Reading “Predator,” Ander Monson’s new book, “sometimes felt like reading a tweet thread from the most annoying white people on Twitter,” jaycaspiankang writes. “And yet, against all odds, Monson pulls this off.”
,” are fuelled by a type of mania, usually brought on by poverty, drugs, or what amounts to an inborn degeneracy. “Predator,” by contrast, takes the depraved energy and poetic prose of those books, but places the conflict directly in the mind of a forty-five-year-old English professor who likes to play mildly violent video games. We learn early on that Monson has a wife and daughter. We are assured that his life is fine now, even comfortable.
And yet, against all odds, Monson pulls this off. “Predator” is not a pleasant read, but its moral oscillations and reveries fully capture white guilt in its most cringeworthy form. This, at least in my reading, is intentional. The book’s premise, its close reads into banal action scenes, and its simple ethics are absurd and ultimately quite funny.
Despite such clearly comical passages, “Predator” is not exactly a satire, nor is Monson some knowing white man who is trying to skewer other, less knowing white men. He is dead serious about these excavations of self, which becomes clearer as we hear about his childhood, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, in which he and his friends keep building bombs they find in “The Anarchist Cookbook.
I have vivid memories of my friends and myself planning some kind of insurrection in the town, probably after watching, figuring out which buildings we’d have to take, and with what weaponry. Would we take the radio station first, or would we have to take out the power plant down by the water? It was a joke, of course, and it was also not a joke. I mean, we thought both things is what I mean. The line between our reality and our fantasy was not at all as thick as it became later as adults .
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