Reviewed by Ben Allee
The Shrieking of Nothing
by Jordan Rothacker
Spaceboy Books LLC
October 202, Paperback, 179 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1951393397
It starts, as great detective stories so often do, atop the long-ago re-faced Stone Mountain—now called New Gibraltar by the inhabitants of the post-apocalyptic domed city of Resurga, once known as Atlanta—where two detectives specializing in religiously motivated crimes are interviewing an avatar of the Filipino mountain goddess of Mount Makiling, Dayang Masalanta, about the recent disappearance of a young rave-goer who’d become infatuated with her.
Not like any detective story you’ve read? Well, it isn’t, actually. It’s Jordan Rothacker’s The Shrieking of Nothing, the second instalment in his series of short, philosophically charged detective tales set in the domed city of Resurga, out now from Spaceboy Books.
From New Gibraltar, protagonist Edwina Casaubon and her partner/mentor, cyborg detective Rabbi “Thinkowitz” Rabbinowitz, follow the missing boy’s trail through their ever-fascinating world. On their hunt, they encounter avatar-training small business owners, visit the operators of the dome’s delicately abbreviated Breath/Death Monitoring System (BDMS, for short), and learn about the Ego Death Fests that invite folk of all kinds to trip out—all while navigating the solar-punk’d greenway of an LED-lined, forested 285 loop (which, as any Atlantan knows, is the greatest fantasy of all).
The story connects in many ways to its predecessor, 2020’s The Death of the Cyborg Oracle, but stands on its own as a wild, conceptual, playfully written ride. And though hints of Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, and Aldous Huxley abound, it is utterly original—principally because its world is neither utopian, nor dystopian, but somewhere uniquely in between.
Our narrator, Casaubon, is clear in her social optimism: after Kapital-driven environmental destruction rendered the rest of the world uninhabitable, the citizens of Resurga drastically remodeled civic life by collectively abolishing Kapital and adopting new religious and ethical frameworks to support themselves—and their new world is pretty much working! Writing to an imagined future reader, she espouses Resurga’s virtues, often prodded by Thinkowitz’s learned references to bygone Prophets like Paul Lefargue, David Bowie, and Dante Alighieri. In Resurga, labor, resources, exchange, and social disparity have been solved by replacing the old god Kapital with a new, singular ethic that nobly drives their civilization forward: an ethic of Somber Hope, in which all strive for the Greater Good.
And beyond Casaubon and Thinkowitz’s own philosophizing, their perspective is confirmed and expanded upon by their myriad encounters, as discussions with witnesses or suspects invariably affirm the mutual respect, earnest Somber Hope, and Greater Good of this world. Gone is the disillusionment of Huxley’s Brave New World, the cyberpunk unease and conspiracy of Dick’s Ubik or A Scanner Darkly, the hostile social hierarchies and self-annihilation of Ballard’s High Rise or The Drowned World—in The Shrieking of Nothing, the utopia of the future is real.
Here, though, is a strange irony: our protagonist, Edwina Casaubon, is a detective, and a homicide detective at that. How do we reconcile the fundamental improvements of Rothacker’s synchronistic future with the strange idiosyncrasies of crime? Of murder? To tell you the truth, I’m really not sure. But I certainly hope Resurga doesn’t find a solution anytime soon.
More than once, the Resurgans’ reiterations of respect, utopian sensibilities, radical empathy, and overall goodwill tested the limits of my suspension of disbelief (and perhaps that is the point!). But thankfully, as soon as Resurga’s perfection seemed to be too much, Hell re-entered our fictional Heaven.
Bashed-in heads. Missing corpses. Bloody confessions. These sights punctuate otherwise pristine, egalitarian living, and originate from fascinating Sacred motivations.
To solve the problem of Kapital, the citizens of Resurga have replaced its monetary Abstraction with abstraction of another kind, something else to worship. In pursuit of Somber Hope, they’ve universally adopted a henotheistic system, plucking deities from the neglected corners of human history and geography to match individual needs while never excluding or negating the beliefs of others. Despite inherent disparities—radical nihilists, evangelical protestants, and mountain-goddess avatars could struggle to get along—folks in Resurga put aside any religious differences in pursuit of the universal ethic.
For the most part.
But when someone takes their religious abstraction a little too far, as in both The Shrieking of Nothing and The Death of the Cyborg Oracle, our dynamic duo steps in to solve the case in near-procedural fashion:
A murder or nefarious act occurs, with clues pointing to a Sacred motivation. Sacred Detectives Casaubon and Thinkowitz arrive on the scene, use clues to determine leads, interview suspects and witnesses, and, finally, uncover and gently neutralize a sympathetic killer with abnormally misanthropic tendencies.
But these relatively straightforward plots (and largely static protagonists) don’t hold much weight as handicaps, because they aren’t really the point. They’re the vehicle, the mechanism by which we explore the substance of this world. They allow us to meet Resurga’s miraculous inhabitants and fill out their aspirational vision of unity, an experience best exemplified by this case’s simultaneously reverent and endearingly ridiculous resolution, which must be read to be believed (without spoiling too much, projectile squash is involved).
Resurga, ultimately, is an awkward place to investigate a murder—that’s part of Shrieking’s charm. But it is a fascinating place to ask questions about what makes justice, faith, and society at large work—that’s Shrieking’s greatest asset.
Still, I’d love to delve deeper into this perfect setting and its imperfect people. Where exactly is this dome-world headed? What mistakes might our characters make to jeopardize this fragile system? And beyond the temporary discomfort caused by the occasional bad actor, what happens when Hope is truly tested by some other perennial force—another ethic—of which people will always have more than a few?
As the Resurgans continued to espouse their city’s greatness, I often lost hope that Rothacker would take those interesting paths. But at those moments, I was usually surprised by the next page: interesting turns, bloody scenes, unease enough to keep me wondering. For a detective story set in a post-apocalyptic dome-world’s henotheistic quasi-utopia, that’s about the best thing I could Hope for.
About the reviewer: Ben Allee is a writer and media omnivore in Athens, GA. Interests include film, communication theory, art history, journalism and too much more. He is working on an epic fantasy series inspired by his love of Dungeons & Dragons and character-driven storytelling, short stories about art and creativity’s darker hues, and various efforts in songwriting, poetry writing, and other short fiction.