Drift

by Chris Campanioni

A couple arrive at a Mexican resort town as grisly murders escalate, crowds converge in Manhattan for an End of the World party, a journalist’s search for the real story leads him to the facts of his own disappearance . . . Chris Campanioni’s DRIFT is an apocalyptic riddle, a countdown to dead time, where what’s scripted begins to blur with what’s real and the pervasive fear of being surveilled is matched only by a desire to keep filming.

464 pages, Paperback

Published March 30, 2018

About the author

Chris Campanioni was born in Manhattan in 1985 and grew up in a very nineties New Jersey. The son of exiles from Cuba and Poland, Chris is a writer, multimedia artist, and instructor. He is a recipient of the International Latino Book Award for his debut novel, Going Down (Aignos, 2013), the Pushcart Prize for “Soft Opening,” from his cross-genre collection Death of Art (C&R Press, 2016), and the 2013 Academy of American Poets College Prize.

Reviews

[Moran · Rating 1 out of 5]

I purchased this book in order to complete the minimum order balance required for free shipping directly from the publisher, King Shot Press.

That said, I did do some research about the book prior to purchase and was very excited to read it! All online reviews and descriptions sounded promising: grand, postmodern, overwhelming, inexplicable. I thought that maybe I had wandered upon a lost postmodern work, similar to when I discovered A Naked Singularity (a stranger at a diner mentioned it to me by coincidence while we were waiting to be seated for breakfast).

Then I got the book and found the first few chapters to be interesting. Muddling, strange, not fully coherent, but interesting.

And then I progressed further into the book -- over two hundred pages into the book -- and it seemed to me that there was nothing there. At times, as a reward for slogging through all these pages, I was given a nice anecdote about some handsome people going out to a party or chatting in an audition room. Other times, I would be required to endure pages after pages of a nihilistic manifesto. Ultimately, the book became a bore and a chore and I stopped reading it.

I could not find anything redeeming in its contents. The protagonist, seemingly crafted after the author himself, came off as an egotistical pretty boy that wants very desperately to prove to the reader that he's also smart. The plot, meanwhile, seems nonexistent and the prose, wastefully dense.

Creating a good piece of postmodern literature requires more than big words, personal reflection, and the placement of seemingly unconnected stories side-by-side. Authors seem to think that their works must be impenetrable in order to be transcendent. I do not support this style of writing.

[Benoit Lelièvre · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not the easiest book to wrap your mind around.

I'm not even sure I understood it, but I'm pretty sure I've enjoyed it. From what I could gather, DRIFT is a series of (sometimes)connected and (sometimes) metafictional stories about how reality can get nebulous when your job is to craft fiction and narrative arts of every sort. Written in a fragmented, (sometimes) stream of consciousness style, it is somewhat of a trippy, experimental journey into the mind of those truly committed to art.

I think. Anyway, I admire the sheer balls of it.

[Michael Browne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Channels the interpersonal casual nihilism of Bret Easton Ellis circa The Rules of Attraction and uses Bolaño’s 2666 as a formal template, thus creating a uniquely existential glimpse into our modern anxieties and relationships—and perhaps most importantly—our compulsory desire for permanence.