Kill Rudy Johnson

by Rudy Johnson

263 pages, Paperback

Published June 20, 2025

Reviews

[Jesse Hilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’d like to talk more about this elsewhere (book reviews being like some mobile sci-fi fantasy castle that can teleport but can only appear in a single space at a time a la Krull), but I will say that this was very funny and heartbreaking. Relating to the world through video games and their very erudite and dense lore yields poetry with unmistakable comic potential — and yet the biographical detail of the person in question comes reverberating through. This book is not at all for stuffed shirts who need their poets to observe the obsequies or niceties or even the forms: woke it is not. All kinds of slurs and transgressions occur with the license of a wisenheimer Lenny Bruce, but a Lenny Bruce who seldom leaves the house and relates to the world through multiplayer online role-playing games. It’s a bespoke literary objekt that is designed to make a refined reader laugh and feel terror at its barely-contained irreverent rage. There are, throughout, crude cartoons and images done in what looks like MS Paint, along with an array of QR codes leading to interactive games (haven’t gotten to those yet, a little scared of the worlds they must be portals to). Overall, the book took me into a realm of highly elaborate nerd-dom and magic, where millennial IT literacy is the gnostic Code of Truth, where the conflict, war, pestilence, hostility of our outer non-game world are refracted and viewed in the company of a childhood friend, warmly joking with you over communal junk food. In the midst of this, mental illness, depression, identity crises, the bureaucracy of healthcare are the real horror stories we all would strive to escape with the help of an entertainment console. The pure imagination and scathing humor of this book make it an earnest, funny, pop-culture idiot savant expression of hard-earned joy (and I hate that word, I never want to use it, but it so applies here: games are the source of nearly unending fun. This book is fun for those who can surrender to its weird, frightening territory.)