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Crisis Actor
tragickal presents CRISIS ACTOR.
An actor, a soldier, a shooter in a simulation chamber throttled by transmissions from the dead ages. A lecture on fame told through a two-way mirror. Thirty minutes till curtain call.
“An artist’s statement and a terrorist’s manifesto are synonymous.”
An actor, a soldier, a shooter in a simulation chamber throttled by transmissions from the dead ages. A lecture on fame told through a two-way mirror. Thirty minutes till curtain call.
“An artist’s statement and a terrorist’s manifesto are synonymous.”
- GenresFiction
207 pages, Paperback
Published October 31, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
May 12, 2021
Scored as a torrent of fragments, Crisis Actor loads language like flashing blips of a Venn diagram mapping celebrity, violence, and art. Excerpted are suicide notes, manifestos, artist statements, diaries, emails and much more, discharging like a school shooter's augmented AR-15. Each chapter is a magazine that never seemed to end, and I didn't want them too.
May 27, 2026
you need to read this book.
November 8, 2021
A singular and phenomenal book -- I loved it and will be thinking about it for a long time!
February 11, 2023
When I first read Crisis Actor I didn't know if I got it. I kept looking for the signs I had come to expect from a book. Plot, character development, resolution. But Crisis Actor is not a standard book. Its cut-up style confuses and entrances the reader all at once. It both invites but pushes you away.
When I accepted Crisis Actor for what it is, and stopped trying to force it into my idea of what a book should be, it started to make more sense. A modern novel. A novel for the misinformation, trust no one, institutions failing age. A novel for the kids.
When I accepted Crisis Actor for what it is, and stopped trying to force it into my idea of what a book should be, it started to make more sense. A modern novel. A novel for the misinformation, trust no one, institutions failing age. A novel for the kids.
November 16, 2020
Absolutely devoured this novel! I highly recommend to anyone looking for a change of pace in what they're reading - Matt's brought you something very unique.
May 30, 2022
“Messy, isn’t it?”
April 2, 2022
(Only 80% through at time of writing) Interesting structure. Single-sentence to paragraph-long snippets are interwoven. Each snippet follows one of a few threads- a story about a Student during a school shooting, a story about a strange play about a Doctor/Soldier/Administrator, a story about a Crisis Actor (someone who helps trains EMTs, nurses, etc, by acting injured or sick). The stories sometimes feel like they blend into each other, and they aren't 'traditionally' told.
If not that, the snippets are often quotes from poets, authors, terrorists, politicians, or wikipedia-article-like info blurbs about shootings, world events, facts, etc. The overall feeling and mood of this work is like being in a labyrinthine storage room, each box filled with some odd fact about dark American history or the darkness in the USA. The effect is claustrophobic, fairly heavy, so despite this novel being "short", it takes a while to get through as I often turned to wikipedia to look things up. I learned about a bunch of interesting anglophone novelists and writers in the process (JG Ballard), which was neat.
Probably what's sticking with me most are the snippets that refer to events like the Abu Ghraib tortures, or 9/11 attacks - the snippets consider what happens when we frame those events as 'artworks'. Of course, when you read a statement like "9/11 was an artwork", your first reaction might contain something of moral offense, but I think reading such things as one might an 'artwork' seems to clearly render what those acts caused. (The entire 9/11 attacks caused, basically, the entire political climate for most of my living life as a kid in the USA. So many talking points revolve around patriotism and those attacks - but arguably what those attacks demonstrated are the American will to never want to admit to its damages overseas.)
Something that comes to mind is, why did something that caused 3000 deaths - how did that act change the minds of the majority of Americans, vs. something like COVID in the USA which killed 750,000 (so far!) and injured many more, and has seemingly done very little to change the state of healthcare or medicine, beyond people (often, begrudgingly ) learning the juvenile act to wear a mask when sick?
What I found hopeful in this book was that, despite what writers are often told, writing is still powerful. I've never read it and don't know what its content actually entails, but the entire fiasco over Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses (which is mentioned in the book) seems totally made up! But the outcry was real and people were even murdered.
I heard about this book through an interview https://tragickal.com/sean-sam-interv... , which also links interesting experimental writing and other authors.
It's refreshing to find something like this amidst the ho-hum state of mainstream Anglophone fiction. Parallels to be found with my medium of choice (videogames).
If not that, the snippets are often quotes from poets, authors, terrorists, politicians, or wikipedia-article-like info blurbs about shootings, world events, facts, etc. The overall feeling and mood of this work is like being in a labyrinthine storage room, each box filled with some odd fact about dark American history or the darkness in the USA. The effect is claustrophobic, fairly heavy, so despite this novel being "short", it takes a while to get through as I often turned to wikipedia to look things up. I learned about a bunch of interesting anglophone novelists and writers in the process (JG Ballard), which was neat.
Probably what's sticking with me most are the snippets that refer to events like the Abu Ghraib tortures, or 9/11 attacks - the snippets consider what happens when we frame those events as 'artworks'. Of course, when you read a statement like "9/11 was an artwork", your first reaction might contain something of moral offense, but I think reading such things as one might an 'artwork' seems to clearly render what those acts caused. (The entire 9/11 attacks caused, basically, the entire political climate for most of my living life as a kid in the USA. So many talking points revolve around patriotism and those attacks - but arguably what those attacks demonstrated are the American will to never want to admit to its damages overseas.)
Something that comes to mind is, why did something that caused 3000 deaths - how did that act change the minds of the majority of Americans, vs. something like COVID in the USA which killed 750,000 (so far!) and injured many more, and has seemingly done very little to change the state of healthcare or medicine, beyond people (often, begrudgingly ) learning the juvenile act to wear a mask when sick?
What I found hopeful in this book was that, despite what writers are often told, writing is still powerful. I've never read it and don't know what its content actually entails, but the entire fiasco over Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses (which is mentioned in the book) seems totally made up! But the outcry was real and people were even murdered.
I heard about this book through an interview https://tragickal.com/sean-sam-interv... , which also links interesting experimental writing and other authors.
It's refreshing to find something like this amidst the ho-hum state of mainstream Anglophone fiction. Parallels to be found with my medium of choice (videogames).
November 12, 2021
Much to think about
June 2, 2024
Frightening mixture of fiction and non-fiction: facts were gleaned from the media regarding Donald Trump, terrorism, mass shootings, and entertainment, just to name a few topics. These short pieces of info were arranged into a Ballardian assemblage surrounding a bizarre plot whereby individuals are hired to portray victims of mass disasters for the government to practice their crisis responses. It’s been a while since I read the book so it’s a bit fuzzy but I certainly felt like I was in the hands of somebody who had put in a formidable amount of research. Reality is portrayed vividly, reflected accurately, for how else would we gain access to the horror? Truth is stranger than fiction, and we live in an era where reality has a monstrous, insistent energy even though its writhing, in our eyes, is largely mediated by the Internet and TV. Hate to invoke Ballard too much, but I read this shortly after reading The Atrocity Exhibition, and this feels more than slightly like a 21st century update of that controversial intersection of media, violence, celebrity, and sex. I liked the book in general, was scared by the fluid dynamics and ripples of the information and death, but felt like there was something missing in the construction. I’ve tried to read David Markson’s fictional mosaics of real life data and didn’t particularly feel gripped by them, and this novel from Lee kind of repeats that effect, or non-effect, in this reader at least. Deduct one star.
January 18, 2026
One of my favorites of the millennium. Very influential.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews