It seems this is the second book in a series. I did not know this when I requested the book from NetGalley several years ago. I was interested because I enjoyed Gladstone’s writings on Cracked.com* and wanted to see what his fiction was like. This being the case, I have not read the first book in the series. As it turns out, not having read the first book in the series isn’t a problem with this book. Gladstone (the author, presumably the real human being that one could hit with a Frisbee given the correct circumstances) is a sufficiently experienced writer to give his readers enough background information that they can piece together the important things that took place in his first book without stopping the action of the second.

Storywise, this reads a bit like the movie Silver Linings Playbook, in that a screw-up gets out of an institution and goes to win back his ex-wife while bigger events take place around him that he reluctantly becomes a part of. It also has some kind of half-assed Internet sleuthing bringing in, well, 4chan and Anonymous which, from 2021, is off-putting. Anyway, the supporting characters are a little flat, but so is Gladstone (the character, but not the character version of himself that everyone continues to reference because of the first book), and things definitely get a bit recursive, but that was, as I recall, what the Internet was into in 2015, when this book was published.

And I must say, the period between 2010 and 2015 were my most active years on the Internet, and so the references and allusions this book makes are familiar, but to a modern reader will certainly feel dated and out of touch. This is the curse of being an older Millennial, I suppose. The humor is kind of funny, but feels a little off. Someone with a different experience of the Internet might not even find it funny, though they’d be able to recognize that it’s supposed to be. Overall, this is a quick read that stands well on its own, much like Gladstone’s writings on Cracked were when I was reading them, and if you are someone who can separate art from artist, and you were active on the Internet during the early- to mid- 2010s, this may be a book for you.

*Important note: Apparently in the intervening years things have come out about Gladstone (the author) and some of his colleagues at Cracked that casts a pall over not only this book, but that era of the Internet, and I’m sorry he and the others turned out to be that way.