Book review: “[NSFW]” by David Scott Hay

If ever there were a trigger warning needed, it’s the one for David Scott Hay’s new novel [NSFW] which cautions the reader that the novel includes “sex, drug use, witchcraft, profanity, gun violence, collapse, suicide, harm to a minor, terrorism, civil unrest, hate crime, social media, religion, capitalism.”   And that isn’t even a complete list.

There are also motorcycle accidents, a car crash, a murder, an attempted assassination, a successful assassination, a creepy social media entrepreneur known as the face (who seems to have trademarked that italic “f” in product names), false evidence, a poisoning, a Hollywood musical about a mythic group rape, drone attacks, school shootings, nerve gas attacks, a suicide-bomber, a burglary and the slaying of a jellyfish.

I’ve probably missed a lot. [NSFW] is not a novel for the faint-hearted.

In fact, neither is this review.  It needs a trigger warning.  Consider those first two paragraphs as serving that function.

“Not safe for work”

Regarding the novel’s title, maybe you know what NSFW means.  I had to look it up, and I found out that it’s short for “not safe for work” — as in, it’s not safe to share links to co-workers that might be deemed offensive, such as images of naked people.

In Hay’s novel, the term is turned on its head since the two central characters are members of an office staff who work at Vexillum, a subcontractor to the face, hoping, at the end of a 90-day probationary period, to land a promised but undefined bonus, health benefits and maybe a real job with the face.

Their assignment: To watch an endless stream of videos that are posted on the face’s social media platform and determine, within the 70-second delay time, if a video is violent enough or deadly enough or pornographic enough or abusive enough or bloody enough — or real enough — to be blocked from showing up on the face.

Hence, the reason for many, but not all, of those trigger warnings.

“Backwards in slo-mo”

For instance, on one of the novel’s earliest pages, the narrator tells of “an old-fashioned beheading video” he has to watch, noting that it’s not a quick process — “Elbow grease.  Sawing.”  And he goes on:

“A few of the masked terrorists wear championship T-shirts of sports teams that lost the championship.  Shirts for both teams being printed ahead of time.  Instead of being destroyed, they are shipped to Third-World countries…”

After watching a suicide jumper slam into the sidewalk, the narrator tells how his hands tremble on his workstation keyboard and his stomach churns, and he runs the video “backwards in slo-mo and watch him regenerate and fly up, up and away.”

The work that the narrator and the other people in the office do is NSFW.  No human being should have to do it, but, in the future world of Hay’s novel, it’s something apparently that can’t be done through an algorithm or AI.  So, someone very low on the corporate ladder, someone desperate for a bonus and a real job and that “unicorn of our generation: retirement,” has to do it.

“A love story”

The novel is the story of a man and a woman in the office known only as @Sa>ag3 and @Jun1p3r.  They tell each other their names, and they don’t want to know. @Sa.ag3 is the narrator, and he is telling his story to @Jun1p3r. 

Whatever else [NSFW] is — and it’s many things — @Sa>ag3 insists on one of the early pages, in the middle of the book and on its final page: “This is a love story.”

In a dystopian way, they “meet cute” on their first day at work as the novel’s first few sentences explain:

“We had sex in a lactorium the first day of training.  People knew.  We were not discreet or quiet.  But HR did nothing; there was no one waiting to breast-feed. It was also not the worst the other trainees at Vex would hear or see that day.”

[NSFW] is Hay’s second novel.  His first, The Fountain, published last spring, is a rollicking, knowing and wackily thoughtful story of a water fountain at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art that bestowed on its drinkers the ability to create a certifiable masterpiece of art.  The only catch was that it also bestowed an early death.

Say it ain’t so

Both books belong to that school of science fiction (or speculative fiction) that is prophetic at its heart, aiming to comment on our present-day reality by creating a slightly exaggerated future world. 

The subject of The Fountain is the art community and art business and, at a deeper level, the act of creativity and the created thing itself. Stuffed with artists and wannabes and hangers on, with screwballs, doomed lovers, a wood nymph and a dreadlock-wearing artist known as “Jawbone” — it is a fun read.

I wouldn’t say I had fun reading [NSFW] although, like its predecessor, it’s a page-turner.  It’s captivating and compelling, but, in terms of the world Hay creates (or channels), it’s appalling.

Is this where we’re headed?  Say it ain’t so.

“A fever dream”

The Fountain had a sense of delight to it since art and creativity are, by nature, life-giving and life-enriching.  [NSFW], by contrast, is a fever dream the grimmest aspects of human nature, starting with greed and hate.  As a prophecy, it is about a spiral down into the worst possible abyss of social media and social inequality and the hopelessness of hearing the sound of black helicopters coming for you.

Hay is a former Chicagoan now living on the West Coast, and both novels are set in in the Windy City.  In The Fountain, the characters live and act out their lives in the physical geography of Chicago. 

In [NSFW], nearly all of the story takes place either in the Vex office where horrendous terrors are being carried out on the Mother Screen and in the second-floor apartment that @Jun1p3r and @Sa.ag3 turn into the Garden, a sort of anti-social media oasis.  Chicago is simply a place they move through in going between these compass points.

Don’t get me wrong.  [NSFW] is as strong and as valuable a novel as its predecessor.  But, where The Fountain had an element of Ghostbusters or Beetlejuice to it, [NSFW] resonates with the likes of such movies as Lord of the Flies and Blade Runner and Twelve Monkeys.

You should read this book — if only to scare the bejesus out of you.  It will make you think twice about picking up your device.

Patrick T. Reardon

3.23.23

This review originally appeared at Third Coast Review on 3.6.23.