Alex Gonzalez’s gripping debut novel >rekt, set to release tomorrow, 25 March 2025, offers a chilling exploration of toxic masculinity and the darkest corners of the Internet.

At its core, >rekt follows Sammy Dominguez, a man who believed he had life under control—until a devastating car accident upends everything. Overcome with grief and guilt, Sammy turns to shocking and violent videos from his past for solace. But when he receives a link to a dark web site featuring footage of his girlfriend Ellery’s death, he descends into a nightmarish world of disturbing videos—accidents, suicides, and murders.

The site, Chinsky, seems to anticipate his every move, and the enigmatic user “Haruspx” guides him deeper into a virtual abyss. As Sammy becomes more consumed by his obsession, he begins to uncover an unsettling truth: to expose Chinsky’s origins, he may have to transform into something monstrous himself.

A gripping, unsettling and poignant read, >rekt fuses the cautionary tones of Black Mirror with the visceral rawness of Chuck Palahniuk. The novel relentlessly examines how we fill the emotional voids within us with digital content—and the disturbing consequences that follow.

In anticipation of the book’s release, SCREAM Magazine sat down with Gonzalez to explore the dark themes at the heart of rekt. We discussed the intersection of grief and the dark web, the dangers of living in an internet- and social media-driven world, and how the digital realm can be as toxic for those with addictive personalities as substances like drugs, alcohol, or gambling. These provocative issues are woven into rekt, a novel that forces readers to confront uncomfortable truths about our relationship with the digital world—and the terrifying consequences that come with it.

When Sammy’s girlfriend dies in a horrific accident, he turns to shock value videos online for distraction. Until someone messaged him a dark web link to various videos of his girlfriend dying, including one of the accident that killed her. As he dives into this site, he becomes obsessed and the darkness takes over.

Given this book is largely about snuff films, please only read if you can deal with gore or have a strong stomach. That said, there is so much more to the story than that. It’s a twisty, action based, creepy story, that also is a strong character study and dives into mental illness. Fans of creepypasta and just overall odd tales, will enjoy this one. Personally this would have been a five star read for me except it was a little longer than it needed to be and I lost interest at some points. I still highly recommend!

“Now I’m fairly certain that anything good online is fake, but everything bad online is real.”

Rekt comes out 3/25.

rekt by Alex Gonzalez is a story of how grief can take us to some very dark places. Being new to the genre, I have to say that I was very uncomfortable and disturbed by some of the places this book takes the reader to, but I could not put it down. Be warned that this has so many trigger warnings so please be sure to do your research before going on this journey. From what I can tell, this is a debut novel. I finished it in almost one sitting, and I cannot wait to see what comes next for this author.

Thank you to Kensington Publishing | Erewhon Books for the opportunity to read this eARC. All opinions are my own.

Rating: 5 Stars
Pub Date: Mar 25 2025

Tags:
#KensingtonPublishing
#ErewhonBooks
#rekt
#AlexGonzalez
#YarisBookNook

Honestly I’m sad I can’t rate this one higher. The premise is what drew me to it initially—I’m a sucker for stories about grief, and stories that involve the dark web. But for whatever reason, it took me forever to get into, and I just didn’t want to pick it up. Towards the end, the story is told through mixed media, and I felt like that worked much better for this sort of plot—I wish the whole thing would’ve been told that way. Overall, I’m glad I gave this one a shot, even though it didn’t quite meet my expectations.

This book made me deeply uncomfortable and gross. The nightmare every single one of these characters went through is enough to make anyone nauseous. There were so many horrific things described so casually that it was reeling to keep up with.

But I could not put it down. Because that was the point. It overwhelmed the senses, it was confusing and weird and unsettling and awful and thrilling and consuming. It talked about toxic taboo things by forcing them to be black and white. And while there are no characters you'd necessarily root for, especially Sammy, you walk away really wanting things to turn out all right for them.

I've never read a book like this before and I don't think I ever will again.

Thank you to NetGalley, Alex Gonzalez, and Kensington Books / Erewhon Books for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

I tried to get into this book, but I just couldn't. The slow build-up just didn't do it for me and I couldn't get past it. I think that the main character overall was written fine, and I could really feel his grief, but I couldn't get into the book at all.

I think this was a fine book and would be good for someone, but it wasn't good for me.

Whoooo buddy, that went some dark places. This was my first read by Gonzalez but I really enjoyed it. No idea how old the author is but I’m assuming we’re in the same age bracket as I can definitely remember checking out rotten.com with morbid fascination around the same age. I never really developed a taste for it (ironically, I love horror but can’t even watch true crime anymore) but could totally understand someone ending up down that path following the death of a close loved one. For me I turned to mind altering substances following my mom’s death, but it could just have easily been sick videos that send me into my own implosion.

In rekt we follow Sammy. Sammy’s a fairly typical young adult but still suffers after being present for his uncle’s death years prior. He has suppressed as much of his trauma from this and other interactions as he can, but following the death of his girlfriend he is thrust back into an undeniably toxic tailspin into the sickest corners of the internet. When he seems to stumble upon a never ending trove of videos of people he knows dying in a cornucopia of ways, he sets out on a dangerous path, but for what end?

Sammy is grieving but an absolutely frustrating character at times. He’s also massively relatable but definitely a guy you want to kick in the face at least once. The side characters were likable, dimensional and surprisingly wholesome. The chinsky concept as a whole was difficult to grasp but with the AI advancements going as quickly as they are, it’s not that difficult to envision.

The book is kind of a slow burn in the sense that very little happens for quite a while. There are still disturbing depictions of violence sprinkled in from the first page, but it takes a while for the book to get to the meat of the story. I really enjoyed this one. I went in blind and never really gathered my bearings until after the book was finished and I could think about it as a whole. It’s a sad one. Lots of disturbing things mentioned, but mostly just our protagonists describing videos he’s seen. Definitely recommend but please keep in mind there are some heavy violence depictions mentioned. There’s a level of detachment with those, but still may be too much for some readers. Dope read.

Alex Gonzalez is a sicko, and I mean that as the ultimate compliment!! The premise to REKT is great—Sammy loses the love of his life, and gets pulled into the world of the dark web where horrifying things begin happening. A gorefest for sure, the violence and blood reflects how tortured Sammy's inner life and soul are in the wake of Ellery's death. This is THE RING meets AMERICAN PSYCHO, and I enjoyed every minute of it, even when I had to take a break and take deep breaths. This writer has the juice!!

Rekt has a compelling premise, delving into AI, internet safety, and the chilling consequences of technology in the wrong hands. Gonzalez explores these themes with a dark, unsettling edge that makes for some truly disturbing moments.

While the story itself is intriguing, the pacing falters, particularly in the middle, where it starts to drag and lose momentum. At times, it feels like a tighter edit could have made the narrative more impactful, trimming unnecessary length to keep the tension high. The ending, unfortunately, didn’t quite land for me—it felt confusing and didn’t deliver the payoff I was hoping for.

I find books focused on the dark web interesting so rekt definitely was up my alley. When Sammy tragically loses the love of his life, Ellery, he tries to take his mind off things by watching disturbing videos on the dark web. It evolves to point where it is an obsession and he can’t stop himself, especially when an anonymous user sends him a link to a video of Ellery’s accident. But that’s not the only video that’s on this new website that has been shared with Sammy - there are multiple videos of not only Ellery, but people known to Sammy being killed in every way possible.

I liked the concept of this story as it was different to other dark web themed books I have read. It shows the power of technology and how it is used to create deepfakes to instil fear and curiosity in people’s minds. I did get a little tired of Sammy going on about Ellery and how he deserves to feel like crap because of her death (I get it, but continuously grovelling and hurting others is not the way to move on). The side characters Izzy and Jay lacked some development and I didn’t really care for them at all which was disappointing considering they were present in the majority of the book.

Thank you to netgalley and Erewhon Books for the ARC!

This is definitely for fans of splatterpunk (that’s the closest I can get). A gore fest through the dark web with some 90s nostalgia. Take the authors hand and go through this gore filled journey with them.

Thanks to NetGalley for the copy of this ARC. This will be out March 25,2025.

For fans of: The Terrifier films, Red Rooms (2023), American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami, This Thing Between Us by Gus Moreno, Maeve Fly by C.J. Leede

"The only thing that is real is death and dying and murder and blood. I am a man online. I am traumatized and I need people to know it."

This book grabbed hold of me and did not let go. I kept feeling the itch to dive back in, just like the main character Sammy and his obsession with the dark corners of the internet. It was the pull of a good internet rabbit hole, an internet legend in the making the likes of which you might see covered by a channel like MrCreepyPasta or The NoSleep Podcast. There were immersive, epistolary elements like chat logs, forum threads, and emails that gave the legend more weight. If you've ever been caught up in following the unfolding of an internet mystery (like smartschoolboy9, a recent example off the top of my head), that's exactly the feeling this book gives you. And it is dark. You have been warned.

With beautiful turns of phrase and imagery, Gonzalez unleashes the monsters of the dark web, presents horrific scenes of gore and brutality, and positions it all through the lens of a grief-stricken, traumatized young man who's trying to come to terms with his past and maybe even find some kind of redemption. He's so guilty about the death of his girlfriend that she haunts him just like the Wax Man, a CreepyPasta monster he created and wrote about to process his trauma. He won't allow himself to open up IRL the way he needs to, and like his dead girlfriend, he's grappling with wanting to not want to be online.

"That really sucks. You were a kid and you saw something that fucked you up. You went online to cope, and you made a persona where you can be angry and weird, and the internet liked it. And then it decided to eat you. There are a billion people out there and they saw a weak kid struggling and so they sunk their teeth into you. Then they showed other people. Then others. . . What difference does it make? You're not the chosen one. You're just one of many poor bastards that they decided to fuck with."

Which leads me to my ultimate takeaway from this: In the digital age, we are only given so many ways to process and share feelings about what we're doing, especially in the current alienated, fractured society of social media. It can start to feel like only the internet world matters, and lives in meatspace are meaningless or unimportant. We assert our selves and personalities through consumerism and media. Our connections are performative, fragile, and insincere. Some friends we only know by their internet usernames and social profiles. For troubled young men especially, they can end up in online spaces that twist them in ways they don't even realize are happening until it's too late and they've been caught. As one character says: "It has you."

Speaking of characters, they were overall rich and well done. There's a lot to appreciate in every single person who appears in a scene, if even for a paragraph. Everyone has their secret traumas and motivations, and it's only a matter of time before they get revealed.

It's the secrets and the mystery and the cyber-horror that drives this story. It's being haunted by or through technology: just when you least expect, or in the middle of a tense, high-stakes moment, you get a mysterious text on your phone. It's the lack of real privacy in the digital age: mass surveillance + AI = the creation of fucked up and non-consensual deepfakes of everyone you know spread on the internet.

Mix this with the toxic masculinity and anti-empathy of the dark web, and you get, well, something like The Com or Terrorgram. Or Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan types who build whole fanbases around misogyny and living up to a certain male standard. A "real" man puts women down by objectifying, beating, and raping them. Empathy is the problem instead of the solution; giving in opens you up to vulnerabilities, which goes against their "survival of the toughest/meanest" mindset. In a kill-or-be-killed world, only the killers survive.

Which brings me to thoughts on another recurring theme: death, grieving, memento mori. Sammy started out watching so many deaths online in order to desensitize himself from it. His girlfriend's death was just another car accident caught on a traffic cam. There was no ultimate meaning to it. Or was there? This is what gets under his skin and he has to find out, or die trying. Because without her, he can't find a real reason to live. Which is pretty sad, to be honest, but there are people like that, and it's people like that who can end up going down the same dark road Sammy has. Their tragedy makes for an excellent story.

And excellent money, because these sickos on the dark web managed to capitalize even on how people might die. They turned death into a game people can bet on.

Finally, I gotta talk about free will, because this made even a firm believer in free will like me start to question things. How much control do we have over where we end up based on where we started and what choices we have available to make? What were Sammy's options, considering his family members and their inherited trauma, his upbringing and natural personality? Was he always going to go down the dark path and get caught by it? What might have made things different, and at what points? Sammy grapples with this, but I think he finally does come to a conclusion.

e now lurks in Brooklyn, a place only marginally less terrifying than the setting of his book. He co-founded the horror zine youarenotalone, a title that feels eerily relevant when reading rekt, considering its themes of internet voyeurism, grief, and the slow, rotting descent into digital nihilism. Gonzalez also teaches horror writing workshops, meaning he’s actively training others to fuck with your head. Thanks, dude.

rekt is the story of Sammy Dominguez, a man whose life is crumbling faster than your WiFi connection at peak hours. Once a seemingly functional human with a future, Sammy finds himself sinking into the darkest corners of the internet after his girlfriend, Ellery, dies in a brutal accident. What starts as morbid curiosity—watching gore videos as a coping mechanism—mutates into a full-blown obsession when he stumbles onto Chinsky, a dark web hellhole that provides a buffet of snuff films, including a disturbing number of videos that seem to feature alternate deaths of Ellery herself.

As Sammy delves deeper, his life implodes. His relationships dissolve, his sanity flickers like a dying LED light, and his moral compass? That thing is spinning like a fucking Beyblade. But Rekt isn’t just about one man watching too much internet horror—it’s about the very real horror of the internet watching back. It’s about AI, voyeurism, and the terrifying realization that nothing online is ever really gone.

If the internet is a meat grinder for the human soul, then rekt is a 400-page reminder to keep your hands (and your goddamn eyes) away from the gears. Gonzalez isn’t subtle about his themes, but who needs subtlety when you’re talking about toxic masculinity, AI-generated nightmares, and the moral decay that happens when your browser history reads like a police report? Grief horror is nothing new, but rekt takes the concept and straps it to a jet engine. Sammy isn’t just grieving Ellery; he’s grieving himself, his past, his possible futures. His descent into the bowels of internet depravity is an act of self-destruction, a digital form of cutting where the scars aren’t on his skin but in his perception of reality. Watching death videos doesn’t just numb him—it reshapes him. He isn’t just watching horror; he’s being rewritten by it.

Sammy’s journey is also a grim examination of how the internet radicalizes lost, lonely men. He’s not some 4chan basement troll from the start—he’s a normal guy with trauma, a dude who starts by peeking into the abyss and eventually gets dragged inside. His story is a cautionary tale about how online isolation festers, how grief and guilt can warp into something unrecognizably monstrous, and how unchecked digital consumption can make you a participant in your own downfall.

In rekt, the internet serves as the monster in the closet, the demon under the bed, the thing that whispers, Just one more click. Chinsky, the dark web site Sammy stumbles onto, feels less like a malevolent entity, one that evolves, predicts, and consumes. Gonzalez taps into a fundamental fear of the digital age: that we aren’t in control of what we see. That we’re being watched. That our deepest, most fucked-up impulses are being catered to, curated, and fed back to us.

Gonzalez writes like someone who has seen too much and isn’t afraid to make you see it too. His prose is unrelenting, visceral, and disturbingly immersive. The book reads like a mix between Chuck Palahniuk, Creepypasta threads, and a transcript from an FBI internet crimes division case file. The pacing is relentless, pulling you deeper into Sammy’s unraveling mind until you’re trapped with him in a nightmarish freefall.

There are moments where the novel slows, and yes, some might argue that certain passages drag—but that’s the point. The book mirrors the experience of doomscrolling: the hypnotic, inescapable pull of something awful that you know you should look away from but can’t.

Strengths

Unflinching Horror: Gonzalez absolutely embraces disturbing content. The book is visceral, relentless, and at times, genuinely stomach-churning.

A Relatable (If Deeply Flawed) Protagonist: Sammy isn’t some edge-lord caricature; he’s disturbingly real. His descent is believable, and that’s what makes it horrifying.

Relevant as Hell: This book taps into fears that feel uncomfortably current—AI-generated horror, radicalization, online addiction.

Emotional Weight: This isn’t just about the horror of gore—it’s about the horror of grief, of being lost, of not knowing how to climb out of the abyss.

Criticisms

Pacing Gets Murky in the Middle: There’s a stretch where the momentum slows, and while thematically it makes sense (mirroring Sammy’s increasing detachment), it may cause some restlessness.

Not for Everyone (Which is a Strength and a Weakness): If you have a weak stomach or a lingering sense of optimism about humanity, this book is gonna wreck you (pun intended).

The Ending Will Divide Readers: Some will love it (I personally was into it), some will hate it, but no one is walking away indifferent.

rekt is not a book you read lightly. It’s a book that grabs you by the skull and forces your eyes open to witness the worst parts of human nature—online and off. Gonzalez has crafted something uniquely horrifying, a novel that doesn’t just tell a scary story but becomes one. It’s bleak, brutal, and borderline dangerous in its ability to make you think about every link you’ve ever clicked.

Is it a fun read? Fuck no.

Is it a brilliant one? Absolutely.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to clear my browser history and tape over my webcam. Again.

Gonzalez did a great job of putting the reader into the absolutely vile skin of the protagonist and the degeneracy of his world, an impressive feat considering most of the extreme gore and depravity was referenced as shock videos rather than actually experienced in the story. While there's been quite a bit of horror that explores grief in recent years, I can't think of any that delve this deeply into the protagonist's particular brand of psychological self-harm (and later, harm to others). I love any story that incorporates technology as a conduit of horror and the deep web aspect worked great to explore the isolation and toxicity of modern-day masculinity. Truly an upsetting read!

Shout out to Alex Gonzalez and Kensington Publishing for the ARC.

This book BLEW my mind. The nostalgia of the early 2000s internet and the horrors of the early World Wide Web came back and slapped me in the face. EBAUMS World?! PAIN OLYMPICS?! It was like you hid in the corner of my family's computer room and obtained my entire youth search history while I learned how to use my 95 DELL and traverse the internet with my friends. This concept is everything nightmares are made of.

This book is a fascinating take on the dark web, toxic masculinity, incel behaviors, and the AI? Question mark? The future is here - we're already living in it.

Genre speculation: Is this splatterpunk? Kind of? Objectively yes? I have found typically with splatterpunk there is a lot of splatter and no punk, what I mean is- there is a lot of gore, and no plot. This entire story is driven by grief and the through-line is poetic from start to finish.

Reviews - Reviews aim to be as spoiler-free as possible.
Ratings - Historically a low rater.

Stars: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ - Would read again and again and again
Dark Content: 🩶
Gore: 🔪🔪🔪🔪

Bookshelves:
Horror ‎

Diversity Check:
Cultural Representation
Intersectionality

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me an e-arc of this book.

This was a really dark premise, and I think it was pulled off in a way that gives it a lot of plausibility, thus making it even more terrifying. The strongest aspect of this story was Sammy. He's such a complex character that has a lot of extremely tragic flaws that take him down some undesirable paths. His arc is graceful though, and there was a lot of buy in for me. The story did drag a little around the middle, but I was invested enough in the story to keep going. I would say the violence is very extreme and even in the splatterpunk realm at times. There's some extremely disturbing descriptions, but they aren't ALL for shock factor.

Overall, I loved the premise and the characters were great. I think this would make a fantastic movie.

When immense grief, generational trauma, horror and an internet connection converge. Rekt is a story where a young man's descent into the online world and consistently side stepping his emotional needs leads him down a dark spiral of increasing exposure to violence and acting against his self interests.

Sammy is not a character I would say I rooted for at any point in the novel. He does reprehensible things. However, Rekt is asking insightful questions about where does one go when they lose community and themselves IRL? We know what Sammy *could* have done but he increasingly acts against his own interests. What is it about going online and searching the Internet for help even when it does not serve us? Even when it harms us?

The novel then becomes part rollercoaster, part chase, and part whodunnit where intricate clues are woven between forums. Yet Gonzalez told us the entire time what to expect. I'm a sucker every time for a writer who expertly tells me how things are going to go from the jump and yet I'm shook every single time.

As others have noted this book is not for the faint of heart. Not just because of the CWs needed throughout but it may make you question your relationship to being online. Gonzalez has captured a sentiment lingering in the depths of my mind for a while which is that can we really go back to existing only IRL and for how long? Where does online end and IRL begin once the two worlds collapse together? Can you escape one if you're entrenched within the other? Like one of the characters, I too "want to not want to be online." But can we at this point of existence or are we too deeply embedded to ditch being online altogether?

If you love shows like Black Mirror and simultaneously have been looking for a reason to log out and finally delete your data, then this book is for you.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with a review copy!

A hard read that deals with hard topics, "rekt" is in a very similar vein of another book I read called "Scanlines," about a group of teenagers cursed by a particular snuff film. It's such an interesting premise, that I genuinely liked Gonzalez's take on the premise as well.

Alex Gonzalez's "rekt" (meaning "wrecked" in online gaming slang) combines internet horror and grief horror to come up with an amazing, absolutely original, and tremendously horrifying tale of Sammy, a Latino man in his 20s, losing his humanity and ultimately his sense of social and interpersonal reality. The book goes way beyond anything similar in portraying, in harrowing detail, how the loss of a loved one, his high-school girlfriend, around whom Sam had built his whole life, leads him on a journey through the worst content the dark web has to offer: snuff, torture and gore vids, absolutely dark content which Sam devours daily and about which he inevitably becomes obsessed. Already fed on creepypastas and nosleep-type of subreddits, Sammy gets addicted to the internet's dark side, with disastrous consequences for his personal life and his sense of self. Sammy's descent is described in first person, intimately, intensely; as his world collapses and his sense of morality slowly evaporates, Sammy is reduced to an impersonal, selfish and sick coping mechanism, impacting everyone around him negtively.

Up to this point, the book might have been solely a horrific novel about trauma, grief, and addiction in the online world of the 2020s. However, just a hundred pages in, the story reaches a wholly different level, when Sam is sent a link to a CCTV video of his girlfriend's fatal car accident. And then he's led to a host site with links to an assortment of videos where she's killed in the most gory of ways. In one, she's being drown slowly and painfully. In another, she's abused horribly. And in yet another, she gets tortured to death. WTF right? Well, what follows is an original, gory, entertaining and totally immersive, yet emotionally very heavy, tale of Sammy's unfortunate discovery of a nightmarish conspiracy celebrating pain and death for money. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

"rekt" is totally unpredictable, immensely imaginative, and incredibly well-written. I've never read anything like it. It touches in unexpected ways themes of toxic masculinity, internet addiction, and PTSD, visting places most people feel uncomfortable even mentioning. It'll blow your mind.

Gritty, raw, and so heavy. An upcoming release once again reminding me why I love grief horror so much. Rekt was wholly original and a very addictive read. I enjoyed almost everything about it. I will say that there was one incredibly disturbing mention/trigger that I really could’ve done without. But woah! What a book! It really makes me want to cover up the little camera on my phone and laptop, that’s for sure.