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Inflation
Martin “Marty” Grasso (think Mardi Gras) wakes to find the world turned into a Dantesque “carnival of bloat.” Excess consumption is patriotic, high fat and cholesterol diets are good, exercise is frowned upon, the price of fuel ticks upward by the second, and giant virtual billboards, or VRBLs, bombard citizens with advertisements for consumer products. As a mysterious vortex sucks up rapidly dwindling energy reserves and civilization faces famine, chaos and collapse, the impending catastrophe is blamed on a subversive element known as the sappers. Marty’s quest for the truth intersects virtual worlds, utopian societies and ever-morphing nightmares—in a wild vaudeville cyber-punk noir romp that crosses into the twilight zone of "sic"-fi where nothing is ever what it seems.
217 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 26, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 7, 2023
InFlATion is REYoung’s dystopian satire on modern consumer excess. In the city of Catabolus, Marty Grasso lives the Catabolian dream— he has a nice house, a self-driving car, a socially engaged wife, two kids excelling school, and an important job at huge government contractor working to expose the energy terrorists that are said to be crippling his city’s energy grid. But something’s eating at Marty as he and everyone around them eats themselves to satiation; something is definitely not right….
InFlATion benefits from REYoung’s exceptional lexical craftmanship. It bubbles with gorgeous dripping gelatinous fleshy bits and succulent sentences that themselves seem to salivate at every explosion of gustatory indulgence. It skewers not only our increasingly grotesque addiction to food, entertainment, and consumer delights, but also our social blinders, our desire to fit in and have those around us do the same, and our acceptance of autocracy when it serves our personal life-view.
But full-length satires are very hard to pull off without feeling cartoonish and derivative, and the plot arc here is both overly tentative and heavily indebted to a line of social exaggeration works such as White Noise, Brazil, Fahrenheit 451, 1984, and even WALL-E. So, InFlATion is not as original or striking as The Ironsmith, but much lighter in tone and lots of fun nonetheless.
InFlATion benefits from REYoung’s exceptional lexical craftmanship. It bubbles with gorgeous dripping gelatinous fleshy bits and succulent sentences that themselves seem to salivate at every explosion of gustatory indulgence. It skewers not only our increasingly grotesque addiction to food, entertainment, and consumer delights, but also our social blinders, our desire to fit in and have those around us do the same, and our acceptance of autocracy when it serves our personal life-view.
But full-length satires are very hard to pull off without feeling cartoonish and derivative, and the plot arc here is both overly tentative and heavily indebted to a line of social exaggeration works such as White Noise, Brazil, Fahrenheit 451, 1984, and even WALL-E. So, InFlATion is not as original or striking as The Ironsmith, but much lighter in tone and lots of fun nonetheless.
August 2, 2022
A MAGGOT
A quirky, dystopian, darkly humorous spoof of multiple popular genres including horror, comic-book, detective and sci-fi rolled into a post-modern “maggot”(think Fowles), Inflation is a sendup of the culture of bloat and conformism in every aspect of society. The novel’s many twists and turns feature socially redeeming fat suits, virtual worlds, a utopian society, an increasingly malevolent talking car, a teenager’s trans-dimensional screen avatar named Queen Martyr-D, the mysterious “sappers,” and a gaggle of cartoonish extras. Arguably REYoung’s most “accessible” novel to date, in turn grim, funny, purple, menacing, lyrical, and demented. And begging for a Tim Burton adaptation.
A quirky, dystopian, darkly humorous spoof of multiple popular genres including horror, comic-book, detective and sci-fi rolled into a post-modern “maggot”(think Fowles), Inflation is a sendup of the culture of bloat and conformism in every aspect of society. The novel’s many twists and turns feature socially redeeming fat suits, virtual worlds, a utopian society, an increasingly malevolent talking car, a teenager’s trans-dimensional screen avatar named Queen Martyr-D, the mysterious “sappers,” and a gaggle of cartoonish extras. Arguably REYoung’s most “accessible” novel to date, in turn grim, funny, purple, menacing, lyrical, and demented. And begging for a Tim Burton adaptation.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews