Erewhon Books announces rekt by Alex Gonzalez, forthcoming in Spring 2025. A disturbing examination of toxic masculinity and the darkest pits of the Internet, rekt traces a young man’s algorithmic descent into depravity in a future that’s nearly here.
Once, Sammy Dominguez thought he knew how the world worked. The ugly things in his head—his uncle’s pathetic death, his parents’ mistrust, the twisted horrors he writes for the Internet—didn’t matter, because he and his girl, Ellery, were on track for the good life in this messed-up world.
Then a car accident changed everything.
Spiraling with grief and guilt, Sammy scrambles for distraction. He finds it in shock-value videos of gore and violence that terrified him as a child. When someone messages him a dark web link to footage of Ellery dying, he watches—first the car crash that killed her, then hundreds of other deaths, even for people still alive. Accidents. Diseases. Suicides. Murders.
The host site, chinsky, is sadistic, vicious, impossible. It even seems to read his mind, manipulate his searches. But is chinsky even real? And who is Haruspx, the web handle who led him into this virtual nightmare? As Sammy watches compulsively, the darkness in his mind blooms, driving him down a twisted path to find the roots of chinsky, even if he must become a nightmare himself…
I’m overwhelmed with excitement that rekt is coming out and that it will finally find its readers. I’m not sure who those readers are or if we’d be friends, but I like to think we have something in common. A lot of the book operates under the quiet, shared agreement that we all watched the same horrible things online. I wrote the book assuming that was the case. I didn’t know how not to. I grew up on eBaum’s World, 4Chan, and watching the BME Pain Olympics, and I was somehow expected to turn out okay. I think I did! I’m ready for the world to read this story as it’s something that grows more relevant with each news cycle. rekt is about AI, grief, and being a guy online. It’s a nasty book, but it’d be inauthentic otherwise. I’m ecstatic that Diana and her team at Erewhon saw something in it. I was beginning to feel like a crazy person.
—Alex Gonzalez, author of rekt
From Executive Editor Diana M. Pho: “From page one, I was immediately sucked into the horrors of rekt as a razor-sharp, viscerally-brilliant cautionary tale. Shocking, seedy and nihilistic, this fever-dream of a book is also one of the most realistic imaginings I’ve seen yet about the dangerous uses of AI technology. Alex’s writing will leave scars, and I think the world of rekt is just bubbling beneath the surface of our screens.”
—Diana M. Pho, Executive Editor with Erewhon Books
> Be me, 10
> At sleepover
> watching clips
I was ten years old when I first saw somebody die. I was sitting on a bed with Lucas and Austin and I was pale and queasy. A middle eastern guy with a well shaped beard took a giant bread knife to the neck of some poor bastard. He sawed left and right, and the video quality was so poor that you didn’t see the spray of blood cross the air, you only saw it pool on the ground like it was coming from below, rising up to flood the place.
When the video ended and the screen went black the three of us stared at our own reflections. I felt like a ghost. I went to get snacks downstairs, and when I came back Lucas was queuing up another. I think it was called Split Face. After that we watched another with a man and a jar, although I don’t think he died in it. After that we watched one where a girl slept belly down in her bed. A guy in a balaclava came in and hit her in the back of the head with a silver hammer. She started shaking and spazzing right there, her heels kicking and bunching up the blankets. People off camera laughed. Then the guy took off his pants and got on top of her. The video was called Russian Rodeo.
At school we talked about it like secrets, whispering behind the white backs of shuffling nuns.
At reconciliation, huddled in the chapel, we all promised not to tell the priests about it.
I kept my mouth shut and looked out through stained glass.
* * *
> Be me, 11
I saw him through the window and heard him crying and begging for help and I took off my glasses and ran to my room and hid under the bed. The whole bed. Not just the blankets. And my room was so close to the garage I kinda heard it all and he knew I saw him and I think over time everyone knew I saw him and everyone knew I pretty much could have opened the door to save him. The crying got really bad and I knew right then to never cry alone like he was doing right there in the garage where, again, I pretty much could have saved him.
That video goes on forever.
There is no need for confession.
Everyone already knows.
* * *
A lot happens in this story so bear with me.
* * *
> Be me, 26
> About to end it all
> Feels good, man
Blood Mountain sits at the northern border of Georgia and is the introduction to the Appalachian Trail. In reality, it’s a foothill with ambition, and I had driven down from New York with one goal in mind. I dropped the trunk of my Isuzu Amigo and took out the sawed-off shotgun that Izzy had given me. It was greasy and heavier than I remembered even though I had just used it a few hours earlier. Now it felt foreign in my hands, an awkward object that was trying to slip away and leave me for dead. When Izzy gave me the gun back outside of Horseshoe Beach he told me, grinning through his ski mask, “You gotta get up close and personal with this guy.” Guy referring to the gun and not who I’d be using it on – a mystery even still as I crouched in the bushes and climbed up the hillside.
It was dusk and the trees were dying at crooked angles, their branches shedding leaves in the wind. In the day, when I scoped the place out, I understood why they called it Blood Mountain. The reddish clay blended with the autumn foliage and gave the land the aesthetic of an abattoir. The dew reflected the various shades of brown, orange, rust, and red and put a mist into the air like somewhere around the bend a woodchipper coughed up gore and human vapor. I hadn’t been sleeping well for months (years, really) and the stale coffee in my stomach gave me the shakes. You get on your fifth cup, and it doesn’t really make you any more awake. You just become tired and jittery. I felt the gas station creamer curdle in the acid of my belly. I felt my lips crack in the cold wind. There was a moment where I considered putting both barrels of the sawed-off under my chin and spreading my brain all over the fell logs and flora of the land. Blood Mountain? Don’t mind if I do. But you see those movies where the hero says something like, “I’ve come too far to stop now,” and I kind of related.
The truth is, though, I had been passive for too long. For years I let what lay on that hill torment and torture me and bend me into the worst possible version of myself. I had become a living and breathing goblin because of what lay just a few miles up ahead. Have I come too far to stop now? No, no. I’ve put this off for too long. Back when I was still in school, the notion of kicking down a shed door and blasting at anyone inside would’ve made my skin crawl, but now I was approaching thirty and everything I loved was gone. College me was a putz. He had been through nothing.
Yet, perhaps, I always knew it had to end this way. Even back when Becca was breaking up with me at Beef O’Brady’s, and I got drunk and watched the Rays lose another game. Back when I stalked dive bars and clubs around Tallahassee. Back when Lucas knocked me out and I clocked my head against his desk. Back when I met Jay. Back when I met Alexa. Back when I saw more blood and guts and carnage than most people could ever stomach. Back when I cried every day because I didn’t know what else to do. Back when I drank my weight in whisky and chain smoked and used my carpet as an ashtray, eyes glued to my laptop, watching neon yellow flash across my eyes, showing me suicides, disembowelments, mass shootings, and everything in between. And maybe, possibly, way far back to when Ellery died, and we put her in the ground.
Excerpted from rekt, copyright © 2024 by Alex Gonzalez
