Inept Concepts, $2.99, ISBN 978-1386182467
Thriller, 2018
I give a sigh when I open Brad D Sibbersen’s Involuntary and realize that it’s about the evils of Nice Guys and incels.
Sure, there are those guys out there, but these words have been so misused on the always embarrassing to behold progressive social media to mean “guys that don’t agree with my political leaning”. I look at the copyright date and sigh again, expecting another tired old scree about guys that support the Orange Man Bad.
Fortunately, it’s too all over the place and even out there for me to feel offended or annoyed by it.
Anyway, this story is about sad sack guys that pledge funds to the Antiope Project, which lets them spy on two women that are led to be in the house under false pretenses.
Really? This is the best these guys can settle for? I know, it’s three years before OnlyFans will come to be, but come on, this feels like the kind of “adult sleaze” that can be visualized only in the heads of horny preteens. We can do better in terms of creativity when it comes to intrusive misogyny, surely?
Reading this thing, I can only wonder why it is so fragmented, as if the author is desperately trying to impress me by thinking that this style will make his brainpower triple in my estimation. Sadly, I’m pulling a Shania here and saying that this doesn’t impress me much.
New characters are introduced and then booted out of the story unceremoniously, and half the time while reading this, I’m wondering whether I should take notes so that I can halfway follow this story. The other half of the time, I’m wondering why I am even reading this thing.
Even when the story enters Saw territory in a most half-baked manner, it still remains a mosaic of paragraphs that seem to be haphazardly put together.
As I’ve said earlier, this story isn’t inventive enough to make the most out of its premise. This story feels like some Hostel-wannabe that gets derailed because the author is distracted by the need to show off how opaque he can make his story out to be.
Also, as I’ve said, come on, the whole thing boils down to hidden cameras placed all over the place. For something marketed as both horror and thriller, it has me expecting something more. Even something as played out as drugging women and pimping them out to sadists would be more creative than hidden cameras in a house, sheesh, for a story that is supposed to fall under those two genres!
I’m also not sure whether this story succeeds in making any statement. Everyone here is afflicted with one or more of flavors of idiocy, and if there is any take home message I can get from this one, it’s that all these stupid people with way too much time and money to waste really should find more interesting outlets to throw themselves into.
At the end of the day, this one is just pointless all around. It’s not a creative horror or thriller story, it isn’t a fun read due to the author’s style, and it fails to say anything of impact or even noteworthy against and for nice guys and incels. It’s just… words and more words, and not even a fun kind of word garble.
