New books arrive from seasoned veterans whose premises blend gothic horror, academia, and experimental syntax. Gothic horror appears in an online influencer mansion where a plan to transform an aging house into an influencer hub unleashes mystery and menace behind facades, the owner, and always-online residents. Language is treated as a malleable substance, with traditional syntax discarded to render thought directly; The Lesser Bohemians centers on Eily, an Irish theater student whose turbulent romance with an older actor blooms into complicated love. Deep internet knowledge informs explanations of TikTok-scale trends and locates gothic possibilities within social media culture. Academic credentials including Cambridge, Oxford, and Yale inform empathetic portrayals of student anxieties.
McBride shares a common lineage with James Joyce and Samuel Beckett not only as Irish writers but also as unrepentant experimenters with no respect for the sanctity of traditional syntax. In her hands, language is not a tidy vessel for information so much as it is a malleable substance: the unkempt stuff of thought itself. In 2016's The Lesser Bohemians, those thoughts largely belonged to Eily, an Irish theater student whose turbulent romance with an older actor blooms into the complicated love that animates
Stein knows more about the internet than I do. (Probably more than you too, dear reader, but I don't want to presume.) She's the kind of person legacy media organizations turn to when they need to explain a trend on TikTok, say, or any other frightening internet phenomena. Makes sense, then, that the versatile writer has found the gothic possibilities in a house full of social media influencers.
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