will offend some people, particularly wildly obnoxious white middle-class people and those fragile mediocrities presently installed in the literary world, but honestly who gives a fuck? That’s what being creative is all about, ain’t it?]

It was a cool Tuesday morning when the topless maid found Paul Van Kleason’s naked corpse in his dusty book-lined living room.

Ezmerelda Gibbons felt the prickly shudder of gooseflesh, although the source of this unsettling chill was not Van Kleason’s pathetic and chalky-white dead body, but the unceasing breeze rolling in from the Atlantic.

Horripilation was an occupational hazard in sex work, which she supposed this was, although Ezmerelda had never done the nasty with a client. She counted her lucky stars that she possessed enough dignity not to fuck Van Kleason despite his feeble one-note bleats into the ether, his steadfast pledges to redistribute some of the large bills he had secured from a shady film deal eight years before.

If only these braying men really knew how little their lustful lunges mattered, how infrequently their advances were reciprocated.

But she was in the business of serving up fantasies. And the more you kept these desperate dudes hungering, the more you could bank on these losers lining your coffers. This seemed a reasonable tradeoff after centuries of patriarchal oppression.

Van Kleason’s body was lumpy and ass-up. Arguably one of the most undignified ways you could meet your maker. The only part of his porcine body with anything faintly resembling muscle were his legs, questionably toned from the “Nature Walks” that he had live-streamed on social media to persuade people that he was woke and eco-aware. But Van Kleason told Ezmeralda privately that he had to hawk his shitty novels. He would even show her his royalty statements while she was bent over, scrubbing away at one of the thick onyx smudges that always seemed to line his kitchen basin. She did this as the jangle of his loosened belt buckle chimed into her ears, followed by the deep-throated horrors of Van Kleason relieving himself. At least he had enough presence of mind to do this when she wasn’t looking.

Van Kleason had been quite industrious in his final moments of life. His left hand grasped his iPhone 14 Pro, where an OnlyFans PPV of Ezmerelda bumping and grinding to Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” — a power ballad she thoroughly loathed — played on auto-repeat before the phone mercifully expired from a dead battery. Disturbing. His last cognizant thought had been of her. Ezmerelda was creeped out further when she noticed his right hand near his buttery thigh, dangling like a five-fingered answer to a lifeless pigeon, limply and listlessly reaching for his spotty STD-bedecked garter snake. A minuscule reptile that would grow no more.

How had Van Kleason died? Coronary thrombosis? A broken heart? The deep hate he secretly harbored for his readers finally catching up to him?

Ezmerelda stepped closer to the body, the footfalls from her teetering high heels reverberating against the high ceiling of this dubious manse. This sad and lonely palace to “success.”

She called the local police.

“I’d like to report a dead body,” she said to the folksy Caucasian cadet answering the phones.

“A dead body?” he said.

He was still green enough to express sincere horror, but Ezmeralda knew that this would be hammered out of him in six months, where he would likely become a gun-toting yahoo with a voracious appetency for racial profiling.

“Now, ma’am,” he said, “that’s an emergency. You really should call 911.”

“Oh, I didn’t kill him. Do you think that’s why I called?”

There was an awkward pause from the cadet as it suddenly dawned on him just what type of woman he was talking with.

“Uh, I’m sorry. Why are you calling us?”

“They have bigger things to take care of, don’t they?”

“Ma’am, stay right there. We’re sending over three units right now. We’ll need to question you.”

“Is that really necessary?”

“I’m afraid that it is.”

“I think some…discretion may be necessary here.”

“Ma’am, there’s a clear protocol.”

“I understand this, but this man is…I’m sorry, was…a somewhat prominent figure.”

“A prominent figure?”

“Do you read?”

“No.”

“Well then you probably don’t know him.”

“I have your address at 63rd Avenue North. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Stay there.”

“Will the questioning take long?”

She had a manicure appointment, a hard-won slot with the best pedicurist in town, and a daily berating from her personal trainer scheduled that afternoon. These local bumpkins truly had no idea how much upkeep was required to secure your place within the top 10% on OnlyFans. Not quite what Du Bois had in mind.

“That’s not for me to say. I’m sorry to inconvenience you, ma’am, but you’re going to have stay on the scene. Are you experiencing any shock or trauma?”

“No.”

“Then everything will be as ripe as roses.”

Ripe. A peculiar adjective to use for comfort when a quasi-famous man was lying dead only ten feet away from you and the pigs might somehow find a way to pin this on you.

“We’ll have someone there in ten minutes.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

She canceled her appointments by text. She knew that her personal trainer would scream at her the next time she saw him for “betraying” their pledge. Rollins’s toxic masculinity had been freshly liberated after that annoying guy had gone viral on TikTok. The long-haired dude who walked with a coffee mug in verdant splendor and screamed at total strangers to go to the gym while ducking his head like some wispy salamander in search of a worm for breakfast.

She didn’t have any feeling one way or the other for Van Kleason. Sure, he was a human being, but not a particularly good one, even though he had made considerable ado over what a “good guy” he was. So there was little to mourn other than how his death had inconvenienced her. And how she would have to find another client who had been so devoted to fiercely chronic masturbation. Van Kleason had been good for at least two thousand dollars a week. Money that she had been forced to transfer to the volatile realm of Ethereum because some of the fuddy-duddy banks had closed her accounts for “moral reasons.” Or maybe because they became easily unsettled because of the way she looked. Never mind that she had carefully followed the law.

Ezmerelda had become accustomed to death. Aside from a nine month stint at the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office ten years before, where she had grown a Teflon skin in response to the stink and grime of newly dead people and the constant aroma of Formaldehyde, there had also been the pandemic. Three of the last people in the world who truly understood and accepted her had passed away. And this despite their hardcore hygiene protocols, which rivaled Howard Hughes at his most germophobic.

She was only thirty-five years old, but her understanding of mortality matched those who were two decades older. And even before this terrible Tuesday morning, during her hard days growing up in Canarsie, there hadn’t been a single week in which she didn’t hear some grisly news about one of the jovial neighborhood locals gunned down as the gangs and the drug dealers carved up turf when they weren’t looking for a new shorty among her sistas. The murders that flourished under Dinkins. The unbroken rattle of gunfire that kept her hiding under blankets as a child. It was a wonder that there was anybody still alive to rent another unit in her housing development.

But that was the funny thing about Brooklyn. Avaricious landlords in Park Slope and Carroll Gardens ensured that there were always be new people moving into her neighborhood, claiming it as theirs and not bothering to bone up on previous history. Some of them were naive. Some of them were fearless. One clueless and newly married white couple had knocked on her family’s door with a homemade fruitcake and had made awkward attempts to befriend her mother, but their unit was vacant inside of six months. And it steeled her determination to escape. To find some sanctuary on earth where she would never have to apologize for being who she was. She had tried to convey her truth and her life story to white people, but they never seemed to comprehend it, even when you explained it to them as if they were small children. White people were more keen on complaining about the barista who had bungled their pumpkin spice latte that morning or their uncertainty in ordering jerk chicken from the nice place next to the liquor store. “Is it appropriate?” they would ask. “I don’t want to appear insensitive!” But white people had this way of bungling interracial camaraderie, even after reading several volumes of Black history. Fear of Black people was permanently baked into their DNA. So she smiled and nodded and made white people feel a little better about their privilege and their simplistic liberalism. And she sometimes hated herself for it. She knew damned well that these same white people, these hopeless fucks who would boast to other white people about having one Black friend, would call the police on her if she looked at them the wrong way or blasted The Pharcyde too loud.

Most of her OnlyFans subscribers were white. But she wasn’t going to be their fetish or their special chocolate sundae. She took their money, blocked anyone who was racist, and quietly redistributed half of her earnings to her own people.

Van Kleason, for all of his faults, walked on the right side of the delicate line. She knew that she had been something of an exotic curiosity to him — largely because she was considerably more schooled than some ghettoass jabroni hopelessly smitten by Tyler Perry’s oeuvre — but she had never been his mammy. And she sure as hell wasn’t going to cosplay as Hattie McDaniel. Not to him or anyone. If any of her clients read, she would examine their bookshelves. And if she saw a volume from that racist white bitch Kathryn Stockett, she’d get the hell out of there faster than a cheetah sprinting around a David Attenborough-narrated landscape for lunch.

Years before, she had won a scholarship to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She’d hoped to write the Great American Novel, but suspected that none of the white people had bothered to read her work and that she had been selected more out of tokenism. This was confirmed as she worked hard to land her MFA. Several has-been white male writers, bankrolled by the tendentious largesse of slightly older white male has-beens who could be found on social media laying down platitudes about why cancel culture was bad, tore her short stories to shreds and condemned her for not conveying what they deemed to be the “female experience,” which they were apparently inexplicable experts about.

So she largely gave up the writing, especially after her OnlyFans began to take off during the pandemic. She had never intended to stick around there for long, figuring that it was a temporary form of survival. She had prided herself in always paying her rent on time, even when she had to exhume her couch for spare change. But when the job market had “rebounded” (at least according to economic “experts”), she made another stab at working in New York media, learning that every door had been closed to her. That’s when she discovered that she had been targeted with a vicious smear campaign on social media initiated by Emma Silveburg, a former Big Brother contestant who had somehow rebranded herself as a mediocre novelist and was now begging her 90,000 Twitter followers to finance her divorce, Brie Attenberg, a narcissist prone to fits of rage who had made viral TikToks demanding that aspiring and talentless creatives write five thousand words a day at gunpoint (only one of Attenbeg’s wildly popular videos had resulted in some imitative jackass accidentally shooting his student during a live stream death, causing Attenberg to ditch the Luger P08 and become a dubious poster girl for gun safety, which the thoughtless throngs ate up, of course), and Van Kleason, a largely incoherent and inexplicably bestselling speculative fiction writer who slid into her DMs one lonely night and told her that the only reason he had amplified the online vitriol was because he had the hots for her. Could she come three times a week to his Myrtle Beach home and clean for her? Could she wear nothing but an apron and slowly reveal her tits? If that wasn’t acceptable, maybe Ezmerelda could dress up as a Waccamaw cottonpicker from 1893 and talk demurely like some hopelessly deferential squaw.

She wasn’t going to be some colonial plaything for anyone. She came very close to blocking Van Kleason. But then he came back with an offer she couldn’t refuse. Van Kleason promised her referrals.

It was an unlikely side hustle, with several other aspiring sugar daddies had expressed desires to “sculpt her in their image,” a curious phrase and a vaguely ecclesiastic kink that involved talking dirty while sustaining a Peter Falk impression. Some of these sad middle-aged men were in unhappy marriages and they toiled in go-nowhere middle-class McJobs that they clearly despised, but they all somehow found spare hours during day and night and they all seemed to be big fans of crime shows like Columbo and Baretta. She watched what she could find of these ancient crime dramas on YouTube and she became an expert mimic. She stripteased and talked dirty in private video chats and timed her “Just one more thing” purr to hit just before the very moment they climaxed off-camera. (She would charge $400 extra if they insisted on jisming on camera, rightfully counting on most of them being cheapskates.) While many of her former classmates, all master networkers tight with her former teachers, were trying to dig their way out of the credit card avalanches instigated by rising inflation, Ezmerelda watched her savings account burgeon into two years of living expenses. She was ignored by them, of course. The damage done by Silverburg, Attenberg, and Van Kleason was significant. But she didn’t worry too much about that because, unlike them, she had made it. Meanwhile, her old “friends” at Iowa wrote longass blog posts decrying the evils of capitalism, but never actually doing anything about it. So it became increasingly easier to not allow them to live inside her head rent-free.

Still, there had to be a better way to get by than this.

There was a knock on the door. The whirling red and blue of sirens spilled through the French window, casting a lambent glow on Van Kleason’s bare lily-white ass, which was beginning to look faintly green. Ten seconds later, her phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Miss Gibbons, we’re here. Would you mind opening the door?”

(Word count: 2,465/50,000 words.)

(Next: The Coat Basket)

by Edward Champion

The 2022 National Book Award Fiction Longlist, Ranked

I read the 2022 National Book Award finalists in two weeks. Here are my rankings.

On September 16, 2022, the National Book Awards announced its fiction longlist. That very same morning, I started working the phones, contacting publishers and asking them to send me review copies. Some publishers were incredibly gracious (even as they rightly questioned my monomania). My wild literary experiment was simple: what happens when one hardcore bald man in Brooklyn with a hopelessly iconoclastic streak reads all ten longlist titles before the October 4th finalist announcement?

I finished reading the books on September 30th. Then my computer broke down. Then I fixed my computer. Now it is one day before the announcement and I have arrived, just in the nick of time, to raise a little hell and serve up some heartfelt praise.

I have no connection with any of these authors. The only conflict of interest here involves one of the books being edited by a loathsome liar and rumormongering backstabber whom I strongly detest. He has pushed many kind heads beneath the undertow for careerist purposes and, despite leading a smear campaign accusing bloggers of unethical journalism many years ago, he has evinced pure unethical venality in regularly buying books for the publisher he represents that are agented by his partner, thus securing a crooked two-income stream. Still, quality work is quality work and this scumbag’s unfortunate association with a book I happened to love did not deter me in any way from ranking the book very high. (I have elided this man’s name, as well as that of another hateful and treacherous individual cited below, to make it slightly more difficult for him to name search himself. But if you really need to know who they are, Google is free.)

I am certain that many of the weak-kneed literary networkers regularly practicing social media fellatio will be offended by what I have to say. But unlike these deplorable cheerleaders regularly selling out their principles for a galley, I’m constitutionally incapable of kissing anyone’s ass, particularly if the work or the writer is irredeemably mediocre. In a world of vulpine backslapping, sham gatekeeping, transactional relationships, and cowardly “No haters” review policies, I felt that it was my duty to offer a brutally honest and sincerely passionate take on this year’s slate. What this means is that any endorsement you get from me is the genuine article. I’ll leave the smoke-blowing to the inveterate blurb whores and the blue checkmarks who regularly stump for the banal and the unremarkable to win likes and followers.

Let me state from the outset that the judges mostly got it right this year. This is the most interesting fiction longlist that the National Book Awards has served up in years. And if this is a sign of lists to come, then the National Book Awards may indeed regain its prestige from the payola horrorshow that only Tom LeClair has had the stones to rightly call out. Liberated from the previous executive director’s disastrous and self-serving stewardship, which ushered in an onslaught of wildly overrated commercial titles and turned the medal into a popularity contest rather than a true gauge of literary merit and caused any self-respecting reader to turn to the Booker Prize winners for real heft (Anna Burns’s Milkman, Bernardien Evanisto’s Girl, Woman, Other, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, and Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain all represented distinctive literature that the National Book Awards used to be about before the previous director vitiated the award’s credibility with her relentless efforts to dumb everything down), the National Book Awards are something that we can be proud of again. The previous director is so evil and deplorable that, according to two unimpeachable sources whose anonymity I shall never betray to anyone, she once announced that she would throw a lavish fete if I successfully committed suicide. I suspect that such unbridled sociopathic sentiments were one of the primary reasons why the National Book Awards plummeted in recent years — drifting away from empathy-driven titles depicting what it is to be alive. Fortunately, Fiction Chair Ben Fountain has smartly guided his team of judges to single out weirdos, risk-takers, and reliable outliers. Short stories are very well represented this year and the selections here are largely superb. Young and emerging writers have also received their proper due. This is, in short, a well-considered list.

But the longlist is far from perfect. There were only two titles that I deeply regretted reading. Still, I can state with confidence that three of the represented books are bona-fide masterpieces and deserve to be included among the five finalists. There were also a few literary names (new to me) who greatly impressed me with their fierce talent and blazing originality. So without further ado, here’s the ranked longlist!

Unranked: Fatimah Asghar, When We Were Sisters

This is the only longlist title with a publication date weeks after the finalist announcement. The supercilious mooks at One World Books — operating from the “There’s always one guy at the party who pisses in the pool” playbook — failed to respond to my requests for a review copy by email, phone, and Instagram. They didn’t even have the decency to say no. ThusI have been forced with great reluctance and disappointment to exclude this bank from my rankings. If Asghar makes it to the finalists, I will be more than happy to review it.

THE MEDIOCRE

9. Alejandro Varela, The Town of Babylon

You know how when you go to a bar and there’s some guy who starts telling you his life story? And he’s completely uninteresting. And he won’t shut up. Even when you’re nice about it. Even when you buy the guy drinks. He keeps coming at you. He lives to talk and dominate. He’s so in love with all the dull and dry details of his sad life and he still somehow believes that he’s remarkable. Well, this is how I feel about Alejandro Varela and his prose. The premise of being nonwhite and queer in suburbia really should have worked, but Varela is so thin and lackluster with his characterizations — even when he sets up some seemingly can’t-miss plot twists with secret lovers and a murder. I’m completely down for a wholesale evisceration of white capitalism. But your perspective has to be interesting and it has to work within the constructs of fiction. Andrés — the protagonist here — is a remarkably whiny fuck who is too enamored of schmaltzy cliches like “I am unsettled by the past.” He seeks peace by attending a twenty-year high school reunion, but his endless monologues felt too much like being trapped in a hotboxed van with some narcissistic twentysomething stoner rather than a married man hitting his forties. So this ended up being my least favorite book. It was the only National Book Award title that I threw against the wall. I even blasted the Beastie Boys as loud as possible as I did so to ensure that my fury was as authentic as possible. There’s no other way to say it: The Town of Babylon is one of the worst books of 2022.

8. Leigh Newman, Nobody Gets Out Alive

I’ve largely been happy with this year’s longlist, but I’m afraid that Leigh Newman’s short stories simply don’t cut the mustard. I really should have loved this collection. After all, it’s largely about struggling women in Alaska. But Newman, at least to my aesthetic sensibilities, is more of a nonfiction writer who has turned into a fiction writer. She doesn’t possess the verve or the knack for narrative momentum that you find in such brilliant small-town chroniclers as Elizabeth Strout and Stewart O’Nan. The more interesting details of her stories (why Alaskans need air conditioning, why the People Mover is used in October) are really the springboards for essays or journalism, not fiction. Many of these stories, such as “High Jinks,” are banalities that go nowhere. The strongest material in the book is “Howl Plaza,” “An Extravaganza in Two Acts,” and the second section of “Alcan, An Oral History” — all of which steer us into the inner observations of these hardscrabble characters with fine details. But even this work was still not strong enough to grab my heart. I really wanted to know more about these people! But when your deepest concerns are about how much salmon and cashews you’re scooping from the bottom of a bag on a trip, then I may as well just go to the bodega and listen to some dude tell me stuff like this in person. In short, Newman doesn’t have the music of a true storyteller. And I’m utterly baffled as to why the National Book Award judges picked this title for the longlist. Networking perhaps? That’s the only reason I can fathom.

THE GOOD

Yes, it’s true! Only two miniature hit pieces from The Most Hated Man in PublishingTM! That’s how good the longlist is this year!

7. Ramona Emerson, Shutter

Holy frjole, folks! A crime novel made it onto the list! While it’s refreshing to see the National Book Award fiction judges be more inclusive of genre, I don’t think Shutter entirely sticks the landing. Ramona Emerson has a great feel for atmosphere and captures the shady feel of Albuquerque (and, in Emerson’s defense, she’s up against the inevitable Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul parallels). The novel does have an engaging premise: Rita Todacheen, an overworked Navajo photographer snaps crime scenes and has the ability to see the dead. The book alternates between Rita’s early life discovering photography with her grandmother (as well as contending with her increasing knack for yakking it up with the recently departed) and Rita in the present day — toiling every spare hour, not sleeping or eating, something of a ghost herself. But the internal affairs/police corruption subplot that Emerson tries to hang this book’s narrative momentum on is too generic and doesn’t quite work. Moreover, the investigator who talks with ghosts motif has been well played out by now. The Sixth Sense, The Frighteners, The Dead Files. I had hoped that Emerson would show more of how talking with the dead altered Rita’s character. After all, these ghosts are quite determined to talk with her (and the mechanisms that Rita employs to get some peace from these garrulous spirits are clever)! But I very much enjoyed Emerson’s writing voice. I just wish that this novel stretched genre a lot more than advertised.

6. Jonathan Escoffery, If I Survive You

This is an often dazzling, but by no means perfect interconnected short story collection about Jamaican immigrants on the run in Florida and the manipulative capitalistic forces that can turn anyone into a grifter. Escoffery has a good eye for the lowlifes who prey upon the poor and the vulnerable, as well as the personal circumstances that turn people into scammers. The best stories are “In Flux,” “Splashdown,” and “Independent Living,” which have solid and heartfelt observations about systemic injustice and that feel gritty and real. The remaining stories either get lost in the need to use the recurring character Delano to match everything or they just don’t land. But make no mistake: Jonathan Escoffery is a marvelous writer, a dude whose future work I plan to read eagerly. I do hope this is the beginning of a long career.

5. Gayl Jones, The Birdcatcher

Gayl Jones, as any literary person is well aware, is a legend. A neglected talent who deserves laurels and more. This is not quite on the level of Corregidora or Eva’s Man, but it is wild and fierce and stunningly original. We follow an erotica writer and the strange couple she hangs out with. The first 150 pages are breathtaking, questioning the nature of sanity and art and unafraid to tackle the truth of body disfigurement. But the novel starts to go off the rails with the third part, losing some energy and, with that vigor, much of the outlandish metaphors that make this book so original. But The Birdcatcher is still a wonderful read — even though, with all the references to Karl Malden and mercurochrome, it seems likely that this novel had been sitting in a drawer until Beacon rescued it. But I’m glad that this novel was published. It turns out that the world had to catch up to Gayl Jones’s fearless vision.

4. Marytza K. Rubio, Maria, Maria and Other Stories

Marytza K. Rubio is a fantastic writer! I love her imagination! This book reminded me of some of the more outlandish tales from Los Bros Hernandez. The more inventive and crazier that Rubio is, the more interesting she is as a writer. She crawls into interior lives and shakes up the short story form with the tenacity of someone determined to find the most unusual narrative entry point. There was only one story in this collection (“Moksha”) that struck me as somewhat conventional. But the rest? The rest! Oh, I enjoyed this book so much! The title story is a banger, as is the fascinating “Tunnels.” There is a concern for doubles, multiple identities, and, most intriguingly, black magic. Rubio is a tremendously exciting writer who caused me to walk through the Brooklyn streets with a goofy swagger that only a sui generis writer can summon. I’m very eager to read her future work.

THE GREAT

3. Jamil Jan Kochai, The Haunting of Hajii Hotak and Other Stories

A total knockout! And if this stunning collection doesn’t make it into the finalists, it will be a literary injustice as great as Jakob Guanzon’s Abundance (a gritty masterpiece) being completely shut out last year. Kochai is just thirty years old, but he is talented as fuck! His stories are invaluable in the way that he provides perspective into the people of Afghanistan (as well as those who make their way to America). A story like “Occupational Hazards” would be gimmicky in other hands, given that it recontextualizes a man’s employment history. But Kochai somehow gets you to feel for this dude’s struggle within the form, thus superseding the trap of novelty. “Return to Sender” is a veritable horror story about a couple who receives their child’s body in pieces through the mail. While other writers would chomp at the bit for grisly shock value, Kochai is too careful and honorable a writer to do this. We truly feel the horror of this couple and it doesn’t come across as sensationalist. With these amazing tales, Kochai makes a compelling argument for keeping your eyes open and thinking beyond yourself. And he does this with an accomplishment that writers ten or fifteen years older than him have completely failed to master. I’m definitely keeping an eye on this kid. Like his fellow Sacramento writer William T. Vollmann, Kochai has the writing talent to get us to care about the souls who are rendered invisible by bourgeois scum.

2. Sarah Thankam Mathews, All This Could Be Different

If this great novel doesn’t make it to the finalists, I will go up to my rooftop, scream random obscenities, and shake my fist at the heavens! Sarah Thankam Matthews is a measured writer who will leave you in awe, both in what she reveals about her protagonist Sneha and what she leaves you to infer. (Is her nonbinary friend Tig using her? Or are they similarly troubled? These are the ambiguities that amount to great literature!) This is a character study of an Indian immigrant: queer, work authorization papers set to expire in two years, struggling to survive in Milwaukee. We see Sneha battle depression and anxiety. We see her suffer the indignities of an abusive downstairs neighbor who constantly complains. We see her ponder what love is with her girlfriend Marina. And we see her punished for making the very bold moves that the Sheryl Sandbergs of our world demand that we lean into. What makes Murphy such a terrific talent is the way she subtly depicts the forces of capitalism around us: what is unseen, what is known and unknown, and how everyone is only a few weeks away from making a desperate decision. And this tension is what sustains the narrative drive of this largely plotless novel. How can Sneha, who is so confident about declaring her salary to a mediocre man paid less than she is, be absolutely terrified of coming out to her parents? There’s one hilarious scene in a restaurant, in which Sneha is approached by an Indian mother who demands the phone number of her father, that really nails how one’s background is ineluctable no matter where you are in the world. There’s also a brilliant subtext here about how chasing your dreams (in this case, a commune idea called the Pink House) may not be a decision that is yours. When two cops cruelly pester Sneha and Tig near the end, we’re also reminded of the dangers of judging people. We’re all pinballs bouncing around in an infernal machine. But how do we live? And how do we not screw up? Or give up? I found this novel tremendously engaging and I came very much to care for Sneha and all her troubles.

1. Tess Gunty, The Rabbit Hutch

It was very difficult to decide between This Could Be Different and The Rabbit Hutch. I loved both novels with all of my heart. And both books are masterpieces. So I went for a four mile walk and carefully gauged the qualities of both books. And in the end, I had to stump for Tess Gunty. (Sarah Thankam Mathews, I am still greatly in awe of your work! I hope you don’t take it personally! I’m just one dude! Please write more books!) This is a novel that contains so many styles and angles on foster kids, abuse, social presumption, and the loneliness that so many people carry and that is neglected by others. Gunty writes with a kaleidoscopic eye about the fictitious Rust Belt town of Vacca Vale, Indiana — a doomed place denuded of industry and wonder, a town heavily populated by rats, a locale in which those who remain wonder what dreams they can still chase as they live in warrens. There’s even a sitcom television star reminiscent of Lucille Ball, wild comments sections on funeral parlor webpages, and supernatural insinuations. Above all, one is struck by just how batshit talented Tess Gunty is. Her prodigious dexterity on the page, which includes a chapter composed almost entirely of one sentence paragraphs, will undoubtedly annoy those who walked into this novel hoping for a straightforward story or even the alt-lit kids who seem to hate any title published by a major house. But even though I hate the editor of this book with every fiber of my being, I have to hand it to him. He likely got something more out of Gundy far more amazing than what was already there. If this book doesn’t make it to the National Book Award finalists, it will be a major insult to coruscating literary achievement.

by Edward Champion

The New Quantum Leap Series is a Steaming Pile of Creatively Bankrupt Bullshit

The “continuation” of Quantum Leap is one of the worst reboots I’ve seen in years. It is a cash grab completely bereft of the inventiveness and imagination that made the original series so distinct.

I absolutely adored the original Quantum Leap series. It was quirky, imaginative, emotionally honest, and breathtakingly original. It was buoyed by the considerable talents and charisma of its two leads: Scott Bakula, who played the time-traveling scientist Dr. Sam Beckett, and the late Dean Stockwell, who appeared as Al, Sam’s cigar-smoking holographic guide, and who regularly wore flashy and often hilarious suits that seemed to be designed by some insane tailor obsessed with clashing pastels. The original series had the guts to tackle social issues with emotional sensitivity, such as the audacious episode in which Dr. Sam Beckett leaped into a rape victim. It had the confidence to tinker with daring premises, such as Sam leaping into a chimpanzee in the early days of the space program. And this go-for-broke high-concept approach made Quantum Leap one of the most fascinating shows on television in the 1990s. It greatly helped that showrunner Donald Bellasario was smart enough to hire top-notch writers. And because Sam could leap into anyone, the show was essentially an all-genre production in a way that hasn’t quite been seen since — unless you count such amazing shows as Farscape and Fringe. Quantum Leap could be a goofball comedy one week or a trenchant drama the next. It was also not afraid to embrace juicy melodrama, such as the very fun Evil Leapers who were introduced in the fifth season. Above all, the original series had heart and passion and guts. And this is arguably why the series remains so well-loved today.

But now NBC, fueled by corporate greed and knowing full well that fans are easily manipulated and will bob their heads up and down over the most mediocre storytelling, has “continued” this series and completely destroyed what was once a must-watch show. The first episode is poorly written garbage made by vile mercenary hacks who have clearly not studied what made the original series so enjoyable and who have neither the talent nor the inclination to carry on with the inventive tradition. I mean, when Bakula himself has completely distanced himself from this series in the classiest way imaginable, you know that the producers of this hideous affair shit the bed and then some. Bakula, so integral to the series, dodged a bullet. I hope he sticks to his guns and isn’t involved at all with this amateurish and shoddy production.

In Dr. Sam Beckett’s place, we have a dull and manipulative clod by the name of Dr. Ben Song, played by Raymond Lee. While it’s great to see an Asian American actor as the leading man in a television series, Lee, to put it charitably, is a hopeless stiff. An actor who clearly doesn’t have the thespic range of John Cho, Steven Yuen, or Sandra Oh — all of whom would have been perfect as the lead here. He appears to be deeply uncomfortable in the role. And his character is established in the first episode as a man who betrayed his partner, Addison (played by Caitlin Bassett), by injecting some new code into the supercomputer Ziggy and leaping, leaving only a thoughtless video message for her. To add insult to injury, Addison has now taken the place of Al as the holographic guide. So that means Addison now has to watch her fiancé regularly get it on with people in the bodies he leaps into. And if the show is committed in any way to the original concept of “putting right what once went wrong,” then it has established a morally bankrupt and incredibly selfish man in Sam’s place. The original series had the good sense to leave Sam’s wife out of the picture. Since the paper-thin Addison doesn’t possess the temperament of a cuckquean, it’s doubtful that she wants to see her partner fuck other people in her presence. So in an attempt at gender parity, the showrunners have succeeded instead in creating a misogynistic scenario in which Addison is more in the role of victim rather than guide. And given how Quantum Leap lives or dies on this vital character dynamic, the new series has already painted itself into a disastrous corner. It certainly doesn’t help that Sam’s “Oh boy!” has been replaced with Ben’s “Oh shit!” Perhaps this is a subconscious act from the producers in which they are offering a honest assessment of the new show’s true worth.

The new series also spends far too much time in the present day Quantum Leap Project, assembling a cast of tepid characters which include a nonbinary “architect” named Ian Wright (played by Mason Alexander Park with high camp) and Ernie Hudson reprising his role from “The Leap Home (Part 2)” as Herbert “Magic” Williams. Hudson, at least, has some fun with his role with big chewy lunges. He probably would have made a more interesting holographic guide than Addison. But Mason Alexander Park, because of the piss-poor writing, is reduced to yelling at DJs to play insipid song choices (“Come Dancing” instead of “Dead End Street”? Really?) and looking more like a thoughtless nonbinary caricature rather than an interesting three-dimensional character. Rather than keep the Quantum Leap Project secret, as the original series did, the mystery of the program is now needlessly revealed. And given how bereft of imagination this “continuation” is, the show’s producers have killed all the wonder that kept us rapturously watching three decades before. By keeping the show’s focus primarily on Sam, we were able to get to know him over time. And it also naturally guided the writers to mine the personal histories of their two central characters — often with emotionally moving results. (Who can forget the heartbreaking moment in “The Leap Home” when Sam sings “Imagine” to his sister when he leaps into himself and she knows, upon recognition of John Lennon’s telltale style, that he has to be from the future?) But because the new series now splits the story between Ben’s journey and the present day environment, we have less screen time with Ben. And with writing that is decidedly much inferior to the original series, the show is a veritable snoozefest and an insult to audience intelligence.

The other main problem is that, because a leaper can only travel within his own lifetime, Ben’s time range isn’t nearly as interesting as Sam’s. While Sam could inhabit the 1950s, the 1960s, and the 1970s, Ben can only go back to the 1980s at the earliest. And given the jejune and witless writing that now drives this colossal disaster, I doubt very highly that the writers will investigate, say, the collapse of the Soviet Union or the fall of the Berlin Wall. Their commitment to history is cheap nostalgia, seen in such obvious song choices as David Bowie and a-ha and memorialized further with a double bill of The Goonies and St. Elmo’s Fire seen on a movie theatre marquee.

The original series also had a sense of humor. I mean, the producers had to be funny given how goofy the conceptual hook was. But this new show is completely devoid of humor. In the original series, Al’s handlink had a number of weird squeaks and wheezes attached to it. And this brought a peculiar atmosphere to the series. But Addison’s tool is a generic circular device that can display holographic data in which there is no real commitment to sound design.

Change, of course, is inevitable. And reboots and remakes can work. Before the talentless Chris Chibnall utterly ruined the show, Doctor Who produced some of its best episodes when it returned in 2005. The American iteration of The Office is arguably better than the British original. Or what about Mad Max: Fury Road? Or Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica?

But based on a social media search I conducted last night, the fans have gobbled this truly terrible show up without question. And they are aided and abetted by dopes like Primetimer‘s Mark Blankenship, who actually had this to say:

Not every television show has to be an aesthetic breakthrough, because if everything were that compelling, then we’d never get the laundry folded.

This is anti-intellectualism. This is settling for mediocrity. Television, at its best, is art. And art has the duty to grab you by the lapels and not let go. Television isn’t something that should drone on in the background to alleviate lonely domestic duties. It should be about something.

And Quantum Leap isn’t about anything other than the need to fill up plutocratic coffers.

Fan entitlement now means accepting corporate “entertainment” without intelligence, craft, or wit and proclaiming this as “great” simply because you have some dim memory of the original series being great. It now involves surrendering your capacity to feel or to practice critical thinking. It involves possessing a Borg-like mind and becoming some slavish lemming to a corporate empire that does not give two fucks about quality storytelling and wants to take as much time and money from you as it can.

What NBC has done here is a shameful calumny. By employing talentless mercenaries as writers and producers, it has committed a significant crime against True Art. (And I am willing to hold up several episodes of the original series as True Art — indeed, Quantum Leap was some of the best television in the 1990s.) The Peacock has taken all that was great about Quantum Leap and created a steaming pile of insipid shit that is the greatest possible insult to originality. And because most people’s standards have plummeted, Quantum Leap will undoubtedly be a huge hit, perhaps expanding and becoming as smug and as bloviated and as vapid as the Marvel Cinematic Universe.