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Confessions from a Dark Wood
Ken, the publisher, here. I don't often laugh, cry, and spit food on my computer screen simultaneously, but this book made that happen. You'll meet Nick, a hapless pawn in the world of global capital brand management consulting. And his girlfriend Sadie Parish, the first domestic suicide bomber. And his boss, emperor of bullshit, Pontius J. LaBar. And PJ's dreaded orangutan. It's a hilarious, heartbreaking, painfully smart satire that guides you through the high dollar swamps of modern industry.
- GenresFiction
204 pages, Paperback
First published October 10, 2012
3 people are currently reading
82 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
December 7, 2012
We are all probably in desperate need of a wake-up call if we are to believe that Eric Raymond's novel, Confessions from a Dark Wood, is a work of fiction.
The global economy is a post-idea economy.
Long gone are the days of disparate marketplaces functioning concurrently. The world IS our marketplace. Commercialism is bordering now on religion. Overabundance requires studios, agencies, and firms, like LaBar Partners Limited, to define items in a sprawling marketplace of the indefinable.
Though the product might take on a tagline, title, and price-tag, it can no longer be "just a candy bar" or "just an energy drink." It must be distinguishable. It must ensnarl our split-second attention spans.
In prose that hearkens to both Douglas Coupland and David Foster Wallace, Raymond defines the narrative arc around the impulsivity of high-life.
Read this book and realize that the more we try to speak of, and recommend, products, the more we are selling ourselves in hopes of being heard.
The global economy is a post-idea economy.
Long gone are the days of disparate marketplaces functioning concurrently. The world IS our marketplace. Commercialism is bordering now on religion. Overabundance requires studios, agencies, and firms, like LaBar Partners Limited, to define items in a sprawling marketplace of the indefinable.
Though the product might take on a tagline, title, and price-tag, it can no longer be "just a candy bar" or "just an energy drink." It must be distinguishable. It must ensnarl our split-second attention spans.
In prose that hearkens to both Douglas Coupland and David Foster Wallace, Raymond defines the narrative arc around the impulsivity of high-life.
Read this book and realize that the more we try to speak of, and recommend, products, the more we are selling ourselves in hopes of being heard.
January 6, 2013
Originally published at the L Magazine http://www.thelmagazine.com/newyork/a...
Does anyone use Blackberries anymore? According to the New York Times, they’re “black sheep” nowadays, but two years ago they were ubiquitous—in large part because they were given to corporate employees as part of the company plan. Raymond’s debut novel concerns that time—and the feeling of being welcomed into a corporate structure that’s fundamentally flawed. Nick Bray (not to be confused with DeLillo’s Nick Shay) starts out as a copywriter at Purv, a website specializing in industrial-machine porn, but at his father’s funeral he meets a polished intern from LaBar Partners Limited, a consulting agency that deals in capital brand management. The intern gives Nick a business card and then takes off after the CEO’s Porsche with a videocamera. Nick is confused, but later learns that this is part of the intern’s job: what’s the point of owning a Porsche if you can’t see yourself drive it?
Self-regard plays heavily in Confessions; LaBar Partners owns the tallest building in midtown-Atlanta but only occupies its top four floors. Its ventures range from a high-priced kidnapping service called the “Soldier of Fortune 500 package” to NFL superstar Shaun D. Braun’s dream to build the First National Dogfight League. Within a week Nick has an obsidian AMEX, slicing through “hostesses and concierge and resistance” as Media Vice President (everyone in the company starts out as a VP), but there are kinks in the infrastructure of his high-maintenance lifestyle. Bray falls in love with an aspiring suicide bomber who has new corporate logos tattooed on her body every time he sees her; he gets visits from his father’s ghost—mirroring scenes from Hamlet—who tells him, “all the ant does is dig a tunnel and move the food around.” Then there’s the surprise that awaits at the end of Shelby the orangutan’s leather harness...
The similarities to American Psycho are obvious, if you replace a hyper-privileged insider eviscerating everything atop the social pyramid with congenial Nick Bray. But American Psycho was a grotesque from the get-go, making it obvious that it was a work of fiction; in both its title and execution, Confessions is a satire that sounds more like real life. Bateman kills people; Nick can only manage to drown his Blackberry.
Does anyone use Blackberries anymore? According to the New York Times, they’re “black sheep” nowadays, but two years ago they were ubiquitous—in large part because they were given to corporate employees as part of the company plan. Raymond’s debut novel concerns that time—and the feeling of being welcomed into a corporate structure that’s fundamentally flawed. Nick Bray (not to be confused with DeLillo’s Nick Shay) starts out as a copywriter at Purv, a website specializing in industrial-machine porn, but at his father’s funeral he meets a polished intern from LaBar Partners Limited, a consulting agency that deals in capital brand management. The intern gives Nick a business card and then takes off after the CEO’s Porsche with a videocamera. Nick is confused, but later learns that this is part of the intern’s job: what’s the point of owning a Porsche if you can’t see yourself drive it?
Self-regard plays heavily in Confessions; LaBar Partners owns the tallest building in midtown-Atlanta but only occupies its top four floors. Its ventures range from a high-priced kidnapping service called the “Soldier of Fortune 500 package” to NFL superstar Shaun D. Braun’s dream to build the First National Dogfight League. Within a week Nick has an obsidian AMEX, slicing through “hostesses and concierge and resistance” as Media Vice President (everyone in the company starts out as a VP), but there are kinks in the infrastructure of his high-maintenance lifestyle. Bray falls in love with an aspiring suicide bomber who has new corporate logos tattooed on her body every time he sees her; he gets visits from his father’s ghost—mirroring scenes from Hamlet—who tells him, “all the ant does is dig a tunnel and move the food around.” Then there’s the surprise that awaits at the end of Shelby the orangutan’s leather harness...
The similarities to American Psycho are obvious, if you replace a hyper-privileged insider eviscerating everything atop the social pyramid with congenial Nick Bray. But American Psycho was a grotesque from the get-go, making it obvious that it was a work of fiction; in both its title and execution, Confessions is a satire that sounds more like real life. Bateman kills people; Nick can only manage to drown his Blackberry.
October 15, 2012
If you've ever worked in marketing, advertising, branding, or consulting, this book is the cathartic read you've been looking for. Satire or documentary? It's hard to say.
April 20, 2018
I loved this book so much I published it.
December 26, 2017
Welcome to the corporate world of BS. A hilarious but oddly disturbing/satisfying work of 'fiction.'
November 9, 2012
This is a very special new book, and a keenly original authorial voice. It's funny on every page, and it will kill you with insight on every other page. I used to work for a small-time version of Pontius J. LaBar -- they populate the Marketing and PR industries the way drug addicts populate America's restaurant kitchens -- and I can tell you Eric Raymond gets this guy exactly right. The overpromising to clients, the disregard for boundaries both personal and professional, the sick drive that infects everyone around him -- these are the character traits Raymond manages to make ring excruciatingly true, even as LaBar engages in behaviors just *slightly* elevated above the day-to-day. And yet, for all this high-minded satire, Confessions From A Dark Wood keeps its feet on the ground and remains, as the best books do, the story of Us.
Read
October 24, 2014"We stumbled through the bright light of the Tantamount lobby and into the elevator. I could feel that we were accelerating upward and at the same time hurling towards an event, the way that an evening passes a point and begins to take you with it, to sweep you in it's inevitable undertow. Though the apartment was dark, the ambient light of the elevated city revealed the contours and surfaces in a starlight-like haftone."
December 29, 2012
Terrific stuff -- bleak comedy that does an impressive turn at the end to become something ultimately very moving. Highly recommended.
April 26, 2013
Nick Bray, the narrator of Eric Raymond's debut novel Confessions from a Dark Wood, is a modern Nick Carraway—up for banter, full of observations, yet destined to disappear when in the presence of a bigger personality. Upon the death of his father and the loss of his crappy job, Nick goes to work for a soulless capital brand management company helmed by Pontius J. LaBar, a dwarfish grotesque with a certain talent for intellectually bullying prospective clients into submission.
Raymond is a master of deploying consultant blather for comic effect and of finding the grotesque in the mundane. For this reason, the book is never surer-footed than when in the presence of Labar and his jargon surrogate, Randi, who is tasked with making clients feel out of their depths. Her first words to Nick are, "As you've probably intuited, we're in desperate need of someone with cross-channel capacities. Someone who can interpret those innovating digital modalities for our Web 1.0 clients."
LaBar is a man consumed by private demons, but unlike Gatsby, he is concerned not with hiding a former self (that metamorphosis is complete) but instead with beating a rival consulting business (that may or may not exist) by obsessing over the detail work of wowing clients. "Do you think we should arrive in the white-on-white Bentley," LaBar asks Nick before meeting with a big potential client, "or would separate Ferraris be more his style?" And when Nick ups the ante by suggesting they hire a driver for the occasion, Pontius delivers the closest thing he's got to a catch phrase: "I couldn't agree more." The emphasis, for LaBar, like the American one percenters his creator skewers, is always on "more."
Confessions is a book exploding with ideas, and one that would improve if it took all of its absurd conceits seriously. What if Nick's dad existed not only as a witty foil but as a challenge to Nick's assumptions about himself? What if the consequences of the company's internship program were more fully integrated into the story? What if the domestic terrorism plot was initially presented not in a punchline but in scene, eliciting Nick's natural terror and better setting up the poignancy of scenes ahead? I'm more inclined to be horrified if I'm asked to believe all this is truly happening.
To be clear, though: Give me an idea bomb like this one over sad polished prattle any day.
Confessions' twist on the corporate sell-out story is that Nick shows few signs of having had much soul to sell in the first place. He begins the book as an uploader and captioner of robot-on-woman porn, so we are not expected to weep for him when he defers vague dreams of a meaningful life to go work for LaBar. At least it can be said that when he screen-grabbed smut, Nick was broke.
Labar's wants—fame, money, winning—are far less complicated than Nick's, and it is a relief for Nick to judge his pitiful boss so that he may further avoid having to figure himself out. When LaBar is disrespected in a meeting with a celebrity client, Nick gleefully narrates, "Pontius' face flushed and his upper lip stuck to his teeth in the peculiar smile he used as the defense most-high against having a tantrum."
Nick maintains ties to the lost part of himself by befriending a near-broke poet, by chatting with the ghost of his dead father, and by harboring a beautiful underage terrorist who hopes to punish the United States for her brother's death, while in the meantime tattooing her body with the logo of every major American corporation. Nick tries to talk her out of her plans for martyrdom while resenting the extent to which she exercises her free will.
And in Nick's defense, his career as LaBar's lackey does seem preordained. We begin to learn about LaBar and his firm immediately, before the boss even enters the narrative, so large does he loom over Nick's consciousness. And when Labar does show up, the book does not slowly simmer us into the weirdness that is LaBar Partners Limited, but tosses us immediately into the fryer, creating the Shining-like sense that Nick has always worked there.
It's telling when, late in the novel, Nick prepares to step forward and give it all he's got in a speech before a roomful of bloodthirsty gamblers, the power suddenly goes out. God seems to be telling Nick at every turn: This is a story about the agency you lack, not the agency you've got.
The final chapter is a gut punch that perfectly combines the book's light/playful side and its crushing/tragic side, an ending that makes Nick finally stand out among the outsized characters around him. Still, it's hardest to leave behind LaBar, the inspiration for the book's sharpest lines and darkest laughs, and that's saying something in a book full of both.
[This review originally appeared in The Collagist. http://www.dzancbooks.org/the-collagi...]
Raymond is a master of deploying consultant blather for comic effect and of finding the grotesque in the mundane. For this reason, the book is never surer-footed than when in the presence of Labar and his jargon surrogate, Randi, who is tasked with making clients feel out of their depths. Her first words to Nick are, "As you've probably intuited, we're in desperate need of someone with cross-channel capacities. Someone who can interpret those innovating digital modalities for our Web 1.0 clients."
LaBar is a man consumed by private demons, but unlike Gatsby, he is concerned not with hiding a former self (that metamorphosis is complete) but instead with beating a rival consulting business (that may or may not exist) by obsessing over the detail work of wowing clients. "Do you think we should arrive in the white-on-white Bentley," LaBar asks Nick before meeting with a big potential client, "or would separate Ferraris be more his style?" And when Nick ups the ante by suggesting they hire a driver for the occasion, Pontius delivers the closest thing he's got to a catch phrase: "I couldn't agree more." The emphasis, for LaBar, like the American one percenters his creator skewers, is always on "more."
Confessions is a book exploding with ideas, and one that would improve if it took all of its absurd conceits seriously. What if Nick's dad existed not only as a witty foil but as a challenge to Nick's assumptions about himself? What if the consequences of the company's internship program were more fully integrated into the story? What if the domestic terrorism plot was initially presented not in a punchline but in scene, eliciting Nick's natural terror and better setting up the poignancy of scenes ahead? I'm more inclined to be horrified if I'm asked to believe all this is truly happening.
To be clear, though: Give me an idea bomb like this one over sad polished prattle any day.
Confessions' twist on the corporate sell-out story is that Nick shows few signs of having had much soul to sell in the first place. He begins the book as an uploader and captioner of robot-on-woman porn, so we are not expected to weep for him when he defers vague dreams of a meaningful life to go work for LaBar. At least it can be said that when he screen-grabbed smut, Nick was broke.
Labar's wants—fame, money, winning—are far less complicated than Nick's, and it is a relief for Nick to judge his pitiful boss so that he may further avoid having to figure himself out. When LaBar is disrespected in a meeting with a celebrity client, Nick gleefully narrates, "Pontius' face flushed and his upper lip stuck to his teeth in the peculiar smile he used as the defense most-high against having a tantrum."
Nick maintains ties to the lost part of himself by befriending a near-broke poet, by chatting with the ghost of his dead father, and by harboring a beautiful underage terrorist who hopes to punish the United States for her brother's death, while in the meantime tattooing her body with the logo of every major American corporation. Nick tries to talk her out of her plans for martyrdom while resenting the extent to which she exercises her free will.
And in Nick's defense, his career as LaBar's lackey does seem preordained. We begin to learn about LaBar and his firm immediately, before the boss even enters the narrative, so large does he loom over Nick's consciousness. And when Labar does show up, the book does not slowly simmer us into the weirdness that is LaBar Partners Limited, but tosses us immediately into the fryer, creating the Shining-like sense that Nick has always worked there.
It's telling when, late in the novel, Nick prepares to step forward and give it all he's got in a speech before a roomful of bloodthirsty gamblers, the power suddenly goes out. God seems to be telling Nick at every turn: This is a story about the agency you lack, not the agency you've got.
The final chapter is a gut punch that perfectly combines the book's light/playful side and its crushing/tragic side, an ending that makes Nick finally stand out among the outsized characters around him. Still, it's hardest to leave behind LaBar, the inspiration for the book's sharpest lines and darkest laughs, and that's saying something in a book full of both.
[This review originally appeared in The Collagist. http://www.dzancbooks.org/the-collagi...]
March 23, 2013
Pretty awesome debut novel. Definitely some tonal inconsistencies tat can be jarring and some ideas that are introduced aren't as developed as they could be -- the protag's dead father seems to appear for comic relief rather than any other purpose.
Still, it's ambitious and funny and dark. A little bit like Palauhniuk without the pseudo-philosophic self importance. Really wasn't looking for another wink-wink commentary on corporate minutiae, but the writing quality is just great.
Also, big props to Sator for the design of the book. Get this one in print.
Still, it's ambitious and funny and dark. A little bit like Palauhniuk without the pseudo-philosophic self importance. Really wasn't looking for another wink-wink commentary on corporate minutiae, but the writing quality is just great.
Also, big props to Sator for the design of the book. Get this one in print.
May 30, 2013
There was a lot to like here. He writing is energetic, the story is fun. Not much interior reckoning by the narrator as to his decision making or his failed relationship with his dead father. But the specter's periodic appearances are nice asides to the plot. The description of the bullshit global consulting firm culminates pretty hilariously, finally. But all the deep reflections on the prosaic placeless scenery that we all know and hate anyway like airport security and skymall magazines, I could do without. You don't have to spell it out. We get it.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews